[1862.

THE SUMMING UP OF SHILOH.

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The same day, in a letter to Grant asking permission to send a flag-of-truce party on the field to bury his dead, he prefaced his request :—

"At the close of the conflict yesterday, my forces being exhausted by the extraordinary length of the time during which they were engaged with yours on that and the preceding day, and it being apparent that you had received, and were still receiving, re-enforcements, I felt it my duty to withdraw my troops from the immediate scene of the conflict."

Grant laughed heartily at such a communication from a foe, and was half inclined to reply that no apologies were necessary. But he responded that the dead were already buried; otherwise he should have been glad to extend "this or any courtesy consistent with duty and dictated by humanity."

During the battle C. F. Smith was lying prostrate at Savanna. A few days later he died, and his remains were taken to Philadelphia, where they were followed to the grave by thousands of admirers and friends.

Grant's and Beauregard's official reports exhibited their losses as follows:

Military critics will always differ about the battle of Shiloh, but the general verdict of history will probably be -(1.) that the ground was admirably defensible; (2.) that within twenty-five miles of a concentrating enemy our troops ought to have been intrenched; (3.) that Grant conducted the battle with skill, and inspired the whole army with his indomitable faith in success, and (4.) that his army, despite the stragglers, did the most creditable fighting of any Union troops during the war.

For two days, without intrenchments on either side, two armies faced each other in stubborn stand-up fighting, the only instance during our conflict. "It was the first hurling together of the two peoples upon a large scale in a hand to-hand fight, and when the enemy retreated from that

256

HUE AND CRY AGAINST GRANT.

[1862.

broken and gory field, he retreated with his arrogance tamed, and his dream of invincibility dispelled forever." *

In preparation for it the enemy had stripped the entire Southwest. Its momentous consequences were soon apparent. It threw New Orleans into our hands; it opened the Mississippi to Memphis; it was such a deadly blow that never again in the West did the rebels take the offensive with their old vigor.

At first, news of the victory caused great rejoicing in the North; the President appointed a day of thanksgiving, and new luster was added to the fame Grant had earned at Donelson. But a storm of injurious reports followed, caused by the jealousy of officers sore at being overtopped by him; the old hatred of the contractors, and the rivalry of Buell's troops, who, seeing all the array of stragglers, and thinking that they had saved the day, were aggrieved that Grant did not give them the chief credit in his dispatches.

These slanders, repeated by the press and in both branches of Congress, asserted that Grant was drunk, and did not reach the field until the battle was nearly over; that Prentiss was captured in his shirt early in the morning; that thousands of our men were bayoneted in their tents, and that if Buell had not arrived Grant's whole army must have surrendered. With no less injustice, also, it was related that Buell had remained behind purposely that a rival general might be ruined.

Grant took no public notice of the hue and cry against him, but in a letter to his father he explained how grossly the facts were misrepresented, and added :

"I will go on and do my duty to the very best of my ability, and do all I can to bring this war to a speedy close. I am not an aspirant for any thing at the close of the war. ***One thing I am well assured of-I have the confidence of every man in my command."

The letter was published, and also some from one of the staff. As soon as Grant saw them in the papers he telegraphed instructions that no more be allowed to go into print.

*Henry C. Deming.

1862.] HALLECK REMOVES HIM FROM COMMAND.

257

CHAPTER XXI.

SHACKLED.

HALLECK SOON came to the field and took command in person. Grant seemed quite as much in disfavor with him as in Congress and the newspapers, and it was currently reported that the department commander had placed him under arrest. This was untrue; but he did shelve him by a bit of pettifogging worthy of a little soul. After profound study Halleck issued an order* placing Thomas in command of the right wing of the army, keeping Buell in command of the center, and Pope of the left, and putting the reserves under McClernand. It concluded:

"Major-General Grant will retain the general command of the District of West Tennessee, including the Army Corps of the Tennessee, and reports will be made to him as heretofore, but in the present movement he will act as second in command under the major-general commanding the department."

Halleck assumed to Grant that this was a promotion, -that it was necessary to have a second in command, who, if the general-in-chief should be killed or disabled, would be ready to succeed him. Halleck took such excellent care of his precious person that there seemed little danger of such a contingency. Grant, himself frank, was slow to suspect duplicity, but he was sore and disappointed, though the smooth-tongued lawyer sometimes talked him into a good humor.

For four or five weeks after Shiloh, my friend Thomas W. Knox and myself, messed at Grant's head-quarters with the chief of staff. Our tent was always near the General's. Each evening he reclined on the logs, or stood before the

* April thirtieth.

1

R

258

THE JOURNALISTS IN THE FIELD.

[1862.

camp fire, smoking and talking of the Mexican war, or of Shiloh; or sat for hours in the tent beside us, while we played whist or "twenty-one," offering an occasional suggestion about the game, but never touching a card or a glass of liquor.

These were dark days. Halleck issued orders to subordinates directly over Grant's head. Chicago and Cincinnati papers assailed him bitterly. I never but once knew him to allude to these unjust attacks. Then he said to a friend of his, a journalist :

"After we have all done our best, to have such a torrent of obloquy and falsehood poured among my own troops is too much. I am not going to lay off my shoulder-straps until the close of the war, but I should like to go to New Mexico, or some other remote place, and have a small command out of the reach of the newspapers.

There were now twenty or thirty correspondents in the field. They hunted in couples. When in riding about the camps-their custom always of an afternoon-one pair met another, the four would dismount, tie their horses, and sit upon logs or lie under the trees and discuss the situation. The group would soon be swelled by other passing journalists and officers. Whatever the conversation began about, it soon drifted to Grant, concerning whose recent battle, though enjoying every facility for learning the facts, they were about equally divided.

Halleck gathered a hundred and twenty thousand men, the largest army ever seen in the West, and three times greater than Beauregard's on his front. As has been aptly said, "Napoleon might as well have intrenched on the field of Austerlitz, or Wellington on the eve of Waterloo." But the battle of Shiloh had developed the natural caution of a military theorist into incredible timidity, and our army with a front ten miles long, crept toward Corinth at a snail's pace.

Grant had not lost his keen sense of the ludicrous. Rawlins was proud of a splendid bay horse, presented to him by Galena friends, and took special pleasure in contemplating its long showy tail. But one morning he found this reduced to the semblance of an old blacking-brush. Not a single

1862.]

A COUPLE OF HORSE STORIES.

259

hair was left more than two inches long. He could hardly recognize the noble charger thus shorn of his glory. Swearing that some enemy had done this, he started for a pistol, vowing to shoot the offender, whom he supposed to be some orderly angered at a hasty rebuke. Grant, standing in his favorite position outside his tent, with hands in pockets and smoking his after-breakfast cigar, happened to be looking on. Learned in the ways of horses and their kind, he comprehended that not the shears of an angry soldier, but the teeth of some vagrant mule, had taken this liberty with the flowing appendage. Rawlins' consternation and indignation were irresistibly droll, and the chief roared with laughter. This was too much, and the adjutant remembering Grant's favorite cream-colored steed, retorted:

"Well, General, I hope that some night a mule will eat off the tail of your old yellow horse-and then see how you'll like it."

For months afterward, whenever the aide rode in advance, the ill-treated tail provoked the General to new cachinations. But he came near being served with poetic justice. Meeting, one day, his old Twenty-first regiment, the men greeted him with cheer after cheer, and, flocking about him, each cut, not "a hair," but a lock "for memory" from his horse's tail and mane. Rawlins' wicked wish would soon have been gratified, had not Grant made haste to escape from the sentimental soldiers.

"Love me, love my horse," was his maxim. Jocose friends used to say, that to disparage his charger or to ride a better one was a sure way to lose favor. A boy, who had been a great favorite, once struck the cream-colored steed, and its master never forgave him.

The pleasant spring days among snowy tents in those deep old woods-how long ago they seem! How defiant were the rebels, and how dark the prospect of subduing them! But one ray of light came. Knox and myself were riding through the forest when a friend met us and shouted:

"Hurrah! Butler has taken New Orleans! Oh, you needn't look incredulous; there's no doubt about it. I have just read it in a rebel newspaper."