Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[559] their part. The army of the Mississippi, after the cruel retreat from Shiloh to Corinth, could not indulge in any self-deception concerning the struggle it had just undergone; but it could boast of having fought gallantly, and washed out, in its own blood, the humiliating remembrance of Fort Donelson.

The Federals had received a great and wholesome lesson: it could not be lost upon men of such sterling worth as Grant and Sherman. Henceforth both officers and men felt the necessity of constant vigilance, for they were all learning their trade at once in this great and severe school. The nation, enlightened by that universal publicity which has become so deeply grafted upon its customs, was perfectly aware that the success of the second day had been preceded by a bloody defeat; and far from being carried away by the cries of victory, it set itself earnestly to work to sustain the struggle, the terrible magnitude of which it was at last beginning to appreciate. Up to the present time, in fact, the general impression had been that one or two battles would suffice to decide the fate of the continent; and Grant himself had been led astray by this popular delusion. When the Confederate army was seen to recover so speedily from the disaster of Donelson, and to strike such a terrible blow at the conquerors, who were already flattering themselves that they had nothing but easy successes before them, people at last began to understand that, in asking for 200,000 men to conquer the West, Sherman had been right, against all the world. To use another expression of this remarkable man—as profound a thinker as he was just and intrepid in action—‘It was necessary that a combat fierce and bitter, to test the manhood of the two armies, should come off, and for such a struggle the battle-field of Pittsburg was as good as any other.’ It was, in fact, from the date of this battle that the two armies learned to know and to respect each other. Taught by the experience thus gained, their generals felt that so long as such armies continued in the field the struggle between the North and the South would not come to an end. Hitherto their object on both sides had been to capture or defend certain positions, rivers, and territories. Beauregard, in the East, had thought of nothing but the defence of Manassas. In the West everything had been sacrificed by the Confederates in order to preserve the countless fortifications