 Ulysses S. Grant wasn't new to war, as were so many of his men, but the previous day's battle was unlike anything he or anyone else had ever seen before. During the battle he saw one of his scouts get decapitated by a cannonball while standing so close to him that some of the poor man's brains and blood landed on Grant's uniform. Looking at the hospital ships and the piles of wounded soldiers, even Grant had trouble taking it all in. Some as memoirs quote, I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the riverbank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall of my horse the Friday night proceeding, and the bruise was so painful that I could get no rest. The drenching rain would have precluded the possibility of sleep without this additional cause. Some time after midnight, growing restive under the storm and the continuous pain, I moved back to the log house under the bank. This had been taken as a hospital, and all night wounded men were being brought in. Their wounds dressed, a leg or an arm amputated, as the case might require, and everything was being done to save life or alleviate suffering. The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain, end quote. As Grant leaned on his crutch underneath that tree, taking shelter from the rain, a man came up to him. Grant had a lantern in his free hand, and he held it up to see who was approaching. It was General Sherman. Sherman thought that after their clear defeat, they should cross the Tennessee River to recuperate, say from further attack. He was there to ask Grant how they should go about making the withdrawal. But when he saw Grant, Sherman realized that Grant had no intention of retreating, and he declined to mention it. Instead, Sherman said simply, Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day of it, haven't we? Yes, as all Grant said in reply. The two men stood in grim silence for a minute, then Grant finally added, Lick'em tomorrow, though. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. In the past two episodes, we looked at the first day of the devastating Battle of Shiloh. The Confederate Army successfully pushed the Union forces back to the banks of the Tennessee River. The battle is already the bloodiest in American history, even though the fight wasn't yet over, and casualty reports were still coming in. But you didn't have to get the numbers to realize that this fight had set a new precedent for the bloodshed the war would see. In today's episode, we will look at the second day of the battle. On the night of April 6th, General Pierre Beauregard sent Jefferson Davis a message saying, a complete victory. He knew he still had to finish the battle in the morning, but he thought it was as good as won. But he was overconfident. It wasn't helped by misreported reconnaissance. Nathan Bedford Forrest missed the battle on the 6th. He and his cavalry showed up during the fight at the Hornets Nest and against orders. He tried to lead a cavalry charge against the Union line, but his men got tangled up in the wild foliage of the forest. And it took them too long to get their horses free. So they missed the fight entirely. But Forrest wanted to offer some contribution. So he had his men take uniforms from some of the dead Union soldiers to go and spy on the Union camp during the night. When they returned, they brought reports of thousands of fresh soldiers being unloaded from the Tennessee River. But when they brought their report to General William Hardy, one of the division commanders, Hardy confused their message, thinking that Grant was loading thousands of troops into the ships. Basically that Grant was already in the process of retreat. This is the message that Hardy passed along to Beauregard. Beauregard had also received reports that Don Carlos Buell was somewhere in North Alabama, well away from Pittsburgh landing. In fact, just as one of those coincidences of history that we find every so often, the man who brought this inaccurate report to Beauregard was one of President Lincoln's brothers in law. Compounding Beauregard's poor intel may have also been the Union division commander Benjamin Prentice, who had been taken as prisoner after his line in the Union center finally broke. After he was captured, Beauregard personally interrogated him and Prentice later bragged that he told Beauregard that Don Carlos Buell was nowhere near Pittsburgh landing. Seems unlikely that Beauregard would have believed the report of the captured Union officer without at least having some corroborating reports though. But instead of retreat, Grant was up in the middle of the night planning for an early morning assault. He was speaking to his division commanders and directing them as to where to position their troops. So while Grant was preparing, Beauregard was enjoying a premature sense of victory. Visitors trickled into Beauregard's tent to visit their new commander during the night and they found him sitting with a pheasant on his lap. Apparently a soldier had captured it and presented it to the general as a gift to eat for dinner. But the poor bird was a casualty of the battle. It had a broken wing and it was in shock from the day's explosions. If I may offer an interesting aside, wild animals who find themselves in the middle of war exhibit symptoms of trauma, not entirely unlike humans with PTSD. Since the first season of the podcast was devoted to the war on drugs, I obviously have an interest in that type of war as well. When bombs started raining down over Vietnam during the Vietnam War, herds of buffalo would run traumatized to opium fields, which they typically left alone and they would start chewing on the poppy plants and what appears to be a form of self-medication for the trauma not entirely unlike the human soldiers in Vietnam who self-medicated with the heroin that opium produced. But anyway, this bird, this pheasant, had no opium, but the animals seemed to be traumatized from the day's fighting and Beauregard apparently took pity on it. So he had somebody construct and make shift cage for it, so he could carry the bird with him as a pet. So as he sat in his tent that night, neglecting to adequately prepare his army for the next day's fight, he occupied himself with his new pet pheasant. The soldiers on the ground of course had their own experiences that horrible night. Many slept, but only because the battle had exhausted them so thoroughly, especially for the Confederates who had to get up before Don to line up for the initial attack. But many soldiers couldn't sleep. They were distracted by the heart-wrenching sounds of the wounded, still strewn about all over the battlefield, groaning in agony. Sometimes they would hear a scream from an unknown soldier, possibly from one of the many conscious but immobile soldiers who found themselves being chewed on by the wild hogs who are now roaming about and feeding from the bodies of the men littering the ground. Numerous soldiers accounts speak of hogs feasting on dead and wounded men. One soldier remembered a pack of hogs that he found quote, quarreling over their carnival feast, end quote. The Union gunboats continued to lob shells throughout the night as well, which disturbed any peace the Southerners might get. According to one account, when the sun came up in the morning, four Confederates were found lying dead in the camp. They were sitting in a circle around a cloth they had set on the ground so they could play cards. There was a bayonet sticking out of the ground that they had fixed a candle on top of the sea. In their hands, they still clutched the cards from the previous night's game. There were no apparent moons on any of these four soldiers, but they were all dead. The men who discovered them concluded that a Union shell must have landed nearby. And even though it didn't hit them, the explosion being so close by must have been enough to stop each of their hearts. I honestly don't know how plausible their theory is, but I'll admit that I don't have a better theory for how four soldiers could have been instantly killed without any visible wounds to show for it. The Union camps the Confederates took meant that some soldiers had something to sleep on, but the camps were still littered with the bodies of the men who had died trying to defend them. One soldier was so exhausted that, quoting his account, I had slept in the tent with two dead Yankees, end quote. Others dug shallow pits to sleep in, and one even found a hollowed out tree trunk that he climbed inside for the night. But if the sounds of wounded soldiers and exploding shells weren't enough to prevent soldiers from sleep, the smell and sight of the carnage might. The amount of blood on the battlefield was tremendous, but the smell was all you could make of it during the night. It wasn't until the morning that most soldiers realized the carnage they had spent the night in. One Southerner wrote, quote. The Yankee camps that we took were beautifully located with fine springs running down in branches. But on Monday morning, I saw those branches having their waters all colored with blood, end quote. Another soldier, the son of Sam Houston, who is the first president of the Republic of Texas, in fact, gave an even more horrible account, quote. In the darkness I had filled my canteen, and drinking from it with a comrade, we decided that we had found a brackish spring. But the next morning, in replenishing my stock of water, I emptied the canteen to find its contents strongly tinctured with blood, end quote. Others were kept from sleep simply due to the trauma of battle or concern for the wounded soldiers and missing friends. One soldier, undoubtedly speaking for many men that night, later wrote, quote. Many of us could not sleep that night for talking over the happenings and incidents of the day. A goodly number of our friends had been killed or wounded, and we were busy till a late hour loading up and hunting for our missing comrades and friends who had fallen. Many sad rehearsals of where this and that one had fallen, end quote. Those who did spend the evening searching the field for wounded comrades were occasionally met with the terrible image of the destruction as the weather stormed all night, and every now and then, a flash of lightning that illuminated the field. In one man's words, quote. When any of us walked about, we had to have a light to keep from falling over the dead that lay around. When the lightning flashed, the veil of night was rent, and the curtain of darkness was lifted, and sickening sights fell before my eyes. Near me at one time, lay a dead man, his clothes ghastly, bloody face turned up to the pattering raindrops that fell upon that brow, cold and death, end quote. I always like to point out good opportunities for movie makers, and I think this is one of them. These men knew that there were dead and wounded all over the place, but the darkness of the night hid the scene, and all they could see was the little space near whatever light they could carry with them. But imagine tiptoeing around this field, when in an instant, the entire place is fully visible. And for only a millisecond, you can see the full carnage. The Union army started to move toward the Confederates at five in the morning. For the new troops who had not seen the havoc of yesterday's battle, the first encounter with the destruction was unimaginable. One of Buell's regimental commanders, Ambrose Beers, left a vivid description of his first sight of the battlefield, as he and his men marched toward the Confederates. The first thing that struck him was the damage to the forest, quote. Here and there were small pools, mirrored discs of rainwater with a tinge of blood. Riven and torn with cannon shot, the trunks of the trees protruded bunches of splinters like hands. The fingers above the wound interlacing with those below. Large branches had been lopped and hung their green heads to the ground, or swung critically in their netting of vines as in a hammock. Many had been cut clean off and their masses of foliage seriously impeded the progress of the troops. The bark of these trees, from the root upward to a height of 10 or 20 feet, was so thickly pierced with bullets and grape that one could not have laid a hand on it without covering several punctures. None had escaped. How the human body survives a storm like this must be explained by the fact that it is exposed to it but a few moments at a time, whereas these grand old trees had had no one to take their places from the rising to the going down of the sun, end quote. The destroyed trees were the first indication of what an incredible battle it must have been, but then he started to see the evidence of the armies themselves, quote. Angular bits of iron, concave o' convex sticking in the sides of muddy depressions showed where shells had exploded in their furrows. Napsacks, canteens, haversacks, distended with soaken and swollen biscuits, gaping to disgorge, blankets beaten into the soil by the rain, rifles with bent barrels of splintered stocks, waste belts, hats in the omnipresent sardine box. All the wretched debris of the battle still littered the spongy earth as far as one could see in every direction. Dead horses were everywhere. A few disabled caissons or limbers reclining on one elbow as it were. Ammunition wagon standing, disconcilant behind four six sprawling mules. Men? There were men enough. All dead apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line, a federal sergeant variously hurt who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive rattling snorts and blowing it out and sputters a froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull above the temple. From this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain. One of my men whom I knew for a womanish fellow asked if he should put his bayonet through him. Expressively shocked by the cold-blooded proposal, I told him I thought not, but it was unusual, and too many were looking. End quote. Beers gave one of the more vivid testimonies of his experience on April 7th, but he certainly was not alone in this sentiment. A soldier in the other division under Bewell noted, quote, directly on the way to our position on the field lay hundreds of dead men, mostly our own, whose mangled bodies and distorted features presented a horrible sight. Numerous dead horses and our partially sacked camps gave evidence of the havoc, and, which was far worse, of the reverses and disasters of the day before, end quote. This soldier added that the sight made him realize that they had their work cut out for them in the fight to come, recognizing that this kind of wreckage could only have followed an unimaginably difficult fight. The soldiers, as they passed through the corpses, struggled to keep in order while they advanced. The closer they got to their destination, the thicker the bodies on the ground became. Soldiers didn't want to step on any of the corpses, and at first it was easy to avoid them, but the further in they marched, the more difficult it became for each of the thousands of new soldiers to find empty ground for their feet, and they had to break ranks to keep from disrespecting dead. Ambrose Beers also noted the aftermath of the fires that had spread during yesterday's battle. As he stepped onto the ashes of charred of vegetation, Beers wrote, quote, death had put his sickle into this thicket and fire had gleaned the field. Along the line, which was not that of extreme depression, but was at every point significantly equidistant from the heights on either hand, lay the bodies half buried in ashes, some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony had told of the tormenting flames. Their clothing was half burned away, their hair and beard entirely. The rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth, others shriveled to mannequins. According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles, which had given them claws for hands, had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin, end quote. At first, Beers thought that it was apparent that the enemy, knowing that the Union had received reinforcements, must have retreated back to Corinth. The place seemed to be deserted, but almost as quickly as this thought entered his head, fighting broke out ahead of him, quote. The forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a crash like that of a great wave upon the beach, a crash that expired in hot hissings and the sickening spat of lead against flesh. A dozen of my brave fellows tumbled over like tin pins, some struggled to their feet only to go down again and yet again. Those who stood fired into the smoking brush and doggedly retired. We had expected to find at most a line of skirmishers similar to our own. It was with a view to overcoming them by a sudden coup at the moment of collision that I had thrown forward my little reserve. What we had found was a line of battle, coolly holding its fire until it could count our teeth. There was no more to be done but get back across the open ground, every superficial yard of which was throwing up its little jet of mud provoked by an impinging bullet. We got back, most of us, and I shall never forget the ludicrous incident of a young officer who had taken part in the affair walking up to his colonel who had been a calm and apparently impartial spectator and gravely reporting, the enemy is in force just beyond this field, sir, end quote. On the Confederate side, Beauregard was alerted to the Union presence with the sound of gunfire. He wasn't worried. He was looking forward to completing his victory over Grant. Beauregard was, after all, the hero of Fort Sumter and Bull Run. The fighting centered once again around the Hornet's Nest where maybe 4,000 Confederate troops met a Union force of more than double that, each making up the center of their lines with other regiments spread out once again to their right and left. The Union men at the center had the advantage of numbers, obviously, but the impromptu response by the Confederates actually gave them the impression that the Southerners had reinforcements of their own. Because the Confederates were caught off guard, the regiments that formed the center of the line trickled in a bit at a time, so from the Union perspective, they kept receiving new men. But the Union men, several thousand of them at least, were fresh while the Confederates they faced were still licking their wounds from the day before. And I mean psychological wounds in this context. It goes without saying that this took a toll on their ability to put up a fight. Here they were, seeing even more of their comrades fall. After one regimental officer from Kentucky was wounded, he had to fall back to the hospital. As he later wrote in his diary, quote, Before I go, I must look upon the faces of my noble dead. I have seen them again. The flaxen hair of little Tom Caldwell is matted over his once sunny face. Poor land's face is so blackened by wound and forehead that I would not have known him but for wound and dress. Chestnut is calm as of sleeping. George Small's face is dark and lowering. The light of battle has faded from his face. My noble friend Casey appears to have been in great pain when he died. How I pity his family. Smith seems to have died easy. Johnson appeared calm. Tom Lyle suffered greatly, shot through the bowels. Walker suffered a good deal, but endured it like a man. Kennerley was in great misery, shot in bowel. John Pillow died last night. What a message I have for his family. Tell my mother I died like a soldier, end quote. But the Confederates weren't eager to give up the ground. They had worked so hard to gain, and they fought hard for more of the day. And I don't want to detail troop movements as I did the previous day, because it'll make the episode tedious, and it's not all that important. The Union won with numbers more than attacks. This was very much a battle of attrition, much of it waged face to face. As one soldier put it, quote, the fight became almost hand to hand. Here the slaughter on both sides was terrible, end quote. When the artillery was brought out, the new Union troops got another test of the horrors they had missed out on the day before. As Ambrose Beers wrote of it, quote. The two sides of the field were soon studded thickly with confronting guns, which flashed away at one another with amazing zeal and rather startling effect. Of course, an infantry attack delivered from either side was not to be thought of when the covered flanks offered inducements so unquestionably superior. And I believe the riddled bodies of my poor skirmishers were the only ones left on this neutral ground that day. There was a very pretty line of dead continually growing in our rear, and doubtless the enemy had at its back a similar encouragement. The configuration of the ground offered us no protection. By lying flat on our faces between the guns, we were screened from view by a straggling row of brambles, which marks the course of an obsolete fence. But the enemy's grape was sharper than his eyes, and it was poor consolation to know that his gunners cannot see what they were doing so long as they did it. The shock of our own pieces nearly deafened us. But in the brief intervals, we could hear the battle roaring and stammering in the dark, reaches of the forest to the right and left, where our other divisions were dashing themselves again and again into the smoking jungle. What would we not have given to join them in their brave hopeless task, but to lie in glorious beneath showers of shrapnel darting divergent from the unassailable sky, meekly to be blown out of life by level gusts of grape. To clench our teeth and shrink helpless before big shot, pushing noisily through the consenting air. This was horrible, end quote. At least one of the Union cannons that Beers was complaining about was being manned by a boy who was only 14 years old at the time, but worked a gun according to his commander, quote. With the skill and bravery of any soldier during the entire engagement, I did not for a moment see him flinch, end quote. The ground was so thick with dead that at one point, a Union officer recalled the horse he was riding, stumbling. When he looked down to see what had tripped it up, the horse had, quote, one knee on the upturned skull of a dead confederate, covering the leg with brains, end quote. Elsie Duncan, the nine-year-old girl who lived next to the battlefield and her family were still caught in the middle of the destruction. As she remembered the horrors, quote. Went into one house where they had taken wounded and dead men. The floor was covered with blood. As I went back into the house, I saw a young woman screaming and ringing her hands, and mother was trying to quiet her. She could not do anything with her. She said that she had two sons in the battle, one on each side fighting against each other. There was nothing that we could do to help the suffering mother. She went on toward the firing line. We heard that one was killed in his own backyard. Then a man came running up to the house. He was wild with grief and sorrow. Mother tried to get him to rest awhile. She gave him a drink of water. He said that he had twin sons in the battle, one on each side. We heard afterwards they found them locked in each other's arms, both dead. The women and children were horrors stricken when they found themselves caught between the fighting lines. They did not know what to do or where to go. One woman took her daughter and her two little grandchildren down under the bluff with the river almost at their feet. They stayed under there three days and two nights without food or water. The cannonballs and shells from the gunboats tore the roof off the house Monday. The downstairs was used as a hospital. The floors were red with human blood, shed in cruel warfare. End quote. The two armies fought until mid-afternoon. Grant was not on the battlefield. He stayed behind at Pittsburgh Landing where his reinforcements continued to pile in. Grant could immediately direct them where to go to join the battle. As one Southerner described the Union reinforcements quote, they appeared to me like ants in their nest. For the more we fired upon them, the more they swarmed about. One would have said that they sprouted from the ground like mushrooms, end quote. Beauregard by mid-afternoon was up on a ridge where he could see the battle raging below him. His line was holding, but Union troops continued to pour in. While little by little, Confederates left the fight. Either wounded, killed, or simply unable to endure further combat. Eventually one of Beauregard's officers came up to him and said that the Confederate Army was quote, a lump of sugar, thoroughly soaked with water. Yet preserving its original shape, though ready to dissolve. After offering his metaphor for how fragile the line was, the officer asked, would it not be judicious to get away with what we have? Beauregard looked at the forces fighting below him as he and his subordinate were on top of a ridge. The general looked grim. Finally he replied, I intend to withdraw in a few moments. The withdrawal began around four in the afternoon. About a thousand Southerners were organized to wage a final counter attack against the Union in order to cover the retreat of the rest of the forces. Beauregard was hoping it would be enough to drive the Northerners back one last time, but their line held. Still it bought time for the rest of the Confederates to fall back. As the defeated Southerners moved back toward Corinth, they set fire to the camps and equipment that they couldn't take with them. The need to stop and destroy anything that could benefit the Union slowed them down tremendously. They were already exhausted, but the retreat took days, all with a little sleep and on empty stomachs. One soldier wrote to his wife, quote, the trip back to Corinth used me up worse than the battle as we were gone five days and slept about ten hours during the time. We ate nothing almost, traveled very hard, and it rained on us every night. End quote. They were certainly worried that the Union might pursue them, but the Union soldiers were to beat themselves. They reclaimed the camps they had lost the evening before to find them in tatters. They were lucky enough to recover any of their belongings that they had left behind. The items would be full of bullet holes. Sherman found the extra horses he had left tied up to a rope line. The ropes still tethered them to the spot, but the horses were all dead. The side of the camp was haunting. Even after everything they had already been through. One soldier, said, quote, I found a Confederate soldier of the Fifth Mississippi dead in my bed, end quote. He wasn't the only one to find enemy dead in his tent, and the men started carrying the corpses away before they returned to clean the blood off of whatever they could salvage. The last combat action of the Battle of Shiloh occurred on April 8th, in a small confrontation known as the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The fight was between two Civil War legends, William Tecumseh Sherman and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sherman wasn't pursuing the enemy, not entirely, but he was following their retreat, flushing out pockets of rebels that he found and trying to gather intel. He had with him two brigades of soldiers, which he thought was a sizable enough force for the purpose. Most of what he found of the enemy didn't need flushing out. They were the thousands of wounded filling up Confederate hospital tents that had been put on either side of the road. Sherman arrested the surgeons in the tents, but after getting them to promise to turn themselves into grant as prisoners once their work was done, he let them return to their work, tending to the Confederate wounded. But finally, he came upon a clearing of fallen trees, which led to the skirmish being named Fallen Timbers. At the clearing was a rebel camp, and Sherman could see southern cavalry roaming about it. Several regiments of cavalry were sharing the camp, including forests. Sherman ordered his cavalry regiment, the 77th Ohio, to charge in and drive the enemy out. Sherman probably assumed that there would be no fight. At the sight of a regiment of Union cavalry galloping in, waving their swords in the air, he figured the rebels would run off. But not forest. Seeing the Yankees charging in, he gathered his men and whatever men he could organize from several other regiments, and he ordered them to charge as well to meet Sherman's cavalry. Sherman's men did not expect this, and they immediately turned back. Now, forest was leading his cavalry in a chase against Sherman. With the enemy coming toward him, Sherman ordered his infantry to form defensive positions. Now there are a lot of bad things we can say about Nathan Bedford Forest. He'd earned his wealth trading in human flesh, and he harbored no guilt about taking a life. His famous mantra was war means fighting, and fighting means killing, which I suppose is true enough. After the war, he helped found and served as the first Grand Wizard of the original Ku Klux Klan. So he wasn't a spectacular guy all around. But of all the bad things we might say about forest, he wasn't a coward. With Sherman's force in sight, forest actually ran ahead and reached the enemy, while the rest of his men were still trailing behind. It seems the adrenaline made him unaware that he was out distancing his soldiers, as he found himself being surrounded by Northerners shouting, kill him, kill him. But forest, holding a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, he slashed and shot at any Yankee that got within reach. At one point, a Union soldier pressed his rifle up against forest's ribs and sent a bullet, point blank, through his back. Forest responded by reaching down, grabbing the soldier by the collar, and yanking him up on the horse behind him, where he used the poor guy as a shield. So here's another good scene for the movie version of this story, just because forest is fighting like a complete badass. With the captured soldier covering him from enemy fire, forest rode back to the camp and threw the guy who shot him to the ground before dismounting and seeing to his injury, which as painful as it was, turned out not to have hit anything vital. And he would obviously recover well enough to earn infamy throughout and after the war. Back at the fight, the Confederate resistance was enough to drive Sherman back to Pittsburgh landing. Sherman wasn't looking for a fight anyway, he was just flushing out pockets of the enemy and taking whatever prisoners he could find. Now he had 19 men killed, 30 wounded, and 11 who had simply run off. The Confederates, after their quick strike, spread out into the woods. So Sherman made his way back to camp. He later admitted that forest got the better of him, saying, quote, I am sure that had he not emptied his pistols as he passed to the skirmish line, my career would have ended right there, end quote. With the skirmish that earned the name the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and isn't typically counted as part of the Battle of Shiloh, the fighting at Pittsburgh landing was finally over. The combined casualty counts reached more than 20,000 men. Obviously, casualty counts are inaccurate, especially for the Confederacy, but relatively recent research has suggested that the longstanding count for Confederate casualties was too low. If the new estimates are correct, the total casualty count would be close to 30,000, and the Confederates would have had a whopping 32% casualty rate. In any case, it is enough to say, as I've mentioned in all previous episodes on this battle, that this was the bloodiest battle in American history up to that point. A lot of the books you read on the subject say that the Battle of Shiloh had more casualties than all the other US wars put together, but this is absolutely untrue. However, the most recent war that the US had faced, the Mexican-American War, which lasted two years, had a total American casualty count of around 17,000, roughly 10% of whom were killed in combat. The official report for the Union dead, just one side at the Battle of Shiloh, reported 1,754 men killed in combat. So the Union alone had about as many killed in combat as the entire Mexican-American war. When the Civil War started, anybody fighting age or above, aside from recent immigrants, would have remembered the Mexican-American war. And this would have been the conflict they referenced when anticipating the war that was on the horizon in early 1861. After the Battle of Bull Run, they started to get an inkling that this new war would be larger. But it was only after the Battle of Shiloh that people really had an idea of what modern warfare, with the rifling technology and the mini-ball and iron clad ships, really meant. In a single battle, each side alone met the country's most recent war in body count. Shiloh itself would be topped by some of the battles yet to come, but every other large-scale battle would be compared to Shiloh. The Battle of Shiloh essentially became the new standard of measurement for battlefield horror. Now, we aren't quite done with the Battle of Shiloh. We just finished telling the story of the battle itself, and I have one more episode planned to discuss the aftermath of Shiloh for the people who lived in Pittsburgh landing. But the next episode, we are going to do something a little bit different. For the first time ever in the nearly two years I've done this podcast, I'm going to have a guest on the show that I know many of you are already fans of. Professor CJ, the Rothbardian history professor who produces The Dangerous History Podcast. CJ just finished his own 29-hour series on the Civil War, which I'll admit I was not aware of until after I started my own or else I probably would have chosen a different topic myself. But I think you'll find that next week's episode is something different than you'll get from either of our series on the Civil War. CJ will be helping me tell the story of Shiloh again, all three days of battle. But if you think this is going to be just another redundant rehashing of the same battle we just finished, you'd be very wrong. We've been talking about tactics and which high ranking officer was killed. But the next episode, in my opinion, is the true Battle of Shiloh. We will be telling the battle as experienced through the eyes of two soldiers, one Confederate and one Union. Not only are these accounts gripping and emotionally compelling, but they are far more representative of the experiences of the vast majority of those who fought in this awful and bloody war. You're not going to want to miss it. Historical Controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash supportHC. If you would like to explore the rest of our content, please visit Mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G.