in our rear, making it necessary to guard every point of the railroad back to Columbus, on the security of which we were dependent for all our supplies.  Headquarters were connected by telegraph with all points of the command except Memphis and the Mississippi below Columbus.  With these points communication was had by the railroad to Columbus, then down the river by boat.  To reinforce Memphis would take three or four days, and to get an order there for troops to move elsewhere would have taken at least two days.  Memphis therefore was practically isolated from the balance of the command.  But it was in Sherman’s hands.  Then too the troops were well intrenched and the gunboats made a valuable auxiliary.

During the two months after the departure of General Halleck there was much fighting between small bodies of the contending armies, but these encounters were dwarfed by the magnitude of the main battles so as to be now almost forgotten except by those engaged in them.  Some of them, however, estimated by the losses on both sides in killed and wounded, were equal in hard fighting to most of the battles of the Mexican war which attracted so much of the attention of the public when they occurred.  About the 23d of July Colonel Ross, commanding at Bolivar, was threatened by a large force of the enemy so that he had to be reinforced from Jackson and Corinth.  On the 27th there was skirmishing on the Hatchie River, eight miles from Bolivar.  On the 30th I learned from Colonel P. H. Sheridan, who had been far to the south, that Bragg in person was at Rome, Georgia, with his troops moving by rail (by way of Mobile) to Chattanooga and his wagon train marching overland to join him at Rome.  Price was at this time at Holly Springs, Mississippi, with a large force, and occupied Grand Junction as an outpost.  I proposed to the general-in-chief to be permitted to drive him away, but was informed that, while I had to judge for myself, the best use to make of my troops was not to scatter them, but hold them ready to reinforce Buell.

The movement of Bragg himself with his wagon trains to Chattanooga across country, while his troops were transported over a long round-about road to the same destination, without need of guards except when in my immediate front, demonstrates the advantage which troops enjoy while acting in a country where the people are friendly.  Buell was marching through a hostile region and had to have his communications thoroughly guarded back to a base of supplies.  More men were required the farther the National troops penetrated into the enemy’s country.  I, with an army sufficiently powerful to have destroyed Bragg, was purely on the defensive and accomplishing no more than to hold a force far inferior to my own.