Day 37. April 6, 1862. (page 2)

*Battle of Shiloh fought April 6-7, southwest Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing. Grant beats Johnston.

**Kentucky ratifies the 13^th Amendment in 1976.

Note: Today & tomorrow– in these two days at Shiloh– more will be shot in the back woods of Tennessee than in all prior American wars combined.

Note: Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh near the Tennessee River, occurred during the Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862. Known as Black Thursday in 1865; at Sailor’s (Sayler’s, Rebel spelling) Creek, Lee loses a 1/4 his army.

Note: Lincoln wires McClellan today that because he has 100k troops, he needs to make a move on the line at Yorktown. McClellan wires back he has only 53k. He also wires Edwin Stanton (Secretary of War) “Here is to be fought the great battle that is to decide the existing contest…..My present strength will not admit of a detachment sufficient for this purpose….”

Note: Rebels are eating bark & leaves & sifting through horse poop for corn kernels knowing whatever they put in their stomach– especially corn– would just cause more diarrhea– “Tennessee Trots or the Virginia quick-step”– but something had to go in… To be clear, both armies were, at various points, starving, as was the Southern populace, especially at Vicksburg, where a rat made a decent meal, or earthworms, locusts, crows, snakes, acorns. Squirrels, but then they still do. For a lengthy discussion of intestinal diseases (& theories of psychology postulated!), see Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War George Worthington Adams 1952, especially Chapter 10, 199-206.

Note: 17, the number of muscles we use to smile. 54, muscles we use to step forward.

Note: Vicksburg, etc. was bad, yes. See next century, the Battle of Stalingrad (8/23/1942-2/2/1943), with 2 million casualties. See also Hiroshima, Nagasaki. See, see, see.

“On this day in 1865, Matthew A Henson became the first person to reach Geographic North Pole in 1909 along with Robert Peary.”

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hope we may soon have a Sabbath day respected….

Sheridan’s soldiers at Sailor’s Creek: they run up on the end of the southern column, its white bone flank sticking out in air like an open fracture, a broken rib bone that has cut through the skin. They capture 8 generals and 6,000+ prisoners. And like a pupil becoming fixed with the shock of it, a round black sun forming a tightening ring around this day in 1865, Lee supposedly says to General Mahone, “My god! Has the army dissolved?” He writes Davis that “a few more Sailor’s Creeks and it will all be over.”

Maybe not dissolved, but today Lee’s son George Washington Custis Lee is captured at Sailor’s Creek. Now ¼ of his army is gone= 8,800, poof. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down getting closer.

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