After the battle, a constant stream of civilian surgeons, and sanitary commission agents, men and women, came up the Tennessee to bring relief to the thousands of maimed and wounded soldiers for whom we had imperfect means of shelter and care.  These people caught up the camp-stories, which on their return home they retailed through their local papers, usually elevating their own neighbors into heroes, but decrying all others:  Among them was Lieutenant-Governor Stanton, of Ohio, who published in Belfontaine, Ohio, a most abusive article about General Grant and his subordinate generals.  As General Grant did not and would not take up the cudgels, I did so.  My letter in reply to Stanton, dated June 10, 1862, was published in the Cincinnati Commercial soon after its date.  To this Lieutenant-Governor Stanton replied, and I further rejoined in a letter dated July 12, 1862.  These letters are too personal to be revived.  By this time the good people of the North had begun to have their eyes opened, and to give us in the field more faith and support.  Stanton was never again elected to any public office, and was commonly spoken of as “the late Mr. Stanton.”  He is now dead, and I doubt not in life he often regretted his mistake in attempting to gain popular fame by abusing the army-leaders, then as now an easy and favorite mode of gaining notoriety, if not popularity.  Of course, subsequent events gave General Grant and most of the other actors in that battle their appropriate place in history, but the danger of sudden popular clamors is well illustrated by this case.

Tho battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, was one of the most fiercely contested of the war.  On the morning of April 6, 1862, the five divisions of McClernand, Prentiss, Hurlbut, W. H. L. Wallace, and Sherman, aggregated about thirty-two thousand men.  We had no intrenchments of any sort, on the theory that as soon as Buell arrived we would march to Corinth to attack the enemy.  The rebel army, commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston, was, according to their own reports and admissions, forty-five thousand strong, had the momentum of attack, and beyond all question fought skillfully from early morning till about 2 a.m., when their commander-in-chief was killed by a Mini-ball in the calf of his leg, which penetrated the boot and severed the main artery.  There was then a perceptible lull for a couple of hours, when the attack was renewed, but with much less vehemence, and continued up to dark.  Early at night the division of Lew Wallace arrived from the other side of Snake Creek, not having fired a shot.  A very small part of General Buell’s army was on our side of the Tennessee River that evening, and their loss was trivial.