Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-65: its Causes, Incidents, and Results: Intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the War for the Union. Volume II.

[58] refuge under the batteries of Vicksburg, unharmed. Repeated attempts to destroy or sink her¹ were defeated by the shore batteries; and, on the 24th, the siege was raised; Com. Farragut, with Gen. Williams, returning down the river; while Com. Davis, with his fleet, steamed up to the mouth of the Yazoo, thus abandoning, for the time, the reopening of the Mississippi.

Gen. Grant's victorious army, after a brief rest at Fort Donelson, recrossed, considerably strengthened, to the Tennessee, just above Fort Henry, where several gunboats and a large number of transports, passing down the Cumberland into the Ohio, and thence into the Tennessee, took up our soldiers by regiments and started with them on a new movement up the Tennessee. General Charles F. Smith had been designated by Gen. Halleck to direct this movement, but was soon disabled by the sickness of which he died not long after reaching Savannah, Tenn., and Gen. Grant was thus restored to chief command. The rendezvous of the expedition was at a little place called Danville, where the railroad from Memphis to Clarkesville and Louisville crosses the river. The gunboats Tyler and Lexington had already made a reconnoissance up the Tennessee, meeting their first resistance at Pittsburg Landing, an insignificant two-house nucleus of a prospective village, 8 miles above Savannah and 20 miles N. N.E. of Corinth, Miss., at the junction of the Memphis and Charleston with the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. The country hence to Corinth is rolling, and generally wooded. Two or three miles southward is Shiloh Church, and some ten miles farther is the road-crossing known as Monterey, where there were half-a-dozen houses. The region is thinly and recently settled; still mainly covered by the primitive forest; gently rolling, and traversed by a number of inconsiderable crecks, making eastward and northward, to be lost in the Tennessee.

At Pittsburg Landing, the Tyler found a Rebel battery of six guns, which it silenced, after a mutual cannonade of two hours; returning thence to Danville and reporting. The movement of the army southward on transports was continued — the 46th Ohio, Col. Worthington, leading, on the transport B. J. Adams--so far as Savannah, where it was landed,² and proceeded to take military possession. All the transports, 69 in number, conveying nearly 40,000 men, were soon debarking the army, with its material, at and near this place, whence Gen. Lew. Wallace's division was dispatched³ to Purdy, a station 16 miles W. S.W., where the railroad was destroyed. Gen. Sherman's first division was next⁴ conveyed up the river to Tyler's Landing, just across the Mississippi State line; whence the 6th Ohio cavalry was dispatched to Burnsville, on the Memphis and Charleston road, some miles eastward of Corinth, which was likewise destroyed without resistance. The expedition then returned unmolested to Savannah.

These easy successes, and the fact that no enemy came near or seemed to meditate annoyance, must have imbued our leading officers with a