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For many of the reinforcements, including an Englishman named Robert Neve of the 5th Kentucky Volunteers, this was their baptism of war. “Boys,” said Neve’s commander in the morning, just before sending the Union regiment off into the woods, “we shall beat them today, for their general is killed. He was shot yesterday in leading a charge.” The news had no real meaning for Neve except that his side was apparently doing better than the rebels. Yesterday the Confederates had attacked; today it was their job to return the favor. Neve’s regiment surged through the woods like hunters flushing out their prey. Occasionally, a stray shell interrupted their momentum. With every foothold gained, Neve’s confidence rose; fighting was not so bad after all.

The exhausted Confederates made a game effort to repel the invaders. Henry Morton Stanley’s company marched forward in skirmishing order. The young soldier stood in a daze until his captain barked, “Now, Mr. Stanley, if you please,” which mortified him. He rushed blindly forward, straight into a pocket of Federal soldiers from Ohio. Two of them wanted to shoot him immediately, but an officer saved his life. As he was marched off to the Union camp, they chatted about “our respective causes, and, though I could not admit it,” he wrote later, “there was much reason in what they said.” The slavery question “could have been settled in another and quieter way, but they cared all their lives were worth for their country.”7

General Beauregard ordered his army to retreat to Corinth, more than twenty miles away. In the confusion after the battle, along with the abandoned wagons and artillery guns that had become stuck in the mud, hundreds of wounded men were also left behind. Beauregard’s reputation for tactical genius was also a casualty, although Grant’s received a knock, too, for the way he was taken unawares on the first day. The total number of casualties was staggering: more than 23,000 men, or 25 percent of the forces engaged.

Shiloh was not the only blow to the Confederacy. That same day, the famously abrasive and arrogant Union commander General John Pope captured another strategic point: Island No. 10 on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Journalist Edward Dicey had traveled west to Cairo, a commercial depot on the Mississippi River just above the Mason-Dixon Line. He watched as great hospital steamboats disgorged their wounded from Shiloh and Island No. 10. “All day and all night long you heard the ringing of their bells and the whistling of the steam.” Piles of coffins waited on the jetty “with the dead men’s names inscribed upon them, left standing in front of the railway offices.”8

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In Virginia, General McClellan had already landed two-thirds of his army at Fortress Monroe, which guarded the entrance to Hampton Roads, and was marching up the peninsula toward Richmond when the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, sent a small fleet to attack the remainder of the ship transports. On April 11, the Merrimac, accompanied by six vessels, steamed toward the Federal fleet and its Monitor. Francis Dawson had been assigned to the Beaufort, which, despite its grand-sounding name, was only a small tugboat with one gun. “The general idea was that the Monitor would be overwhelmed by the combined attack,” wrote Dawson. But the Monitor refused to leave the cover of Fortress Monroe, disappointing HMS Rinaldo and the two French warships that had moved in to observe the fight. One of the Confederate gunboats did manage to capture three transports, which elicited an indiscreet cheer from the Rinaldo, but otherwise little was achieved in the expedition. When Dawson returned to the base, he was relieved to learn that he was being transferred. Captain Pegram had been given command of an ironclad in New Orleans, and Dawson was to join him.9

The French minister, M. Mercier, visited Richmond a few days later, on April 16, expecting to hear talk of surrender.10 Instead, that after-noon, the Confederate Congress—which had