EVERY fifteen minutes or so, steamers brought another several hundred of Buell’s men across to the landing, and before morning he would have more than 17,000 fresh troops on the field. Not only that, but well after dark the much sought division of Lew Wallace at last concluded its bizarre odyssey from Crump’s Landing and emerged from the Owl Creek swamps near Sherman’s position at the far right end of the Union line. This now gave Grant nearly 25,000 completely new troops—more men than Beauregard could muster in the entire Confederate army at that point, considering the casualties and stragglers. It seems almost a criminal error of military intelligence that nobody—not Sidney Johnston, Beauregard, or anybody else—thought to put a close watch on the routes Buell might have used to march to Grant’s relief. But in those days and times the term “military intelligence,” if not exactly an oxymoron, was at best an expression of a vague and more or less unrefined concept that smacked of being “undignified.”
