Book Description

Excerpt from The Story of Our Army From Colonial Days to the Present Time, Vol. 2 The Campaign of Shiloh - The Army and Navy Invest New Madrid and Island No. 10 - Grant's Army Advances to Pittsburg Landing - Battle of Shiloh - Far Reaching Consequences of the Confederate Reverse. Meantime there had been hard fighting in the West with the broad general result that the advance into the Confederacy which Grant had begun with the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson had been stubbornly maintained. The Confederate armies had in the main been pushed back out of Tennessee. On the west bank of the Mississippi, New Madrid was the objective of a powerful military and naval expedition under General Pope and Commodore Foote, and together with the fortifications on Island No. 10, a sand bar in the middle of the river, long since washed away, gave the Federal forces serious occupation for many weeks. In the main the operations against these works were approaches by parallels and a vigorous bombardment. April 5th General Beauregard telegraphed to Richmond concerning the attack on New Madrid: "The enemy has thrown three thousand shells and burned fifty tons of gunpowder without injuring the effectiveness of our works, and killing but one man." The gunboats naturally took an active part in this cannonade, and the soldiers in the cold and muddy trenches by which New Madrid was hemmed in used to get impatient over the ineffective firing. "Well, what is the navy doing to-day?" About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.