Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: Ambrose Bierce and the Battle of Shiloh

Although I tend to avoid battle history as a subject for in depth analysis in historical study of the Civil War, Shiloh provides a fascinating case for understanding the disconnect between American perception and reality.  It wasn't until Shiloh that soldiers from both sides, as well as the larger American population, truly saw the proverbial elephant charging through their serene American landscapes, no end to its destructive capacity in sight.  There has been endless controversy surrounding the interpretation of actions during the two crucial days of bloodletting; was General Grant drunk on the day of battle? Was General Buell deliberately slow to arrive?  I do not think we can know these answers, nor do I think these are the important questions, but we can perceive the importance of Shiloh from the endless attempts to grasp and redefine it.

One interpretation of Shiloh can be found among the extensive and vivid accounts within the recently resurrected writings of Ambrose Bierce, a Union officer who possessed no illusions of grandeur with regard to the "Blood-stained period."1  He recorded his account of Shiloh in 1881, amidst a surge of publishing of these types of historical writings in reference to the conflict nearly two decades past.  Bierce's work was not well received due to its vivid imagery describing the true horrors he had experienced.  He saw no reason to portray the war as something it wasn't.  To Bierce, the Civil War in general, and Shiloh in particular, could not be understood in the censored language published in most popular histories.  He preferred to express the full extent of suffering on the battlefield, the psychological trauma of battle, and the necessary, though alarming abandonment of soldiers' peacetime sentiment.  Describing his memory of the aftermath of the first day of Shiloh, Bierce reports, "very often we struck our feet against the dead; more frequently against those who still had spirit enough to resent it with a moan.  These were lifted carefully to one side and abandoned.  Some had sense enough to ask in their weak way for water. Absurd!"2

Before Shiloh, most Americans, citizens and politicians alike, believed the war would be a swift conflict resulting in either the preservation of national unity its dissolution into two discordant states.  After Shiloh and the loss of over 25,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, the nation began to perceive the true magnitude of this sectional dispute.3  The war would not be over in a timely manner and no one could then know the human price of its resolution.  Bierce recorded his perceptions decades in hindsight, but his memory of the chaos is a plausible recollection that informs us of how hopeless the scene of slaughter must have appeared: "O those cursed guns! –  Not the enemy's, but our own.  Had it not been for them, we might have died like men.  They must be supported, forsooth, the feeble, boasting bullies!  It was impossible to conceive that these pieces were doing the enemy as excellent a mischief as his were doing us..."4  It would be a long and devastating war.

In the 1880's, interest in the war was renewed as the true horrors had faded from the nation's collective memory.  This era fostered extensive interest in memoirs, published collections of diaries and letters, and novels focusing more on honor and grandeur than on gruesome recollections.  It is understandable then that Bierce's work met resistance: "Death had put his sickle into this thicket and fire had gleaned the field.  Along the line... lay the bodies...  Their clothing was half burned away – their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails.  Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins.  According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken.  The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh! I cannot catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted for."5 These were not the truths Americans wanted to read after fewer than twenty years of healing.  But it is important to understand that neither were these horrors expected by the young green troops at the onset of the massacre at Shiloh.

Why is Shiloh or Ambrose Bierce important for historical study of the Civil War in 2013?  I think their importance resides in their stark and devastating reality.  The Civil War should be studied for its impact on American society and as a haunting reminder of how entire worlds can be torn asunder in the absence of reasoned conflict resolution.  In the end of Bierce's account of Shiloh, he longs for the serenity of his prewar memory, while conceding the ease of discarding the painful recollections of the past: "O days when all the world was beautiful and strange... Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? –that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly surrender another life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh."6 Just as Bierce could not fully relinquish the haunting specter of the past, we must not disregard its lesson.

1.  Ambrose Bierce, "What I Saw of Shiloh," Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Russell Duncan & David J. Klooster (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 110.2. Ibid, 100.
3. Michael Fellman, Lesley Gordan, and Daniel Sutherland, This Terrible War: The Civil War and Its Aftermath, (New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2008), 126.4. Bierce, 106.5. Ibid, 107.
6. Ibid, 110.