Sculpted by Gary Casteel
1863 Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Monument Replicas
The 48th Ohio went into the woods around Shiloh Church as green as spring grass. They had been farmers and clerks and boys from the southwestern counties only months before. Organized at Camp Dennison in the fall of 1861, mustered in on February 17, 1862, under Colonel Peter J. Sullivan, they received their Austrian rifles at Paducah and then steamed up the Tennessee. By mid-March they were in camp near the little log meetinghouse that would give the battle its name. Thirty days after they first held those rifles, the war came looking for them.
Sunday morning, April 6, 1862, it found them.
Gen. William T. Sherman’s division held the western edge of the Union line. Col. Ralph P. Buckland’s brigade—the 48th, the 70th, and the 72nd Ohio—lay nearest the church. When the long roll beat and the pickets came tumbling back through the woods, Sullivan and Col. Job Parker did not wait for perfect orders. They took the regiment forward across the bridge, into the woods beyond, and met the first gray wave head-on.
For two brutal hours those three Ohio regiments stood their ground. They fired, reloaded, fired again, driving the Confederates back only to see them reform and come on once more. The noise was a continuous roar. Men fell in the underbrush. The 48th’s band threw down their silver cornets, grabbed muskets, and joined the line. Two of them would never play again.
Sherman himself later wrote that Sullivan and his men behaved with great gallantry. Sullivan took a ball through the forearm early and kept commanding. When the left of the division finally gave way and the whole line had to bend back toward the Purdy Road, the 48th fell back in good order, fighting as they went. Later that afternoon they found themselves near the landing, supporting the last batteries, helping to stop the final Confederate surge of the day. Some said a man from the 48th fired the shot that mortally wounded Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston. Whether true or not, the claim tells you something about the intensity of the fighting those Ohio boys endured.
Night fell in rain and exhaustion. The regiment mustered fewer than three hundred effectives.
Monday morning, they went forward again with the rest of the army. The Confederates gave ground stubbornly. Sullivan, still with the regiment, was hit once more—his right arm broken by a shot while he tried to rally his thinning ranks. Parker took over and finished the day. By late afternoon the camps around Shiloh Church were back in Union hands.
The cost was terrible. Roughly one man in three who had stood in the ranks on Sunday morning was killed, wounded, or missing. The regiment’s own history recorded about twenty dead and ninety wounded. Officers fell with the enlisted men. Captain Warner of Company B was shot through the head. The survivors buried their dead and tried to make sense of what they had just lived through. They were no longer green. The regiment went on to further service, including Corinth, the Vicksburg campaign, and later the Red River campaign.
The marker was dedicated on June 6, 1902, and is located along Confederate Road (near the Hamburg-Purdy Road intersection) in Shiloh National Military Park.
