greater powers of organization, of action, and discipline—­but naturally exacting and severe, and not possessing the qualities to attract the love of his officers and men.  He had a hard task to bring into order and discipline that mass of men to whose command he succeeded at Tupelo, with which he afterward fairly outmanoeuvred General Buell, and forced him back from Chattanooga to Louisville.  It was a fatal mistake, however, that halted General Halleck at Corinth, and led him to disperse and scatter the best materials for a fighting army that, up to that date, had been assembled in the West.

During the latter part of June and first half of July, I had my own and Hurlbut’s divisions about Grand Junction, Lagrange, Moscow, and Lafayette, building railroad-trestles and bridges, fighting off cavalry detachments coming from the south, and waging an everlasting quarrel with planters about their negroes and fences —­they trying, in the midst of moving armies, to raise a crop of corn.  On the 17th of June I sent a detachment of two brigades, under General M. L. Smith, to Holly Springs, in the belief that I could better protect the railroad from some point in front than by scattering our men along it; and, on the 23d, I was at Lafayette Station, when General Grant, with his staff and a very insignificant escort, arrived from Corinth en route for Memphis, to take command of that place and of the District of West Tennessee.  He came very near falling into the hands of the enemy, who infested the whole country with small but bold detachments of cavalry.  Up to that time I had received my orders direct from General Halleck at Corinth, but soon after I fell under the immediate command of General Grant and so continued to the end of the war; but, on the 29th, General Halleck notified me that “a division of troops under General C. S. Hamilton of ‘Rosecrans’s army corps,’ had passed the Hatchie from Corinth,” and was destined for Holly Springs, ordering me to “cooperate as far as advisable,” but “not to neglect the protection of the road.”  I ordered General Hurlbut to leave detachments at Grand Junction and Lagrange, and to march for Holly Springs.  I left detachments at Moscow and Lafayette, and, with about four thousand men, marched for the same point.  Hurlbut and I met at Hudsonville, and thence marched to the Coldwater, within four miles of Holly Springs.  We encountered only small detachments of rebel cavalry under Colonels Jackson and Pierson, and drove them into and through Holly Springs; but they hung about, and I kept an infantry brigade in Holly Springs to keep them out.  I heard nothing from General Hamilton till the 5th of July, when I received a letter from him dated Rienzi, saying that he had been within nineteen miles of Holly Springs and had turned back for Corinth; and on the next day, July 6th, I got a telegraph order from General Halleck, of July 2d, sent me by courier from Moscow, “not to attempt to hold Holly Springs, but to fall back and protect the railroad.”  We accordingly marched back twenty-five miles—­Hurlbut to Lagrange, and I to Moscow.  The enemy had no infantry nearer than the Tallahatchee bridge, but their cavalry was saucy and active, superior to ours, and I despaired of ever protecting a railroad, preventing a broad front of one hundred miles, from their dashes.