General Halleck soon arrived, assuming command of the combined forces of Grant, Buell, and Pope. It was a grand army.
Grant Under a Cloud.
Grant nominally remained at the head of his corps, but was deprived of power. He was under a cloud. Most injurious reports concerning his conduct at Shiloh pervaded the country. All the leading journals were represented in Halleck's army. At the daily accidental gatherings of eight or ten correspondents, Grant was the subject of angry discussion. The journalistic profession tends to make men oracular and severely critical.
Several of these writers could demonstrate conclusively that Grant was without capacity, but a favorite of Fortune; that his great Donelson victory was achieved in spite of military blunders which ought to have defeated him.
He Serenely Smokes and Waits.
The subject of all this contention bore himself with undisturbed serenity. Sherman, while constantly declaring that he cared nothing for the newspapers, was foolishly sensitive to every word of criticism. But Grant, whom they really wounded, appeared no more disturbed by these paper bullets of the brain than by the leaden missiles of the enemy. He silently smoked and waited. The only protest I ever knew him to utter was to the correspondent of a journal which had denounced him with great severity:
"Your paper is very unjust to me; but time will make it all right. I want to be judged only by my acts."
When the army began to creep forward, I messed at Grant's head-quarters, with his chief of staff; and around the evening camp-fires I saw much of the general. He rarely uttered a word upon the political bearings of the war; indeed, he said little upon any subject. With his eternal cigar, and his head thrown slightly to one side, for hours he would sit silently before the fire, or walk back and forth, with eyes upon the ground, or look on at our whist-table, now and then making a suggestion about the play.
Most of his pictures greatly idealize his full, rather heavy face. The journalists called him stupid. One of my confrères used to say:
"How profoundly surprised Mrs. Grant must have been, when she woke up and learned that her husband was a great man!"