CSACW Shiloh Battlefield Tour - Stop Eleven - Stuart's Position

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#11 - Stuart's Position

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Quotes from Actual Battlefield Participants

“We were right on top of them. It was like shooting into a flock of sheep.”
Maj. F. E. Whitfield, 9th Mississippi

Notes from the Field . . .

Here on the far left of the Union line was the brigade of Col. David Stuart. Actually a part of Sherman’s Fifth Division, it had been detached to hold the flank closest to the river. Stuart’s officers heard the firing and got their men into line well before the Confederates reached the vicinity of their camps. First contact of skirmishers came about 9:40 a.m. on the bluff on the south side of Locust (or Spain’s) Branch, about 400 yards south of Stuart’s camps.

Confederates of the brigades of Brig. James R. Chalmers and Brig. Gen. John K. Jackson attacked Stuart and initially enjoyed good success. Col. Rodney Mason, commanding the 71st Ohio, proved to be as great a poltroon as Jesse Appler of the 53rd, and took his regiment to the rear on the run after only a couple of volleys. Lt. Col. Oscar Malmborg of the 55th Illinois, flustered and clueless, put his men through a series of complicated and absurd maneuvers until the regiment disintegrated in confusion and broke for the rear. Stuart, their old commander, got the Illinoisans to rally along the lip of a steep ravine about 400 yards behind (north of) their camps, and Col. T. Kilby Smith of the 54th Ohio, a Zouave regiment, formed up beside them.

The Confederates, busy ransacking Stuart’s abandoned camps, did not immediately follow up their advantage. They also may have been confused by the complicated terrain, with its profusion of meandering ravines. When Chalmers and Jackson finally did advance, they did so tentatively, mostly skirmishing and gradually building up pressure on Stuart’s outnumbered Federals. The blue-coats’ situation was desperate, not only were they 800 men trying to fend off 4,000, but their right flank never quite tied in with Hurlbut’s left, leaving another of those gaps that plagued the Army of the Tennessee throughout the day.

Finally, around 2:15 p.m., with Stuart wounded and ammunition running short, Kilby Smith, now ranking officer in the brigade, ordered a retreat. The Federals scrambled to the rear across the broad, deep ravine behind them while Confederates rushed forward to fire into them. “We were right on top of them,” recalled Maj. F. E. Whitfield of the 9th Mississippi, “It was like shooting into a flock of sheep. I never saw such cruel work during the war.”

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