Adams County men fight at the Battle of Shiloh

Sunday, April 6, 1862, had
been a day in hell for the Adams County men of the 50th Infantry Illinois Volunteers
— Union soldiers for little more than seven months. They had been under heavy
fire on that first day of the Battle of Shiloh. Casualties
were staggering. The men of the 50th knew the din of fire. They had
been with pit bull Major Gen. Ulysses Grant to pull down the Confederate flag
at Fort Henry on Feb. 8, and they were at the front of the Union ’s attack that
took the enemy’s works at Fort Donelson in three days of pitched battle a week
later.

The men of the 50th had seen the horrors of war. Three soldiers died and
many more were wounded in the two battles.

“It was an awful sight to
one like myself, who never saw the like before, to see dead strewed all over
the ground — men without heads and arms,” wrote Company K’s 28-year-old Timothy
D. McGillicuddy, who had come from Hannibal, Mo., to join the 50th. Much more
of the same was to come. The two-day battle in April in southwestern
Tennessee took its name from the small church near the center of the
battlefield. Its name, Shiloh, haunted those who fought there. In Hebrew it
meant “place of peace.” Now it meant anything but — casualties of the North and
South at this place numbered more than 23,000. More than a hundred were men of
the 50th Illinois. Planning to attack the Confederate transportation
hub at Corinth, Miss., 20 miles south, Union generals had been amassing forces
at Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River just northeast of the church.

With the first sunlight shimmering on the Tennessee River
shortly after 5 a.m. on April 6, a patrol from Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss’ Sixth
Division ran headlong into an advance picket of the 3rd Mississippi Infantry.
The rebel Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston had decided to strike before Grant could
unite his army with Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s force, then on its way down
the Tennessee River. Johnston’s plan was to insert his forces between
Grant’s organizing army and the Union forces arriving at Pittsburgh Landing.
With little coordination among them, federal units found themselves continually
outflanked and pushed back by the rebels. On the Union’s left flank, where the
thick of the enemy attacked, Prentiss’ untested regiments resisted the
onslaught but were forced back repeatedly until they reached a
deeply-rutted wagon path called the “Sunken Road.” Grant ordered Prentiss to
hold the position “at all hazards.” So intensive was the exchange of fire,
Prentiss’ men christened it “The Hornet’s Nest.”

Elsewhere, the Adams County-formed 50th Illinois was ordered
to aid Illinois Col. David Stuart’s Second Brigade on the far east side of the
Union line, near the river, and which now was under heavy attack. Scouts
Michael Ward and Martin Kiser, both privates from Quincy, hurried back to
Company C, which was crouched in a ravine, to warn of a large line of advancing
rebels snaking toward them.

First Lt. Theodore Letton, a Quincy music teacher before the
war, saw the Confederate flag, then hundreds of rebels, their heads bobbing and
rising above the west horizon just ahead. Letton ordered his men to open fire.
At the same instant, the 50th felt the heat of fire from the rear. The enemy
line was clamped around them, extending past the south end of the ravine, which
put the rebels behind the men of Company C.

“To say that I was surprised and horrified would fall
far short of expressing my feelings at that moment,” Letton wrote in his
reminiscence of the battle. “I felt certain the whole company would be
annihilated.”

Letton
ordered his men to pull back, take positions behind the trees, fire, retreat to
the next tree line back, reload and repeat the tactic.

“We retreated probably a mile, and I am confi dent the enemy
suffered a great deal more than we did in that running fight,” Letton wrote.

But the 50th suffered plenty. Seventy-nine men went down in
the first 15 minutes. A rebel musket ball blew Colonel Bane from his saddle,
shattering the bone in his right arm above the elbow. The projectile
ripped into Bane’s side, fracturing two ribs and lodging in his chest. Doctors
said the wounds were mortal. His brother Garner, a surgeon from Liberty,
however, saved Col. Bane’s life by amputating the arm.

Meanwhile, Prentiss’ men withstood repeated Confederate
attempts to overrun them and were buoyed by reinforcements from Gen. W.H.L.
Wallace’s Second Division on the right and Illinois Gen. Stephen Hurlbut’s
Fourth Division on the left.

By mid-afternoon, however, rebels were ripping Hurlbut’s unit
apart and heavy artillery fire forced Wallace to fall back. Wallace himself did
not make it. A musket ball crushed his skull and exited through one eye. In the
exchange, Confederates suffered an even greater loss. Gen. Johnston, one of the
South’s most important generals and a favorite of rebel President Jefferson
Davis, was mortally wounded.

Now at the salient point of the battle, Prentiss and his men
held at the Sunken Road under the severest southern fire of the day. Shortly
before 6 p.m., nearly 12 hours after Prentiss’ men first engaged the enemy,
the Confederates surrounded the Sixth Division. Prentiss surrendered his
exhausted force to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, whose attack on Fort Sumter a year
earlier had started the Civil War. With that act, which saved the lives of
2,200 men, Gen. Prentiss had “lost everything but honor,” said the official war
record. His division’s stand bought Gen. Grant the time he needed to organize
his army for victory the next day.

For hundreds of young men in Prentiss’ Sixth and Bane’s 50th,
who had stubbornly contested every inch of ground at Shiloh on April 6, 1862,
the Civil War was over.

Reg Ankrom is executive director of the Historical
Society. He is a member of several history-related organizations, the author of
a history of Stephen A. Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War
history.

S

ources

Costigan,
David. “Once Upon a Time in Quincy: Civil War Generals.” Quincy
Herald-Whig, October 28, 2011. At

Hicken,
Victor. Illinois in the Civil War. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois
Press, 1966.

Hubert,
Charles F. History of the Fiftieth Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry in the
War of the Union. Kansas City, Missouri: Western Veteran Publishing Company,
1894. Collection, Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County.

“Illinois
Civil War Detail Report.” Illinois Secretary of State. At

“List
of Quincy Soldiers Who have died in the service of their county in the war of
the Great Rebellion,” The Directory; History and Statistics of the City of
Quincy for the Years 1865-1865. Compiled by S. B. Wyckoff. Quincy, ILL: Steam
Press of the Whig and Republican, 1864. Collection, Historical Society of
Quincy and Adams County.

“Maps
of Shiloh, Tennessee, 1862: Battle of Shiloh, TN, April 6, 1862, Day One”
Civil War Trust.

Prentiss,
Brig. Gen. B. M. “Report of Brig. Gen. B. M. Prentiss, U. S. Army,
commanding Sixth Division, Quincy, Ill., November 17, 1862,” War of the
Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol.
X. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884. Collection, Historical Society
of Quincy and Adams County.

“50th
Illinois Infantry Regiment History,” Report of the Adjutant General of the
State of Illinois, Volume III Containing Reports for the Years 1861-1866.
Revised by Brigadier General J. N. Reece, Adjutant General. Springfield,
Illinois: Phillips Bros., State Printers, 1901. At