WordNet
n. the second great battle of the American Civil War (1862); the battle ended with the withdrawal of Confederate troops but it was not a Union victory [syn: Shiloh, battle of Pittsburgh Landing]
Wikipedia
The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, was a major battle in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, fought April 6–7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee. A Union army under Major General Ulysses S. Grant had moved via the Tennessee River deep into Tennessee and was encamped principally at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee on the west bank of the river, where Confederate forces under Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard launched a surprise attack on Grant's army. Johnston was killed in action during the fighting; Beauregard, who thus succeeded to command of the army, decided against pressing the attack late in the evening. Overnight Grant was reinforced by one of his own divisions stationed further north and was joined by three divisions from another Union army under Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. This allowed them to launch an unexpected counterattack the next morning which completely reversed the Confederate gains of the previous day.
On April 6, the first day of the battle, the Confederates struck with the intention of driving the Union defenders away from the river and into the swamps of Owl Creek to the west. Johnston hoped to defeat Grant's Army of the Tennessee before the anticipated arrival of General Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio. The Confederate battle lines became confused during the fierce fighting, and Grant's men instead fell back to the northeast, in the direction of Pittsburg Landing. A Union position on a slightly sunken road, nicknamed the "Hornet's Nest," defended by the men of Brig. Gens. Benjamin M. Prentiss's and William H. L. Wallace's divisions, provided critical time for the remainder of the Union line to stabilize under the protection of numerous artillery batteries. Wallace was mortally wounded when the position collapsed, while several regiments from the two divisions were eventually surrounded and surrendered. General Johnston was shot in the leg and bled to death while personally leading an attack. Beauregard, his second in command, acknowledged how tired the army was from the day's exertions and decided against assaulting the final Union position that night.
Tired but unfought and well-organized men from Buell's army and a division of Grant's army arrived in the evening of April 6 and helped turn the tide the next morning, when the Union commanders launched a counterattack along the entire line. Confederate forces were forced to retreat from the area, ending their hopes of blocking the Union advance into northern Mississippi. The Battle of Shiloh was the bloodiest battle in American history up to that time, although it was superseded the next year by the Battle of Chancellorsville and, soon after, the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, which would prove to be the bloodiest of the war.
Usage examples of "battle of shiloh".
Richmond had heard of the great battle of Shiloh, the failure to destroy Grant and the death of Albert Sidney Johnston.
During the Battle of Shiloh, the Northerners lost over thirteen thousand men, while we only lost a tad over ten thousand good old boys.
I mind you of the more than twenty thousand American dead at the Battle of Shiloh.
The battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in Tennessee, eighty -eight miles east of Memphis, had been fought on April 6 and 7, 1862.
Burden murmured approvingly, fingers feeling for his favorite talisman: the flattened bullet removed from his father's shoulder after the Battle of Shiloh and kept by that sardonic and violent man as a memento of a heroic time .
That was a hard and cruel conflict, but no man who'd survived the Battle of Shiloh was likely to be intimidated by some bozo on a horse, gun or not.
It was in the cauldron of death that was the battle of Shiloh that I found myself.
And that's all you'll be, as irrelevant as a muzzleloader encampment or a reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh, if you keep closing your eyes to what's happening -what's already happened.