after a defeat. Again (it is a truth that will bear repetition) in revolutions, popular convulsions, political agitations – a method may be safely attempted which will be hazardous and of doubtful policy after actual war has commenced. In the former periods, enthusiasm runs higher, patriotism is more reckless and demonstrative than when the bayonets are about. The danger then is distant, and with the majority of men, when a general excitement is prevailing, the remote danger excites no fear. Many a patriot is willing to be Brigadier General of the peaceful militia, and to devote himself to a cause, from the stump, who would feel a strong and very natural reluctance to leave home, wife, children and property, to accept the hardships of a soldier's life, and be shot at whenever his officers feel enterprising.
If the sentiment of the people be not unanimous and very decided, the secret of success in revolutions is to captivate the popular fancy, give the first direction to the popular current. It is a struggle between the leaders, and the most audacious, not to say the least scrupulous, are apt to win.
It is unsafe, in such periods, to rely surely upon any sort of action from the people – it would be the mistake of supposing that every man, unshaken by any influence, had made up his mind, and knew what he was going to do, and that the majority by some instinct, would be immediately obeyed. A brave, honest, intelligent people will be likely, once convinced and committed, to abide gallantly by their decision. If their education has been wholesome, and their traditions unique, they will be stimulated by ordinary perils and disasters to increased energy and exertions.
But whether the revolutionary fermentation be in process, or the stand has been taken – it is easier to induce the masses of a people to vote for resolutions than to become soldiers.
It doubtless would have proven a successful policy, to have pushed Buckner instantly to Louisville, and Zollicoffer to Lexington, to stay as long as they were safe, and return with the recruits and the supplies that they could have collected, leaving behind them the positive assurance that the country was not inaccessible to Confederate troops. But to have taken the army into Northern Kentucky, upon the supposition that the unarmed population would arise and enable it to remain there – in the face of the threatening dangers and the almost positive certainty of instant battle – would have been a blind, unreasoning daring, which had no place among the qualities of General Johnson. The wisdom and prescience of the great commander were afterward so abundantly demonstrated, that we may be pardoned for believing his judgment right in this instance also.
In establishing his base at Bowlinggreen, he secured, as has been shown, a line well adapted to enable him to assume the offensive so soon as his army was sufficiently strong to do so with effect. The very fact of his moving into Kentucky at all was a pledge and guarantee to the people of his department, that, if sustained by them, he would keep the war out of their territory, and encouraged his army to hope for an active, dashing campaign. He placed himself where the more enterprising and determined of the Kentucky rebels could join him, and he spared no effort, no appeal, which could stimulate enlistment in his army among the young men of Kentucky, or of the States of his department.
That his appeals were neglected was not only his, but the Confederacy's deadly misfortune. Numerical weakness frustrated in September 1861, his plan to appear before the people, not only of Northern Kentucky, but of the Northwestern States, as the victor of a decisive battle, and, in the following February, forced him to retreat from Kentucky altogether. The first and most golden opportunity was lost; and the future history of the war in the West, was a series of terrible reverses to the Confederate arms, or of victories brilliant indeed, but, in the end, fruitless.
The condition of the Confederate troops was far better, in many respects, at this time, than at any subsequent period of the war.
There were, then, facilities and means for providing them with necessaries and comforts which more latterly did not exist. Provisions were abundant everywhere, and were regularly supplied.
The railroads, which were then, all in good repair and well provided with rolling stock, afforded sure means of supplying the troops which were stationed in those parts of the country through which they ran. The numerous navigable streams also afforded facilities, and practically shortened the routes of supply.
In all cases, however, in which neither the railways nor the rivers could be used to supply them, troops were compelled to depend for subsistence, in a great measure, upon the country immediately about their cantonments, and as they exhausted the surplus provisions in different neighborhoods, they would shift their encampments. This was owing to the great lack of wheel transportation. It was very difficult to procure wagons, except by purchase or impressment from the citizens, and those so gotten were of course inferior. Much less inconvenience was subsequently experienced on this score, after they began to be manufactured in the Confederate and were captured in great numbers from the enemy. At this time, many articles such as sugar, coffee, etc., indispensable to the comfort and conducive to the health of troops in the field, were plentifully furnished – after the first year of the war they were known among us only by camp-fire traditions. The men rarely suffered, then, from the want of clothing, blankets, shoes, etc., even when the quartermasters could not furnish them, for they could obtain them from home, or purchase them, wherever they happened to be quartered, at reasonable prices. There was, perhaps, no regiment in the army which had not its full complement of tents; they were manufactured at Memphis, and other points, in numbers adequate to the wants of all the troops.
Cooking utensils, also, could be had in abundance – the marching commands suffered, not from the want of them, but from the lack of transportation for them. It is true that those which were furnished us were not of the kind and pattern which experience has prescribed as most fitting for military use, but they were capital substitutes for flat stones and forked twigs.
In the medical department there was an almost total lack of the necessary material. The supply of medicines in the South at the outbreak of the war was barely sufficient for the wants of the population at that time. Some medicines were run through the blockade from the North, in small quantities, during the spring and summer of 1861. But the supply thus obtained by no means met the demand. The volunteers collected together in camps and crowded cantonments, subjected to a sudden change of diet and mode of living, sickened in great numbers. Diseases which had never before, or but in rare instances, proven dangerous, now assumed alarming types. The systems of the patients may have been relaxed and their vitality partially impaired, during the early period of camp life, when they were just foregoing their old habits and were not yet hardened to the new, or it may be that when men are congregated in great numbers, certain diseases, by transmission from one to another, may be cultivated into extraordinary malignancy – at any rate a large proportion of the inmates of every camp sickened and many died. At Bowlinggreen in the winter of 1861 and 1862, the mortality was dreadful, measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia and diseases of the bowels, carried off a host of victims – every sickness, however, seemed fatal at that time.
There was, consequently, a great and constantly increasing need of medicines; and, perhaps, some waste of them, when they were collected in large quantities and shipped from point to point, was unavoidable. But all these problems, all the difficulties of properly supplying the army, began to be solved and modified, as the genius of adaptation and substitution was developed among the troops themselves. If a man could not get a blanket, he made an old carpet, cut to the proper size and lined on one side with a piece of strong cotton cloth, serve him instead. The soldier who lacked shoes bid defiance to the rough roads, or the weather, in a pair of ox-hide buskins, or with complicated wrappings of rags about his feet. I have known more than one orderly sergeant make out his morning report upon a shingle, and the surgeon who lacked a tourniquet used a twisted handkerchief. Of the most necessary military material, arms and ordnance stores, there was the greatest scarcity. Perhaps one half of the entire western army (of all the troops in the department) were armed (at the time that General Johnson came) with shot-guns and squirrel rifles, and the majority of the other half with scarcely as serviceable flint-lock muskets.
The troops under General Bragg at Pensacola were
