On the staff I had been thrown into intimate relations to Colonel William M. Wherry, senior aide-de-camp, and Major J. A. Campbell, adjutant-general. These officers continued to the end of the war in these positions, which they filled with great credit and usefulness. Major Campbell was admirably fitted for the supervision of the records and the correspondence of the army, and for reducing to the form of clear and succinct orders the directions of the general. He was accurate, systematic, and untiring; always at his post, whether it were at his desk in camp, or by the side of his chief in the field. Of slight, almost frail body, with an intellectual face, he looked unequal to rough field work, but showed a stamina in fact which many a more robust man envied. Colonel Wherry was the incessantly active personal representative of the general, intrusted with his oral orders, and making for him those examinations and investigations which are only satisfactory when the commander has learned to trust the eye and the cool judgment of his assistant as his own. Wherry had been with General Schofield from the first campaign in Missouri in 1861, and both were with Lyon when he fell at Wilson's Creek. He remained his confidential aide through the whole war, and for years afterward, being early appointed from Missouri to the line of one of the new regiments of the regular army. Lithe, graceful, and genial, he was always welcome, when he came to a point where fighting was going on, to learn for the general the actual situation or to bring his orders. [Footnote: Wherry is now (1899) Brigadier-General of the United States Army, retired, after brilliant service in the campaign of Santiago, Cuba.]
During the winter the division of the Fourth Corps commanded by Brigadier-General Thomas J. Wood had been in closest connection with us. It had taken part in all the marchings and countermarchings of the period when I was chief of staff, and I had thus begun an acquaintance with its commander which was to grow into lasting friendship. General Wood was colonel of the Second Regular Cavalry, a Kentuckian who had earnestly taken the National side, and an influential officer of the old army. His intelligence and activity were very marked, and his courage was of the cool indomitable character most highly prized in divisions of a great army. Of medium height, solid but not large build, dark hair and complexion, high forehead, he was a noticeable man in any assemblage of officers. A fluent talker, attentive to polite forms of speech as well as of conduct, he was liked and respected throughout the army, and especially in the Army of the Cumberland, where he had served throughout the war. He had won promotion by gallant and meritorious services again and again, when at the battle of Chickamauga it was his ill fortune to receive the famous order to "close up on Brannan and support him." The situation made the order ambiguous, but Wood understood it to mean that he should move to the left till he should find himself in rear of Brannan's division, since another division was between them in the line. He thought it a strange order, but thought also that Rosecrans must know why he sent it, and that it was "his not to reason why" but to obey. The obedience opened the gap through which Longstreet's men poured, breaking the line and routing part of the right wing. Wood took the place assigned him by Thomas in the horse-shoe curve around the Snodgrass hill, and did his full share of the desperate fighting which held that part of the field. But he had thus become the subject of a controversy, and the friends of Rosecrans charged him with a too literal obedience, and a failure to use a sound discretion in his action. The result was that whilst Rosecrans was removed from active field service, Wood still found himself under a cloud, and opposed by influences which stood in the way of his promotion till the war was almost ended. He continued to be distinguished in every engagement of the Atlanta campaign and that of Nashville, and no division saw harder or more honorable service than his.
The first week in April saw the changes in the organization of the Twenty-third Corps which I have indicated. On the 3d I was relieved of staff duty and assigned to the third division, with orders to proceed at once to Bull's Gap and take temporary command of the corps whilst General Stoneman should hasten to Kentucky to prepare the cavalry corps for active service. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. iii. pp. 245, 259, 268.] I think the change was agreeable to Stoneman, for he was most at home with mounted troops and liked that service. Schofield's permanent assignment to the Twenty-third Corps was made on April 4th by the President, though the general had still to await for some time the action of the Senate on the confirmation of his promotion. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. iii. p. 258.] His enemies were still persistent, and even succeeded in obtaining a report of the Senate committee against his confirmation. General Sherman wrote to his brother, the senator, in behalf of his subordinate;[Footnote:Id., pp. 332, 343.] but it was not till General Grant was back in Washington and used his powerful personal influence that the confirmation was finally secured after the campaign had opened. It seemed at one time that not even the manifest mischief of deranging the organization of the army, as deliberately settled by both Grant and Sherman, would overcome the political hostility arrayed against him. This was without any reasonable foundation. Although Schofield was not given to political discussion, my closeness to him enabled me to know that he was an earnestly loyal man whose heart was warmly engaged in the National cause. He believed in emancipation as a right and politic war measure, and in fighting the rebellion vigorously till it should be conquered. He had made enemies among the Kansas politicians because he tried to prevent the war on that frontier from degenerating into a vendetta when murder and robbery should take the place of civilized warfare. Some influential radicals in Missouri were hostile because he held the scales even between them and the conservative Union men.
At Bull's Gap I found the corps headquarters in a shingle-palace which had been built for a hotel at the railway station, and which was now the only house there. It was empty as a barn and fast going to ruin, but it gave shelter for our office work. Wood's division of the Fourth Corps was put in march to join the Army of the Cumberland, and we were left to watch the enemy and await the moment when the destruction of the railway and our own march southward should begin. We soon had a curious bit of evidence that Longstreet had finally abandoned the expectation of re-occupying East Tennessee. It was found in the applications made by women to join their husbands who were in the Confederate service. The "grapevine telegraph" was an "institution" during the whole war. News which was either interesting or important was passed on through the lines, and it was impossible to be so rigid in precautions as greatly to delay it. To stop it was utterly futile. Longstreet had hardly received the orders from his government to prepare to rejoin Lee's army in Virginia, when the headquarters of our army at Knoxville felt the pressure of applications for leave to pass the lines. On the 6th of April a party of forty women and children came up by railway, to be sent through the lines under a flag. They were of course without tents or any means of camping out, and the crazy building in which I had my quarters was that night as crowded and as picturesque as an Asiatic caravanserai. The rain and the almost impassable roads made their journey anything but one of pleasure, but by the aid of the few wagons at the post they went forward in a day or two. A second party, about as large, followed in the course of a week, and had even a rougher time than the first. There were delays on the part of their friends, in sending trains and escort to meet them at the break in the railway, but the hope of rejoining loved ones gave them courage, and they bore cheerfully their sufferings and privations.
The bitterness of the feud between the loyalists and disunionists in the Holston valley can hardly be imagined by those who did not witness it. The persecutions of the loyal mountaineers had been such that when their turn of ruling came they would have been more than human if they had not retaliated. The organization of home-guards gave to these armed bodies of men the power, and with it came the temptation to abuse it. The memory of the men who had been hanged for bridge-burning, and of those who had languished and died in prison charged with no crime but disloyalty to the Confederacy, was a constant stimulus to severity. Their blood seemed to cry from the ground. We found a constant necessity for moderating their passions, and it was not always possible to keep them within the bounds of civilized warfare. My experience in West Virginia was repeated with some phases of still greater intensity. When we got these loyal men away from home, campaigning on distant fields, there was no trouble in enforcing discipline, and they showed no more fierceness of personal retaliation than other troops. I suspect this will everywhere be true, in greater or less measure, and that in all wars it will be found for the interest of humanity not to allow local troops to garrison their own homes.
The scouts and irregular organizations were, as usual, the most likely to fall into excesses. I had an example of this, falling under my own eye at the time I am speaking of, and showing how, under this intense exasperation, the "bush-whacking" degenerated into guerilla war in which no quarter was given on either side. I had sent out a reconnoissance of a party of Indiana cavalry accompanied by some thirty of the Tennessee scouts, the whole force about a hundred in number. They had encountered a hostile party of "irregulars" some thirty strong, and had routed them. They brought in fifteen prisoners, and reported ten of the enemy killed. Those who were captured had all surrendered to the Indiana men, and the Tennesseeans were disposed to complain that quarter had been given. True, the party which had been attacked was said to have committed great outrages, and to have been engaged in forcing loyal men into the Confederate Army under their conscription laws. The chief of the scouts came to my quarters, and I put to him the ordinary question as to the luck of his last expedition. "Oh," said he, in a dejected nasal tone; "some pretty good luck and some bad luck." "What bad luck?" said I, thinking some of his men had got hurt. "Oh, them Indiana cavalry fellows let the captain of the gang and fourteen of his men surrender to 'em." "And what became of the rest?" "We had to deal with them," said he, significantly; "and they didn't surrender." Such is civil war when it becomes a deadly feud between old neighbors and acquaintances.
The month of April ran on with continued activity of reconnoitring parties, but no larger movements. The spring was unusually backward. There was a flurry of snow on the 16th, but it did not lie on the ground, and about the 20th lovely spring weather began in earnest. The best evidence we had that our lines of communication were getting in more efficient condition, was the arrival of an agent of the Sanitary Commission with a large shipment of fresh vegetables for gratuitous distribution. We were sorely in need of them. There was a good deal of incipient scurvy in camp, and scarce any one was wholly free from disorders caused by too restricted diet. Our regular rations were bacon and flour, varied occasionally by a small issue of dried white beans or rice. This was nutritious enough, but after some months' steady use, nature pretty imperatively demanded a change. The noble organization of the Commission had been watching for the opportunity, and the arrival of a generous supply of potatoes, onions, and pickled cabbage made feast days for everybody from the general down. At my headquarters we had been confined to the soldiers' rations, and it was impossible to get anything else. The only ferment to raise our bread was saleratus, and we had become very tired of saleratus biscuit. No luxuries ever tasted so well as these plain vegetables. Our physical condition craved them, and they were food and medicine at once. The sauerkraut was finely shaved cabbage laid down in brine, and a steaming platter of it made the pièce de résistance of our camp dinner as long as it lasted. The onions we sliced and ate raw with a dressing of vinegar. The gusto with which we enjoyed this change of diet remains a vivid remembrance after a quarter of a century, and is the best proof of our need of it. The health of the whole camp was restored, and we were "hard as nails" during the year of rough campaigning that was to follow.
The first week in May was the time of rendezvous for Sherman's grand army in northern Georgia, and with the opening of the last week in April the signal was given to destroy the railroad between Bull's Gap and the Watauga River, or further if the enemy should leave the crossing of that stream unharmed. Our position at the gap was high in the cleft of Bays Mountain through which the railway passes and then turns southeastward to the Nolachucky. The road then goes up the valley of that stream and over a ridge to the Watauga, which runs to the northwest, joining the Holston again by a route which is nearly at right angles to the general trend of the valley. The Watauga is not easily fordable at an ordinary stage of water, and thus the triangle between the Holston on the left, the Watauga in front, and the Nolachucky on the right, made the debatable ground of the upper valley. Whilst we held the barrier at Bull's Gap the enemy could not stay on the hither side of the Watauga, nor could we pass the river and stop short of a strong position an equal distance beyond.
We made a strong demonstration of cavalry supported by infantry, as if we were determined to cross the Watauga and push on into Virginia. The Confederate cavalry set fire to the bridge, as we expected them to do. One brigade was ordered to Jonesboro, to march back destroying all the railway bridges and tearing up and twisting the iron rails as far as possible. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. iii. pp. 477, 492.] With another force I began in person a similar work of destruction on the section nearest Bull's Gap. Time could only be given us for this work till the 27th of April, but on the evening of that day my division was reunited at the gap, having torn up and twisted about one third of the track over a space of fifty miles, and thoroughly destroyed all the wooden bridges. [Footnote: Id., pp. 500, 512.]
The footsore and sick were put on a railway train, and with the rest I began the march for Knoxville. As General Sherman was urgent for speed in our movement, the columns were kept near the railway and the trains were run to meet them, taking the men in detachments. The first day of May found us at Charleston, the crossing of the Hiwassee River, with two divisions of the Twenty-third corps and with General Schofield in our midst. A new division from Indiana was on its way, by rail, to join us at Cleveland, and it was certain that we could be in our place as left wing, before the 5th, the day assigned by Sherman. Two days were given to getting up and organizing our trains, and on Tuesday, the 3d, we marched at daybreak, with our field organization complete. The Atlanta campaign was begun. General Schofield went over to Chattanooga to meet Sherman, and the command of the corps on the march was committed to me. [Footnote: Id., xxxviii. pt. iv. pp. 5, 22, 32, 48.] On the 4th, leaving Cleveland, we crossed the Georgia line and advanced to Red Clay, where, with the Army of the Cumberland on our right, the union of Sherman's forces in the field was completed.