lect the rich and opportune spoils of war scattered broadcast on the field left in our possession, and impracticable to make any effective dispositions for their removal to the rear.

"I accordingly established my headquarters at the church of Shiloh, in the enemy's encampment, with Major-General Bragg, and directed our troops to sleep on their arms in such positions in advance and rear as corps commanders should determine, hoping, from news received by a special dispatch, that delays had been encountered by General Buell in his march from Columbia, and that his main forces, therefore, could not reach the field of battle in time to save General Grant's shattered fugitives from capture or destruction on the following day.

Such are the representations of those having the best means of information relative to the immediate causes of the failure to drive the enemy from his last foothold, and gain possession of it. Some of the more remote causes of this failure may be noticed. The first was the death of General Johnston, which is thus described by his son:

"General Johnston had passed through the ordeal (the charge upon the enemy) seemingly unhurt. His noble horse was shot in four places; his clothes were pierced by missiles; his boot-sole was cut and torn by a Minié ball; but, if he himself had received any severe wound, he did not know it. At this moment Governor Harris rode up from the right, elated with his own success, and with the vindication of his Tennesseeans. After a few words, General Johnston sent him with an order to Colonel Statham, which, having delivered, he speedily returned. In the mean time knots and groups of Federal soldiers kept up an angry discharge of firearms as they retreated upon their supports, and their last line, now yielding, delivered volley after volley as they retreated. By the chance of war a Minié ball from one of these did its fatal work. As General Johnston, on horseback, sat there, knowing that he had crushed in the arch which had so long resisted the pressure of his forces, and waiting until they could collect sufficiently to give the final stroke, he received a mortal wound. It came in the moment of victory and triumph from a flying foe. It smote him at the very instant when he felt the full conviction that the day was won."

1862]

FELL IN SIGHT OF VICTORY.

67

His wound consisted in the cutting of the artery that runs down through the thigh and divides at the knee, and passes along the separate bones of the lower part of the leg. The wound was just above the division or branch of the artery. It was fatal only because the flow of blood was not stopped by a tourniquet. The narrative continues:

"General Beauregard had told General Johnston that morning as he rode off, that if it should be necessary to communicate with him or for him to do anything, he would be found in his ambulance in bed. Governor Harris, knowing this, and how feeble General Beauregard's health was, went first to his headquarters-just in the rear of where the army had deployed into line the evening before. Beauregard and his staff were gone on horseback in the direction of Shiloh Church. He found them there. The Governor told General Beauregard that General Johnston had been killed. Beauregard expressed regret, and then remarked, 'Everything else seems to be going on well on the right.' Governor Harris assented. Then,' said Beauregard, the battle may as well go on.' The Governor replied that he certainly thought it ought. He offered his services to Beauregard, and they were courteously accepted. General Beauregard then remained where he was, waiting the issue of events."*

Sidney Johnston fell in sight of victory; the hour he had waited for, the event he had planned for, had arrived. His fame was vindicated, but far dearer than this to his patriotic spirit was it with his dying eyes to behold his country's flag, so lately drooping in disaster, triumphantly advancing.. In his fall the great pillar of the Southern Confederacy was crushed, and beneath its fragments the best hope of the Southwest lay buried. A highly educated and richly endowed soldier, his varied experience embraced also civil affairs, and his intimate knowledge of the country and people of the Southwest so highly qualified him for that special command that it was not possible to fill the place made vacant by his death. Not for the first time did the fate of an army depend upon a single man, and the fortunes of a country hang, as in a balance, on the achievements of a single

"The Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston," p. 616.

army. To take an example far from us, in time and place, when Turenne had, after months of successful manoeuvring, finally forced his enemy into a position which gave assurance of victory, and had marshaled his forces for a decisive battle, he was, when making a preliminary reconnaissance, killed by a chance shot; then his successor, instead of attacking, retreated, and all which the one had gained for France, the other lost.

What

To take another example, not quite so conclusive, it was epigrammatically said by Lieutenant Kingsbury, when writing of the battle of Buena Vista, that if the last shot, fired at the close of the second day's conflict, had killed General Taylor, the next morning's sun would have risen upon the strange spectacle of two.armies in full retreat from each other, the field for which they had fought being in the possession of neither. material consequences would have flowed from the supposed event-how the Mexican people would have been inspired by the retreat of our army, how far it would have brought out all their resources for war, and to what extent results might have been thereby affected-are speculative inquiries on a subject from which time and circumstance have taken the interest it once possessed.

The extracts which have been given sufficiently prove that, when General Johnston fell, the Confederate army was so fully victorious that, had the attack been vigorously pressed, General Grant and his army would before the setting of the sun have. been fugitives or prisoners.

As our troops drew near to the river, the gunboats of the enemy became ineffective, because to fire over the bank required such elevation of the guns that the shot and shell passed high over the heads of our men, falling far away in the rear.

General Polk described the troops in advance for that reason as quite safe from the fire of the gunboats, though it might seem terrible to those far in the rear, and expressed the surprise and regret he felt at the order to retire.

Grant's army being beaten, the next step of General Johnston's programme should have followed, the defeat of Buell's and Mitchell's forces as they successively came up, and a return by our victorious army through Tennessee to Ken

1862]

MUST BE MATTER OF CONJECTURE.

69

tucky. The great embarrassment had been the want of good military weapons; these would have been largely supplied by the conquest hoped for, and, in the light of what had occurred, not unreasonably anticipated.

What great consequences would have ensued must be matter of conjecture, but that the people of Kentucky and Missouri generously sympathized with the South was then commonly admitted. Our known want of preparation for war and numerical inferiority may well have caused many to doubt the wisdom of our effort for independence, and to these a signal success would have been the makeweight deciding their

course.

I believe that again in the history of war the fate of an army depended on one man; and more, that the fortunes of a country hung by the single thread of the life that was yielded on the field of Shiloh. So great was my confidence in his capacity for organization and administration, that I felt, when he was assigned to the Department of the West, that the undeveloped power of that region would be made sufficient not only for its own safety, but to contribute support if need be to the more seriously threatened East.

There have been various suppositions as to the neglect of the wound which caused General Johnston's death. My own opinion, founded upon the statements of those who were near him, and upon my long acquaintance with him and close observation of him under trying circumstances, is, that his iron nerve and extraordinary concentration of mind made him regardless of his wound, in the fixed purpose to dislodge the enemy from his last position, and, while thus struggling to complete the victory within his grasp, he unheedingly allowed his life-blood to flow away.

It often happens that men do not properly value their richest gifts until taken away. Those who had erroneously and unjustly censured Johnston, convicted of their error by the grandeur of his revealed character, joined in the general lamentation over his loss, and malignity even was silenced by the devoted manner of his death. My estimation of him was based on long and intimate acquaintance; beginning in our youth, it

had grown with our growth without check or variation, and, when he first arrived in Richmond, was expressed to some friends yet living, in the wish that I had the power, by resigning, to transfer to him the Presidency of the Confederate States.

CHAPTER XIX.

Retirement of the Army.-Remnants of Grant's Army.-Its Reënforcements.— Strength of our Army.-Strength of Grant's Army.-Reorganization.-Corinth. -Advance of General Halleck.-Siege of Corinth.-Evacuation.-Retreat to Tupelo.-General Beauregard retires.-General Bragg in Command.-Positions on the Mississippi River occupied by the Enemy.-New Madrid.-Island No. 10.-Fort Pillow.-Memphis.-Attack at Hatteras Inlet.-Expedition of the Enemy to Port Royal.-Expeditions from Port Royal.-System of Coast Defenses adopted by us.-Fort Pulaski.

Ar the ensuing nightfall our victorious army retired from the front and abandoned its vantage-ground on the bluffs, which had been won at such a cost of blood. The enemy thereby had room and opportunity to come out from their corner, reoccupy the strong positions from which they had been driven, and dispose their troops on much more favorable ground. Called off by staff-officers, who gave no specific instructions, our brigades, according to circumstances, bivouacked on the battle-field, marched to the rear, or made themselves comfortable on the profuse spoils of the enemy's encampments. General Buell says:

"Of the army of not less than fifty thousand effective men, which Grant had on the west bank of the Tennessee River, not more than five thousand were in ranks and available on the battlefield at nightfall on the 6th, exclusive of Lew Wallace's division, say eight thousand five hundred men that only came up during the night. The rest were either killed, wounded, captured, or scattered in inextricable and hopeless confusion for miles along the banks of the river."

In addition to the arrival of Wallace's division, the entire divisions of Nelson and Crittenden got across the river during the night, and by daylight that of McCook began to arrive;