The Guns of Shiloh

The Guns of Shiloh is the second book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Civil War Series, published in 1914. It follows directly from The Guns of Bull Run and switches the main perspective from Harry Kenton on the Confederate side to Dick Mason on the Union side. The two cousins from Kentucky are now serving in opposing armies, and the series will keep cutting between them through the eight book sequence.

Most of this volume is set in the western theater of the war during the late winter and early spring of 1862. Dick has joined a Union regiment under Colonel Arthur Winchester, his older friend and mentor, and the regiment moves with the Army of the Tennessee through the Forts Henry and Donelson campaigns and then south into Tennessee toward the engagement at Shiloh. The battle of Shiloh itself takes up the long central section of the book, narrated in Altsheler’s clear and surprisingly accurate style. He had read his Sherman and his Grant and his Confederate after action reports, and the troop movements are correct in their broad shape.

Altsheler is especially good on the first day of Shiloh, the disastrous Union surprise at Pittsburg Landing that nearly ended the war for the western Union forces. He shows the early morning Confederate attack as it broke over the Union camps, the slow rallying around the Hornet’s Nest, the death of General Albert Sidney Johnston, and the eventual stand at the Landing as Buell’s reinforcements crossed the river overnight. The second day, the Union counterattack, is handled more briefly.

The book runs about three hundred and fifty pages. It works as a standalone novel of the western theater up to mid 1862 and also as the second installment of the longer series. For readers continuing on, The Scouts of Stonewall comes next and switches the perspective back to Harry Kenton in Virginia. The full sequence runs through to Appomattox.