April 6, 1862, the union soldiers were not prepared for the charge of their Confederate brothers. Many of the boys were untrained and undisciplined, but as in many battles of war, murderous events served to alter the future.

The six of April, 1862, was a day fought with momentous issues for the future of the American Republic. The evening of the 5^th had witnessed the concentration of a great army, whose leader had declared in the pride and strength of his army, on the coming morning. Over whelmed and destroyed, the army of the Union laid encamped in the wilderness church of Shiloh. At no point during our prolonged and sanguinary civil war was the Union more imperiled than that eventful Saturday evening. The battle of Shiloh was the first decisive and preeminently, the most important battle of the war.

That morning, the sun rose over the Union encampment at Pittsburgh Landing, also known as Shiloh. Neither Ulysses S. Grant, the Union Commander, nor Albert S. Johnston, Confederate Commander, could possible know what this day would hold. It was a day that would bring advances in military tactics, and bring innovations in the medical field. It would change all preconceived notations that the Civil War would be short-lived. For Johnston and thousands of other brave soldiers on both the Union and Confederate side, it would bring death.

When Johnston�s powerful Army of Mississippi , hit the federal camp, there was mass confusion on both sides. Most of the boys had never been in battle before, so they did not know their orders. The Rebels rolled over one Union position after another. Then, amongst the confusion, along a sunken road, the Union finally established and held a line that stopped the southern advancement.

The division that stopped the advancement consisted of Illinois and Iowa farm-boys under the command of General Prentis. Grant�s orders were to hold the sunken road at all cost. Prentis greatly understood the seriousness of Grant�s orders. The Confederate infantry launched eleven attacks on the sunken road. The union line wavered and bent, but would not break. The confederate artillery lined up sixty-two cannons, the most that had ever been used in a war at that time, at point blank range and fired upon the sunken road. With the cannons, the Rebels were able to move in and take the old sunken road. After six hours of fighting the rebels forced the Union to surrender.

There was also a great deal of fighting at a peach orchard, just yards away form the sunken road. Peach blossoms covered the dead bodies like a fresh snowfall. General Johnston led the last raid on the peach orchard. He came out with his clothes tattered from bullets the grazed him and his boot soles shot off. A Confederate officer saw him wobbling in his saddle and asked if he was injured. Johnston said, �Yes and I feel seriously.� His aid took him to a nearby tree where they found out he was shot in the back of the leg. Johnston bled to death. He could of been saved if he had not sent his surgeon off to care for the Union prisoners.

A farm pond near the peach orchard was covered with soldiers from both armies. Many men went there to bathe their wounds and get a drink, but for many it was their last drink. Many who survived said, �The water was stained red with blood.�

That night, dead soldiers laid every where. Neither army had developed a plan for gathering their dead. General Grant said, �A person can walk in any direction with out touching the ground.� In a Confederate camp that night one soldier said, �You can hear the screams of the injured. They scream for water, God must of heard them for the heavens opened and rain fell.� Flashes of lightening showed vultures feeding on the un-gathered dead.

Later that evening, the long awaited arrival of Don Carlos Buell�s reinforcements arrived. Under the cover of gunboat fire, his troops came in on steamboats. The gunboats� fired on fifteen minute intervals, allowing Buell�s forces to come aground, and rob the Confederates of their greatly needed rest. The morning of April 7, the Confederates were pushed back off the ground they had fought so hard to win the day before. With fresh Union troops, the weary Rebels had little chance to win a complete victory.

The final number of dead or missing was 13,000 on the Union side and 10,500 on the Confederate side. There were as many people killed at Shiloh as there were at Waterloo during the Napoleonic war. The difference between Shiloh and the Napoleonic war is that there were not 20 more Waterloos to come.

Shiloh was a decisive battle in the war. The South needed a win to make up for the land lost in Kentucky and Ohio. It also needed to save the Mississippi Valley. Memphis, Corinth, and Vicksburg were now vulnerable to Union attack, there was no doubt that those cities would be the next targets.

However, General Grant and his men had been rid of their over-confidence by the Battle of Shiloh. They now knew that hopes for an easy victory over the South were ill-founded. The North knew that this war was going to be, in the words of the Union soldier, �A very bloody affair.�