The Battle of Shiloh
Grant's victories at Forts Henry and Donelson opened the Tennessee and Columbia rivers to Union gunboats and control. Grant made swift use of his advantage, sending Federal troops to take Nashville on the Columbia. He also sent Foote's gunboats up the Tennessee River. Confederate general Albert Sydney Johnston saw no alternative but to retreat to the important rail junction of Corinth, Mississippi, where the railroad running from Memphis to the eastern Confederacy crossed the railroad running north-south between Mobile, Alabama, and the Ohio River valley. There he would collect as many Southern soldiers as he could and stop Grant's drive south.
Brigadier General Charles F. Smith served under Grant, his former pupil, at Forts Henry and Donelson. Grant held him in the highest regard. Smith died of an infection in 1862, and Grant's biographer Jean E. Smith reports that William Sherman later wrote that had Smith lived and remained a general “no one would have ever heard of Grant or myself.”
Grant, too, was eager for a fight. If he could defeat the Southerners in Corinth, Memphis would likely fall into Union hands, an important goal in winning the Mississippi River from the north all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Grant advanced with 42,000 troops to a place called Pittsburg Landing on the west side of the Tennessee River near the Mississippi border. He remained there for nearly a month, waiting for the arrival of Don Carlos Buell's army, which had been in central Kentucky and then Tennessee. Once Buell's men arrived, Grant planned to advance on Corinth and defeat the Rebels there.
Southerners Strike First
Johnston saw the danger of Grant reinforced with Buell, however, and decided to strike secretly and swiftly. Johnston's second in command, Pierre G. T. Beauregard, liked the idea at first but then changed his mind; he felt that marching 20,000 Confederate soldiers twenty miles from Corinth to Pittsburg Landing would be too easily detected and that Grant would be reinforced before they arrived.
But Johnston persisted and when his army arrived on the outskirts of Pittsburg Landing on April 6, they found no signs of Buell's arrival. Nor was there much awareness that a large force of Rebels was so close by. The Confederate forces had succeeded in catching the Union troops off guard, and after three hours of brutal, bloody fighting, they managed to overrun divisions commanded by William T. Sherman and Benjamin Prentiss near Shiloh Church. The battle could have turned into a rout, but Johnston's army lost its momentum when his soldiers started rummaging through the overrun Union camps looking for food and supplies.
The Confusion of Battle
The battle became increasingly disorganized, and soldiers on both sides scrambled to find their correct units. One major battle turned into numerous smaller skirmishes, with both sides taking heavy casualties. In many cases, confused Confederate troops dressed in both blue and gray fired on their own men, and hundreds of panic-stricken soldiers on both sides ran from the battlefield in terror.
When Grant arrived on the scene, he ordered his remaining men to hold their positions in a dense thicket at all costs. With Grant barking orders and doing his best to rally them, the Union soldiers managed to repel more than a dozen hard Confederate charges. Johnston, who was directing the assaults, took a bullet in the thigh and bled to death. In the early evening, the 2,200 defenders of the thicket — which came to be known as “the Hornet's Nest” because of the constant gunfire — were ordered to surrender as they came under attack by Confederate artillery. But it was growing dark and had started to rain, so Beauregard, who assumed command upon Johnston's death, decided to delay a final assault until the next morning. The decision cost him greatly.
Grant Fights Back
During the night, Buell's army began to arrive and Grant positioned them for a morning attack. Beauregard awakened the following morning to face an army nearly twice as strong as before. Fighting resumed around 7:30 A.M., and the Union forces were able to recapture almost all of the ground they had lost the previous day. The Confederates made one counterattack but were pushed back. Late in the afternoon, Beauregard ordered a withdrawal back to Corinth, covered by Nathan Forrest's cavalry.
Thus Grant's army won the battle, but Grant was strongly rebuked for being caught off guard. Halleck, Grant's superior officer, accused Grant of being drunk at the time. It was a false accusation — Grant had been away from the front to have a leg injury treated — but it was typical of Halleck. Halleck also blamed Grant for the large number of Union casualties. In fact, the casualties for these armies — still full of untested volunteers — were horrendous.
More than 13,000 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in the battle, compared to 10,694 on the Confederate side. This loss included more than twice the number of dead than all previous the engagements of the war combined.
Shiloh crushed any hope that the Confederacy could reverse the losses of territory inflicted by the defeats at Forts Henry and Donelson any time soon. And it inflicted cruel casualties that the South would have difficulty making up. The battle also shocked Northerners. It was the largest, bloodiest battle ever fought in America, and it was clear that the Confederacy was not going to give up its struggle for independence with a few simple setbacks; rather, it was going to commit its young men to fighting no matter the cost in lives and money until they won or were decidedly crushed.
