It was the impression of the people of this State . . .

. . . from the reports of the telegraph and the Chicago papers that the battle of Pittsburg was fought exclusively by the Chicago Batteries and a few regiments and divisions commanded in the interest of the Chicago papers. Every train and every boat arriving here is loaded with wounded Iowa soldiers. So it is elsewhere. St. Louis is filling up with wounded. So are Louisville, Evansville, Cincinnati, &c. Thousands of wounded Missourians, Indianans, Kentuckians and Ohioans, mattered, maimed, sick and sore, on their way to hospitals where they can be cared for. The whole northwest is mourning over a disaster caused by the blundering and criminal negligence of Chicago-made Generals who have been manufactured into great commanders by forcing process of Chicago special newspaper puffing. The Country is full of widows and orphans made so through sheer negligence and incapacity. It strikes us that we have had enough of this – that our rulers ought to exercise more discrimination, and make no more promotions on account of the clamor of the Chicago press. The disaster of Belmont and the Blundering at Donelson ought to have been enough without this last crushing demonstration of General Grant’s incapacity. And we are not only to look at what the country has suffered but at what it has escaped. But for the opportune arrival of Buell and the Generalship displayed by him on Monday the army of General Grant made up as brave troops as ever took the field, would have been utterly destroyed or captured with all its munitions of war and commissary stores and the Union cause set back at least a year.

– Published in the Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 19, 1862