The Battle of Shiloh Begins
Two days of bitter fighting began on April 6, 1862, at Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee. Union commander Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, planning to advance on the important railway junction at Corinth, Miss., met a surprise attack by General Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of Mississippi. The Confederates pushed the Federals back steadily during the first day’s fighting, in spite of Johnston’s death that afternoon. Only with the arrival of Union reinforcements during the night did the tide turn, forcing the rebels to withdraw. The opposing sides slaughtered each other with such ferocity that one survivor wrote, ‘No blaze of glory…can ever atone for the unwritten and unutterable horrors of the scene.’
Image: Library of Congress
