morning was gone.  Although General Ord must have been within four or six miles of this battle, he did not hear a sound; and he or General Grant did not know of it till advised the next morning by a courier who had made a wide circuit to reach them.  General Grant was much offended with General Rosecrans because of this affair, but in my experience these concerted movements generally fail, unless with the very best kind of troops, and then in a country on whose roads some reliance can be placed, which is not the case in Northern Mississippi.  If Price was aiming for Tennessee; he failed, and was therefore beaten.  He made a wide circuit by the south, and again joined Van Dorn.

On the 6th of September, at Memphis, I received an order from General Grant dated the 2d, to send Hurlbut’s division to Brownsville, in the direction of Bolivar, thence to report by letter to him at Jackson.  The division started the same day, and, as our men and officers had been together side by side from the first landing at Shiloh, we felt the parting like the breaking up of a family.  But General Grant was forced to use every man, for he knew well that Van Dorn could attack him at pleasure, at any point of his long line.  To be the better prepared, on the 23d of September he took post himself at Jackson, Tennessee, with a small reserve force, and gave Rosecrans command of Corinth, with his three divisions and some detachments, aggregating about twenty thousand men.  He posted General Ord with his own and Hurlbut’a divisions at Bolivar, with outposts toward Grand Junction and Lagrange.  These amounted to nine or ten thousand men, and I held Memphis with my own division, amounting to about six thousand men.  The whole of General Grant’s men at that time may have aggregated fifty thousand, but he had to defend a frontage of a hundred and fifty miles, guard some two hundred miles of railway, and as much river.  Van Dom had forty thousand men, united, at perfect liberty to move in any direction, and to choose his own point of attack, under cover of woods, and a superior body of cavalry, familiar with every foot of the ground.  Therefore General Grant had good reason for telegraphing to General Halleck, on the 1st of October, that his position was precarious, “but I hope to get out of it all right.”  In Memphis my business was to hold fast that important flank, and by that date Fort Dickering had been made very strong, and capable of perfect defense by a single brigade.  I therefore endeavored by excursions to threaten Van Dorn’s detachments to the southeast and east.  I repeatedly sent out strong detachments toward Holly Springs, which was his main depot of supply; and General Grierson, with his Sixth Illinois, the only cavalry I had, made some bold and successful dashes at the Coldwater, compelling Van Dorn to cover it by Armstrong’s whole division of cavalry.  Still, by the 1st of October, General Grant was satisfied that the enemy was meditating an attack in force on