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[379] Mississippi.1 Hearing of this, on the 5th General Grant moved from Cairo and occupied Paducah. A few days afterward General Zollicoffer advanced with four Confederate regiments through Cumberland Gap to Cumberland Ford. The Union Legislature had met on the 2d. Resolutions were passed on the 11th requiring the governor to issue a proclamation ordering the Confederate troops to leave the State. They were promptly vetoed and promptly passed over the veto, and the proclamation was issued. In spite of the governor's opposition, acts were passed putting the State in active support of the Government. The governor was reduced to a nullity. General Robert Anderson who was assigned on May 28th to command the Department of Kentucky, was invited to remove his headquarters to Louisville, and the State's full quota of volunteers was called for, Recruiting was pushed with energy, and by the end of the year 28 regiments of infantry, 6 of cavalry, and 3 batteries had been organized. On September 15th General Albert Sidney Johnston assumed command of the Confederate forces in the West, and at once ordered General Buckner with five thousand men from Camp Boone and another camp in the vicinity to proceed by rail and occupy Bowling Green. Buckner reached that point early on the 18th, having sent in advance one detachment by rail to seize the bridge over Green River at Munfordsville, and another to go as far as Elizabethtown and bring back all the rolling-stock possible. This was successfully accomplished, a part of the advance detachment going as far as the bridge over the Rolling Fork of Salt River, within thirty-three miles of Louisville, and burning the bridge. Buckners movement was supposed in Louisville to have that city for its objective, and great excitement prevailed there. Rumor magnified his forces, but there was abundant ground for apprehension without that. General Anderson was in command, but he was without troops. The only forces in his department in Kentucky were the unorganized regiment of Colonel Buckner near Hopkinsville, the few hundred recruits gathered at Greensburg by General Ward, and Nelson's forces at Camp Dick Robinson,--none of which were ready for service,--the Home Guard Brigade of Louisville, and the scattered companies of Home Guards throughout the State. Opposite Louisville was Rousseau's camp, in which were some two thousand men not yet prepared for the field. Very few troops were in reach. Owing to the neutrality of Kentucky, the regiments recruited in Ohio, Indiana, and the North-west generally had been sent as fast as organized to the Potomac or Missouri armies. Fortunately, Governor Oliver P. Morton, of Indiana, had received information, about the 1st, which had led him to reserve a few regiments for Kentucky, and in response to General Anderson's appeal he hurried them forward. Anderson had learned of Buckner's intended advance the day it was made, and the non-arrival of the regular train from the south showed him that it had begun. The Home Guards of Louisville were at once ordered out for ten days, and, assembling at midnight, eighteen hundred of them under Colonel A. Y. Johnson, Chief of the Fire Department, started by rail for
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