After a few miles, Grant stopped the race and offered to buy Old John right there. “Why the hell not?” Wallace probably thought, not that he believed in Satan or God or their respective domains. The stallion’s forelegs rent the sky in frustration.
“GO!” The Union soldier dropped his kerchief. He also couldn’t beat his commanding officer. They rode out together and Grant challenged Wallace to a good-natured race. He invited Wallace to his headquarters to talk strategy, carefully skirting Shiloh. So Grant thought it prudent to show his gratitude. Now Wallace had famously saved Washington DC from the Confederates. But historians still debate his reasons and who was at fault. Wallace and his regiment arrived late to the battle, costing thousands of lives. President Lincoln demanded an explanation for the slaughter. Shiloh was the Civil War’s first bloodbath, leaving 24,000 men on both sides dead or wounded. I saw an open field…so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground. In his memoirs, Grant would describe the horror of Shiloh thus: Grant like the legends they’d once been-before the Battle of Shiloh. They cantered into the headquarters of Ulysses S. “After this war ends, I must pick up a paintbrush again.” He patted Old John’s neck and urged him on. General Lew Wallace, tall upon the back of his stallion Old John, paused to admire the red-gold Virginia countryside. To catch a boy and hold him fast one has only to set the delicate machinery of the wonder-box in him at work.
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