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#7
- The Morass
Picture or portrait of soldier |
Official Report of a Commander | Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut (Hyperlink of a commander's name links to their name on the Official Order of Battle)
The Morass - stop #7 is not on the NPS MapThe Morass is located on the Corinth Road between the little bridges for Shiloh Branch and East Fork of Shiloh Branch at the position marker for Cleburne's brigade.
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Quotes from Actual Battlefield Participants
| “Boys, do not be
discouraged. That was not the first charge that was ever repulsed.” |
| “From
out of the edge of this great opening, came regiment after regiment and
brigade after brigade of the Confederate troops. The sun was just rising
in their front, and the glittering of their arms and equipments made a gorgeous
spectacle for me.” John A. Cockerill, 70th Ohio |
Just before the
53rd Ohio retreated from Rea Field (Stop 6), Adjutant Dawes
noticed “directly in front of the spot where General Sherman’s orderly
lay dead, . . . a group of mounted officers and a peculiar flag—dark blue, with
a white center.” That flag would become unpleasantly familiar to Union troops
west of the Appalachians as the banner of Patrick R. Cleburne’s
division—perhaps the best division and commander in the Confederate army. Cleburne,
however, who was probably one of the officers Dawes sighted, was not commanding
a division today but a brigade. He had a lot to learn before he would become
a famous general. And he was having a bad morning.
An Irish immigrant and a veteran of the enlisted ranks of the British army, Cleburne had worked as a druggist and then a lawyer in Helena, Arkansas, for a number of years. He was not very comfortable with horses, but of course he was riding one this morning as he led his brigade forward as part of Hardee’s first attack wave. Moving a brigade through the woods in the long, strung-out formation prescribed by Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics was hard enough, but when Cleburne got here, his real troubles started.
The
main and east forks of Shiloh Branch gradually approach other here
in
an area of deep mud and dense thickets known in battle reports as “the morass.”
Gamely, Cleburne tried to lead his command through. It was no good. His horse
mired down, then panicked and started rearing, finally throwing Cleburne. Fortunately
there were several inches of muck and water to cushion his fall. Meanwhile,
his brigade split on the impassable obstacle formed by the morass. The two right
regiments, including the ill-fated 6th Mississippi, passed around the
right of the slew, while the four left regiments went the other way. Somehow
they never came back together on the other side. The 6th Mississippi and
23rd Tennessee fought in Rea Field against the 53rd Ohio, while
the other regiments, continuing to drift to the left, engaged the rest of Sherman’s
division around Shiloh Church and just to the north of it (Stops
8 and 9).
Still game, if somewhat bedraggled, Cleburne caught his horse, got back on, and galloped back and forth between the two severed wings of his brigade—carefully skirting the morass—as he tried to coordinate their movements. It was a hopeless endeavor. Here, as elsewhere on the Shiloh battlefield, difficult terrain, inappropriate formations (like that of Cleburne’s brigade in single line of battle some 1,500 yards from end to end), and lack of training and experience caused the Confederate advance to become fragmented and uncoordinated.
For further reading:
A
Meteor Shining Brightly: Essays on the Life and Career of Major General Patrick
R. Cleburne by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn (Editor)
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