Shiloh was a Civil War engagement fought in Tennessee, 1862. It was a Union victory.
As a result of the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, the commander in the area, was forced to fall back, giving up Kentucky and much of West and Middle Tennessee. He chose Corinth, Mississippi, a major transportation center, as the staging area for an offensive against Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee before the Army of the Ohio, under Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, could join it. The Confederate retrenchment was a surprise, although a pleasant one, to the Union forces, and it took Grant, with about 40,000 men, some time to mount a southern offensive, along the Tennessee River, toward Pittsburg Landing. Grant received orders to await Buell's Army of the Ohio at Pittsburg Landing. Grant did not choose to fortify his position; rather, he set about drilling his men many of which were raw recruits. Johnston originally planned to attack Grant on April 4, but delays postponed it until the 6th. Attacking the Union troops on the morning of the 6th, the Confederates surprised them, routing many. Some Federals made determined stands and by afternoon, they had established a battle line at the sunken road, known as the "Hornets Nest." Repeated Rebel attacks failed to carry the Hornets Nest, but massed artillery helped to turn the tide as Confederates surrounded the Union troops and captured, killed, or wounded most. Johnston had been mortally wounded earlier and his second in command, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, took over. The Union troops established another line covering Pittsburg Landing, anchored with artillery and augmented by Buell's men who began to arrive and take up positions. Fighting continued until after dark, but the Federals held. By the next morning, the combined Federal forces numbered about 40,000, outnumbering Beauregard's army of less than 30,000. Beauregard was unaware of the arrival of Buell's army and launched a counterattack in response to a two-mile advance by William Nelson's division of Buell's army at 6:00 am, which was, at first, successful. Union troops stiffened and began forcing the Confederates back. Beauregard ordered a counterattack, which stopped the Union advance but did not break its battle line. At this point, Beauregard realized that he could not win and, having suffered too many casualties, he retired from the field and headed back to Corinth. On the 8th, Grant sent Brig. Gen. William T. Sherman, with two brigades, and Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood, with his division, in pursuit of Beauregard. They ran into the Rebel rearguard, commanded by Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, at Fallen Timbers. Forrest's aggressive tactics, although eventually contained, influenced the Union troops to return to Pittsburg Landing. Grant's mastery of the Confederate forces continued; he had beaten them once again. The Confederates continued to fall back until launching their mid-August offensive.
Fought over two days, April 6 and 7, 1862, the Battle of Shiloh stands as one of the pivotal clashes of the American Civil War. Some know it instead as Pittsburg Landing. The action unfolded in the southwestern corner of Tennessee, within the conflict's western theater, on ground situated between an obscure country church called Shiloh and the Pittsburg Landing site along the Tennessee River. When the smoke cleared, a pair of combined Union armies had bested the Confederacy's Army of Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant led the Federal forces as major general, and Albert Sidney Johnston commanded the Confederates until he fell mortally on the field, at which point P. G. T. Beauregard, his second-in-command, took charge.
Confederate strategy centered on crushing Grant's Army of the Tennessee before reinforcements and fresh supplies could reach him. A surprise assault on the opening day yielded substantial ground for the South, yet Johnston's death from wounds meant Grant's force survived intact. During the night, Grant received reinforcement from a division that had been positioned farther to the north, and elements of Major General Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio arrived as well. When morning came, Union troops launched a counterattack nobody had anticipated, undoing everything the Confederates had won the day before. Battered and depleted, the Southern army retreated further south, prompting a limited Union chase that began and concluded the following day.
Despite claiming the field, Federal forces suffered roughly 2,500 more losses than their Confederate counterparts, a gap driven largely by the number taken prisoner. Once the scale of Union casualties became public, harsh criticism fell on Grant, and choices made by commanders on both sides drew scrutiny from observers both present at the battle and far removed from it. At the time, no engagement in the war had proven more costly, and with nearly 24,000 casualties combined, Shiloh ranks among the bloodiest battles fought during the entire conflict.
In February 1862, Ulysses S. Grant led a Union army to two of the most consequential Union triumphs the war had yet produced: the battles of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, fought in Tennessee along the Tennessee River and the Cumberland River respectively. Both waterways served the Confederacy as crucial supply lines, linking Nashville with an ironworks and rich farmland in the region. Nashville itself sat where several rail lines met, and it functioned as a key depot for supplies and gunpowder production. U.S. Navy gunboats bolstered Grant's forces during these engagements; these vessels ran on steam, had flat bottoms and armor plating, and could mount as many as thirteen guns. As a reward, Grant was elevated to major general, placing him above every other general in the western theater,
On the Sunday morning of April 6, five of Grant's six divisions lay encamped in the stretch between Shiloh Church and the Tennessee River. Sherman's division had settled the Shiloh ground first, placing his four brigades near the principal roads leading to Pittsburg Landing. Colonel David Stuart's brigade held the eastern edge of the field, near the Hamburg-Savannah Road and a nearby ford. Sherman's remaining three brigades anchored the western, or right-hand, portion of the line near Shiloh Church, guarding the Pittsburg-Corinth Road and the bridge over Owl Creek on the Hamburg-Purdy Road. Prentiss's division sat between Sherman and Stuart, while McClernand and Hurlbut occupied the ground closer to the river. W.H.L. Wallace's division camped nearest Pittsburg Landing itself, to the north. Five miles downstream at Crump's Landing waited Lew Wallace's division, originally sent in mid-March to wreck a rail line; during that raid his soldiers had discovered a sizable Confederate force nearby, and for that reason his division stayed put near Crump's Landing. Grant himself was farther north, at his Savannah headquarters. Nelson's division, part of Buell's army, had already arrived at Savannah, though Buell's remaining divisions were still on the march.
No one anticipated combat at Shiloh, so the camps had no defensive arrangement and no trenches were dug. Sherman's and Prentiss's untested divisions sat farthest forward, nearest Corinth, guarded by only a scattering of pickets despite a minor clash on April 4. Colonel Everett Peabody, leading Prentiss's First Brigade, grew uneasy after hearing accounts of Confederate soldiers spotted around Shiloh. Close to midnight on April 5 he directed Major James E. Powell to lead three companies of the 25th Missouri and two companies of the 12th Michigan toward Seay Field, where the sightings had occurred. Prentiss knew nothing of this, and Powell's men marched southwest along a farm track toward the Pittsburg-Corinth Road.
Southwest of Powell lay the Confederate Third Brigade of Hardee's corps, under Brigadier General S. A. M. Wood, who had pushed 280 skirmishers forward from Major Aaron B. Hardcastle's Third Mississippi Battalion. Most of Hardcastle's men held the southeast corner of a forty-acre cotton field belonging to James J. Fraley, with two picket lines set closer to the Federal camps. Near 5:00 a.m. the Confederate pickets fired on Powell's approaching column before falling back to the battalion. Once Powell closed to within two hundred yards of Hardcastle's main body, the Confederates opened fire in earnest, and these two small forces traded shots for more than an hour, marking the opening of the battle.
By roughly 5:30, the noise from Fraley Field reached Confederate commanders, prompting Johnston to order a full assault. Johnston told Beauregard to remain behind the lines managing men and material, while he himself rode forward to direct the fighting, an arrangement that in practice left Beauregard controlling much of the battle. On the Union side, Powell warned Colonel Peabody that thousands of enemy troops were pressing him back. Prentiss, hearing the gunfire, discovered that Peabody had dispatched the patrol without permission and angrily accused him of triggering a major clash against Grant's wishes. He quickly recognized the size of the force opposing him, however, and pushed reinforcements forward. Though unauthorized, Peabody's patrol disrupted the Confederate plan for surprise and bought many Union soldiers a brief window to prepare. Even so, several Union commanders remained skeptical that a real attack was underway; Sherman himself doubted it until a ride toward Rea Field around 7:00
Grant's directive for Lew Wallace to march to the fighting produced almost no result at first. That morning his troops had been scattered across as much as five miles from Crump's Landing, positioned there so reinforcements could reach him quickly if his separated command came under assault. A second courier from Grant reached him at 11:30 in the morning, yet Wallace's column did not begin moving until noon. A further messenger caught up with him at 2:00 p.m. to tell him he had taken the wrong route. Wallace had assumed his job was to reinforce Sherman and McClernand at the camps they had started in, not realizing both divisions had already been driven back toward Pittsburg Landing.
By midday Sherman and McClernand had likewise been forced back to Jones Field. Yet the three regiments of McDowell's First Brigade managed to rejoin them, and three more fresh regiments arrived as well. Backed by McDowell, McClernand's men launched a counterattack that drove the Confederates past the spot where McClernand had set up headquarters that morning, with heavy losses suffered on both sides. Once Confederate reinforcements arrived, a bayonet charge around 1:00 p.m. forced McClernand and McDowell back to the line from which their counterattack had started at Jones Field.
Farther east, the Union right, made up of Sherman's and McClernand's divisions along with Veatch's brigade, had become a scattered mass of individual men and fragments of units, many of whom had thrown away their gear and headed toward the landing. Even so, what remained of these divisions kept fighting.
Conditions were far steadier at the center of the Union position. Prentiss beat back several assaults from Colonel Randall L. Gibson's brigade. Captain Andrew Hickenlooper's 5th Ohio Independent Light Artillery Battery broke up the first charge with shrapnel and canister, inflicting heavy Confederate casualties. A third attempt cost Gibson's brigade so many men, including a colonel struck in the face, that most of his soldiers withdrew and took no further part in the day's fighting. One of the Union dead there was Major James Powell, who had led the patrol that first discovered Confederate forces at Fraley Field that morning. While Prentiss dealt with Gibson, Sweeny held off Confederate assaults near Duncan Field.
The Union left gave ground more severely than the right. Stuart's two surviving regiments, under the temporary command of Lieutenant Colonel Malmborg since Colonel T. Kilby Smith was absent, made repeated stands east of Bell Field against a pair of Bragg's brigades. Luck favored the Union side when Bragg's famished troops ran low on ammunition and tur
Sometime after midnight and before four in the morning, Brigadier General Alexander M. McCook's division, part of Buell's Army of the Ohio, reached Savannah. Around four o'clock, the leading unit of that division came ashore at Pittsburg Landing. Meanwhile, on the Confederate side, the 47th Tennessee Infantry Regiment was still marching toward the fighting. This regiment, made up of 600 poorly equipped and inexperienced soldiers, represented the only reinforcement Beauregard would receive that day, and it did not show up until eight in the morning. Once losses and desertions were subtracted, Beauregard could count fewer than 20,000 men still fit to fight.
On the eastern flank of the Union position, Buell launched his assault at five in the morning with Nelson's three brigades leading the way. Crittenden joined him on the right several hours later. Together the two divisions pushed forward, scattered enemy skirmishers, and were eventually reinforced on Crittenden's right by elements of McCook's division, though McCook would not have all three of his brigades on hand until nearly noon. Facing them on the Confederate right was Hardee, whose best-organized force was the division under Brigadier General Jones M. Withers. The skirmishers Nelson had driven back earlier belonged to Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry and small detachments from Chalmers's Brigade within Withers' command. Behind these skirmishers stood Chalmers's Brigade along with an improvised brigade formed from three regiments, while a patchwork of other regiments held the line to the west, supported by several artillery batteries.
Near the Davis Wheat Field, situated between Barnes Field and the Peach Orchard, Colonel William B. Hazen's brigade suffered more than half of all the casualties Nelson's division would sustain that day. Additional combat unfolded around Sara Bell Field, where three hours of fighting ground to a standstill. By around noon both sides pulled back, leaving Nelson's men once more at Wicker Field. Hardee suffered a minor wound during this stretch of combat but still led a counterattack. To the west of Nelson's position, Crittenden and McCook pushed ahead before being pushed back toward Duncan field. By midday, Buell's forces had taken possession of the Hornet's Nest.
On Grant's portion of the field, the offensive opened when Lew Wallace's still-fresh division forced Pond's worn-out brigade out of Jones Field. Confederate troops under Gibson and Wood struck back, prompting Sherman to move his division into line, after which the Confederates were driven off. McClernand and Hurlbut then entered the action, and by 10:30 in the morning all four Union divisions
Public perception of Grant's conduct at the battle began favorably, but the mood soured within a week, particularly once a newspaper account by Whitelaw Reid
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