On this day in 1862 Federal forces under the command of Ulysses S. Grant were attacked by a Confederate army led by Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard at Pittsburg Landing. The battle has come to be known as Shiloh, after a small church at the site of the battle. The Shiloh meeting house would be forever linked to Bloody Shiloh.
In the gray light of dawn, April 6, a small Federal reconnaissance discovered Johnston's army deployed for battle astride the Corinth road, just a mile beyond the forward Federal camps. Storming forward, the Confederates found the Federal position unfortified. Johnston had achieved almost total surprise. By mid-morning, the Confederates seemed within easy reach of victory, overrunning one frontline Union division and capturing its camp. However, stiff resistance on the Federal right entangled Johnston's brigades in a savage fight around Shiloh Church. Throughout the day, Johnston's army hammered the Federal right, which gave ground but did not break. Casualties upon this brutal killing ground were immense.
Meanwhile, Johnston's flanking attack stalled in front of Sarah Bell's peach orchard and the dense oak thicket labeled the "hornet's nest" by the Confederates. Grant's left flank withstood Confederate assaults for seven crucial hours before being forced to yield ground in the late afternoon. Despite inflicting heavy casualties and seizing ground, the Confederates only drove Grant towards the river, instead of away from it. The Federal survivors established a solid front before Pittsburg Landing and repulsed the last Confederate charge as dusk ended the first day of fighting.
The Union men who stood their ground in the Hornet's Nest bought the time necessary for Grant's forces to reorganize and for reinforcements to arrive. The following day, the Union army drove the Confederates from the field. Almost 24,000 casualties (total from both sides), dead, wounded or missing, occurred in those two days.
UPDATE: Thanks to Crosspatch for pointing this out. The memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant are available, free of charge, online. Here's the chapter on Shiloh.
Every US citizen should at some time or another read this: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. It is available online and it doesn’t cost anything to read it.
Fabulous link, Crosspatch, thank you.
You are most welcome and I would hope that others will also take the time to read it from start to finish (I am not yet all the way through it, but I read a few chapters and bookmark my place and come back to it again later).
And Bartleby has done us all a great service by publishing such works online for anyone to read free of charge.
A couple of other “must reads” in that library are Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. There’s no excuse for anyone not to have read them … they are now free to anyone with a web browser.