I have before shown that Grant was not surprised--for if his army had been surprised, the fault would have been as justly chargeable to him as though he had been personally present on the ground. He had been to the front himself the night before and examined the situation; he had placed Sherman--the tried and the true as he knew him then--in the most advanced position. Grant himself says, "As to the talk of our being surprised, nothing could be more false. If the enemy had sent us word where and when they would attack, we could not have been better prepared." It was undeniable that the brave general, the successful commander, was again under a cloud. All the false rumors were in time disproved; but if there had been no malignant, jealous enemies, dreading a total eclipse of their own farthing candles in his department, the country would have believed in Grant after Shiloh, as they did after Donelson. An effort was made to relieve him entirely from command, and to extinguish the star which was steadily rising. General Halleck painfully went through the necessary form of thanking Generals Grant and Buell for their conduct at Shiloh, and immediately repaired to the scene of operations to take command of the united armies of Grant and Buell in person, now called "The Grand Army of the Tennessee." It was largely reënforced, and numbered one hundred and twenty thousand men. It was divided into three corps, under Thomas, Pope, and Buell, with McClernand in the reserve. Grant was nominally in command of the Tennessee district; but his army was placed beyond his control, and orders were transmitted to his subordinates without any knowledge on his part of their purport. Grant was second in command, without power or influence in the camp. Halleck consoled him with a sarcastic bit of philosophy, declaring that the second in command, in case the chief was killed, ought not to be embarrassed with the immediate control of a body of troops. Grant did not appreciate the situation, and evidently believed that there was no danger of his superior's falling in battle. The man who had won Donelson and Shiloh so heroically could not be winked entirely out of sight, or doubtless he would not have been permitted to retain even a complimentary position. Grant was practically in disgrace, and was so regarded in the army. His situation was intensely disagreeable, and nothing but his unselfish devotion to the cause prevented him from retiring in disgust from the field where he was insultingly ignored.