The Wigfall Grays' first great battle came less than a year after they left Collierville. On April 2, 1862, the 4th Tennessee marched out of Corinth with 512 men, part of A. P. Stewart's brigade, and on the morning of Sunday, April 6, it struck the Union camps near Shiloh Church.
By midmorning the regiment lay in the captured Federal camps. Its major, John F. Henry, was killed there by a mistaken volley from Confederate troops. Ahead, on a low rise, a Union battery, McAllister's, Battery D, 1st Illinois Light Artillery, had already turned back several Confederate assaults. Word came that General Bragg wanted it taken. When General Stewart asked the 4th Tennessee whether they would take it, the men answered, "Show us where it is; we will try."
Lieutenant Colonel Otho Strahl led them forward through the undergrowth. They fired a single volley at about thirty paces, then rushed the guns and drove off the infantry behind them. The charge cost 31 killed and 160 wounded. Stewart's report singled out the regiment's conduct and named Colonel Neely and Lieutenant Colonel Strahl for their gallantry.
The 4th fought on through the rest of the day, and on April 7 it served as the core of a new line formed under General Beauregard's eye. By the end of the two days, nearly half the regiment had been killed or wounded.
Shiloh nearly ended the career of the Union commander as well. Ulysses S. Grant's army had been caught in its camps that Sunday morning, and the two days cost the Union some 13,000 men, more than any battle Americans had yet fought. Northern newspapers blamed Grant for the surprise, and some accused him of drinking. General Henry Halleck took command in the field and made Grant his second in command, a post with a title and little else. Grant came close to leaving the army. Instead, that June, he asked to move his headquarters to Memphis, and the ride west took him along the road past Collierville, three-quarters of an hour ahead of Confederate cavalry who were looking for him. (See Collierville at War.)
The Wigfall Grays at Shiloh. Lieutenant Colonel Strahl’s report of the regiment’s losses, written at Corinth on April 10, 1862, names five men of Company C killed: Sergeant S. M. McKinney, J. C. Goodrum, R. A. Moncrief, J. M. Rodgers and A. Strauss. It names eighteen wounded: Captain F. M. Hammonds, Lieutenant J. T. Biggs, Corporal J. N. Houston, D. J. Armour, F. W. Applewhite, Jno. Carr, Geo. Davis, T. D. Coopwood, J. W. Fisher, J. B. Hutchinson, A. J. Kennon, S. E. Kannon, Robt. Payne, C. F. Pearsons, V. Runyan, J. S. Smalley, T. L. Taylor and J. Vaughan. Hutchinson, badly wounded, was also reported missing. The names are spelled as the report gives them. Three of the wounded, James T. Biggs, Thomas L. Taylor and Colin P. Person (“Pearsons”), lie with Merritt Brown at Magnolia.
The night between the two days was spent in the open. “During the night rain fell in torrents,” Grant remembered, “and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter.” The wounded who could not be carried in lay where they had fallen. When the fighting ended on April 7, the Confederates fell back to Corinth and left the field and its dead to the Union army. Union burial details laid the Confederate dead, 1,728 of them, in trenches. Five of those trenches are known in the park today; the veterans who founded it chose to keep them as they were. Whether the five men of Company C lie in one of them is not recorded.
Sources: Report of Brig. Gen. A. P. Stewart, Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 10, Pt. 1; report of Lt. Col. O. F. Strahl of the killed, wounded and missing, Corinth, April 10, 1862, ibid., p. 431 (original in Confederate casualty reports, National Archives, M836); Luke W. Finlay, “Fourth Tennessee Infantry,” Military Annals of Tennessee (1886); Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885–86); Shiloh National Military Park tablets; compiled service records, National Archives; Morton Museum of Collierville History, master roster of the Wigfall Grays; National Park Service, “Shiloh’s Casualties”.
The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.