They have a driving self-tour which lasts about 90 minutes.\u00a0 We did not do that.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 General Johnson brought his troops up from Corinth and hit Grant at the staging area near the river.<\/p>\n
We saw presentations about the battle.\u00a0 It l0oked to me like Johnson had a good idea.\u00a0 The terrain is rolling bluffs with a few river access points.\u00a0 Then there is a “Owl Creek” which runs from the west side of the battlefield, back behind Grant’s position into the Tennessee River.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Everything is heavily wooded now and hard to imagine what it would have looked like at the time.<\/p>\n
But Johnson caught Grant off guard and the first day was bad for the Union.\u00a0 Overnight, Grant was reinforced by two other bodies of troops.\u00a0 And the river transports shelled the Confederate positions. The next day the Union troops pushed back and eventually the Confederates retreated back to Corinth.<\/p>\n
So Johnson was about a day late.\u00a0 If he could have moved a bit quicker he may have done the job on Grant.<\/p>\n
The Union forces moved into Corinth.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Just in the small part of the battlefield we visited there were a lot of monuments and old cannon.\u00a0 It was impressive.\u00a0 The biggest monument<\/a> we saw was commemorating the Iowa troops.\u00a0 The design of the thing reminds me a lot of the monument just south of the Iowa Capitol <\/a>building in Des Moines.<\/p>\n Here is a picture of just a small part of the cemetery looking out over the river.\u00a0 The bluff we are standing on is about 30-40 feet high, rising straight from the water’s edge.\u00a0 Pittsburgh Landing is a couple of slots between the bluffs providing river access, one to the right of this position.<\/p>\n
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