Shiloh: The Hallowed Ground of a Vanishing People
Hello, my name is Jeff Brewer and welcome to my site. This is the official website of ‘Walking Home’ the online space for my guided battlefield tour programs. Since 1985 I have been involved in living history, re-enacting, historical interpretation, and volunteer educational programs from Louisiana to Virginia. From the War of 1812 to WWII, I have participated in or helped produce private, state, and federal programs all aimed at pulling back the
curtain on our American history. At Walking Home, my main focus is on the Battle of Shiloh as well as the larger campaign. The Shiloh tour is a program designed specifically as it relates to that part of the battle experienced by my ancestors who were engaged there as part of General Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of the Mississippi on April 6 and 7, 1862. I also
A lifetime of memories at Shiloh. Me atop a cannon in Sarah Bell's cotton field sometime around 1972.
plan to expand to Fort Donelson as well as Corinth; both places have strong ancestral war ties as well. All are large projects and logistical feats that are a labor of love and devotion to my ancestors specifically, our common American ancestry in general, and to those who keep their memories alive through preservation and promotion of our American History.
What has become a professional venture into the field of “tour operator” began as a simple reunion of sorts at Shiloh National Military Park in the spring of 2020. Gathered there were new friends, old friends, and family members for the purpose of taking a guided tour related to the exploits of my second Great Grandfather John Henry Coker. Shiloh has long been a place of endearment to me, my family, and my childhood friends. This was the place where our ancestors stepped off into history on April 6, 1862 and into a maelstrom of shot and shell that is near inconceivable to the minds of those living today.
My mother, standing in foreground to right, at Shiloh National Military Park around 1957 at age 17 on a visit with her cousins Paul Lee and Brenda. It was her who gave me the love and reverence I have for history.
My second great grandfather and my third great uncle fought through the two days of the Battle of Shiloh as part of Major Aaron B. Hardcastle’s 3rd Mississippi Battalion. They made it through alive, for which I’m thankful or else I wouldn’t be here. Although my uncle would be dead just a few months later, my second great grandfather made it through till September of 1863 where fortunes changed and he found himself in a far distant land “north of the Ohio” as a prisoner of war.
John Henry Coker is my best documented ancestor who served during the war; however our family on both sides was heavily represented in the Confederate Armies. Also my ancestors that did not serve were still affected by it as they merely tried to survive a trying time like none could have ever imagined just a few short years earlier. All of these ancestors who experienced the war and lived to tell about it handed down their accounts of what they saw, what they did, and how they lived during that time. These stories took root and left their mark on each member of the family through the years. I am blessed to have photos of my family at
Shiloh as far back as my Great Grandfather Patrick Henry Pannell who was visiting; it is believed, at the time of the dedication of the Confederate Memorial in 1917.
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When my mother was a little girl she delighted in the tales of family during the war. For a time her great grandmother, who experienced the war first hand, lived with my mother’s grandfather, Patrick Henry mentioned above. At times my mother would spend days in her company and hang on every word her great grandmother, Parthenia Jane Pickens Bell Pannell, would relate of the war years. As my mother grew into a young woman, spurred on by the tales of “The War”, she began making her pilgrimages to Shiloh. Through the changes in life, marriage, the arrival of children, moving across the country, one thing was constant and that was our semi-regular trip to Shiloh. A beautiful spring day would often find us there. As I grew into adulthood, the family trips waned but I never did, taking up that mission with my friends who also had a “Confederate Pedigree” with at least one friend’s ancestors fighting right alongside mine in the same unit.
In the not too distant past, there was once a melancholy aliment among Southerners, a fellowship of the Lost Cause that transcended generations. Although the term “Lost Cause” stands in ill favor now with some, I can assure you in the hearts and minds of the post-war generations right up till the close of the 20th century, the Lost Cause was very real. It can’t be understood from an abstract sanitized peering into written history. It can only be understood by those who inherited it.
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In the tumult of recent years, writer Philip Leigh penned an article for the Abbeville Institute concerning the hostile campaign then underway to tear down Confederate Statues throughout the South. He began his article by quoting Texas novelist William Humphrey who in 1965 wrote:
"If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner it is because all of the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a sense of having been present there himself in the person of one or more of his ancestors. The war filled merely a chapter in his… [family history] … transmitted orally from father to son [as] the proverbs, prophecies, legends, laws, traditions-of-origin and tales-of-wanderings of his own tribe…. It is this feeling of identity with the dead (who are past) which characterizes and explains the Southerner.
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My Great Grandfather Patrick Henry Pannell at Shiloh for what I believe to be the unveiling of the Confederate Memorial on May 17, 1917. His grandfather and my third Great Grand Father Elias Mitchell Pannell, also fought in the war.
It is with kin, not causes, that the Southerner is linked. Confederate Great-grandfather…is not
remembered for his (probably undistinguished) part in the Battle of Bull Run; rather Bull Run is remembered because Great-grandfather was there. For the Southerner the Civil War is in the family. Clannishness was, and is, the key to his temperament, and he went off to war to protect not Alabama but only those thirty or forty acres of its sandy hillside, or stiff red clay, which he broke his back tilling, and which was as big a country as his mind could hold."
My Second Great Grandmother Sarah Parthenia Jane Pickens Bell Pannell. She lived through the war as a little girl and remembered well the men who returned home from the war. It was her who gave my mother her love of history who, in turn, passed it onto me.
When I stumbled across Leigh's article, to be honest, I had never heard of William Humphrey. Nevertheless when I read his words, his language was such that every Southerner at one time could understand and appreciate his sentiment as only a Southerner deeply rooted in his native land could. He verbalized better than any post war writer that I’ve ever seen exactly as to why we Southerners are so protective about our history, which is to acknowledge; to us it's not just history, its family history. I also realized the exclusive nature of what Humphrey wrote testifies that we are a vanishing people. If our history is to be remembered, it will be up to us to make it so and not nameless faceless bureaucrats dictating sanitized curriculum from afar.
Now I want to share that history, that family history, as I believe only someone like me can. Our nation’s national battlefields and military parks are not just monuments and interpretive signs. They are not just cannons and museums. These places are in every sense of the word Hallowed Ground. They are fields, towns, farms, creeks, and streams where our early fathers met in devotion to a cause higher than themselves that often cost them everything they had. Places like Shiloh, Chickamauga, Gettysburg, and Antietam are places of pilgrimage that have spanned time and space standing against the “widening of knowledge” as a familiar place that calls to us over the years. As a Southerner who remembers these battles, not because the battle, but “because Great Grandfather was there” , no matter where I live, no matter where I roam, no matter the changing concepts of what it means to be an American in more modern times; I can always go to any one of these places and walk among the trees, cross the fences and walk the fields, walk by the streams; no matter my age or station in life, I can always return there and go walking home. - JLB
