PRESERVING A REPUBLIC CAN BE BLOODY BUSINESS:

No one expected this--not the fiercest "fire-eater" in South Carolina or the flintiest abolitionist in New England. By the time the guns fell silent at Shiloh on the night of April 7, 1862, soldiers on both sides of the battlefield realized that they had endured something never before seen in American history. Nearly 24,000 men had fallen dead or wounded among the peach orchards and tangled woods in southwestern Tennessee, more than the total loss from all three of America's previous wars combined. Small wonder that New Orleans writer George Washington Cable, himself a former Confederate, would later write: "The South never smiled again at Shiloh." 

 

Neither, for that matter, did the North--at least not for another three long years. Shiloh was the first truly disorienting battle in the national experience, a battle in which large numbers of poorly led troops stumbled into one another, blazed away, fell back, came together again, and stopped butchering each other only after darkness, rain, and exhaustion put an end to the fighting. There would be other battles like Shiloh in 1862, many of them commemorated in this special issue of Civil War Quarterly.

But there would never be another Shiloh, for that was where America's childhood ended. After Shiloh, all cocky talk of bloodless victories and cowardly foes gave way to the sickening realization that a war started almost cavalierly one year earlier would not be ending easily--or any time soon.

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