Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[456] were in momentary expectation of battle, already over-matched by numbers, and in the face of an enemy drawing reinforcements from every quarter), and that this veteran commander, with the best part of the army, had gone to Knoxville to attack Burnside, and with the visionary project of regaining East Tennessee, and perhaps through its gateways again penetrating Kentucky, and making the battle-ground of the Confederacy in this impossible country.

This extraordinary military movement was the work of President Davis, who seems, indeed, to have had a singular fondness for erratic campaigns. His visits to every battle-field of the Confederacy were ominous. He disturbed the plans of his generals; his military conceit led him into the wildest schemes; and so much did he fear that the public would not ascribe to him the hoped — for results of the visionary project, that his vanity invariably divulged it, and successes were foretold in public speeches with such boastful plainness, as to put the enemy on his guard and inform him of the general nature of the enterprise. On the 12th October President Davis visited the field of Chickamauga. He planned the expedition against Knoxville. He was in furious love with the extraordinary design, and in a public address to the army he could not resist the temptation of announcing that “the green fields of Tennessee would shortly again be theirs.”

The announcement of this enterprise alone remained to determine Grant to attack. Burnside was instructed to lure Longstreet to Knoxville, and retire within his fortifications, where he could stand a protracted siege. Lookout Mountain had been evacuated by the Confederates, and Bragg had moved his troops up to the top of Missionary Ridge.

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The battle of Missionary Ridge.

On the 25th November, the enemy prepared for the grand assault, Sherman's force having come up, and occupied the northern extremity of Missionary Ridge. Hooker had scaled the rugged height of Lookout Mountain, and the Federal forces maintained an unbroken line, with open communications, from the north end of this dizzy eminence, through Cheat Valley, to the north end of Missionary Ridge. There were more than eighty thousand veteran troops in this formidable line. The Confederate army, numbering not half so many, had yet a position that should have decided the day. They held the crest of the ridge, from McFarlan's Gap almost to the mouth of the Chickamauga; the position was four to six hundred feet in elevation; and it had been strengthened by breastworks wherever the ascent was easy. The position was such that the enemy was