7 Apr 1862 -
“The hope for an easy war and a cheap victory was gone forever.”
It was a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. By mid-afternoon today it became clear that the Confederate forces had been shattered by the Union counter-attack and were withdrawing. But 24 hours earlier the shoe had been on the other foot, and General Grant’s Army of Tennessee, reeling backwards from the fierce rebel assault, looked on the verge of annihilation.
The Confederates named this engagement Pittsburg Landing, after a stopping place on the Tennessee River. The Union Army called it Shiloh after a small log meeting-house some four miles from the river. By either designation, it was two days of hell that “launched the country onto the floodtide of total war.”
As early as 1 April, Confederate cavalry movements and skirmishing near the Union lines indicated an enemy advance was contemplated. Grant’s headquarters ignored the evidence. “The fact is,” Grant wrote later, “I regarded the campaign we were engaged in as an offensive one and had no idea that the enemy would leave strong entrenchments to take the initiative. But Albert Sydney Johnson, the CSA Commander, had a different scenario in mind. Just before the attack, he told his senior commanders: “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” They came very close in an effort that would cost Johnson his life.
At 0500 on the 6th, as breakfast fires were being lit in the Union camp, patrols spotted Confederate skirmishers through the woods and underbrush. And suddenly, right behind them, emerged the full Confederate battle line, thousands strong, yelling and firing.
Under the shock of the attack, the Union positions disintegrated. Throughout the long day, the fighting was chaotic and relentless. At dusk, when one more Confederate attack might have destroyed what was left of Grant’s army, the rebels halted, exhausted and fought out. During the night, it rained and Grant brought up fresh regiments. By daylight, the Union forces had a sizeable advantage in numbers, and the counterattack began.
Shiloh was shocking in its carnage: a total of 20,000 men were killed or wounded, about evenly distributed on both sides. Included among the dead was Confederate general Johnson, killed on the first day of battle. That was almost twice the combined losses in all the previous engagements of the war now entering its second year. Bloody Shiloh produced a change in the war, which Bruce Catton summed up this way:
It had begun with flags and cheers and the glint of brave words on the spring wind, with the drumbeats setting a gay rhythm for the feet of the young men who believed that war would beat clerking. That had been a year ago; now the war had come down to uninstructed murderous battle in a smoky woodland where men who had never been shown how to fight stayed in defiance of all logical expectation and fought for two nightmarish days. And because they had done this, the hope for an easy war and cheap victory was gone forever.
And so it went...
Richard 
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