After getting captured on day one at Shiloh, Union Gen. Ben Prentiss told a Rebel: “You gentlemen have had your way today, but it will be very different tomorrow. You’ll see! Buell will effect a junction with Grant tonight, and we’ll turn the tables on you.”

So … sleep tight!

As the rest of the Rebel command basked in the first day’s victory, Nathan Bedford Forrest sent scouts in Union uniforms ahead to look things over. They reported that Don Carlos Buell’s army was indeed joining Grant’s; by the next morning, the Rebels would be outnumbered 2:1.

But PGT Beauregard (in charge because Albert Johnston had been killed) didn’t credit the reports. Worse yet, he and Braxton Bragg slept in Sherman’s old tent in the former Union camp. I mean, if there’s ONE GUY you don’t wanna mess with, Karma-wise, it’s a twice-wounded Sherman.

Yet Shiloh Day 2 was not a Wild Berserker Charge. Like a boxer clearing his head, or a hungover CivilWarHumor negotiating brunch, the Federals were dazed by the unprecedented violence of the day before. But they staggered to their feet, drank some bad coffee, and lurched forward.

The Rebels couldn’t believe it: Here they were, enjoying a leisurely picnic of captured Yankee bacon (Mmm), not bothering to dig in cuz they thought the Federals were on the ropes …

… and there’s fucking SHERMAN again, all bloody and limping towards them like Michael Myers.

Beauregard was stunned: Reports of Yankees were coming in from every direction. Meanwhile, in what can only be described as A Very Bad Thing To Happen To A Commanding General, he’d, umm … LOST some of his troops. The fighting bishop, Leonidas Polk, was nowhere to be found ...

Polk had marched a sizeable portion of his command to the rear to get rations. We don’t know what Creole curse word Beauregard uttered when he learned this, but we DO know he had his pulse taken.

It was 120.

So battle or no battle, probably time to cut back on the gumbo.

The Rebels patched together a battle line and, for the rest of the morning, slugged it out in what Sherman called “the severest musketry fire I ever heard.” The weight of the Union reinforcements began to tell, and the Rebels were forced back, counterattacking whenever possible.

For my money, one of the standouts of the second day is the guy who usually gets blamed for it: Lew Wallace. The future Ben-Hur author supposedly got lost on his way to the battlefield, but that story (which dogged him the rest of his life) is really some BS to save Grant’s face.

Wallace is often accused of being timid on Day 2, but you could argue he was actually months ahead of his time: urging his men to adopt such novel tactics as “laying down to avoid cannon fire” and “doing some recon,” which would become standard practice as the war went on.

In a letter home, Wallace said: “Slowly, step by step, I drove them before us, turning their left flank.” A day that began with Rebel hopes of “mopping up” Grant’s army ended in headlong retreat. Prentiss had been right: But the tables weren’t just turned, they were flipped over.

At great cost. Grant wrote of a field “over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.” #Shiloh