Symposium Spotlight: Shiloh Comes to New Orleans
Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2025 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Sean Michael Chick’s topic.
Shiloh Comes to New Orleans
Albert Sidney Johnston’s death at Shiloh is one of the most dramatic and debated of the Civil War. Even as the battle still raged, his body was brought south and buried in New Orleans. It was one of the South’s first moments of mourning, as the South’s largest city held a massive but somber funeral. It was also a way to mourn the massive loss of life at Shiloh, a battle where New Orleans was disproportionately represented both in manpower, but also status. P.G.T. Beauregard and many of the city’s elites fought and died there. When Benjamin Butler occupied the city, he prevented Johnston’s tomb from being covered, allowing the casket and body to rot in the open air. Finally, Johnston’s body was removed after the war and sent to Texas in another large but somber ceremony, which was among the first times public mourning of the Confederacy was allowed. Years later Johnston received a statue in Metairie Cemetery which was a both a moment of mourning and celebration. Shiloh brought the war home to New Orleans more than any other Southern city and left a scar on the city which it forgot over time even as it influenced the city landscape and memory.
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Shiloh is a hugely fascinating story – the background, the preparations made by the armies for battle, the leaders, the great writers who were present – Lew Wallace and Ambrose Bierce for the North, Henry Morton Stanley and John S. Jackman for the South; the chaos in Corinth that should not have occurred, the Confederates’ slow march to Pittsburg Landing, Sherman and Grant living in a world of fantasy and denial which nearly caused an army to be destroyed – and which should have caused their careers to be destroyed; the squabbling amongst Confederate leadership, which was silenced by Sydney Johnston’s “Gentlemen, we attack at dawn…I would fight them if they were a million!”; Johnston and Beauregard bungling the alignment of their divisions, and the dramatic battle itself. I find Larry J. Daniel’s book to be the best single volume on the battle. Elegant writing and he’s not afraid to tell the truth, including that black men fought in the Confederate ranks, something that the Noble Crusaders have ferociously denied for years…