At Pittsburg Landing our Troops Fought Hard

DESCRIPTION: "At Pittsburg Landing our troops fought hard, They killed General Johnston and defeated Beauregard, They way they slew the Rebels, they knew how it would be, With land, force, gun boats, and Union victory."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1938 (Korson-MinstrelsOfTheMinePatch)
KEYWORDS: Civilwar battle
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
April 6-7, 1862 - Battle of Shiloh. The army of U.S. Grant is forced back but, reinforced by Buell, beats off the army of A.S. Johnston. Johnston is killed. Both sides suffer heavy casualties (Shiloh was the first battle to show how bloody the Civil War would be)
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Korson-MinstrelsOfTheMinePatch, p. 96, "(At Pittsburg Landing our troops fought hard") (1 fragment)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Battle of Shiloh" [Laws A10] and references there (subject of the Battle of Shiloh)
NOTES [315 words]: This is only a fragment, but it does not appear, based on both form and content, to belong with any other Shiloh song.
The author of the song seems fairly knowledgeable: General Albert Sidney Johnson was killed at Shiloh, with command devolving to General P. G. T. Beauregard, who was eventually forced to retreat. And when the Union forces were at their lowest ebb, fire from the river gunboats Lexington and Tyler helped save the day.
Although Pennsylvania supplied more than a hundred regiments to Civil War armies, there weren't many Pennsylvania troops at Shiloh. Based on the Order of Battle on pp. 319-320 of Daniel, there was only one Pennsylvania regiment there (ironic for a battle fought at Pittsburg Landing!): the 77th Pennsylvania, which was in Col. Edward N. Kirk's brigade of Alexander Mc.D. McCook's second division of Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio. Could it have brought this item back to Pennsylvania?
HuntMidAtlantic, p. 14, says that the 77th's commander at this time was Frederick S. Stumbaugh. Stumbaugh was born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania (west and a little south of Harrisburg), according to Warner, p. 485, and Shiloh was the only battle at which the regiment actively engaged prior to Stumbaugh leaving the regiment in late 1862. (It was at Perryville and a few other battles, but its part was small.) It would have its turn later; the regiment was at Stones River (where it took enough casualties that a captain ended up in command; McDonough, p. 234) and Chickamauga (where it was shattered and many men captured; Cozzens, pp. 276-278). Fox, p. 486, says that it lost 65 men killed and mortally wounded in the war, and had 254 men die of disease; its heaviest engagement was at Liberty Gap, Tennessee, on June 25, 1863 (part of the Tullahoma campaign that preceded the Chickamauga campaign); four officers and 35 men were killed (Fox, p. 439). - RBW
Bibliography

Cozzens: Peter Cozzens, This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, 1992 (I use the 1996 Illini Books paperback)
Daniel: Larry J. Daniel, Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War, Simon & Schuster, 1997
Fox: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War 1861-1865, 1881; fourth edition 1888 (I use a photoreproduction of the 1898 Albany Press edition which does not list a publisher!)
HuntMidAtlantic: Roger D. Hunt, Colonels in Blue: Union Army Colonels of the Civil War: The Mid-Atlantic States, Stackpole, 2007
McDonough: James Lee McDonough, Stones River -- Bloody Winter in Tennessee, University of Tennessee Press, 1980(I use the 2000 paperback printing)
Warner: Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders, Louisiana Status University Press, 1959 (I use the 1995 hardcover printing)

Last updated in version 6.3
File: KMMP096A

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