Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 4.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[205] breaks the line of the Confederates, who are then put to flight, leaving four pieces of artillery in Crook's hands. The arrival of Wheeler with Martin's division saves the train, which under the escort of Wharton takes the direction of Lewisburg. Each side loses from two hundred to three hundred men in this fight.

The Southerners all along the line take advantage of the night to resume their march, and this time, having no longer anything to destroy, they leave the Federals at a good distance behind. Wheeler, strewing the road with exhausted or dismounted cavalrymen, deserters, and broken wagons, succeeds in reaching the bank of the Tennessee at Rogersville, and after having lost some seventy men in his last engagement, he fords the river on the morning of the 9th over the shallows called Muscle Shoals, already known to our readers. His men are fagged out and his horses unfit for service, having hardly been unsaddled at any time during the past ten days. He has left behind him some wounded men and stragglers, many deserters, and all the prisoners whom he had captured. But in compensation for these sacrifices he has inflicted upon the enemy heavy losses, the consequences of which may prove disastrous. The destruction of the long train at Anderson, the depots at McMinnville, and the railway between Murfreesborough and Wartrace is quickly felt at Chattanooga. The supplies of provisions upon which Rosecrans was counting have failed him for several days; he is obliged to exhaust his depots, reduce men and horses to half-rations, and, the rain coming at the same time making the roads muddy, he will be constrained to subsist from hand to mouth in a condition of dearth which the least accident might transform into a famine.

Such a state of things might be brought on, for instance, by the destruction of the tunnel at Cowan, which Roddey attempts at the moment when Wheeler recrosses the Tennessee. Roddey passes the river at Guntersville on the 10th, and, moving by Maysville and New Market, proceeds toward Salem, where he expects to reach Cowan. But he learns on the 12th that Wheeler is no longer in those parts, and that Mitchell, returning to Bridgeport, chances to be between himself and the river. He immediately retraces his steps, encounters in the night Crook's vanguard, that had followed his tracks from the vicinity of Guntersville, and,