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[142]
This battle finally relieved Grant from his anxiety as to the possession of the territory he commanded. After Corinth, he had 48,500 men, and the arrival of reenforcements soon placed him in position for attack. --Colonel W. C. Church, U. S. V., in Ulysses S. Grant.

The appalling carnage at Pittsburg Landing, on the Tennessee, awakened the North and the South to a fuller sense of the magnitude of the war. The South had suffered a double disaster — the loss of the battle and the loss of General Albert Sidney Johnston. But the Federal victory was not decisive. The Union forces had found their adversaries worthy of their steel and had paid dearly for what they had won.

The Confederate troops after the battle of Shiloh under General Beauregard, who had assumed command of the Army of the Mississippi on the death of Johnston, had been led to the little railroad center in Mississippi, Corinth, where they were recovering their lost organization and strength.

Western Tennessee and the adjoining counties of Mississippi, the territory in which the armies of the Confederacy and the Union were operating, were unfavorable to successful military movements in force. Dense forests covered the region, and the soil was marshy and soft, stretching away in gently rolling hills. The small creeks, abundant about Corinth, are for the most part sluggish and their water unfit for drinking purposes.

Three great railroad systems penetrated the region, offering an excellent and expeditious method of transportation to whichever army was in control of the strategic point on the steel highways — and this important point at the junction of two of the roads was Corinth, which Beauregard now occupied,

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