THE CAMPAIGN OF SHILOH.
575
The evacuation of Columbus was successfully completed on the 2d of March,apparently without any suspicion on the part of our adversary in that quar-ter that such an operation had been going on, or without the least show ofthat vigilance and vigor that were to he apprehended from him after theseries of most serious disasters for the Confederate arms which had character-ized the month of February, 1862. About seven thousand men were nowplaced at New Madrid , and in the quarter of Island Number Ten, under thecommand of General McCown, while the rest of General Polk’s force was with-drawn along the line of the Mobile and Ohio railroad as far south as Hum-boldt , and there held in observation, with a small detachment of infantryleft at Union City, and some five hundred cavalry thrown well out towardHickman, on the Mississippi below Columbus , and extending across to theTennessee River in the quarter of Paris , to watch and report all materialmovements upon either river.
Reliable information reached me that while General Pope was on his marchon the Missouri side of the Mississippi, to strike at New Madrid , such wasthe urgency of the danger impending by way of the Tennessee River that itthreatened the fatal hindrance of the conjunction of our forces, as alreadyarranged about the 23d of February, in response to my dispatch through myaide-de-camp, Captain Ferguson. Growing profoundly apprehensive, on the2d of March I dispatched Captain Otey, an assistant adjutant-general onmy staff, with a note to General Johnston which contained these words:“I send herewith inclosed a slip showing intended movements of theenemy, no doubt against the troops in Western Tennessee . I thinkyou ought to hurry up your troops to Corinth by railroad, as soon as prac-ticable, for [tjhere ☆ or thereabouts will be fought the great battle of thiscontroversy.”
I thus fixed upon Corinth as the Confederate base, because the recentmovements of our enemy up the Tennessee could only be intelligently con-strued as having the Memphis and Charleston railroad primarily, and sucha railway center as Corinth later, as their immediate objectives. J
•^•Evidently the word “here,” as it appears inthe original letter as it reached General John-ston, did not refer and could not possibly havereferred to Jackson, but to Corinth, as is shownby the context of that letter and of others rel-ative to Corinth as the evident Federal objec-tive.— G. T. B.
J To say, as has been done, with apparent seri-ousness, by Colonel W. P. Johnston [see p. 549 ofthe present work], that his father “ sent ” me at anytime, “ with instructions to concentrate all avail-able foi’ces near Corinth,— a movement previouslybegun,”—is a sheer invention that is twin-bornwith the fable concerning General Johnston andthe map upon which in January, 1862, it is alleged,he pointed out a position which had been marked bythe engineers “ Shiloh Church,” and said in effect:“Here the great battle of the South-east will befought” (“Life of General A. S. Johnston,” byW. P. Johnston, pp. 488-490). Now, to be able
to foretell in January, 1862, that a battle would befought at “Shiloh Church,” General Johnston mustalso have foreseen at that moment that within thenext thirty days General Grant would strike andcapture the Confederate center at Forts Henry andDonelson, with one-fourth of the entire force underGeneral Johnston’s command at the time, as alsoobtain the control of both the Tennessee and Cum-berland rivers as far as navigable; thus forcingthe immediate loss by abandonment of the Confed-erates in turn of Bowling Green, Nashville, and Co-lumbus ; foreseen also that General Grant wouldstraightway establish himself at so unfavorable abase of operations as Pittsburg Landing ratherthan at Hamburg, which was really about to bemade the Federal base of operations when the bat-tle of Shiloh interrupted the movement. Under noother conditions could there have been a battle atShiloh Church, a mere log-cabin, unmarked on anymap existing in January, 1862.— G. T. B.