The Road to Shiloh

Rating:
Summary: "Unconditional Surrender" Grant makes his reputation
Review: Although the battles of the Army of the Potomac in the Eastern Theater garner most of the historical interest, the battles in the West were arguably more significant. In "The Road to Shiloh: Early Battles in the West," David Nevin and the Editors of Time-Life Books cover General Ulysses Grant's campaign in Tennessee in 1861-62 in five chapters: (1) The Struggle for Missouri covers the Battle of Wilson's Creek that proved pivotal for the control of this border state; (2) The Go-ahead General details the path by which Grant came to command the Union Army in the West (including that infamous photo of Grant with a fully cultivated square-cut beard); (3) Clash at Fort Donelson relates how Grant followed up his successfully attack on Fort Henry with an attack that would give the Federals control of the Cumberland River; (4) The Devil's Own Day covers the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, in which the Union army was almost routed during one of the bloodiest days of the war; this chapter includes Theophile Poilpot's 400 foot long panoramic painting of the battle for the Hornet's Nest; and (5) An Incomplete Victory tells how Grant and Sherman defeated Albert Sidney Johnston's Confederate Army on the second day of the battle, suggesting that even if a tourniquet had saved Johnston's life, the battle would still have been lost.

Like all of the volumes in the Time-Life Civil War series, "The Road to Shiloh" provides dozens of contemporary illustrations, photographs, paintings, and the like. My one complaint is that if you read these volumes a lot, and it is hard not to, they tend to fall apart. The cover ends up being a nice gray folder. This was rather unfortunate because I brought this particular volume with me when I visited the Shiloh battlefield. The rest of Grant's Western Campaign including the siege of Vicksburg is covered in the "War on the Mississippi" volume of the Time-Life Civil War series.