[Illustration: GENERAL ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON, C. S. A.]
[Illustration: GENERAL BRAXTON BRAGG, C. S. A.]
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL DON CARLOS BUELL.]
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL LEW WALLACE.]
General Grant, in the first article that he ever wrote for publication, remarks that "the battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, has been perhaps less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood, than any other engagement between National and Confederate troops during the entire rebellion. Correct reports of the battle have been published, but all of these appeared long subsequent to the close of the rebellion, and after public opinion had been most erroneously formed." No battle is ever fought that it is not for somebody's interest to misrepresent. In the case of Shiloh there were peculiar and complicated reasons both for intentional misrepresentation and for innocent error. The plans of the commanders on both sides were to some extent thwarted and changed by unexpected events. One commander was killed on the first day, and his admirers naturally speculate upon the different results that might have been attained if he had lived. The ground was so broken as to divide the engagement practically into several separate actions, and what was true of one might not be true of another. The peculiarity of the position also brought together in one place, under the river-bank, all who from fright or demoralization fled to the rear of the National army, which produced upon those who saw them an effect altogether different from that of the usual retreating and straggling across the whole breadth of a battle line. Then there was the circumstance of Buell's army coming up at the end of the first day, and not coming up before that, which could hardly fail to give rise to somewhat of jealousy and recrimination. And finally this action encounters to an unusual extent that criticism which reads by the light of after-events, but forgets that this was wanting to the actors whom it criticises.
The point on which popular opinion was perhaps most widely and persistently wrong was, that the defeat of the first day arose from the fact that Grant's army was completely surprised. Public opinion, throughout the war, was formed in advance of the official reports of generals in three ways. There were many press correspondents with every army, and the main purpose of most of them was to construct an interesting story and get it into print as soon as possible. The National Government adopted the wise policy of giving the armies in the field such mail facilities as would keep the soldiers in close touch with their homes, and they wrote millions of letters every year. All that a soldier needed was some scrap of paper and some sort of pen or pencil. If he happened to have no postage stamp, he had only to mark his missive "Soldier's letter," and it would be carried in the mails to its destination, and the postage collected on delivery. After a battle every surviving soldier was especially anxious to let his family know that he had escaped any casualty, and he naturally filled up his letter with such particulars as had most impressed him in that small part of the field that he had seen, and sometimes with such exaggerated accounts as in the first excitement had reached { 105} him from other parts. Finally, the journalists were not few who assumed to be accomplished strategists, and talked learnedly in their editorial columns of the errors of generals and the way that battles should have been fought. And some of them had political reasons for writing up certain generals and writing down certain others.