>The night of April 6 was a horrible one for everyone involved--nonstop rain and acute physical discomfort. No one could get any sleep and thousands and thousands of men had been wounded. Grant had tried to sleep under a tree, but his leg was still bothering him from spraining it in a fall from a horse a few days ago, so he made his way to the log house that was supposed to be his headquarters. Instead he found it was being used as a field hospital; dozens of wounded, moaning men were inside waiting treatment with more gathered outside. Grant took one look at this and immediately went back out to his tree. "I found the sight more unendurable than being under the enemy's fire," he recalled.>Meanwhile, Sherman decided to look for Grant. He believed the army had been thoroughly beaten and there was nothing to do now but retreat to the other side of the Tennessee a safe distance from the Confederates and recuperate. Sherman wanted to ask Grant about their plans for a retreat. He found him leaning against the tree, a lantern in one hand, his hat pulled down over his forehead, his collar pulled up to his neck, a dimly glowing cigar in his mouth. Sherman suddenly thought better of it and decided not to discuss retreating. He said simply "Well, Grant, we've certainly had the devil's own day, haven't we?" "Yes," Grant replied with a puff of his cigar. "We'll lick 'em tomorrow, though."
>Sherman said “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”Men only want one thing and it's fucking disgusting.
the arrival of Buell's army was a huge morale booster, Grant's soldiers knew everything would be ok and they were going to win this battle
>>18379150>the arrival of Buell's army was a huge morale booster, Grant's soldiers knew everything would be ok and they were going to win this battleHeavy naval artillery from Union gunboats blasting away all night was a big boost for the Federals and demoralizing for the Confederates even if they weren’t hitting much of anything.
>At sunrise, Buell's army formed up to the right of Grant's--the divisions of McCook, Nelson, and a portion of Crittenden's division. Grant's command consisted of the three battered divisions of Sherman, McClernand, and Hurlbut, with Lew Wallace's fresh division on the extreme left of the line. Grant rode up to Wallace, pointed to the Confederate position, and told him to go forward as soon as he was ready. Wallace remembered how oddly calm and unworried he was considering how close he'd been to disaster the previous evening--"If he'd studied how to be undramatic he couldn't have done any better." Grant then rode off and the second day's fight was on.>The Confederates had taken a tremendous beating on April 6 but they were not ready to quit just yet and some of the fighting was as hard and costly as it had been on the first day. By 1:00 PM the Union advantage in numbers began to tell and the Confederate line was about to cave in. Van Dorn's 20,000 men were supposed to reinforce them, but they were still many miles away. A staff officer suggested to Beauregard that it was time to go and he replied "I intend to withdraw in a matter of minutes." The fighting slowed down, rear guards were set up, and Grant, seeing this, gathered two regiments in a line of battle and ordered them to attack. This charge, he thought, broke the last enemy resistance.>Grant's army was more than happy to wish the Confederates godspeed. None of them wanted to remain in contact with these foes any longer than necessary, Buell was hardly the type to pursue a beaten enemy down to destruction, and Beauregard got his mangled army onto the muddy roads and began the withdrawal to Corinth. So ended Shiloh, the largest and costliest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere to date. Grant and Buell had lost a combined 13,000 men and Beauregard around 10,000.
>>18379071No wonder they had to resort to pure numbers to win. What absolute losers.
>>18379071The more I read about the American civil war the more I get the distinct impression something about America's martial tradition died when this conflict ended.
>>18379076When was he crazy?
>>18380054Sherman performed well at First Bull Run, was promoted and sent west, then flipped his wig in the winter of 1861, stepping away from the army and sinking into depression. With the help of Grant and others he got his shit together and was back in the saddle for the spring 1862 campaign.
How did the South ever think they were going to win? Was it autism or rampant inbreeding?
>>18380371Johnston's battle plan for Shiloh was totally unachievable. He hoped to destroy Grant's army and then regain everything the Confederacy had lost in Tennessee in the prior two months. None of this was going to work and he had no real follow-up plan for if he did win the battle.
>>18380367he commanded the nascent Army of Ohio in Kentucky but had a nervous breakdown over the difficult job of trying to make an army out of raw, poorly-equipped volunteers. Buell replaced him in command and he was assigned to less demanding posts to give him chances to recuperate.
>>18380371It was possible. If Missouri and Maryland had joined (as they would have without an outside coup) I'd even say it would be pretty easy. Even without the border states it was possible to imagine a Northern defeat until the summer of 1864, which is really where things ended. All the South had to do was hold on and let the pro-war sentiment of the North exhaust itself.
>The terrible bloodletting left a lasting impact--the Southern novelist George Cable wrote "New Orleans never smiled again after that awful day at Shiloh." As Beauregard's army withdrew back down to Corinth, they had a sense of what was coming; many more terrible battles lay ahead, but the outcome of the war was now a forgone conclusion. This was one battle the Confederacy had to win and they had not quite been able to do it, and that was all thanks to the desperate fighting of thousands of Western soldiers and the unbreakable stubbornness of Ulysses Grant.
