At dawn on 6 April 1862 the Confederate Army of the Mississippi under General Albert Sidney Johnston burst out of the woods into the camps of Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee around Shiloh Church, near Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee. All day the Union divisions were driven back toward the river, and Johnston himself was killed. Overnight Don Carlos Buell's army arrived, and on 7 April the Federals drove the Confederates off. The two days cost nearly 24,000 casualties, more than any battle of the war so far.
The road to Corinth
After the Union victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February 1862, Johnston abandoned Kentucky and much of Tennessee and concentrated his forces at Corinth, Mississippi, where two important railroads crossed. Grant came up the Tennessee River by steamboat and camped his army at Pittsburg Landing, about 22 miles northeast of Corinth, with his forward camps around a log meeting house called Shiloh Church. He was under orders not to fight until Buell's Army of the Ohio, marching from Nashville, had joined him.1
Johnston decided to strike first. He set his army of about 44,000 men in motion on 3 April, but rain and mud slowed the march, and only on the evening of 5 April was it deployed for battle about four miles from the landing.2
Surprise at dawn
The Federal camps were not entrenched. According to the American Battlefield Trust, Brigadier General William T. Sherman, who ran the camps day to day, dismissed reports of Confederates nearby, writing to Grant on 5 April that he did not expect anything like an attack. The Trust relates that Sherman's men had just finished breakfast on 6 April when word came of Confederate units on the march. Riding out to look, Sherman saw his orderly shot dead beside him and was himself hit in the hand.3
The Confederates overran the forward camps, and all morning Grant's divisions fell back through a series of stands at Shiloh Church, the Peach Orchard, Water Oaks Pond and a thicket that survivors named the Hornets' Nest. The attackers became almost as disorganized as the defenders, as corps and brigades tangled in the woods.4
Johnston falls
In mid-afternoon Johnston was shot in the right leg while directing an attack on the Union left. The bullet cut an artery, and he bled to death, leaving General P. G. T. Beauregard in command. At the Hornets' Nest, Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss and W. H. L. Wallace held out for hours against repeated charges and a mass of Confederate guns. According to HistoryNet, Wallace was mortally wounded at about 5 p.m., and by 5:30 Prentiss, surrounded, raised a white flag and surrendered the 2,250 soldiers still with him. Meanwhile Grant's battered divisions had fallen back to a strong line west of the landing, protected by massed artillery and rugged ravines.5
Beauregard halted the attacks at nightfall, believing the battle won. He did not know that Buell's troops were crossing the river to join Grant overnight.6
The second day and the cost
On 7 April the combined Union armies, more than 54,000 men, attacked a Confederate army reduced to roughly 30,000 to 34,000. After a day of counterattacks, Beauregard withdrew to Corinth, and the exhausted Federals did not press the pursuit.7
The American Battlefield Trust and the National Park Service put the total losses at 23,746 killed, wounded and missing. The Trust gives 13,047 Union casualties, including 1,754 killed, and its Confederate figures of 1,728 killed, 8,012 wounded and 959 missing add up to 10,699, slightly more than the 10,669 in its own summary. Grant was attacked in the press for being caught unprepared, but, the Trust notes, Lincoln stood by him. Corinth fell to the Union at the end of May. The battle is told in full in our article on the Battle of Shiloh.8
Also on this day
- 1941: German bombing of Belgrade. In the first days of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, the German air force bombed Belgrade in reprisal for the coup that toppled the government which had signed the Tripartite Pact.
