ined armies,
in which the individual qualities, good or bad, of the troops play a
conspicuous part. Direction on the part of Johnston or Grant was not
conspicuously seen, but the latter, whose troops were surprised and
driven back some distance, was intensely determined. In the course of
that afternoon Albert Johnston was killed. Rightly or wrongly
Jefferson Davis and his other friends regarded his death as the
greatest of calamities to the South. After the manner of many battles,
more especially in this war, the battle of Shiloh was the subject of
long subsequent dispute between friends of Grant and of Buell, and far
more bitter dispute between friends of Albert Johnston and Beauregard.
But it seems that the South was on the point of winning, till late on
the 6th the approach of the first reinforcements from Buell made it
useless to attempt more. By the following morning further large
reinforcements had come up; Grant in his turn attacked, and Beauregard
had difficulty in turning a precipitate retirement into an orderly
retreat upon Corinth, forty miles away, a junction upon the principal
railway line to be defended. The next day General Pope, who had some
time before been detached by Halleck for this purpose, after arduous
work in canal cutting, captured, with 7,000 prisoners, the northernmost
forts held by the Confederacy on the Mississippi. But Halleck's plans
required that his further advance should be stopped. Halleck himself,
in his own time, arrived at the front. In his own time, after being
joined by Pope, he advanced, carefully entrenching himself every night.
He covered in something over a month the forty miles route to Corinth,
which, to his surprise, was bloodlessly evacuated before him. He was
an engineer, and like some other engineers in the Civil War, was
overmuch set upon a methodical and cautious procedure. But his mere
advance to Corinth caused the Confederates to abandon yet another fort
on the Mississippi, and on June 6 the Northern troops were able to
occupy Memphis, for which Lincoln had long wished, while the flotilla
accompanying them destroyed a Confederate flotilla. Meanwhile, on May
1, Admiral Farragut, daringly running up the Mississippi, had captured
New Orleans, and a Northern force under Butler was able to establish
itself in Louisiana. The North had now gained the command of most of
the Mississippi, for only the hundred miles or so between Vicksburg far
south and Port Hudson,