Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul: A Collection of Articles Written for and Published in the Daily Pioneer PressMoore, Frank
History
Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul: A Collection of Articles Written for and Published in the Daily Pioneer Press
Moore, Frank
Frontier and pioneer life -- Minnesota; Saint Paul (Minn.) -- History
permission of the commanding general. Dispatches sent to Grant for
information concerning his command was never delivered to him, but
were delivered over to the rebel authorities by a rebel telegraph
operator, who shortly afterward joined the Confederate forces.
Many years after the war Gen. Badeau, one of Grant's staff officers,
was in search of information for his "History of Grant's Military
Campaigns," and he unearthed in the archives of the war department the
full correspondence between Halleck, McClellan and the secretary of
war, and it was not until then that Gen. Grant learned the full extent
of the absurd accusations made against him.
After the battle of Pittsburg Landing Gen. Halleck assumed personal
command of all the forces at that point and Gen. Grant was placed
second in command, which meant that he had no command at all. This
was very distasteful to Gen. Grant and he would have resigned his
commission and returned to St. Louis but for the interposition of his
friend, Gen. W.T. Sherman. Gen. Grant had packed up his belongings
and was about to depart when Gen. Sherman met him at his tent and
persuaded him to refrain. In a short time Halleck was ordered to
Washington and Grant was made commander of the Department of West
Tennessee, with headquarters at Memphis. Gen. Grant's subsequent
career proved the wisdom of Sherman's entreaty.
When Gen. Halleck assumed command he constructed magnificent
fortifications, and they were a splendid monument to his engineering
skill, but they were never occupied. He was like the celebrated king
of France, who "with one hundred thousand men, marched up the hill and
then down again." Gen. Halleck had under his immediate command more
than one hundred thousand well equipped men, and the people of
the North looked to him to administer a crushing blow to the then
retreating enemy. The hour had arrived--the man had not.
"Flushed with the victory of Forts Henry and Donelson," said the
envious Halleck in a dispatch to the war department, previous to
the battle, "the army under Grant at Pittsburg Landing was more
demoralized than the Army of the Potomac after the disastrous defeat
of Bull Run."
Soon after the battle the venerable Gen. Scott predicted that the
war would soon be ended--that thereafter there would be nothing but
guerrilla warfare at interior points. Gen. Grant himself in his
memoirs says that had the victory at Pittsburg Landing been followed
up and the army been kept intact the battles at Stone River,
Chattanooga and Chickamauga would not have been necessary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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