These letters
are too personal to be revived. By this time the good people of
the North had begun to have their eyes opened, and to give us in
the field more faith and support. Stanton was never again elected
to any public office, and was commonly spoken of as "the late Mr.
Stanton." He is now dead, and I doubt not in life he often
regretted his mistake in attempting to gain popular fame by abusing
the army-leaders, then as now an easy and favorite mode of gaining
notoriety, if not popularity. Of course, subsequent events gave
General Grant and most of the other actors in that battle their
appropriate place in history, but the danger of sudden popular
clamors is well illustrated by this case.
Tho battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, was one of the most
fiercely contested of the war. On the morning of April 6, 1862,
the five divisions of McClernand, Prentiss, Hurlbut, W. H. L.
Wallace, and Sherman, aggregated about thirty-two thousand men. We
had no intrenchments of any sort, on the theory that as soon as
Buell arrived we would march to Corinth to attack the enemy. The
rebel army, commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston, was,
according to their own reports and admissions, forty-five thousand
strong, had the momentum of attack, and beyond all question fought
skillfully from early morning till about 2 a.
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