from Kentucky, which had indeed been to them "the dark and bloody ground." Columbus and Nashville were evacuated, and fell into our hands. Island No. 10 was invested, and the Tennessee river groaned beneath a mighty army afloat, the same that had conquered Donelson, under its popular leader, General Grant, and which, it was fondly hoped, would strike far away into the center of the rebel States. Throughout the North, men talked of the war as done, and speculated as to the terms of a peace that was soon to come.

But the end was not yet. The rebel leaders, who had embarked their all in this cause, and had pictured to themselves a magnificent slaveholding empire, stretching away from the Potomac to the Sierra Madre, in Mexico, and swallowing up all tropical America in one mighty nation, devoted to the interests of cotton and slavery alone, over which they should reign, were not yet satisfied to relinquish their cause as desperate, and abandon their glorious dreams. With a wonderful energy that must command our admiration, though it be only of the kind that is accorded to Satan as pictured in "Paradise Lost," they passed the conscription law, abandoned the posts they still held on the frontier, and concentrated their forces on a shorter line of defence.

The eastern part of this line extended from Richmond, through Lynchburg, to East Tennessee. In the west, it was represented by the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, extending from Memphis, through Corinth, Huntsville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, to Charleston. Here they poured forward their new levies, and began to prepare for another desperate contest.

The unaccountable inertness of the Eastern army of the Union, under McClellan, gave them time to strengthen their defences, and reinforce their army, which had dwindled to a very low ebb during the winter. But while the commander of the East was planning strategy that, by the slowness of its development, if by nothing worse, was destined to dim the lustre of the Union triumphs, and lose the results of a year of war, the West was in motion. Down the Mississippi swept our invincible fleet, with an army on shore to second its operations. Up the Tennessee steamed Grant's victorious army, and Buell, with forty thousand men, was marching across the State of Tennessee, to reach the same point. My own division, under the lamented General O. M. Mitchel, was also marching across the State, but in a different direction, having Chattanooga as its ultimate aim, while Morgan, with another strong force, many of whom were refugees from East Tennessee, lay before Cumberland Gap, ready to strike through that fastness to Knoxville, and thus reach the very heart of rebellion.

To meet these powerful forces, whose destination he could not altogether foresee, Beauregard, who commanded in the west, concentrated his main army at Corinth, with smaller detachments scattered along the railroad to Chattanooga. The railroads on which he relied for supplies and reinforcements, as well as for communication with the eastern portion of rebeldom, formed an irregular parallelogram, of which the northern side extended from Memphis to Chattanooga, the eastern from Chattanooga to Atlanta, the southern from Atlanta to Jackson, Mississippi, and the western, by a network of roads, from Jackson to Memphis. The great East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad, which has not inaptly been called "the backbone of the rebellion," intersected this parallelogram at Chattanooga. Thus it will be seen that to destroy the northern and eastern sides of this parallelogram isolated Beauregard, and left East Tennessee, which was then almost stripped of troops, to fall easily before General Morgan.

So important was this destruction of communication deemed by those in power, that it was at first intended to reach both sides, and destroy them by armies; but the distance was so great that the design of destroying it in this manner was abandoned.

However, just at this time, J. J. Andrews, who was a secret agent of the United States, and had repeatedly visited every part of the South, proposed another method of accomplishing the same object, by means of a secret military expedition, to burn the bridges on the road, and thus interrupt communication long enough for the accomplishment of the schemes which were expected to give rebellion in the southwest its death-blow. He first made the proposition to General Buell, who did not, for some reason, approve of it. Afterwards he repeated it to General Mitchel, who received it with more favor.

Our division was at this time lying at Murfreesboro', repairing some bridges that had been destroyed, preparatory to an onward march further into the interior. All at once, eight men were detailed from our regiment—four of them from my own company. No one knew anything of their object or destination, and numberless were the conjectures that were afloat concerning them. Some supposed they had gone home to arrest deserters; others, that they were deserters themselves. But this last idea was contradicted by the fact that they were seen in close and apparently confidential communication with the officers just before their departure, as well as by the character of the men themselves, who were among the boldest and bravest of the regiment. Many supposed that they were sent into the enemy's country as spies; but the idea of sending such a number of spies from the privates in the ranks was so obviously absurd, that I did not seriously consider it. However, I was not long to remain in uncertainty, for an officer, who was an intimate friend of mine, revealed the secret to me. The enterprise was so grand and so audacious, that it instantly charmed my imagination, and I at once went to Colonel L. A. Harris, of the Second Ohio, and asked, as a favor from him, that if any detail was made for another expedition of the same kind, I should be placed on it.

Soon after, one of the party, from Company C, returned, and reported that he had ventured as far as Chattanooga, and there had met a Confederate soldier who recognized him as belonging to the Union army; and while, for the sake of old friendship, he hesitated to denounce him to the authorities, yet advised him to return, which he immediately did, and arrived safely in camp in a few days. He would give no details that might embarrass his companions, who were still pressing their way onward into the Confederacy.

A short time after this, all the party came back, and I received full details of their trip to the center of rebeldom. They had proceeded in citizens' dress, on foot and unsuspected, to Chattanooga; there had taken the cars for Atlanta, where they arrived in safety. Here they expected to meet a Georgia engineer, who had been running on the State road for some time, and, with his assistance, intended to seize the passenger train, at breakfast, and run through to our lines, burning all the bridges in their rear. For several days they waited for him, but he came not. They afterwards learned that he had been pressed to run troops to Beauregard, who was then concentrating every available man at Corinth, in anticipation of the great battle which afterwards took place. Thus foiled, and having no man among them capable of running an engine, they abandoned the enterprise for that time, and quietly stole back to our lines. Had an engineer then been along, they would, in all probability, have been successful, as the obstacles which afterward defeated us did not then exist.

Our camp had been moved onward from Murfreesboro' to Shelbyville, which is a beautiful little city, situated on Duck river. We camped above the town, in a delightful meadow.

It was Sabbath, the 6th of April, and the earliness of the clime made the birds sing, and the fields bloom with more than the brilliancy of May in our own northern land. Deeply is the quiet of that Sabbath, with the green beauty of the warm spring landscape, pictured on my mind! An impression, I know not what, made me devote the day to writing letters to my friends. It was well I did so, for long and weary months passed