Shiloh

The sorrow seemed alive.

I didn’t expect that. As a Northerner, the Civil War is history, a fact of our evolution as a country.

Here, at the Shiloh National Military Park, in southern Tennessee, acres and acres of battlefield, the blood of Union and Confederate soldiers probably still detectable deep in the soil, the Civil War feels like a wound just barely scabbed over.

The entire park is a place of regret.

This statue, entitled Defeated Victory, depicts the layers of humiliation and shame felt by the Confederacy after their defeat by the Union Army. The statue was the product of three devoted daughters of the Confederacy and was built in 1917, decades after the end of the war. Each element of the statue presented another bit of weeping.They had so much to say, so much grief. It astonished me. Why would they still be sad so many years later?

The Shiloh Church, famous for its importance in the Battle of Shiloh which resulted in more than 23,000 soldiers losing their lives, still stands. It is a rough-hewn wood structure with open doors and windows. Inside are plank benches and a preacher’s lectern. When I stepped inside, the wind blew the curtain into the streaming sunlight and I snapped a dozen pictures trying to capture the sound of its rustle on the wood. None of them was successful although close enough that I can remember even if I can’t convey the sight to you.

I loved being at Shiloh Church. It was a perfect and beautiful place. I know it had been helped to be that way – by park officials and workers – and that left to its own devices, it would have dissolved into the earth, but still it felt as if it was as it had been then and I felt privileged to be there.

Next to the church was a cemetery. And in the cemetery was this gravestone for a man who was born in 1831 and died in 1931. Whether he fought at Shiloh wasn’t clear but his grave was marked by an American flag and a Confederate Flag and both were of recent vintage, clean and crisp with no fading or raveled edges. Whoever had been tending the man’s graves had made sure the flags were in good repair. That’s how I knew for sure that the sorrow was alive. It’s still real.

It was a revelation to me. An education. What I thought was long ago is long ago for only some of us. The assumption – the belief – that the Civil War resolved a grievous injustice, ended the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people – seems remote in this place. There is no mention of that fact. It’s as if all of those people had nothing to do with what went on here.

I don’t know what to make of all this but I’m glad I was there. There is more to be understood.