Beauregard did not know this yet, but he sensed that his own army was disorganized and fought out. He therefore refused to authorize a final assault in the gathering twilight. Although partisans in the endless postwar postmortems in the South condemned this decision, it was a sensible one. The Union defenders had the advantages of terrain (many of the troops in a Confederate assault would have had to cross a steep backwater ravine) and of a large concentration of artillery—including the eight-inch shells of two gunboats. With the arrival of reinforcements, Yankees also gained the advantage of
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