The Sword and the Pen | HistoryNet

From the article:

"For $500 an article, Grant agreed to provide Century with his accounts of four battles and campaigns: Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and Appomattox. (Chattanooga would later be substituted for Appomattox.) He began writing at the family’s summer retreat in Long Branch, New Jersey, and submitted a draft on Shiloh in July 1884. It was admirably straightforward in style, like a general writing an after-action field report—but maybe a little too much so. Editor Robert Underwood Johnson came to see Grant in Long Branch to suggest the infusion of more color and personality.

Judging from the result, Grant employed Johnson’s advice to good effect. Shiloh “was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance,” he wrote. He described “an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, 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.” Perhaps in answer to criticisms that his forces had been caught unprepared and nearly routed, Grant said that there had been “no hour during the day when I doubted the eventual defeat of the enemy.” When the article appeared in print several months later, it brought the Century an unprecedented sale of 220,000 copies. "