Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 Quotes

“Grant spent the first part of the night under a tree a few hundred yards from the river bank. His injured ankle was still aching badly, and the cold rain drenched his face and body. The general decided to limp back to the log cabin near the Landing. He reached the building in a few minutes, but found it was being used as an emergency hospital. Several doctors busily dressed wounds or sawed off arms and legs as the case called for. Wounded and delirious soldiers screamed and shrieked in their agony, while orderlies carried outside the amputated limbs. After a few minutes of this, Grant decided he preferred the rain, and he returned to the comparative sanity of his tree.”
― O. Edward Cunningham, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862

“The battery commander, Captain John W. Powell, had his right arm shot off.45 Udaunted by the loss of his limb, Powell later served with Grant at Vicksburg, and he wound up a major. After the war, the one-armed ex-soldier made the first trip down the turbulent Colorado River as well as many other exploring expeditions. Later he assisted in founding the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, becoming its director in 1879. From 1881-1894, he was Director of the U. S. Geographical Survey. Powell died in 1902, at the age of sixty-eight, one of America’s most respected and esteemed scientists and explorers.”
― O. Edward Cunningham, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862

“Halleck’s tragedy was that he was called on to perform the functions of a daring, dashing field commander, while basically at heart he was simply a bookkeeping bureaucratic official.”
― O. Edward Cunningham, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862