General Jenkins was ordered to inquire into the conduct of the brigades of position, and reported evidence that General Law had said that he did not care to win General Jenkins’s spurs as a major-general. He was ordered to prepare charges, but presently when we were ordered into active campaign in East Tennessee he asked to have the matter put off to more convenient time.
We may pause here to reflect upon the result of the combination against Rosecrans’s army in September, after our lines of transit were seriously disturbed, and after the severe losses in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Tennessee; and to consider in contrast the probable result of the combination if effected in the early days of May, when it was first proposed (see strategic map).
At that time General Grant was marching to lay siege upon Vicksburg. The campaign in Virginia had been settled, for the time, by the battle of Chancellorsville. Our railways were open and free from Virginia through East Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, to Central Mississippi. The armies of Rosecrans and Bragg were standing near Murfreesboro’ and Shelbyville, Tennessee. The Richmond authorities were trying to collect a force at Jackson, Mississippi, to drive Grant’s army from the siege. Two divisions of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia were marching from Suffolk to join General Lee at Fredericksburg. Under these circumstances, positions, and conditions, I proposed to Secretary Seddon, and afterwards to General Lee, as the only means of relief for Vicksburg, that Johnston should be ordered with his troops to join Bragg’s army; that the divisions marching for Fredericksburg should be ordered to meet Johnston’s, the transit over converging lines would give speedy combination, and Johnston should be ordered to strike Rosecrans in overwhelming numbers and march on to the Ohio River.
As the combination of September and battle of Chickamauga drew General Grant’s army from its work in Mississippi to protect the line through Tennessee and Kentucky, and two Federal corps from the Army of the Potomac, the inference is fair that the earlier, more powerful combination would have opened ways for grand results for the South, saved the eight thousand lost in defending the march for Vicksburg, the thirty-one thousand surrendered there, Port Hudson and its garrison of six thousand, and the splendid Army of Northern Virginia the twenty thousand lost at Gettysburg. And who can say that with these sixty-five thousand soldiers saved, and in the ranks, the Southern cause would not have been on a grand ascending grade with its bayonets and batteries bristling on the banks of the Ohio River on the 4th day of July, 1863!
The elections of 1862 were not in support of the Emancipation Proclamation. With the Mississippi River still closed, and the Southern army along the banks of the Ohio, the elections of 1864 would have been still more pronounced against the Federal policy, and a new administration could have found a solution of the political imbroglio. “Blood is thicker than water.”
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE EAST TENNESSEE CAMPAIGN.
General Bragg’s Infatuation—General Grant in Command of the Federal Forces—Longstreet ordered into East Tennessee—His Plans for the Campaign—Poorly supported by his Superior—Foraging for Daily Rations—General Burnside’s Forces—Advance upon Knoxville—Affairs at Lenoir’s and Campbell’s Stations—Engagement near Knoxville an Artillery Combat—Reprehensible Conduct of Officers—Allegement that One was actuated by Jealousy—Federals retire behind their Works—Laying the Confederate Lines about Knoxville.