Curtained by rain and lit by artillery shells arching above them through the night sky, the fresh troops of Major General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio bobbed across the Tennessee River on wooden steamboats during the evening of April 6, 1862. On the western bank of the river, at Pittsburg Landing, an angry, confused and terrified mob of Union skulkers sought shelter alongside the bluffs that overlooked the river. That morning, many of these same troops had been routed from their campgrounds near the primitive Methodist meeting house called Shiloh, 2 1/2 miles southwest of the landing, by onrushing Confederate troops led by General Albert Sidney Johnston’s onrushing Confederate troops, who were seeking to drive the Union invaders from their stronghold in southwestern Tennessee.

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The ensuing battle, the bloodiest single day of fighting yet experienced on the North American continent, had settled by nightfall into an exhausted stalemate, with troops on both sides hunkering down for the night in the vine-choked gullies and brambles that gutted the battlefield. By then, Johnston himself was dead, having bled to death from a bullet wound to the knee, and the badly rattled Confederate high command was unsure what to do next. Some argued for an immediate retreat before the enemy could be reinforced; others wanted to renew the battle at dawn.

The Union commander, however, had no such doubts. Major General Ulysses S. Grant, although admittedly caught by surprise by the Rebels’ morning attack, did not envision retreating. With his back against the winding Tennessee River, such a retreat was not an option. Nor was Grant the sort of commander who spooked easily. When one of his staff members, Colonel James B. McPherson, suggested that they consider withdrawing, Grant immediately snapped, ‘No, sir, I propose to attack at daylight and whip them.’ Already, reinforcements were on the way. Meanwhile, all they could do was wait. Grant tried to catch a few hours’ sleep in the shelter of a large oak tree near the landing. But the incessant rain, coupled with the steady throb of pain from his ankle, which had been injured shortly before the battle when his horse fell on it, made sleep an impossibility. The Union commander then relocated to a log cabin on the bluff above the river. But Union surgeons had taken over the cabin for battlefield operations, which consisted mainly of sawing off shattered arms and legs. The screams of the wounded were too much for Grant. ‘The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire,’ Grant recalled in his Personal Memoirs, ‘and I returned to my tree in the rain.’ It was there that his second-in-command, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, found him later that night, chewing on an ever-present cigar. ‘Well, Grant,’ said Sherman, ‘we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’ ‘Yes,’ Grant replied, ‘lick ‘em tomorrow, though.’

Grant’s confidence was based in part on the steady arrival of Union reinforcements from Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which had been 20 miles away at Savannah, Tenn., when the battle opened. A series of delays having to do with the disposition of artillery pieces and the lack of a local guide had prevented Buell’s lead division, under Brig. Gen. William Nelson, from reaching the field in time to join in the first day’s fighting. Now, however, Nelson’s men were busy piling onto two steamers for the nerve-wracking ride across the river.

Among the fresh troops in Nelson’s division was a young sergeant in the 9th Indiana, Ambrose Bierce, who would later write vividly about Shiloh and other battles as a famous newspaper columnist and short story writer. In his reminiscence ‘What I Saw of Shiloh,’ Bierce recalled sharing the ride across the river with a pretty young woman–’someone’s wife,’ he guessed–who stood on the upper deck of the steamer holding a small, ivory-handled pistol in her hand for use ‘if it came to the worst.’ ‘I took my hat off to this little fool,’ Bierce recalled.

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