How did the confederate lose to the union in the Shiloh battle?

Answer 1

There were several reasons. The Rebels knew that a Yankee force under Grant was encamped at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, near Shiloh Church. They also knew that another strong Yankee force under Don Carlos Buell was moving to join his force with Grant. They also understood that once these two Yankee forces were united they would probably be too strong for the nearby Rebel Army to contend with, so, they decided to attack Grant's force before Buell could get there.

The first reason was that it took the Rebels three days to cover the 20 miles from their camp at Corinth, Mississippi, to get into position to attack Grant. The Rebels had planned on making this march in one day, but, it was early in the war, march discipline was not yet what it would become, and the roads were muddy from recent rain. Yankee scouts reported these Rebels drawing near, and nervous Rebels disobeyed orders and fired their weapons, just to see if their gunpowder was still dry in all the dampness. Despite this, incredibly, Grant's force was taken by surprise when the Rebels did finally attack.

A big factor in the Rebel failure was the Rebel battle plan, devised by Beauregard. There were three corps in the Rebel Army. Rather than put these three corps side by side, so each corps commander would have about 1/3 of the field to manage, and so each could arrange his units so as to have fresh reserves behind the first wave, Beauregard's plan was for each corps to cover a front the entire width of the field, and for them to be one behind the other. So far as I can recollect this was the only instance where anyone was foolish enough to make this sort of completely wrong deployment on any battlefield of the Civil War. This arrangement made it impossible for a corps commander to see what was happening along his entire line, and guaranteed that as soon as the first line was delayed by the defenders the second and third lines would catch up and the corps would become inextricably mingled, ensuring that no effective command and control of the battle could be had.

The commander of the Rebel force was Albert Sidney Johnston. He left the planning to Beauregard, and as soon as he realized what Beauregard's plan entailed he knew it was a mistake, but it was too late to try to rectify it and get the troops in a proper arrangement. Johnston was already extremely impatient with the two extra days his command had taken to drag itself to the field. Some of his staff had suggested that the factor of surprise they had counted on could not possibly still be theirs, and that for all they knew Buell had already arrived, and perhaps it might be best if they just turned around and went back to Corinth instead of fighting. "I would fight them if they were a million" Johnston grimly replied. As the initial Rebel onslaught did achieve surprise and swept the Yankees before it, Johnston and his staff rode onto the field and soon saw a wounded Yankee officer. Johnston left his staff physician to attend to this wounded Yankee, a chivalrous gesture, but one that soon proved very costly. After riding on Johnston was soon wounded in the leg, but said nothing about it. Before long he was reeling in the saddle and toppled from his horse. Examining him, his staff pulled off a boot, which was full of blood, and shortly thereafter Johnston died from loss of blood. A simple tourniquet around his leg would have saved his life. The death of Johnston was a true disaster for the Confederacy, as he was sorely missed not just at Shiloh but for the rest of the war, as the Rebels never had another good commander in the west, and the war was probably lost in that theater.

The death of Johnston left the command with Beauregard, who was unable to do much after the first day to untangle his command, in a terrific snarl as a result of his faulty plan. Beauregard was a nervous, "excitable" type. Whatever the reason the Rebels failed to completely clear the field of Yankees, and were unable to take advantage of the fact that thousands of Yankees had abandoned their units and were cowering under the bluffs along the banks of the Tennessee.

In the years immediately after the war those writing of Shiloh ascribed much of the reason for the Confederate failure to the time taken trying to eliminate "The Hornet's Nest", where a Yankee remnant was making a determined stand in a grove of trees. Recent battlefield Archaeology does not seem to bear this out.

During the night after the first day Buell arrived and added his 30,000 men to Grant's battered force. The next morning the combined Yankees attacked, and swept the Rebels away, recovering all they had lost the day before. Buell was always slow, ponderous even, and the time he took organizing the Yankees to follow the Rebels prevented a complete, crushing annihilation of the Rebel army.