In the novel Shiloh, historian and Civil War expert Shelby Foote delivers a spare, unflinching account of the battle of Shiloh, which was fought over the course of two days in April 1862. By mirroring the troops’ movements through the woods of Tennessee with the activity of each soldier’s mind, Foote offers the reader a broad perspective of the battle and a detailed view of the issues behind it. The battle becomes tangible as Foote interweaves the observations of Union and Confederate officers, simple foot soldiers, brave men, and cowards and describes the roar of the muskets and the haze of the gun smoke.
The author’s vivid storytelling creates a rich chronicle of a pivotal battle in American history This book is a wonderful example of his abilities and deals with the battle of Shiloh through the eyes of several men on both sides of the conflict. His characters are not the generals on the field, rather they are common soldiers ranging from privates who have never seen battle up to a colonel (Forrest) — people that don’t have all the answers, others who are still searching for the questions.
The wonderful thing about Foote’s writing is his ability to make you feel like you were there without bogging the story down with too many numbers and statistics, but allowing the viewer a much deeper understanding of the events of the battle by giving us a glimpse through the eyes of those who were there. Foote is one of the great authorities on the War, and though he wrote this when pretty young it is still filled with detail and knowledge of the war. It conveys well the chaos of the fighting and how, as so often, small failures of generalship cost the battle
Shelby Foote’s Shiloh is a novel about a real Civil War battle told from the point of view of a few common soldiers, both northern and southern, who fought there. Because he chose to depict the action from these points of view, he limits what can be said of the big picture. If one can ignore that big picture, the book works very well at showing the reader what the experience must have been like for individuals caught up in different parts of the fight. Yet needing to provide some of that picture, Foote has each character present background on specific generals and their actions leading up to Shiloh.
This exposition is, for the most part, pretty clumsy and simply detracts from the first person focus. The problem I have with the book is that the reader doesn’t get to know any of the characters very well and overall outcome of the battle is unclear. This is a really small book (just over 200 pages) and while the images are graphic and the characters accessable, the author just doesn’t have the space to spread out and let the reader develop a real emotional response to these characters and their actions.
Nor is he able to provide any perspective on the battle and what it means – even for the individual characters he has presented. I think it helps to have read the section in his narrative history of the Civil War that deals with Shiloh. But this means that the novel doesn’t really stand on its own. The reader must come equiped with prior knowledge or be left with questions that will require some research. Perhaps not bad, but I would have preferred a more comprehensive treatment – something more like Tom Wicker’s Unto This Hour.
That’s just personal taste. Foote did what he intended and did it well. I can’t help it if I just want more. Fans of Shelby Foote’s massive three volume Narrative History of the Civil War, (and I am the work’s biggest fan), will surely find something they like in Foote’s earlier novel about the battle of Shiloh. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that Foote’s real calling is as historian and commentator, and his effort to write a novel here seems to be a bit off the mark.
Perhaps unfairly, novels of the Civil War tend to get compared to Michael Shaara’s brilliant Killer Angels, a comparison that does not bode well for Shiloh. Here Foote tries to tell the story of the battle by providing first person narratives by a number of foot soldiers and adjutants, who often spend most of the battle lost, since I think Foote was trying to portray the confusion of this first great battle of the Civil War, with about 100,000 soldiers on the field and almost 25% casualties.
However his narrative style ends up creating a jumbled mess, with no interaction between the characters, and not enough personal insight to make the reader remember or care about any of the narrators. It seemed to me that Foote the historian is effectively telling the history of the battle and providing biographical info of certain major players, like Albert Sidney Johnston, Ulysses Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest, and he occasionally throws in a forced reference to a girlfriend back home or a memory from school to remind the reader this is a novel.
In particular the very beginning, where assistants tell the reader all about the history of Generals Johnston and Grant (under whom they supposedly serve), seemed contrived. If you enjoyed the campfire banter of Lee and Longstreet in Killer Angels, or the heroic determination of Lewis Armistead to do his duty without harming his good friend Winfield Hancock, you will find nothing comparable here.
Told from the perspective of several of the participants (a Mississippi rifleman, a Minnesota artilleryman, one of N. B. Forrest’s calvalrymen, an Ohio infantry squad leader), this first person narrative tells the tale of the first great cataclysm in the ACW’s western theatre with convincing insight and emotion. The axiom of war – no strategy can survive contact with the enemy – was never proven truer than at Shiloh. Foote’s narrative (this work undoubtedly proved to hone Mr. Foote’s great skills for his monumental American Iliad – Civil War Narrative ) takes the reader to the most basic level of human experience.
These are not troops – they are unique individuals, each with their own unique story to tell. Confusion, noise, smoke bombard overwrought senses – there are no God’s eye view maps with red and blue arrows diagramming troop movements to try to give false sense to the chaos. Heroes and cowards, leaders and followers from North and South, crash into each other in a cacophony of violence near a Methodist meeting house named for Place of Peace, a few miles west of Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River.
Albert Sidney Johnston’s plan for the destruction of Grant’s Army of Tennessee achieves limited success on the first day, only to be defeated on the second day after Buell comes up with the Union Army of Ohio. (Woe to the South at the loss of the great man Johnston, the South’s first soldier. ) The lives of each of the narrators are inextricably and forever linked by their experiences on 6 and 7 April (a Sunday and a Monday, lest we forget) 1862. What brought them together at that place, at that time; what were their thoughts and cares; why and for what and for whom did they fight, and how?
These are basic, difficult questions to answer. Mr. Foote addresses each of these questions, for each individual, in a thoughtful manner, as a sort of personal history. This work is much over-looked and under-appreciated. It should stand next to Crane’s ‘Red Badge of Courage’ in our national treasury of works of art, filed under: ‘Fiction – American Civil War’. Shelby Foote’s non-fiction book about a great Civil War battle, Shiloh, is a gruesome story about death, battle, courage, and cowardice.
Foote described the true parts of battle, but wasted much of the book describing each main character’s life before the war. Foote, however, shows his knowledge of Civil War battle strategies and allows the reader to enter the Shiloh battlefield in which two huge lines of soldiers collided. My favorite parts of Foote’s description of Shiloh–death, blood, battle, exhaustion, and fear–I still remember now. For example, I enjoyed reading when Foote described a man running, getting shot, and not stopping: “I saw one man come over . I saw the front of his coat jump where the shots came through . . . this man kept going for nearly fifty yards downhill” (p. 79). Another gruesome part was when Foote described the surgeons in the medical room on the battlefield. The surgeons were drinking liquor to be drunk so that they could amputate the injured soldiers’ shattered arms and legs. The pile of cut off arms and legs was up to the window. But the most horrifying part of the surgeries was the absence of anesthesia and antiseptics.
Each hurt man would have to be held down as he experienced excruciating pain, but many passed out and later died of infection. Finally, I realized how much suffering two opposing forces can bring upon one country: dying soldiers, devastated country, and unbearable sadness. For example, Foote describes the mile-long lines of men from the South and North opposing each other. Each side would test the cannon’s range, and, after a while, would be destroying huge groups of men and creating gaping holes in the earth.
As a northern infantryman said as he watched the mini balls cut down his friends, “they died for nothing” (p. 191). The front line would also shoot grapeshot that would burst into thousands of tiny pieces and destroy the other army’s front line. All of Shiloh was about two sides of America fighting over slaver! y and secession. About 26, 000 men died without respect, a prayer, or a marked grave. Shiloh is a historically accurate book that would interest anyone who likes to read about the Civil War and wants to understand the pain and suffering our country went through on April 6-7, 1862.
