When we shall come to consider in a future chapter, what else had happened, we shall see clearly that by his victory on the second day of the Shiloh battle, taken in connection with other occurrences, General Grant had made easily possible the immediate and complete conquest of the entire Mississippi Valley. It only required an immediate and determined advance such as General Grant naturally and eagerly desired to make, in order to complete that work at once. He says in his "Memoirs" that two days would have been ample for the conquest of Corinth. But General Grant was not in control of operations in the western department. General Halleck was. General Grant was no longer even in command of the army with which he had driven General Beauregard back to Corinth. General Halleck was, and instead of pressing forward at once as Grant desired to do and driving Beauregard still farther south while capturing all his stores or compelling him to destroy them, Halleck forbade all this and with three men to Beauregard's one, and with thrice or four times his resources in artillery, ammunition and everything else, he fortified at Shiloh and began a slowly scientific approach to works that Grant, in command of that army, would have run over as a schoolboy tramples down a pathway through a clover field. Halleck did not even begin this "scientific" advance against Corinth until the thirtieth of April—more than three weeks after the battle at Shiloh had opened the way. It took him, by his slow methods, a full month more to reach Corinth—less than twenty miles away—and when he got there at last he found the place already evacuated, the Confederates having made good use of the seven or eight weeks' time which his dilatoriness had thus allowed them in removing their guns, ammunition and stores to newly fortified positions farther south.
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.
[CHAPTER XXIV]
New Madrid and Island Number 10
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.