In the spring of 1862, three green armies clashed in the Tennessee pine barrens near an obscure flatboat landing on the Tennessee River.

Desperate to stop two Union armies from joining forces-and by so doing, to prove his worth to the Confederacy, Albert S. Johnston, with Pierre G. T. Beauregard, led the 40,000 man Army of Mississippi north from Corinth, Mississippi. It didn't help that Johnston and Beauregard didn't trust each other, nor that their army, collected from all over the South, had never fought-let alone marched-together...

Planning an advance on Corinth, Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of West Tennessee waited near the trading hamlet of Pittsburg Landing on the west side of the Tennessee River, near a small church called Shiloh, anticipating the arrival of Don C. Buell and the Army of the Ohio. It didn't help that Buell hated Grant, thought they barely knew each other...

On 6 April 1862, the Confederates, most of whom hadn't eaten in days, stumbled into the Federal camps in the dark of night. By sunrise, a fifth of Grant's army had become casualties, but Grant himself wasn't there...yet...

By sunset, the die was cast for a different future for America...

This encounter-two days of fighting that produced over twenty-thousand casualties-was the first major battle of a war that was projected to last only six months. Instead, it dragged on for three more years, and changed the American way of war forever.

The Devil's Own Day: Shiloh and The American Civil War is a careful examination of this pivotal battle, from the co-author of Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Folly, and the creator of The Stella's Game Trilogy.