CSACW Shiloh Battlefield Tour - Stop Fifteen - Hornets' Nest

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#15 - Hornets' Nest

Notes from the Field . . .

Known as “the Sunken Road,” this wagon track was worn a foot or two below the surrounding surface in some places, but it was by no means a “ready-made entrenchment.” It offered very little cover, but it did offer a tangible line on which to rally. The remnant of Prentiss’s division rallied here about 9:00 a.m. and other Union troops moved up on line with Prentiss on either side—Hurlbut on the left and W. H. L. Wallace on the right. The term “Hornets’ Nest” refers to the area of thickets immediately in front of this part of the road. It was given by Confederates who attacked into this area, who spoke of the bullets buzzing by them sounding like angry hornets swarming out of a stirred-up nest.

About 10:30 the first Confederate assault struck this line, Col. William H. Stephens’s Tennessee and Kentucky brigade of Benjamin H. Cheatham’s division, with Cheatham riding along. Union defensive fire devastated Stephens’s troops. One regiment, the 6th Tennessee, lost its entire twelve-man color guard, fourteen officers, and over 200 other casualties. Half an hour later Col. R. G. Shaver’s brigade of Arkansans, along with odds and ends of other units, launched an even more formidable assault but with a similar result. About noon another Confederate brigade entered the struggle for the Hornets’ Nest, three regiments of Louisianans and one of Arkansans, all commanded by Col. Randal L. Gibson. Over the next two hours Gibson’s men charged four separate times, and each time they were beaten back with heavy losses. At 2:30 Shaver’s Arkansans tried again; again the bluecoats stopped them. Then at 3:30 Brig. Gen. Patton Anderson’s brigade of Louisiana, Florida, and Texas troops advanced to the slaughter.

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The Hornet's Nest - looking west across Duncan Field (view of the Federals)

With each Confederate charge, Capt. Andrew Hickenlooper’s Fifth Ohio Battery, along with the rest of the Union artillery, blasted the on-coming Confederates all the way in. First they used shell with two-second fuses, then one-second, then canister, and finally double-canister as the Rebels closed in for the final rush. Then the defending infantry, which had been lying flat on either side of the guns, would rise up and pour a devastating fire into the faces of the attackers. Sgt. F. F. Kiner of the 14th Iowa latter explained, “Our object was to let them come as close as possible within thirty paces, so that we could see the whites of their eyes.” Then on an order from their colonel, the soldiers volleyed into the Rebel ranks. A member of the 12th Iowa Regiment recalled that the Rebels ‘would halt a little under the storm of bullets, hesitate, fall back and fly, leaving the ground covered with their dead and wounded. . . . They came so close we heard their . . . voices and we saw the men falling under the terrific fire.”

Capt. Hickenlooper described the scene: “The ear-piercing and peculiar ‘rebel yell’ of the men in gray and the answering cheers of the boys in blue rose and fell with the varying tide of battle; and with the hoarse and scarcely distinguishable orders of the officers, the screaming and bursting of shell, the swishing sound of canister, the roaring of volley-firing, the death screams of the stricken and struggling horses, and the cries and groans of the wounded formed and indescribable impression, which can never be effaced from memory.”

“Again and again,” Hickenlooper recalled, “this dance of death went on.” In five hours the defenders of the Hornets’ Nest, about 4,300 men, beat off at least eight separate assaults from a combined total of at least 10,000 Confederates and possibly as many as 17,000. Of the attackers, about 2,400 had become casualties.