Battle of Shiloh

On the morning of 6 April 1862, Confederate forces under Albert Sidney Johnston came out of the woods and struck Ulysses Grant's army in its camps near a small log meeting house called Shiloh, in southwestern Tennessee. The Union lines were driven back toward the river, and a knot of defenders along a farm lane, in an area later called the Hornet's Nest, held for hours before surrendering. Johnston was shot in the leg that afternoon and bled to death, the highest ranking officer killed on either side in the war. Overnight Don Carlos Buell's army arrived, and on 7 April the reinforced Union forces drove the Confederates from the field. The toll, by one common comparison greater than all of America's earlier wars combined, told both sides the war would be long.

Shiloh produced some of the war's longest running arguments, above all whether Grant and Sherman were caught by surprise on the first morning, a charge both men denied for the rest of their lives. The Hornet's Nest was long credited with saving the Union army by buying time, but historian Timothy B. Smith and others have argued that veterans' reunions and the park's early markers inflated its role. The battlefield became a national military park in 1894, and its veteran-led commission shaped the story visitors were told for a century. The park also protects Confederate burial trenches and a prehistoric Mississippian mound complex on the same ground.