Across Five Aprils Chapter 8 Summary

In looking back to the spring and early summer of 1862, Jethro sees that things had been going relatively well for the North. There had been victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, and only a small strip of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Vicksburg, in the state of Mississippi, had been under Southern control. As Shad had explained, the Union had only to seize that area, and the Confederacy would essentially have been cut in two. Jethro remembers also, however, his teacher's intimation that the fighting to secure this end would be horrific beyond belief. Indeed, the boy cannot but perceive the recent battle at Shiloh as an empty victory for the North, because of the deaths of Tom and so many...