And so, to the majority of those to-night, the war is but a matter of history and legend of story and of song.
The recollections of those years from 1861 to 1865 are, in many minds, as indelible as though graven on brass, or chiseled in marble.
Those of you who have personal recollections, as well as those familiar with the history of those times, will remember that the summer of 1863, so far as the Army of the Cumberland was concerned, was spent (as was at one time said of the Army of the Potomac) in "masterly inactivity;" and although after the battle of Stone river the army occupied a line as far south as Franklin and Murfreesboro, Tenn. And though the army, under the now immortal Grant, had captured one entire rebel army, and had opened the "Father of Waters," so long closed at Vicksburg; and though the gallant Meade had met the invaders at Gettysburg and hurled him back, in defeat and confusion, to his old lair beyond the Potomac, the Army of the Cumberland, under General Rosecrans, as late as August had barely gained the foothills of the Cumberland mountains.
The Cumberland mountains run in a direction south of west and north of east, and for most of the way are composed of two considerable ridges, some two thousand feet above the valley of the Tennessee. These ridges are broken at Chattanooga by the Tennessee river, and so bold and abrupt is Lookout mountain on the south side of the river, that one can almost conclude that some great convulsion of nature had reft it asunder from its corresponding ridge on the north side.
This chain of mountains, this deep and broad river, lay between our army and that of the enemy when the march commenced southward in August, 1863.
The corps to which my regiment was attached, the 21st, under General Crittenden, and the 14th Corps, under General George H. Thomas, crossed the mountains above Chattanooga, while General McCook's Corps, and the Reserve Corps under General Gordon Granger, crossed at and below Chattanooga.
And while in the effort of crossing this great mountain range and river, the right and left wings of the army must have been seventy-five miles apart, and neither near enough to aid the other in case of an attack. I am almost at a loss to know how the Army of the Cumberland was put south of mountains and river; whether by the ability of Rosecrans, or the stupidity of Bragg, the feat was accomplished.
And while there was many a mountain defile that would have answered for a modern Thermopylæ, happily for us the three hundred Spartans seemed to be wanting.
The early part of August, 1863, found us encamped at Manchester, Tenn., at or near the head waters of the Duck river after the close of the Tullahoma campaign, if it is proper to call that a campaign, that was simply a retreat on the part of the confederates, and pursuit on the part of the federal forces.
Manchester is situated on what is known as the table-lands of Tennessee, and though high and supplied with the most delightful water, very many of our men were sick by reason of the exposure on the campaign just closed, and had to be sent back to hospitals or sent home on furlough, which latter was very seldom done; and when accomplished costing great pains and anxiety. If our national policy had been to furlough our worthy sick, instead of sending them off to the inhospitable hospitals, to be experimented upon by the graduates, fresh from our medical colleges, to pine away with homesickness, be crowded together in great numbers "into the wards of the whitewashed halls, where the dead and dying lay," when a few days and weeks at home with its cheering influences and home diet, something mother could fix up, would have restored, without doubt, thousands of brave men to health and duty, that by reason of the narrow, niggardly, treat-every-man-as-a-coward policy of the government, went down to needless and untimely graves.