Although the army had been reorganized as a result of the consolidation of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Corps, it was still inefficient and its discipline defective. The former condition proceeded from the fact that General Rosecrans insisted on directing personally every department, and kept every one waiting and uncertain till he himself could directly supervise every operation. The latter proceeded from his utter lack of firmness, his passion for universal applause, and his incapacity to hurt any man's feelings by just severity.
My opinion of Rosecrans and my fears that the army would soon be driven from Chattanooga by starvation, if not by the Confederates, I had reiterated in my letters to Mr. Stanton. On the morning of October 19th I received a dispatch from Mr. Stanton, sent from Washington on October 16th, asking me to meet him that day at the Gait House in Louisville. I wired him that, unless he ordered to the contrary, Rosecrans would retreat at once from Chattanooga, and then I started for Louisville. It was a hard trip by horseback over Walden's Ridge and through Jasper to Bridgeport, and the roads were not altogether safe. Ten days before this, in riding along the edge of a bank near the river shore, the earth had given way under my horse's hind feet, and he and I had been tumbled together down a bank, about fourteen feet high; we rolled over each other in the sand at the bottom. I got off with no worse injury than a bruise of my left shoulder and a slight crack on the back of my head from the horse's hind foot, which made the blood run a little. The roads over Walden Ridge and along the river were even worse now than when I got my tumble, and, besides, they were filled with wagons trying to get supplies to Chattanooga. It took at that time ten days for wagon teams to go from Stevenson, where we had a depot, to Chattanooga. Though subsistence stores were so nearly exhausted, the wagons were compelled to throw overboard portions of their precious cargo in order to get through. The returning trains were blockaded. On the 17th of October five hundred teams were halted between the mountain and the river without forage for the animals, and unable to move in any direction; the whole road was strewn with dead animals.
The railway from Bridgeport to Nashville was not much more comfortable or safer than the road. Early in the month I had gone to Nashville on business, and had come back in a tremendous storm in a train of eighteen cars crowded with soldiers, and was twenty-six hours on the road instead of ten. On the present trip, however, I got along very well until within about eight miles from Nashville, when our train narrowly escaped destruction. A tie had been inserted in a cattle guard to throw the train down an embankment, but it had been calculated for a train going south, so that ours simply broke it off. From what we learned afterward, we thought it was intended for a train on which it was supposed General Grant was going to Bridgeport.
My train was bound through to Louisville. Indeed, I think there was no one with me except the train hands and the engineer. We reached Nashville about ten o'clock on the night of October 20th, and there were halted. Directly there came in an officer—I think it was Lieutenant-Colonel Bowers, of General Grant's staff—who said:
"General Grant wants to see you."
This was the first that I knew Grant was in Tennessee. I got out of my train and went over to his. I hadn't seen him since we parted at Vicksburg.
"I am going to interfere with your journey, Mr. Dana," he said as soon as I came in. "I have got the Secretary's permission to take you back with me to Chattanooga. I want you to dismiss your train and get in mine; we will give you comfortable quarters."
"General," I said, "did you ask the Secretary to let me go back with you?"
"I did," he said; "I wanted to have you."