Battle of Shiloh

“Brookhaven” and the Battle of Shiloh

April 15, 2026 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

For a very long time, no one in my father’s family – father, aunts, uncles, grandmother, or cousins – knew why the family Bible contained a death notice. The name was Jarvis Seale; the only thing the listing had was the date of his death. Who was this person? Why was he considered so important that my great-grandfather, who’d penned every entry in the records, had included him. My father guessed Jarvis might have been a distant cousin, or a close friend.

It was only in the years I’d been doing reading and research for my historical novel Brookhaven that I discovered the answer, and then it was simply by happenstance. The key was the date of his death.

I was reading about the two-day Battle of Shiloh, and something about the dates – April 6 and April 7 of 1862 – reminded me of something. The dates were familiar, but in some other context. Where else had I seen those dates? At some point, I made the connection. It was the family Bible, and the mention of the mystery man. His death was listed as April 6, 1862.

I turned to Family Search. I pulled up my great-grandfather’s listing and checked his sisters. And there he was – the husband of an older sister, Martha. The had had five children – a boy and four girls. Family mystery solved.

Last week, specifically April 6 and April 7, marked the 164^th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh. Up to that point in the Civil War, the war had something almost romantic. But over the course of those two days, the reality became apparent. This wasn’t some romantic story of dashing horsemen rattling their sabers. This amounted to almost wholesale slaughter – more than 23,000 men (both sides combined) died during those two days, and many more were injured. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed. The Union has emerged victorious but had almost lost the battle on the first day. General Ulysses S. Grant was vilified in the northern press. The Union had won, but the cost was horrific.

*Shiloh National Military Park one of the Confederate mass graves*.

The Confederate dead – more than 10,000 – were heaped into nine mass graves. The Union dead were given individual graves. One of those mass graves contained the body of Jarvis Seale. As I was writing Brookhaven, it wasn’t difficult to image the grief of Jarvis’s widow and five children. Not only had they lost a husband and a father, they would also never know which mass grave contained his body. One daughter later married and moved to northern Texas. In the local cemetery, she had a memorial stone erected in her father’s memory. It’s why Find-A Grave identifies the cemetery as his burial site, but it’s only a memorial, not a grave.

The Battle of Shiloh eventually played a role in the birth of Decoration Day, which eventually was named Memorial Day. in 1866, women from the former Confederacy decorated the mass graves at Shiloh with floral tributes to the dead. Unexpectedly, they also decorated the graves of the Union dead. Northern women took notice and soon duplicated the practice at the sites of battles in northern states. Foes in life had joined together in death.

Related:

A flood of memories: How rising water imperiled Shiloh wounded – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

“Shiloh” by Shelby Foote

November 22, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Shelby Foote (1916-2005) was a journalist, writer, and historian best known for his three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, published between 1958 and 1974. His writings about the war and the South generally tilted in the direction of the Lost Cause, which means he’s as far out of favor with historians today as he can be. And yet his scholarship and depth of research were impressive.

Foote also wrote six novels, one of which was entitled Shiloh, published in 1952. As the title indicates, it was about the Battle of Shiloh, fought April 6-7, 1862, in southern Tennessee very close to the Mississippi border. It was something of a seesaw battle, in that the Confederates under Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard clearly won the first day, only to see their victory turned into defeat the second day by the Union forces under Ulysses Grant and Don Carlos Buell. There were some 24,000 casualties, the total of both sides, and Shiloh has the dubious distinction of being one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

The name “Shiloh” came from Shiloh Church located near Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River (the battle is also sometimes called the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing). “Shiloh,” interestingly enough, means “peace.”

Foote’s novel is less of a traditional novel and more like seven connected short stories, each with a different narrator. The story moves back and forth between Confederate and Union perspectives. It’s told by a lieutenant and aide-de-camp to General Johnston; a captain in the 53^rd Ohio; a private and rifleman in the 6^th Mississippi; a private and cannoneer for the 1^st Minnesota; a scout in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry; a squad with the 23^rd Indiana; and then Johnston’s aide-de-camp again, listed as “unattached” because Johnston has been killed in battle.

These men, representing both sides, take the reader through the battle and its different aspects. Palmer Metcalfe, the aide-de-camp who provides the beginning and the ending entries, gives a more strategic, step-by-step description. In fact, the first chapter reads more like history than it does a novel. But we see the attacks, the movements, the deaths, the prisoners taken, and ultimately the general carnage that produced such a high casualty rate.

In Foote’s hands, it’s the battle itself that’s the main character and the main story. It’s less about the men who fought it and more about the inevitable turnings of a great wheel of death and destruction.

The Union dead were buried in individual graves; the Confederate dead were buried in several mass, and unmarked, graves. It was here that a tradition started sometime later. Confederate mothers and wives placed flowers on their sones’ and husbands’ graves. Seeing the bare Union graves, they placed flowers on those as well. When Northern mothers and wives heard the story, the reciprocated in likewise fashion. Some good and some understanding did come from that terrible conflict.

Related:

Battle at Shiloh: The Devil’s Own Two Days – Wide Awake Films.

Top illustration: Battle of Shiloh by Thure De Thulstrup for Harper’s Magazine, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Mystery Man in the Family Bible

June 15, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It’s a two-line reference in the family Bible, first owned by my great-grandfather. The family records section in Bibles in the 19^th century was generally inserted between the Old and New Testaments, and that’s where our family recordings were. All of the entries were in the same hand, the early ones in the same ink, suggesting they were written down at the same time. A friend in book conservation judged the Bible to have been published in the 1870s.

My great-grandfather Samuel Young was born in in 1845, 1846, or 1848 – the handwriting is not clear. Other records, like those found in online genealogy sites, have 1845 and 1846. The handwriting is clear for the birth date of his wife and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery. That date is 1844. The same handwriting continues after her death in 1887, which tells me it was my great-grandfather making all the entries (and his death in 1920 is not recorded).

The records are filled with Youngs – sisters, brothers, parents, and children. They begin with the birth of Samuel’s father Franklin, in 1802 in Savannah, Georgia. But there is one entry which always mystified my grandmother, my father, and other relatives, that of a Jarvis Seale. The best guess was my father’s – perhaps a distant cousin who was also a good friend? He was the only non-Young noted in the family records. But who was he?

The advent of online genealogy sites has been helpful – but not completely helpful. I tracked down Jarvis Seale and discovered he was the husband of Samuel’s oldest sister Martha. Ancestry.com says they had only one child; Family Search notes six children. Family Search turns out to be more accurate. Their oldest child, Littleton, was close in age to my great-grandfather Samuel, and I suspect they were more friends than uncle and nephew.

Still, it begs the question of why only the one in-law added to the record? Others could have easily been included; Samuel came from a relatively large family.

Jarvis died when he was 36 in 1862, and it’s the date that might be the first clue – April 6, 1862, the first day of the two-day Battle of Shiloh. When we think of the Civil War, we think of the war in the east – Robert E. Lee, Virginia, or perhaps Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea. Shiloh, in Tennessee near the Mississippi border, was the first major battle of the entire war, engaging thousands of soldiers on both sides. And the numbers of deaths, casualties, and missing staggered people in both the North and the South. To give some idea of the impact, the North ultimately prevailed and won the battle – and newspapers all over the North, horrified at the carnage, called for the removal of the Union generals, who included both Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.

Jarvis has one additional mystery attached to him. The genealogy sites claim he is buried in Red River County, Texas, on the Oklahoma border. There’s even a picture of a memorial stone. But I suspect that’s exactly what it is – a memorial and not a grave. The Confederate dead at Shiloh were buried by Union forces in nine mass graves, the location of three of which are still unknown. It is much more likely that Jarvis is buried in one of those mass graves, as there would have been no reason to move his body to a cemetery in Texas. Jarvis’s oldest daughter, Margaret, was 11 at the time of her father’s death, and she herself died in 1937. She was buried in Red River County, Texas. I suspect, and it’s only a suspicion, that she was the one who had the memorial stone for her father placed in the Red River Cemetery. The family wouldn’t know where at Shiloh he would have been buried, and she might have wanted to make sure he had a stone to be remembered by.

I think, too, of Martha, Jarvis’s wife. She was living in Pike County, Mississippi, near Brookhaven (the county was later divided and renamed) with six children, the oldest of which was 13 in 1862. She never remarried. She died in 1884 and was buried in Mississippi. I wonder at her devastation at the news of her husband’s death, how it affected the Seale and Young families, and what my great-grandfather himself experienced. Samuel and Octavia had 10 children, eight of whom survived infancy. One of their daughters was named Martha (Martha was also the name of Octavia’s mother).

I wonder, too, about my great-grandfather. One brother had died in 1860; another (and the oldest) in 1863 in Texas. Samuel was the last living son. His father died in 1870, when Samuel was 24 or 25. I think about him becoming the family patriarch at 25 years old, with several sisters and their children and his own small but growing family to care for. And I think about his own service in the Civil War, serving as a messenger boy, and about what he must have thought about his brother-in-law being buried in a mass grave in southern Tennessee.

And I understand why the name of Jarvis Seale was included in the Young family Bible.

One of the mass graves at Shiloh for Confederate soldiers (National Park Service)

Top illustration: Engraving Of Grant’s charge at Shiloh by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1822-1888).

Battle of Shiloh

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