Who won the Battle of Shiloh?
The Union won. On 6 April 1862 Albert Sidney Johnston's Confederate army attacked Ulysses S. Grant's camps near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, and drove them back toward the river, but Johnston was killed that afternoon. Reinforced overnight by Don Carlos Buell's army, Grant counterattacked on 7 April and forced the Confederates back to Corinth, Mississippi. The two days cost 23,746 men killed, wounded or missing, the worst toll of any battle on the continent up to that time, and ended hopes of a short war.3
The church that gave the battle its name was a small log meeting house in the Tennessee woods. On the morning of Sunday 6 April 1862, the woods around it filled with 44,000 Confederate soldiers storming into the camps of an army that had not dug a single trench. Two days later some 23,700 men had been killed, wounded or captured, and both North and South understood that the war would be long and terrible.4
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Fort Donelson · Next: The Battle of Antietam
After Fort Donelson
By mid-February 1862 the Union had won a string of victories in the West: at Mill Springs in Kentucky and at Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. The Confederates abandoned Kentucky and Middle Tennessee, including Nashville, and the Tennessee River lay open as a highway into the Southern heartland.5 › Battle of Fort Donelson, 1862
The Confederate commander in the West, Albert Sidney Johnston, pulled his scattered forces together around Corinth in northern Mississippi. The little town mattered because two railroads crossed there, the Memphis and Charleston and the Mobile and Ohio, the best east-west rail link the Confederacy had. Whoever held Corinth held the railroads of the western South.6
Grant's camps at Pittsburg Landing
In March Henry Halleck, the Union commander in the West, sent Grant up the Tennessee River by steamboat. Grant landed his Army of the Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing, 22 miles northeast of Corinth, and set up camp on a plateau above the river, with his forward divisions two miles inland around a log church called Shiloh Meeting House. Halleck's orders were firm: no battle until Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio, marching overland from Nashville, had joined him. Then the combined armies would advance on Corinth.7
Expecting to attack rather than be attacked, the Union commanders did not fortify their camps. William T. Sherman, who ran the forward camps, brushed aside reports of Confederates in the woods. "I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position," he wrote to Grant on 5 April. Grant himself was nine miles downriver at his headquarters.8
Johnston strikes
Johnston knew what the Union intended and decided to smash Grant before Buell arrived. He set his Army of the Mississippi, nearly 44,000 men, in motion on 3 April, but heavy rain and muddy roads slowed the columns, and only by nightfall on 5 April was the army deployed for battle about four miles southwest of Pittsburg Landing. Grant had nearly 40,000 men present for duty.9
6 April: the morning
Shiloh is often called a complete surprise, but the historian Timothy B. Smith, a former ranger at the park, shows that it was not quite that. For days there had been skirmishing in the woods, and Union soldiers knew the enemy was out there; their commanders, ordered not to start a fight, simply refused to act on what they heard. Before dawn on 6 April a Union brigade commander, Colonel Everett Peabody, sent out a patrol without permission. It ran into the Confederate skirmishers less than a mile from the Union front, and the firing gave the camps just enough warning to form lines.10
At daybreak three Confederate corps stormed out of the woods and swept into the southernmost Union camps around Shiloh Church. Sherman rode forward to look; the orderly beside him was shot dead and Sherman was hit in the hand. All morning the Confederates gained ground, and the Union divisions fell back fighting from one stand to the next: Shiloh Church, the Peach Orchard, Water Oaks Pond. The battle was fought in woods and ravines by inexperienced troops on both sides, and the attackers soon became as disorganized as the defenders.11
The Hornets' Nest
In the center, Union troops made their longest stand along a farm lane on the edge of a dense oak thicket. Survivors named it the Hornets' Nest. For hours the Confederates attacked it again and again. Eventually they massed 62 cannon against the position, and the defenders, now nearly surrounded, gave way; Benjamin Prentiss surrendered the remnants of his division.12
Prentiss came out of the war as the hero of the Hornets' Nest, but Smith points out that his division had shrunk from about 5,400 men to 500 by mid-morning and that the line was held mainly by W. H. L. Wallace's veteran brigades. Wallace was mortally wounded and could not tell his side of the story. Even the famous "Sunken Road" may be a later legend: no wartime report calls the lane sunken, and the name first appeared in print in 1881.13
The death of Johnston
At mid-afternoon, while directing an attack on the Union left near the Hornets' Nest line, Johnston was struck in the right leg by a bullet that cut an artery, and he bled to death. P. G. T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, took command.14
Jefferson Davis, who admired Johnston deeply, later wrote that his fall was "the turning point of our fate". Many Southerners came to believe that Johnston would have won if he had lived. Smith disagrees: the lulls in the fighting came from the battle's own rhythm, and Johnston would also have been held up by the Hornets' Nest. A memorial raised by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1917 shows Death taking the laurel wreath of victory from the South.15
Grant's last line
By evening Grant's battered divisions had fallen back to a strong line on a ridge running west from Pittsburg Landing, protected by ravines and backed by more than 50 guns and the fire of the Union gunboats Tyler and Lexington on the river. A few exhausted Confederate brigades crossed the Dill Branch ravine in the dusk, met a wall of fire and fell back. As darkness came, Beauregard, believing his army had won, called off the attacks.16
Former Confederates later blamed him for throwing away a victory, but Smith concludes that Grant's last line could probably not have been broken. Beauregard also believed that Buell was not coming. He was wrong: all night Buell's fresh divisions crossed the river.17
7 April: the counterattack
At dawn on 7 April it was Grant who attacked. The combined Union armies now had some 54,000 men against barely 30,000 to 34,000 Confederates. Beauregard's men made desperate counterattacks, but step by step they were driven back over the ground they had won the day before, as far as Shiloh Church. Around 3 p.m. Beauregard ordered a retreat to Corinth. The exhausted Union army did not pursue far; on 8 April Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry checked the Union advance at Fallen Timbers, and Forrest himself was badly wounded.18
Aftermath
The cost stunned both sides: 13,047 Union and 10,699 Confederate casualties, 23,746 in all. As the American Battlefield Trust notes, Shiloh means "place of peace" in Hebrew. Northern newspapers attacked Grant for being caught unprepared, and many demanded his dismissal, but according to an account the Trust quotes, Lincoln answered: "I can't spare this man, he fights." Grant later wrote that after Shiloh he gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.19 › Ulysses S. Grant
Strategically the battle settled the fate of Corinth. Halleck took personal command, advanced slowly with three armies, and by late May Beauregard abandoned Corinth and withdrew to Tupelo, giving up the best east-west railroad in the western Confederacy. The road was open for Grant's later campaign against Vicksburg.20 › Siege of Corinth, 1862
Myths and memory
Few battles gathered as many legends as Shiloh. Grant himself wrote that it had been more persistently misunderstood than any other battle of the war. The tale of Johnny Clem, the "drummer boy of Shiloh", cannot be true, because his regiment was formed only after the battle. The Bloody Pond, today a park landmark, rests on a single account given by a local resident years later. When the park was created in 1894, its first historian, David W. Reed, was a veteran who had fought in the Hornets' Nest, which helps explain why that part of the field has loomed so large ever since.21
Visiting Shiloh today
Shiloh National Military Park, established in 1894, has about 5,200 acres at Shiloh today, and the American Battlefield Trust counts it among the best preserved Civil War battlefields anywhere. Roads, fields and woodlines are much as they were in April 1862, though the woods are thicker today. Of the 229 cannon placed around the park, all but two are original Civil War pieces. In the Shiloh National Cemetery about two-thirds of the Union dead are unknown. The Confederate dead, all but two of them unknown, were never moved there: they lie in mass graves on the battlefield, five of which were located and are marked. The park has a second visitor center at Corinth, Mississippi.22
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