Shiloh: Bloody April

"Though the battle was crucial to the outcome of the American Civil War, the full story of Shiloh has never until now been told. Commonly considered a draw, Shiloh represented in fact a major reversal for the Confederacy — a Confederacy that mounted at the outset one of the most incredible surprise attacks in American history and came within a hair's breadth of inflicting a major disaster upon the North. Yet circumstances common to war — confusions, misjudgments, human frailities — resulted in eventual defeat. Depending entirely upon original sources, Mr. Sword views this bitter conflict from both sides in a blow-by-blow, shot-by-shot account that is as dramatic as it is comprehensive and authoritative. Shiloh was a battle that took critical measure of two of America's most famous soldiers, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Furthermore, Shiloh saw the death (perhaps at the hands of his own men) of one of the highest-ranking American generals ever to die on the battlefield, Albert Sidney Johnston, C.S.A., and cost the lives of nearly 4,000 other Americans. Despite the decisive importance of the battle of Shiloh, it has until now remained a virtually undiscovered subject for study. The reasons are not hard to find. They are simply that the bitterness of the controversy that Shiloh engendered plus the complexity of the battle itself resulted in contradictory currents that obsured both the facts and their significance. But now Wiley Sword has put it right in a masterful reconstruction that is also an original and valuable contribution to American history"—Jacket.