Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

As evidence of the condition of Beauregard's army, he had not been able to bring into the action of the second day more than twenty thousand men. In the first day's battle the Confederates engaged the divisions of Gen. Prentiss, Sherman, Hurlburt, McClernand and Smith, of 9,000 men each, or at least 45,000 men. This force was reinforced during the night by the divisions of Gens. Nelson, McCook, Crittenden, and Thomas, of Buell's army, some 25,000 strong, including all arms; also Gen. L. Wallace's division of Gen. Grant's army, making at least 33,000 fresh troops, which, added to the remnant of Gen. Grant's forces, amounting to 20,000, made an aggregate force of at least 53,000 men arrayed against the Confederates on the second day.

Against such an overwhelming force it was vain to contend. At 1 P. M. Gen. Beauregard ordered a retreat. Gen. Breckinridge was left with his command as a rear guard, to hold the ground the Confederates had occupied the night preceding the first battle, just in front of the intersection of the Pittsburg and Hamburg roads, about four miles from the former place, while the rest of the army passed in the rear, in excellent order. The fact that the enemy attempted no pursuit indicated his condition. He had been too sorely chastised to pursue; and Gen. Beauregard was left at leisure to retire to Corinth, in pursuance of his original design to make that the strategic point of his campaign.

The battle of Shiloh, properly extending through eighteen hours, was memorable for an extent of carnage up to this time unparalleled in the war. The Confederate loss, in the two days, in the killed outright, was 1,728, wounded 8,012, missing 957; making an aggregate of casualties 10,699. Of the loss of the enemy, Gen. Beauregard wrote: “Their casualties cannot have fallen many short of twenty thousand in killed, wounded, prisoners, and missing.”

Gen. Beauregard was unwilling to admit that the experience of the second day had eclipsed the brilliant victory which he so unfortunately left unfinished on the banks of the Tennessee. He declared that he had left the field on the second day “only after eight hours successive battle with a superiour army of fresh troops, whom he had repulsed in every attack upon his lines, so repulsed and crippled, indeed, as to leave it unable to take the field for the campaign for which it was collected and equipped at such enormous expense, and with such profusion of all the appliances of war.” On the other hand, the North inscribed Shiloh as its most brilliant victory. An order of the War Department at Washington required that at meridian of the Sunday following the battle, at the head of every regiment in the armies of the United States there should be offered by its chaplain a prayer, giving “thanks to the Lord of Hosts for the ”