Seeing the Elephant Book Review via University of Illinois-Chicago

(Book Reviews)


SEEING ELEPHANT

The following review appeared in the Winter, 1992, number of the West
Tennessee Historical Society Papers.


"Seeing the Elephant" Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh
Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves
Contributions in Military Studies, Number 88
New York:  Greenwood Press,  1989 -  215 pp. w/illustrations and map.
Hardback
ISBN 0-313-26692-1


No real differences except, perhaps, place of birth, existed between the Union
and Confederate citizen-soldiers who fought in 1862 at Shiloh Church.
Soldiers from both sides were driven by self-esteem, their sense of obligation
to their comrades, and their sense of identity and loyalty to their community
and to their country.  The soldiers tell their own story in Seeing the
Elephant., tell with their own words about their feelings, their emotions,
their bloodshed, and the events surrounding the battle of Shiloh.  Frank and
Reaves have developed an impressive and comprehensive treasury of letters,
news articles, and diary entries to which they apply techniques of content
analysis in an attempt to identify differences in motivation and spirit among
the men who were there.

The now long dead soldiers tell their own story.  The methodology is the real
strength of this exploration of the men of ShilohQthe story researched and
told in the words,  the memories, of the combatants.  The voices reach out
from the past youthful exuberance... duty, honor, the cause.

"I am well, fat, [and] saucy as a hog," Jim Vanderbilt told his mother in high
summer of 1861.  His outfit, the 23rd Indiana, had just disembarked in St.
Louis and felt fit for whatever rigors the coming campaign would entail (To
mother, August 1861) (61).

"I have no desire to see the thing ended until it can be thoroughly ended, and
honorable too.  If ruin comes to the South[,] She can not reproach us for it,
for she has willfully brought it upon herself" (J. P. Snell to John G. Copley,
June 2, 1861) (72).

Lunsford Yandell wrote...  it was going to be a war to the finish, "because to
end the war and allow us to leave [their homes] would be their destruction.
[Thus]... our only hope of avoiding destruction and utter ruin is to fight our
way through our troubles and conquer our independence" (To sister [Sally],
February 26, 1862) (74).

The battle described by those who were there creates a picture of a struggle
for personal survival.  It is a description not always possible in histories
written from the macro or global view.  This is a micro approachQit is
personal, it is real.

"We would lay on the ground and load our guns stand up and fire sometimes
behind a tree or running from one tree to the other," wrote William Kennedy of
the 55th Illinois, in his description of the desperate fighting in the woods
and gullies next to the Tennessee River....  "It seemed to me," he went on,
"that they were all deers but they was a good deal worse for while I was
looking for them they was firing at me" (To wife, April 1862) (102).

Amos Currier, 8th Iowa Infantry, recalled matter-of-factly the first time he
saw a comrade struck.  He was shot in the head, the bullet making "a peculiar
spat I shall never forget" (Diary, April 17, 1862).  Frequently, the soldiers
gave detailed accounts of the severity of the wounds and the circumstances
surrounding the tragedy for the victim's friends and loves ones back home.  An
Alabamian in Chalmers' brigade recited a litany of individual and family
tragedies as they plunged into enemy fire and advanced toward the Union line
behind the Peach Orchard.  "Before we got fairly in battle Corporal Anderson
was killed almost instantly.  The only words he uttered were. 'I've got it.'
... The next hurt was Richard K. Jones....  He was hit somewhere near the
knee, the ball ranging up the fleshy part of this thigh....  Daniel King was
shot under the eye, next the nose, the bullet passing into his mouth" (The
Mobile Advertiser and Register, April 11, 1862) (105).

 "I have seen enough & am now very willing that peace may come, & I hope it
will come soon," wrote Captain Charles Stewart, 21st Alabama Infantry.  He was
thankful that he had been spared, but he feared for the future realizing that
"the next Battle may be my last" (To Julia, April 12, 1862).  (Stewart was
killed by an exploding canon at Mobile) (126).

The horror of the field after the battle  in the words of the men who were
there:

"The carts for the dead are constantly running," Calvin Morley of the 18th
Wisconsin told his wife (Quiner, Reel No. 2, Vol 6, p. 56).  Over a thousand
men were assigned to disposing of the corpses and carcasses.  "They dig holes
and pile them in like dead cattle and have teams to draw them together like
picking up pumpkins" (G. C.  Meadows, Collection).  Watching dead friends
hitched to ropes and dragged to assembly areas and unceremoniously slung onto
wagons to be carted to burial sites depressed the men terribly....  It was
"dreadful," lamented a Hoosier survivor, "to see the poor soldier just thrown
in a ditch and covered without any box" (J. Hardin to Ress [sister], Letters,
April 12, 1862) (122).

The authors' methodology gives scientific method to the interpretation of
motives, attitudes, and beliefs of the combatants.  The method, while
apparently based on an analysis of the content of the sources, also considers
research into the motivation and psychology of men of the 1860s.  The details
of the method are not precisely spelled out, but enough of the procedure is
given to indicate a comprehensive content analysis technique.which seems to be
fairly reliable and valid.  The statistical analysis appears to be defensible.
The real value of the authors' approach is that they are not simply relating
their own "feelings" about their extensive analysis of hundreds of letters,
first person accounts, and contemporary news articles.  The approach presents
what is unusual in the extensive literature of the Civil War, that is, an
attempt at a scientific non-biased data analysis.  For example, when the
authors report the reaction of the northern soldiers to the west Tennessee
area, anecdotal accounts of the ignorant natives, the poor land, and the
unsophisticated nature of the settlements are cited.   On the other hand, the
similar negative reaction by the Southern troops to the region and its
inhabitants is also reported.

Here they were, at last, in the land of magnolias and mint juleps, crowned by
luxurious manor houses and supposedly peopled by a fine landed gentry.  But
these preconceptions of the South quickly dissipated in the reality of war.
The Union volunteers found, instead, a poor region where "[the] people
owning... slaves live no better off than many a logging shanty up in the pine
woods of Wisconsin," observed C. R. Johnson as he marched through the region
with a Wisconsin regiment (Quiner, Reel No. 2, Vol. 5, p. 139) (68).

A Confederate gunner with the Washington Artillery, William S. Vaught of the
battalion's 5th Company, thought Grand Junction, Tennessee, was the "meanest
place it has ever been my lot to be stuck [in]" (To Albert [brother], March
22, 1862) (69).

The authors point out that both Southerners and Northerners overlooked or were
simply unaware that the region around the Shiloh Church had been settled for
less than forty years.  The area had been leaped frogged during the period of
the great western migration.

Perhaps, one of the major strengths of Seeing the Elephant is the application
of contemporary behavioral and motivational research findings from studies on
modern soldiers to the written evidence left by those who fought in the Civil
War.  In fact, the authors contend the three factors which emerge as the Civil
War soldiers' primary motivation to fightQself-esteem, obligation to comrades,
and loyalty to community and countryQare no different from those cited by
Stouffer in a study of World War II motivation (179).  Not only do the authors
find little or no significant difference between Northern and Southern  Civil
War soldiers, the authors say the basic motivations to fight are essentially
the same for citizen soldiers in this last part of the 20th Century.

S. Kittrell Rushing
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga


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