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SHILOH REVIEWED.

Such are the salient points in the popular conception and historical recordof the battle of Shiloh. Scarcely less remarkable than the facts themselvesare the means by which the responsible actors in the critical drama haveendeavored to counteract them. At society reunions and festive entertain-ments, in newspaper interviews and dispatches, in letters and contributionsto periodicals, afterthought official reports, biographies, memoirs, and otherpopular sketches, the subject of Shiloh, from the first hour of the battle to thepresent time, has been invaded by pretensions and exculpatory statementswhich revive the discussion only to confirm the memory of the grave faultsthat brought an army into imminent peril. These defenses and assumptions,starting first, apparently half suggested, in the zeal of official attendants andother partisans, were soon taken up more or less directly by the persons inwhose behalf they were put forward; and now it is virtually declared by theprincipals themselves, that the Army of the Ohio was an unnecessary intruderin the battle, and that the blood of more than two thousand of its membersshed on that field was a gratuitous sacrifice.

With the origin of the animadversions that were current at the time uponthe conduct of the battle, the Army of the Ohio had little to do, and it hasnot generally taken a willing part in the subsequent discussion. They com-menced in the ranks of the victims, and during all the years that have givenunwonted influence to the names which they affected, the witnesses of thefirst reports have without show of prejudice or much reiteration firmlyadhered to their earlier testimony. It does not impair the value of that testi-mony if extreme examples were cited to illustrate the general fact; nor con-stitute a defense that such examples were not the general rule. I havemyself, though many years ago, made answer to the more formal pleas that

PITTSBURG LANDING, VIEWED FROM THE FERRY LANDING ON THE OPPOSITE SHORE.FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1885.

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