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Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

The Battle of Shiloh began at sunrise on April 6, 1862 — the Sabbath — as 45,000 Confederate soldiers swooped down on an unsuspecting Union army encamped at Pittsburg Landing, a nondescript hog-and-cotton steamboat dock on the Tennessee River. What followed were two of the bloodiest days of the Civil War, leaving 24,000 men on both sides dead, dying and wounded.

When it was over the nation — two nations as it were, for the moment — convulsed, horrified, at the results. A great battle had indeed been anticipated; at stake was control of the Mississippi River Valley, which would likely decide who won the war. But the Battle of Shiloh was not the outcome that anyone wanted.

Beyond the grisly statistics, Americans north and south of the Mason-Dixon line were suddenly confronted with the sobering fact that Shiloh hadn’t been the decisive battle-to-end-all-battles; there was no crushing victory — only death and carnage on a scale previously unimaginable. The casualty figures at Shiloh were five times greater than its only major predecessor engagement, the Battle of Bull Run, and people were left with the shocking apprehension that more, and perhaps many more, such confrontations were in store before the thing was settled.

Among the many ironies of the battle is that its name was taken from a small chink-and-mortar Methodist chapel on the battlefield that had been christened after the Hebrew expression for “Place of Peace.” The building itself was hardly better than a respectable Tennessee corncrib, but it was a house of God and gave its name to the first of the great battles of the Civil War.

The fate of the armies was sealed in mid-March when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s 49,000 men began disembarking at Pittsburg Landing. Elsie Duncan Hurt was 9 years old at the time, a child of one of the area’s farmers. Her black nurse returned from the Landing one day with word that “there were strange steamboats on the river and Yankees camped in the hills.”

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This news soon flashed to Corinth, Miss., a mere 20 miles to the south, where the renowned Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston had gathered 45,000 rebel soldiers bound to the destruction of Yankee host invading Southern soil. At Johnston’s side was the dashing and magnificently named Louisiana Creole general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, recently celebrated as the “hero” of Bull Run.

Noted as a master of strategy and tactics, Beauregard urged an immediate attack on Grant, who was awaiting the arrival of a second Union army marching overland from Nashville under Gen. Don Carlos Buell. When the two combined, they would constitute an irresistible force against any rebel army in the western theater.

Johnston also wanted to wait for another army, a 14,000-man force coming from Arkansas under Gen. Earl Van Dorn, but Beauregard persuaded him to strike at once, before Buell could arrive. Johnston told the Creole to draw up the attack order.

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Confusion and disarray reigned from the outset. First came an appalling mix-up in the muddy streets of Corinth, where the 10,000-man corps of Gen. Leonidias Polk (a cousin of President James K. Polk and, until recently, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana) was encamped with all of its wagons, animals and baggage.

For reasons unknown, Polk idiotically refused to march without a written order — which was still being composed — and it proved impossible for the other corps to move around him. At long last Polk shoved off, but the delay cost the Confederates precious time and prompted one of his officers to remark, “Polk had been in the cloth too long.”

The remainder of the march quickly turned into such a ceaseless military fiasco that it reminded an artillery captain “of the temple scene from ‘Orlando Furioso.’” A mighty rainstorm doused the countryside in floods and washed out roads. Men became lost during the night — whole regiments got lost, even guides got lost — and by dawn entire divisions were so hopelessly entangled that it became necessary to postpone the attack until April 6, perhaps a fatal error.

Meanwhile Grant’s army languished at Pittsburg Landing, supremely ignorant of the menace slowly lurching toward it.

The Yankee soldiers had not been told to fortify their positions — in fact they were ordered not to — which left them camping in the open like Boy Scouts, while daily instruction was given in close-order drill, weapons training and latrine building.

This lack of preparation against attack has never been satisfactorily explained. After the battle, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman suggested that fortifying adversely affected the courage of the men, implying that if they dug in it would look like they were scared of the rebels. Both he and Grant maintained that since there were so many green, or untrained, volunteers in the army, the men’s time would be better spent learning military technique.

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In any case, even as the attack was about to burst upon them, when Yankee officers in the most forward camps began reporting a strong enemy presence in their fronts, Sherman threatened to have them arrested for spreading false rumors.

On the morning of April 6, when these reports could no longer be ignored, Sherman crossly mounted and rode forward — just as the main Confederate battle line emerged from a hedge of trees. As he reached for his field glasses, a bullet struck his orderly in the head; the orderly toppled from his horse, dead. Sherman himself was hit in the hand and dashed off, shouting, “My God, we are attacked!”

All of this overshadowed an otherwise idyllic Sunday morning that had broken cool, bright and clear in the Yankee camps, where the men were finishing breakfast, polishing brass and leather or attending services. Orchards were in full flower, dogwoods were in bloom, the forest floor was carpeted with violets. A number of men recorded that a great many birds were singing in the trees, an ironic cacophony against the sudden spatter of gunfire.

The rebel army, together at last, presented a stirring and dismaying sight, as regiment after regiment, dressed in Confederate gray or butternut brown, emerged from the woods in three successive waves, each in a line two miles long. Banners waving, officers on horseback shouting orders, they marched in perfect order “as if they were on parade.” Sunlight glinted off their gun barrels and bayonets and their bands played “Dixie,” but above it all the bone-chilling Rebel Yell rose from tens of thousands of throats, nearly drowning out the music and the gunfire.

On they crashed forward through forest and field, preceded by a diaspora of frightened wildlife — bounding rabbits, leaping deer, whirring coveys of quail — while Union officers tried frantically to put their units into fighting order. Men, some of whom had only received their weapons the day before, were hastily shoved into a line of battle. Artillery batteries that had never fired a round were raced to the front, where they began blasting shot, shell, canister and grape into the surging enemy.

The Confederate Soldier in the Civil War, 1895

Among the first casualties was the rebel general Adley H. Gladden, a prominent New Orleans merchant and president of that city’s exclusive Boston Club. Leading a charge, he was blown from his horse by a cannonball that tore off his arm at the shoulder, mortally wounding him.

His opposite in the Union line was 38-year-old Col. Everett Peabody, a 6-foot-1, 240-pound, Massachusetts-born and Harvard-educated engineer commanding a Missouri volunteer regiment that bore the brunt of Gladden’s attack. He was struck by five bullets during the first two hours of fighting, buying time for the Yankee divisions in his rear, before a sixth slug shattered his skull, killing him.

All morning the Confederates drove the blue coats northward in a carnival of carnage that left the mutilated bodies of both sides strewn in heaps amid great heroism and equally great cowardice. An estimated 10,000 of Grant’s troops fled the fighting and hid under the bluffs by the river, while a number of rebel regiments were banished to the rear for timidity in battle.

Grant had arrived on the battlefield about 9 a.m. after a two-hour steamboat trip from the mansion where he’d been staying, nine miles downriver. It was an unfortunate and unfair stain on his reputation that, even years afterward, the lady of the house was called upon to testify that Grant was sober when he left the premises.

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Thirty-nine years old, flawed, an indifferent West Point student, disgraced as an army officer, gossiped about as an alcoholic, a failed farmer and a failed businessman, Ulysses Grant had come to his command almost as a fluke. Only nine months earlier the Illinois governor had appointed him to take charge of a dissolute regiment of volunteers that he described as “a mob of chicken-thieves, led by a drunkard.”

Grant managed to whip these miscreants into shape so efficiently he was given two more troublesome regiments, which constituted a brigade. Under army regulations, such a command required a brigadier general, and thus the once-disgraced Grant suddenly found himself wearing the stars of a general officer in the United States Army.

Early on he had become friends with another flawed officer, Sherman, who had been publically accused of being both “timid” as well as “insane” and sent into military limbo before redeeming himself with the army during Grant’s push south. It was suggested that at Shiloh Sherman might have been overcompensating for the accusation of timidity by belittling the notion of a rebel attack.

The rebel onslaught continued unabated, and the Union front lines grudgingly collapsed as the Confederates pressed forward. Elsie Duncan Hurt remembered: “The fighting began at our gate just past the house. As the battle raged it got further away leaving dead men and dead horses behind.”

About midday the fighting coalesced around the Union center, at a scrubwood forest that became known as the Hornet’s Nest for the interminable bullets zinging through the air. It was bisected by an old wagon trail called the Sunken Road, where so many soldiers of both sides perished. Men who went through there next day said that such trees as remained standing were riddled with so many thousands of bullet holes they were astonished anyone, or anything, had survived it.

By mid-afternoon General Johnston was exceedingly pleased with the progress of his assault. The original intention was to drive the Yankees northwestward, into the boggy, moccasin-infested swamps of Snake and Owl Creeks, where they could be rounded up as prisoners. Now they were simply being driven backward — due north.

But the fortunes of war frowned on General Johnston that day. Acclaimed personally by Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s finest officer, Johnston was a perfect specimen of military prowess and acumen, and at 59, he was at the height of his career when the war broke out. He spurned an offer of high Union command to side with his native South and was put in charge of the Department of the West.

Even with the frequent bullet or cannonball whizzing overhead, and with death and destruction all around him, Johnston was in unabashedly good humor until word came from one of his corps commanders that a Tennessee brigade was refusing to fight. Shocked, he rode to the scene and shamed the Tennesseans by declaring that he would personally lead their charge. The attack was soon successful in taking a bloody Union strong point known as the Peach Orchard, amid a rain of bullet-clipped blossoms that fluttered down like snowflakes among the wounded, the dying and the dead.

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Shattered refugees from both sides made their way nearby to the so-called Bloody Pond to bathe their wounds beneath an unspoken (and unauthorized) truce, as the savage fighting raged all around them.

Returning from his charge about 2 p.m., Johnston suddenly reeled in his saddle. When he was lowered from his horse it was discovered that a bullet had severed an artery behind his knee; within a few minutes he bled to death in his boot. In the rush of battle, he hadn’t even known he was hit. A doctor would have immediately stanched the wound with a tourniquet, but as luck would have it, Johnston had sent his doctor away to tend some wounded Yankee soldiers.

Command abruptly devolved on Beauregard, whose headquarters had moved forward near the Shiloh church where Sherman had been encamped. Following Johnston’s death a lull was said to have settled over the field for nearly an hour, which many Southerner’s blamed on Beauregard’s inaction. Nevertheless, as the afternoon wore on, the Confederates pressed nearer to Pittsburg Landing, the last Union stronghold.

The Hornet’s Nest finally collapsed between 5 and 6 p.m. with the mortal wounding of Union Gen. W.H.L. Wallace, a division commander, whose young wife, come to surprise him, was waiting on a steamboat at the landing. Shortly afterward came the capture of Union Gen. Benjamin Prentiss, along with the surrender of his entire division. As the sun cast its last, long shadows, it was beginning to look like the end for the federal army.

Good news came with the arrival of Buell, whose army would cross the river near sundown. It was not a moment too soon, for Grant’s army had begun to draw up for a last-ditch stand with its back to the miry wastes of Snake Creek. Gen. Braxton Bragg immediately ordered his corps to “Sweep everything forward.… Drive the enemy into the river.”

Grant’s adjutant had placed a battery of enormous siege guns in the Union line at that particular point, and the very shock of its fire drove the Confederates back. As Grant was observing these proceedings, a rebel cannonball blew the head off of one of his aides standing not 10 feet away.

Soon Bragg was sending out reinforcements, organizing another, final charge to break the Union line. Then he was staggered by orders from a messenger: Beauregard, unaware that Buell had arrived, had called off the attack till morning.

Bragg was convinced that even though some of Buell’s army was taking the field, one last great charge would split the line and the battle would be won. “My God!” Bragg cried, as he watched other rebel units pulling back. “Too late! My God! Too late!”

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It was also too true. Beauregard, commanding from the Shiloh church nearly two miles from the present scene of battle, was unaware that Buell’s army was arriving. He believed only the remaining Yankees of Grant were milling around Pittsburg Landing like goats being prepared for the sacrifice and could be mopped up in the morning.

But with morning instead came one of the great reversals of the Civil War. Dawn brought an uproar of Union artillery and word that the Yankees were attacking all across the Rebel front. For half a day Beauregard put up a good fight, if for no other reason than he couldn’t think of anything better to do, but the odds were hopeless and his men were spent. At around 2 p.m. on April 7, Beauregard ordered a withdrawal back to the stronghold of Corinth.

That should have ended the matter, but instead the next day Sherman took a large force in pursuit until he ran into a man — Nathan Bedford Forrest — with whose name he would become well acquainted as the war progressed. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers on April 8, Forrest taught Sherman a lesson about the power of cavalry that he would not soon forget, and with that, the fighting at Shiloh came to an end.

There remained the repugnant task of burying the thousands of dead, as well as hundreds of dead horses. The butcher’s bill at Shiloh was just shy of 24,000 killed, wounded and missing, about evenly divided between both sides.

Nothing like it had ever happened in the Western Hemisphere. By comparison, the combined casualties at the Battle of Bull Run were 4,800. In fact, the two days fighting at Shiloh had produced more casualties than all the previous wars of the United States, combined.

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Word soon got out to the Union public that Grant’s army had been surprised, that men were bayonetted to death in their tents while they slept, which was an exaggeration. The public was incensed to hear that an entire 8,000-man division never took the field on the terrible first day, which was true. (It belonged to Gen. Lew Wallace, who took the wrong road and would afterward write the novel “Ben Hur.”) There was also the shameful matter of the 10,000 of Grant’s soldiers who ran away.

In the press and in the halls of Congress Grant was censured for dallying in a mansion miles from the battlefield, for failing to fortify, or reconnoiter, or to even have a battle plan in case of attack, as well as failing to pursue and destroy the beaten Confederate army. Much of this sticks. But there were also accusations of drunkenness, indifference and sloth, which do not.

In Washington, a chorus arose for Grant’s removal, despite the fact that he had won the battle. Popular lore has it that when Grant was accused of drunkenness, Lincoln told the critics, “Then find out what kind of whiskey he drinks and send a barrel to my other generals.” There is no real evidence he ever said this, but there is evidence that he said of Grant: “I can’t spare that man. He fights.”

In the South there was widespread dismay over the outcome and over the death of Sidney Johnston. Late on the first day of battle Beauregard had foolishly sent a telegram to Richmond saying, “The day is ours!” Disappointment was palpable, and Davis wept bitterly over Johnston’s death — they had been at West Point together. He never forgave Beauregard for calling off the attack.

The significance of Shiloh cannot be overstated. If the Union had lost badly, there would have been practically nothing standing in the way of a Southern invasion of the North. Cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, even Cleveland, would have been exposed. Almost certainly Kentucky would have joined the Confederacy — and probably Missouri as well, a calamity for the Union. Southern states would have rallied and recruits poured in. Lincoln would have had to shift his armies to counter the threat, upsetting the military and political balance at the most critical time.

None of that happened, of course. But a very real and important result of the battle was that after Shiloh Grant reached the stark conclusion that the only way to restore the Union would be the total conquest — or in his words, “subjugation” — of the South. Sherman had understood this long before Shiloh and began to indulge his soon-to-be well-known pyromaniacal urges along the Mississippi River near Memphis.

But the overarching significance of Shiloh was to impress on everyone that there was never going to be one neat, brilliant, military maneuver that would end the war — or even come close to winning it. It was as if Shiloh had unleashed some tremendous, murderous thing that was going to “drench the country in blood,” as Sherman had prophesied on the eve of secession.

From the ordinary foot soldiers’ point of view, they had “seen the elephant,” as the expression of the day went. For many it was so terrible that they ran and hid behind the bluffs. It was terrible for others too, but they stood their ground and faced it, or died trying. None of them who went through Shiloh would be the same again.

Confederate private Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee summed it up in his countrified elegance: “I had been feeling mean all morning, as if I had stolen a sheep … I had heard and read of battlefields, seen pictures of battlefields, of horses and men, of cannons and wagons, all jumbled together, while the ground was strewn with dead and dying and wounded, but I must confess I never realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called ‘glorious war’ until I saw this.”

Winston Groom is the author, most recently, of “Shiloh, 1862.” Photo by Squire Fox.