I rode forward several miles the day after the battle, and found that the enemy had dropped much, if not all, of their provisions, some ammunition and the extra wheels of their caissons, lightening their loads to enable them to get off their guns.  About five miles out we found their field hospital abandoned.  An immediate pursuit must have resulted in the capture of a considerable number of prisoners and probably some guns.

Shiloh was the severest battle fought at the West during the war, and but few in the East equalled it for hard, determined fighting.  I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, 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.  On our side National and Confederate troops were mingled together in about equal proportions; but on the remainder of the field nearly all were Confederates.  On one part, which had evidently not been ploughed for several years, probably because the land was poor, bushes had grown up, some to the height of eight or ten feet.  There was not one of these left standing unpierced by bullets.  The smaller ones were all cut down.

Contrary to all my experience up to that time, and to the experience of the army I was then commanding, we were on the defensive.  We were without intrenchments or defensive advantages of any sort, and more than half the army engaged the first day was without experience or even drill as soldiers.  The officers with them, except the division commanders and possibly two or three of the brigade commanders, were equally inexperienced in war.  The result was a Union victory that gave the men who achieved it great confidence in themselves ever after.

The enemy fought bravely, but they had started out to defeat and destroy an army and capture a position.  They failed in both, with very heavy loss in killed and wounded, and must have gone back discouraged and convinced that the “Yankee” was not an enemy to be despised.

After the battle I gave verbal instructions to division commanders to let the regiments send out parties to bury their own dead, and to detail parties, under commissioned officers from each division, to bury the Confederate dead in their respective fronts and to report the numbers so buried.  The latter part of these instructions was not carried out by all; but they were by those sent from Sherman’s division, and by some of the parties sent out by McClernand.  The heaviest loss sustained by the enemy was in front of these two divisions.