Battle Returns to Duncan's Farm

Early on the second day of battle, Confederate gains from the first day were reversed as fighting again engulfed Joseph Duncan's farm. While General Ulysses S. Grant's Union army attacked the Confederate left, General Don Carlos Buell's Union army struck the Confederate right and center here. General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, having assumed command after General Albert Sidney Johnston's death the previous afternoon, hastily reorganized his Confederate forces to resist the Union counterattack. Bitter fighting raged here for three hours until Beauregard's left collapsed and was forced back to Shiloh Church. In their wake, Buell's troops here attacked west along the Corinth Road. A soldier recalled, "It was load and shoot all the time. Fellows fell on all sides of me...I remember the Colonel with his wounded arm pointing to the front...and the feeling that I was about to fire my last when, suddenly...I felt as if a hot cannon ball had struck me on the head, and remember nothing more as I must have fainted that very moment." Private Conrad W. Chapman of Company D, 3rd Kentucky Infantry, and Henry Lovie sketched the battle in the thick of the action, and Lovie's sketches appeared in publications of the time such as Leslie's Illustrated News. Buell's Union center attacked the Confederate center under Breckinridge and Polk, and after 11:00 am Confederates retired their lines from Duncan's farm southward.

Shiloh, Tennessee · United States