The ferocious battle at Shiloh on April 6–7, almost a full year after the outbreak of hostilities, showed once again that basic problems of organizational competence remained more important than abstract questions of strategy or social organization. The troops at Shiloh had obvious deficiencies in equipment, organization, and training, despite the fact that a full year had passed since the outbreak of hostilities. For example, the 15th and 16th Iowa had not even mastered the manual of arms. One Confederate battery had not yet fired a shot. What little training the Confederate artillery had it owed –unsurprisingly–to a West Pointer, Maj. Francis A. Shoup. It was not until after the Shiloh campaign at the Confederate encampment in Tupelo that the Army of Tennessee’s artillery would receive extensive training to supplement the inadequate preparations of the previous fall. Despite the presence of some Enfields, much of the Confederate army was equipped with a hodgepodge of squirrel guns, shotguns, and outdated smoothbore muskets. The Federals, however, did not have any noticeable superiority in their own small arms. Before the battle, Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg had bluntly described his six brigades as “the mob we have, miscalled soldiers.” Ironically enough, Bragg’s troops may have been the best drilled in a raw army about to go on the offensive.
Extremely poor fire discipline remained a continuing problem with green troops. Soldiers frequently saw firing as a form of emotional release from the extreme strain of battle; for example, one Iowan at Shiloh, Warren Olney, reported his unit firing smoothbore volleys without orders at a totally ineffective range of three hundred to four hundred yards: “But though our action was absurd, it was a relief to us to do something.” Drill was supposed to help with the problem; to wit, the colonel of the 32nd Indiana had to use the expedient of ordering his troops to go through the manual of arms in order to steady them after they prematurely opened fire at too great a distance. Brig. Gen. John Logan, one of the best Union officers drawn from civil life, sounded almost like a regular in his constant exhortations to his men to fire only under orders and to make sure to aim their fire at an actual Confederate.
Nevertheless, one soldier at Shiloh, commenting on some of his comrades, remembered that “we were ordered to fire, and as soon as I let go of Ned’s gun, he stuck it up in the air, shut both his eyes, and fired at the tree tops, and Schnider did the same. But Schnider was in rear rank behind Curly and he cut a lock of Curly’s hair off just above his ear, and burned his neck.” The same soldier’s later comment that “it is very trying to one’s nerves to lay under fire and not be able to do anything in return” serves as good an explanation as any for the emotional release some men found in discharging their weapons. One Confederate officer bluntly complained that “stragglers would fall from their own lines and, retiring under cover of another line, fire recklessly to the front.” The historian Andrew Haughton even cites a report of actual fratricides from rear-rank men in the Confederate army. Civil War armies would struggle for years with the problem of soldiers continually loading their weapons without actually firing them.
Basic problems with discipline also included a propensity to pillage. Initial success demoralized many of the Confederate troops at Shiloh in the same way Grant’s troops had lost discipline at the battle of Belmont the previous November; they simply could not resist the opportunity to pillage the captured Federal camp. One Confederate officer had harsh words for the short-term Confederate volunteers, declaring that “the disorders resulting from want of proper discipline were numberless; the most fatal to the consummation of a success so gallantly begun being the lawless spirit of plunder and pillage so recklessly indulged in.” Even veteran troops would have been subject to the simple exhaustion and inevitable disorganization that the first day of fighting produced in the Confederate army, but breaking ranks to pillage enemy camps before the day was truly won represented a level of demoralization over and above being fought out.
Both army commands also had their own defects. Grant and Sherman at the very least could have prepared themselves better for the attack, although in their defense, Grant’s rationale against entrenching so that the raw troops could focus on drill had a certain plausibility to it. Furthermore, the ever-pugnacious C. F. Smith, reflecting the same aggressive school of thought that had made his bayonet charge at Donelson successful, believed that entrenchments would enervate the troops. Indeed, even after the war, John Bell Hood argued that “a soldier cannot fight for a period of one or two months constantly behind breastworks … and then be expected to engage in pitched battle and prove as intrepid and impetuous as his brother who has been taught to rely solely upon his own valor.” On the Confederate side, Johnston and Beauregard have received some critical appraisals by modern scholars for their battlefield performance. The Creole has drawn fire for a muddled battle plan, and historians have criticized Johnston for neglecting his overall responsibilities as army commander. In fact, Beauregard learned nothing from First Manassas, because his plans at Shiloh were also far too complicated and “Napoleonic” for their own good. Confederate staff work for the march on Pittsburgh’s Landing also proved of dubious quality.
Nevertheless, some officers knew and understood tactics well enough to even use assault columns by division—columns with a two-company front commonly used in Napoleonic practice. The 32nd Indiana managed to make a charge while in column by division and then take advantage of its breaking foes by deploying into line and opening fire on the fleeing Confederates. Later in the day, it deployed four companies as skirmishers as opposed to the usual two but retained the column, in an interesting mix of firepower and shock. This early use of light-infantry methods at Shiloh also showed that such tactics did not require the universal use of the rifle-musket, which was not possible at this stage in the indifferently armed armies of the western theater. On occasion, whole regiments deployed as skirmishers. Sharpshooters even picked off artillerists with aimed fire. The commander of the sharpshooters from the second brigade of Union Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace’s division used a swell in the ground to snipe at an artillery battery during one assault. Furthermore, Shiloh also saw at least some deliberate sniping at field officers. Although it did not replace the primacy of the battle line, sharpshooting seemed to have had at least some effect on the battle.
