[Today’s run: 10K race in Corinth, MS]
Yesterday I took the day off and we drove up to northern Mississippi.
After picking up our 10K race packets and driving over the course, we stopped in at the Civil War information center. It is a very nice place. Well worth checking out if you are in the area.
Later in the afternoon we drove north to the visitor center at the Shiloh National Military Park.
They have a driving self-tour which lasts about 90 minutes. We did not do that. But we did walk through the cemetery and down to the Tennessee River at Pittsburgh Landing, right at the base of the bluff below the cemetery.
Grant was bringing his army up via steamboat on the Tennessee River and threatening to come overland from Pittsburgh Landing, TN to Corinth, MS which was (and is) a multi-directional railway hub. General Johnson brought his troops up from Corinth and hit Grant at the staging area near the river.
We saw presentations about the battle. It l0oked to me like Johnson had a good idea. The terrain is rolling bluffs with a few river access points. Then there is a “Owl Creek” which runs from the west side of the battlefield, back behind Grant’s position into the Tennessee River. So Johnson had Grant in a wedge between two bodies of water, one which was too wide to swim and the other, not as large but a substantial obstacle.
Everything is heavily wooded now and hard to imagine what it would have looked like at the time.
But Johnson caught Grant off guard and the first day was bad for the Union. Overnight, Grant was reinforced by two other bodies of troops. And the river transports shelled the Confederate positions. The next day the Union troops pushed back and eventually the Confederates retreated back to Corinth.
So Johnson was about a day late. If he could have moved a bit quicker he may have done the job on Grant.
The Union forces moved into Corinth. The Confederates tried to get them out again but were unsuccessful. The Corinth area saw some other activity from Nathan Bedford Forrest, but generally this area was Union-held for the rest of the war.
Just in the small part of the battlefield we visited there were a lot of monuments and old cannon. It was impressive. The biggest monument we saw was commemorating the Iowa troops. The design of the thing reminds me a lot of the monument just south of the Iowa Capitol building in Des Moines.
Here is a picture of just a small part of the cemetery looking out over the river. The bluff we are standing on is about 30-40 feet high, rising straight from the water’s edge. Pittsburgh Landing is a couple of slots between the bluffs providing river access, one to the right of this position.
