Monday, August 5, 2019

Review: The Generals of Shiloh


By Larry Tagg,

American Civil War was painted on millions of individual canvasses. You can mix them up to make larger pictures which feature different aspects, different battles, differing sides and can be viewed from different angles.  Rearrange the canvases again and you have a different picture of the war.  The Civil War is an era of American history, that it is so vast with multiple moving parts, it can never be viewed as a single picture.  Students of the Civil War can be inundated with facts about the people, places and events of the war that they can quite literally sometimes get lost in the fog of war. While looking at one person, aspect or event of the war others must fade into the background. Turn around, look left, look right, look up or look down and the canvasses shift again and other canvasses must fade into the background. Sometimes students of the war need a guide to lead them through the shifting fog of 150+ years since the end of the war.

Larry Tagg is our guide through the two-day Battle of Shiloh which took place on April 6 & 7, 1862. His book “The Generals of Shiloh: Character in Leadership, April 6-7, 1862,” brings order out of chaos by focusing on the generals and colonels (acting brigadier-generals), and the divisions, corps and brigades they led.

Arranged as in an order of battle, the book is divided into three parts, one for each of the armies involved in the battle on the Tennessee River: The Army of the Tennessee, The Army of the Ohio, and The Army of the Mississippi. Starting with the commanders of each Army, Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell for the Union and for the Confederacy Albert Sidney Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard, Tagg follows the structure of the armies chains of command in descending order from division (for the Union Army) and corps (for the Confederate Army) to brigade command.

Sixty-six men make up the leadership structure of the rural Tennessee battle, each is featured with a photograph (when available) and a brief biographical sketch highlighting the lives of each man before the battle, and then a brief paragraph outlining what happened to each of them after the battle.  Each biography is then followed by the pre-battle history of their commands and their participation in the battle.  One could make an argument for titling Tagg’s book “The Brigades of Shiloh.”  However here the fog of war envelopes the reader and obscures the larger picture of the battle, as the author leads his readers through the minutia of the movements of each, division, corps and brigade.  Since this is a nonlinear approach the reader can easily get lost while following each command around the battlefield. There are only two maps in the book.  More maps would certainly have made following the generals and their commands around the battlefield easier to follow and understand.  To readers of “The Generals of Shiloh” I would recommend copying the maps in the beginning of the book and use them as a bookmark as you read through the book.

“The Generals of Shiloh” is a great book for those well versed in the Battle of Shiloh.  It should be used as a quick reference guide to the commanders and their commands.  Its table of contents makes it very easy to find any individual in just a few seconds.  Larry Tagg has written a book that is easily read in short spans of time, and would be a fantastic companion book to any narrative history of the battle.

ISBN 978-1611213690, Savas Beatie, © 2017, Hardcover, 312 Pages, Maps, Photographs, End Notes & Critical Bibliography. $32.95.  To Purchase the book click HERE.

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