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Updated: May 28, 2025
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.
General Buell immediately set about reorganizing the whole force, and on September 29 issued an order designating the troops under my command as the Eleventh Division, Army of the Ohio, and assigning Brigadier-General J. T. Boyle to command the division, and me to command one of its brigades.
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.
Grant, before the Army of the Cumberland, under Buell, could come to his assistance. At the second battle of Bull Run Gen. Pope claimed that Porter was within sound of his guns, yet he remained inactive. At Pittsburg Landing it was claimed by military men that Gen. Buell could have made a junction with Grant twenty-four hours sooner and thereby saved a terrible loss of life had he chosen to do so.
If there had been no Fred Shackelford I should have borne the news to General Johnston that Buell would join Grant by the fifth, and Johnston would have made his attack a couple of days earlier. I was bearing the news to Johnston that Nelson would reach Savannah by the fifth when I was captured.” “Captured?” echoed Morgan, in surprise.
Reinforcements were arriving daily and as they came up they were organized, first into brigades, then into a division, and the command given to General Prentiss, who had been ordered to report to me. General Buell was on his way from Nashville with 40,000 veterans. On the 19th of March he was at Columbia, Tennessee, eighty-five miles from Pittsburg.
Those from officers of the Army of the Tennessee were sent through me; but from the Army of the Ohio they were sent by General Buell without passing through my hands. General Halleck ordered me, verbally, to send in my report, but I positively declined on the ground that he had received the reports of a part of the army engaged at Shiloh without their coming through me.
These events were watched in the North with all the more anxiety because the Confederate invasion of Kentucky began just about the time of the second battle of Bull Run, and Buell arrived at Louisville within a week after the battle of Antietam while people were wondering how that victory would be followed up.
On the same day Buell telegraphed: "... The establishment of your force on this side of the river, as high up as possible, is evidently judicious.... I can join you almost, if not quite as soon, by water, in better condition and with greater security to your operations and mine. I believe you cannot be too promptly nor too strongly established on the Tennessee.
But Johnston, in an aggressive mood, laid well and boldly his plan to whip Grant before Buell could join him, then to whip Buell, and, having thus disposed of the Northern forces in detail, to carry the war up to, or even across, the Ohio.
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