Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to episode number 111 of our Civil War Podcast.

I'm Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Welcome to the podcast. As promised, with this show we'll

be starting in on the Battle of Shiloh. Well, we won't actually get to the battle

with this episode since if you know us, you know we like to set the stage for everything.

So starting with this show, we'll begin to set the stage for the battle.

Yeah, we're pretty big on background. That's why it took us 30 episodes just to get to

Fort Sumter. Anyway, as for Shiloh, since the beginning of the Civil War, everyone knew

that a big battle in the West was inevitable, even if they didn't know where or when.

But no one probably would have guessed it would take place down in the far southwestern

corner of Tennessee, along the western bank of the state's namesake River, at a place

called Pittsburgh Landing, which was a forgettable hog and cotton loading station where steamboats

put in from time to time. The locals eaked out a living in nearby fields they'd scratched

out from the tangled thickets. And on Sundays, they went to meetings at a rough little Methodist

church named Shiloh Chapel. There on Sunday morning, April 6, 1862, the long-anticipated

big battle in the Civil War's western theater finally kicked off. And over the course

of that day and the following one, there was an appalling and concentrated carnage such

as the American continent had never seen before. The grizzly total of over 23,000 casualties

at Shiloh was almost double the number of killed and wounded at First Manassas, Wilson's

Creek, Fort Donaldson, and P. Ridge combined. That made Shiloh the first great and terrible

meat grinder battle of the Civil War, and the sheer scale of the bloodshed there shocked

northerners and southerners to their core.

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