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By Root 1727 0

rains ever known to Tennessee at that period of the year” came down to turn the soil into a spongy quagmire and to make unpaved roads nearly impassable. The rain kept on, hour after hour and day after day, with no letup: “No Presbyterian rain, either, but a genuine Baptist downpour,” an Illinois soldier called it. Men in the 6th Indiana remembered making a night march on a mountain road beside which flowed a little stream, swollen now to a torrent that covered the roadway so that the men marched sometimes in water thigh-deep, everything dark as the pit, rain pelting down mercilessly, men tripping over submerged boulders or stepping into invisible potholes. “It rained so much and so hard,” wrote one soldier, “that we ceased to regard it as a matter of any consequence and simply stood up and took it, without attempting to seek shelter or screen ourselves in the least. Why should we, when we were already wet to the skin?”11

Over one especially bad stretch of mountain road an entire brigade of infantry was ordered to stack arms and then take station along the road all the way to the summit to help the supply wagons get up the grade. As a wagon or a gun came along, a rope would be attached and a whole regiment would help the mules or horses up the grade, turning the vehicle over to another regiment when it reached the end of its assigned beat and going back downhill to get another. It was fun for a while — it was at least different from ordinary marching — and the men treated it as a lark; but it kept on without a break, day and night, and the soldiers at last began to realize that “it requires a great many wagons to carry 20 days rations for men and animals, in addition to ammunition, medical supplies and other things required by an army.” The work went on from a Sunday evening to a Tuesday morning, with regiments working in shifts; during the nights flickering torches sputtered in the rain to light the way. Rosecrans recalled afterward that it took Crittenden’s army corps four days of extra-hard marching to advance twenty-one miles. When Bragg finally retreated and the Federals settled down in his old camping ground at Tullahoma, the men were able to get their boots off for the first time since they had left Murfreesboro, and one soldier confessed that “it would be hard to find a worse set of used-up boys.”12

Yet there were compensations. Veterans of the 104th Illinois remembered being in camp in the Elk River valley, rain still coming down, everything muddy and sopping, camping ground itself no more than just above water; and suddenly officers rode through announcing that Grant had captured Vicksburg, and the mountain gorge rang with cheers. As they yelled the men realized that their own hard marching had been a victory too, with the last armed Rebels chased out of central Tennessee and the road to Chattanooga now lying open; and they forgot about discomfort, short rations, and bad weather, and set about getting the mud off their clothing and making ready for the next move.13

The army waited in Tullahoma for nearly two weeks while Rosecrans carried on another long-distance argument with Washington. He was well aware that as Bragg retreated he would be reinforced, and he reasoned that since the Federal army which had just captured Vicksburg had nothing in particular to do it might as well move east and cover his own right flank when he resumed the advance. (Grant was arguing in much the same vein; if he should march on Mobile, he believed, Bragg could not conceivably stay around Chattanooga to fight Rosecrans, and all of the Deep South could be overrun before autumn.) But Halleck had other ideas, and Rosecrans was ordered to keep going. Only one concession was made, and it did not prove very valuable: Burnside was getting together an army of fifteen thousand men with which he would move down through eastern Tennessee and attack Knoxville, where the Confederates had troops under the same General Buckner who had surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson.

On August 16 Rosecrans put his men on the road again. The rains had stopped