The Confederate forces in Kentucky and Tennessee had suffered a series of
reverses, culminating in the loss of Nashville. The blow was severe:
immense quantities of war material had fallen to the victor, together with
all the important strategic points. General Johnston withdrew Beauregard's
army to Corinth, in northern Mississippi, where he hoped so to recruit and
equip it as to enable it to assume the offensive and retake the lost
territory.
The town of Corinth was a wretched place--the capital of a swamp. It is a
two days' march west of the Tennessee River, which here and for a hundred
and fifty miles farther, to where it falls into the Ohio at Paducah, runs
nearly north. It is navigable to this point--that is to say, to Pittsburg
Landing, where Corinth got to it by a road worn through a thickly wooded
country seamed with ravines and bayous, rising nobody knows where and
running into the river under sylvan arches heavily draped with Spanish
moss. In some places they were obstructed by fallen trees. The Corinth
road was at certain seasons a branch of the Tennessee River. Its mouth was
Pittsburg Landing. Here in 1862 were some fields and a house or two; now
there are a national cemetery and other improvements.
It was at Pittsburg Landing that Grant established his army, with a river
in his rear and two toy steamboats as a means of communication with the
east side, whither General Buell with thirty thousand men was moving from
Nashville to join him. The question has been asked, Why did General Grant
occupy the enemy's side of the river in the face of a superior force
before the arrival of Buell? Buell had a long way to come; perhaps Grant
was weary of waiting. Certainly Johnston was, for in the gray of the
morning of April 6th, when Buell's leading division was _en bivouac_ near
the little town of Savannah, eight or ten miles below, the Confederate
forces, having moved out of Corinth two days before, fell upon Grant's
advance brigades and destroyed them. Grant was at Savannah, but hastened
to the Landing in time to find his camps in the hands of the enemy and the
remnants of his beaten army cooped up with an impassable river at their
backs for moral support. I have related how the news of this affair came
to us at Savannah. It came on the wind--a messenger that does not bear
copious details.