But Grant's achievement at Shiloh was too great to be ignored. Again, as after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, the land was resounding with the praises of this Galena clerk Ulysses S. Grant, and nobody outside the war department at Washington was even thinking of his superior officer, General Halleck.
But in order clearly to understand what and how much all this meant, it is necessary in another chapter to recount what else had happened of a nature calculated to contribute to the recovery of the Mississippi river and the Mississippi Valley, and to the severance of the Confederacy in twain.
While the battle of Shiloh was in progress another strategically important struggle was fought out.
By way of defending the Mississippi and holding it within Confederate control the Southern generals had strongly fortified New Madrid Bend and Island Number 10.
Let us explain. The Mississippi river is exceedingly tortuous in its course. Some miles above New Madrid in Missouri, it suddenly turns northwardly and makes a great bend. At or near the northerly curve of that bend lies the village of New Madrid, Missouri. There the Confederates had fortified themselves and there General Pope with his army in Missouri was threatening them.
In the course of that vast bend lay Island Number 10, and here the Confederates had still more determinedly fortified themselves with a view of holding the great river. They had a strong force at Fort Pillow, on the Tennessee bank farther down the stream. They held Memphis on the Chickasaw bluffs 240 miles below Cairo. They had possession of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but those positions had not yet been made strongholds by elaborate fortifications. They still held New Orleans and the defenses below that city, though they were destined soon to lose them. Thus they commanded the river and made of it a Confederate highway. It was the obvious policy of the Confederates to retain possession of that great river. It was the equally obvious policy of their adversaries to conquer control of it.
When Beauregard wisely, and indeed under strategic compulsion, withdrew the forces from Columbus, Kentucky, he sent some of the troops constituting the garrison and most of the guns that bristled from the useless fortifications of that town to New Madrid and Island Number 10, where they were needed.