Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to episode number 115 of our Civil War.

I'm Rich and I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Welcome to the podcast. When we left off last time,

it was the morning of Sunday April 6th, 1862, and the big Confederate attack had finally

started to roll forward against the federal divisional camps that had been put up in the

vicinity of Pittsburgh Landing, down in the far southwestern corner of Tennessee. On

most Sunday mornings, the locals would have made their way to an axhune, chink, and mortar

Methodist Church named Shiloh Chapel. But on this particular Sabbath, most of the

areas residents had fled, and the non-descript little house of God was about to give its

name to one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

In the last episode, we focused our attention on the initial Confederate attack on the Union

left. As you guys will recall, the rebel assault there routed the federal division commanded

by Benjamin Prennis, and if you picked up our book recommendation for episode 113, the

West Point Atlas of War, the Civil War, you can turn to the first Shiloh map in it,

and you can see where Prennis' six division camps were located. Prennis' division was

defeated and driven off in disorder, but we said last time that Albert Sinney Johnston

made a critical mistake in apparently thinking that in routing that division of Yankees, he

rolled up the Union left. Based on that assumption, he concluded that he was between the Tennessee

River and the remainder of Grant's Army, which was still offering stout resistance just

over to the West. He thought that having cut off the bulk of Grant's Army from the river,

he could begin the final phase of the battle, that is crashing down on those Union defenders,

driving them north and trapping them between those two creeks and their swampy bottomlands.

But the first step in Sinney Johnston's thinking was an error because he hadn't actually

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