Review - "The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland" by Sean Chick

[The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland by Sean M. Chick (Casemate, 2025). Softcover, 5 maps, timeline, photos, illustrations, reading list, index. 128 Pages. ISBN:978-1-63624-369-6. $24.95]

The American Civil War titles that are a part of the Casemate Illustrated series offer access to concise and up to date histories of major campaigns and battles that are supplemented by color maps and additional visual aids of all types. The latest installment is Sean Chick's The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland.

Chick, who is in the midst of writing a major multi-volume history of Shiloh, situates the battle within the context of a broad wave of Union offensive operations in the western theater that began in February 1862 and quickly produced major land and water advances through Kentucky and deep into Tennessee. The Confederate attack on the Union encampment around Pittsburg Landing on April 6 is properly presented as a desperate attempt to reverse the profound effects of the unmitigated disasters that befell the South's western defense line over the previous two months.

Conventional thought, in both the popular imagination and among scholars, in regard to the personalities, decisions, and events most central to our understanding of the Shiloh campaign and battle has evolved greatly over time. In his book Rethinking Shiloh: Myth and Memory, Timothy Smith identified what he considers to be three distinct historical schools of thought and an evolving fourth. In their own writings and other forms of public engagement, modern subject matter experts such as Smith, Stacy Allen, and others have directly questioned much of what was commonly thought to be true about Shiloh and have rejected many longstanding lines of interpretation along with a number of equally long-cherished myths. Much of that recent reappraisal is reflected in Chick's sound narrative of events. Thus, Chick, though he certainly appreciates its significance, does not make the Hornet's Nest fighting the central event of his April 6 narrative, nor does he opine that it was Confederate army commander Albert Sidney Johnston untimely death that allowed Grant's army to escape defeat on that day. While Chick does wonder what might have been had another hour of daylight been available, the author generally reinforces the consensus view that the Confederates were by no means on the cusp of achieving victory when Johnston's successor, P.G.T. Beauregard, ordered the army to stand down late in the day. That decision was opposed by some front line commanders at the time and was later criticized by pro-Confederate chroniclers seeking a scapegoat for what they saw as a battlefield defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

Chick, who recently authored a Beauregard biography, gives the general a mixed review for this part of his Civil War career. Beauregard's mistakes, such as his ill-conceived initial battle plan and the disorganized state of his command on April 7 (when he was surprised by the timing and strength of the Union counterattack), are duly acknowledged, but the general is also praised for his inspirational battlefield leadership against the combined armies of Grant and Buell before enemy numbers and sheer exhaustion pushed his diminished army to the brink of collapse during the fierce morning fighting on April 7.

In assessing the Union side of things, Chick, as Timothy Smith has similarly argued, finds that Grant's early-war overconfidence displayed at Belmont, Donelson, and Shiloh was a personality trait that barely escaped producing disaster (for the general's own career as well as for the forces under his command). In arranging his divisions around Pittsburg Landing, Grant's lack of defensive preparedness is deemed by Chick to have been particularly "inexcusable," but, on the other hand, Grant is complimented for weathering the crisis on April 6 in his typically cool and determined fashion, even leading from the front in ways that he generally avoided later on in the war. Sherman is similarly criticized for his lack of defensive preparation (and for his crude dismissals of clear signs that the enemy was near), but the author highly commends Sherman's handling of his green division on April 6, when it held its ground for several critical hours against superior numbers and inflicted crippling losses on its attackers. In the author's view, the stand of Sherman's division was a key factor in staving off defeat on Day One. In addressing a point that still divides opinion, Chick's interpretation of the role of Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio concludes that those forces didn't "save" Grant's army from defeat or annihilation on April 6. Instead, they should be considered the essential reinforcements without which the outright driving of the enemy from the field on April 7 was an uncertain proposition. The Lew Wallace controversy, which has been addressed in-depth inside several recent books, is treated briefly and in evenhanded fashion.

Overall, Chick does fine work in condensing a big topic into a very limited amount of space. The narrative provides both big-picture analysis and an appropriate degree of small-unit (brigade and regiment) detail. Well-selected passages from participant writings further enrich the text. Battlefield maps (two for each day) are brigade-scale and useful mostly for general orientation. Among the large collection of illustrations are a number of less commonly reproduced ones, and the informational sidebars also focus on lesser-known figures and topics related to the battle.

Sean Chick's The Shiloh Campaign, 1862 is a strong modern overview that should readily appeal to readers seeking their first exposure to the greatest western battle of the early-war period. There's also enough interesting, non-'run of the mill' commentary on personalities and decisions scattered about the text to draw the interest of deeper students of the subject.