March 15, 1862

March 15, 1862: Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is restored to command of the Army of the Tennessee. He immediately begins to consolidate his divisions (under Sherman, Wallace, C.F. Smith, McClernand, and Hurlbut) around Savannah, Tennessee, where his troops have been engaged in destroying bridges and flushing out pockets of Rebel resistance. Sherman and Hurlbut have taken their troops by steamer to Pittsburg Landing, on the west bank of the Tennessee River, near the Mississippi state line.

—Surgeon Albert L. Castleman, of the Army of the Potomac (U.S.), notes in his journal:

Vienna, March 15th.—Did not lie down last night, but worked in separating and disposing of my sick. Most of them I have brought to this place to embark such as cannot march to Alexandria, by rail. The Brigade did not meet me here, as I expected, and I got to it at Flint Hill (where I left it) last night. I cannot look upon our possession of this place [Mannasas Junction] and the railroad without deeply feeling how much we have been outwitted. Here we have been held still with 150,000 to 200,000 men, since July last, by a little village mounting wooden guns. Poor McClellan, I fear a wooden gun will be the death of him yet, though his failure here may be attributable to the interference of others. I will not hastily condemn him.

—Private Daniel L. Day of the 25^th Massachusetts Inf., with Burnside at New Bern, No. Carolina, the morning after the battle, writes in his journal: "Some enterprising party has hoisted the old flag on the spire of the church on Pollock street. There let it proudly wave; let it catch the first beams of the morning, and let the last rays of the setting sun linger and play amid its folds; let it gladden the hearts of every lover of liberty and loyalty, and let it be a notice to these deluded and ill-advised people around here, that it will never again give place to their traitorous rag of secession."

—Henry Adams, with his father Charles Francis Adams, Sr. in London, writes to his brother Charles, Jr., an officer in the cavalry with the Federal occupying forces at Port Royal, So. Carolina: "

The English on hearing of Fort Donnelson and the fall of Nashville, seem to think our dozen armies are already over the St. Lawrence and at the gates of Quebec. They don’t conceal their apprehensions and if we go on in this way, they will be as humiliated as the South itself. The talk of intervention, only two months ago so loud as to take a semiofficial tone, is now out of the minds of everyone. . . . The blockade is now universally acknowledged to be unobjectionable. Recognition, intervention, is an old song. No one whispers it. But the navy that captured Port Royal, Roanoke and Fort Henry, and that is flying about with its big guns up all the rivers and creeks of the South, is talked of with respect.