Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[479] having supervened, and his soldiers having eaten nothing since the day previous, he contented himself with firing a few cannonshots into the positions of the enemy. The Confederates, being entirely disorganized, were unable to defend them; they crossed to the other side of the Cumberland during the night, destroying the boats which carried them over, and afterwards dispersing among the mountains in order to procure food and to escape from all pursuit. On the morning of the 20th the Federals occupied their works and the camps adjoining them; they took possession of ten field-pieces and more than one thousand five hundred wagons. The Confederate army was annihilated.

During this short campaign Thomas displayed some of those military qualities which at a later period made him conspicuous among the foremost leaders. But he had to rest contented with this success; the condition of the roads and the inclemency of the weather rendered all pursuit impossible. Crittenden had retired by way of Monticello in the direction of Nashville, and part of his troops had gone towards Cumberland Gap. But to undertake to rescue East Tennessee from Confederate rule, to wrest from them the salt-works and the coal-fields which they possessed in the Cumberland Mountains, would have required an army sufficiently strong and well provisioned to advance alone through a difficult country without fear of being cut off or surrounded. Agents of the War Department, who had been sent on special missions into Kentucky, testified to the impracticability of such an enterprise, and the efforts of the Federals had to be directed elsewhere.

We have stated that Columbus, on the Mississippi, and Bowling Green, in the centre of Kentucky, were the two points upon which the Confederate line of defence rested. Polk's army, occupying Columbus, closed the great river against the Federals. That of Sidney Johnston, at Bowling Green, controlled the whole network of railways. Between these two points two large watercourses, the Tennessee and the Cumberland, ran parallel from south to north, the former to the left, the latter to the right, and finally emptied into the Ohio, one at Paducah, the other at Smithland, a little higher up. It was a road with two tracks, open in the most vulnerable part of the Confederate line. In order to