the field for special gallantry, and afterward in official reports.  Still, I did feel a sense of relief when he left us.  We were then two hundred and fifty miles in advance of our base, dependent on a single line of railroad for our daily food.  We had a bold, determined foe in our immediate front, strongly intrenched, with communication open to his rear for supplies and reenforcements, and every soldier realized that we had plenty of hard fighting ahead, and that all honors had to be fairly earned.

Until General Slocum joined (in the latter part of August), the Twentieth Corps was commanded by General A. S. Williams, the senior division commander present.  On the 25th of July the army, therefore, stood thus:  the Army of the Tennessee (General O. O. Howard commanding) was on the left, pretty much on the same ground it had occupied during the battle of the 22d, all ready to move rapidly by the rear to the extreme right beyond Proctor’s Creek; the Army of the Ohio (General Schofield) was next in order, with its left flank reaching the Augusta Railroad; next in order, conforming closely with the rebel intrenchments of Atlanta, was General Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, in the order of—­the Fourth Corps (Stanley’s), the Twentieth Corps (Williams’s), and the Fourteenth Corps (Palmer’s).  Palmer’s right division (Jefferson C. Davis’s) was strongly refused along Proctor’s Creek.  This line was about five miles long, and was intrenched as against a sally about as strong as was our enemy.  The cavalry was assembled in two strong divisions; that of McCook (including the brigade of Harrison which had been brought in from Opelika by General Rousseau) numbered about thirty-five hundred effective cavalry, and was posted to our right rear, at Turner’s Ferry, where we had a good pontoon-bridge; and to our left rear, at and about Decatur, were the two cavalry divisions of Stoneman, twenty-five hundred, and Garrard, four thousand, united for the time and occasion under the command of Major-General George Stoneman, a cavalry-officer of high repute.  My plan of action was to move the Army of the Tennessee to the right rapidly and boldly against the railroad below Atlanta, and at the same time to send all the cavalry around by the right and left to make a lodgment on the Macon road about Jonesboro.

All the orders were given, and the morning of the 27th was fixed for commencing the movement.  On the 26th I received from General Stoneman a note asking permission (after having accomplished his orders to break up the railroad at Jonesboro) to go on to Macon to rescue our prisoners of war known to be held there, and then to push on to Andersonville, where was the great depot of Union prisoners, in which were penned at one time as many as twenty-three thousand of our men, badly fed and harshly treated.  I wrote him an answer consenting substantially to his proposition, only modifying it by requiring him to send back General Garrard’s division to its