General Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations During the Civil War

[279] sources of supply of grain were nearer. In that connection, I find, in a letter to the President dated January 15th, this passage: “Since my arrival, very little long forage has been received, and nothing like full rations of corn — that weevil-eaten. The officer commanding the artillery of a division that I inspected to-day reported that his horses had had but thirteen pounds each, of very bad corn, in the last three days.”

In the course of the inspection made as soon as practicable, I found the condition of the army much less satisfactory than it had appeared to the President on the 23d of December. There was a great deficiency of blankets; and it was painful to see the number of bare feet in every regiment. In the letter quoted in the last paragraph, the President was informed that two of the four brigades inspected by me that day were not in condition to march, for want of shoes. There was a deficiency, in the infantry, of six thousand small-arms. The artillery-horses were generally still so feeble from long, hard service and scarcity of forage, that it would have been impossible to manoeuvre our batteries in action, or to march with them at any ordinary rate on ordinary roads. It was long before they could draw the guns through fields. Early in February, when the supply of forage had become regular, and the face of the country almost dry, after the review of a corps, the teams of the Napoleon guns were unable to draw them up a trifling hill, over which the road to their stables passed.

On the 15th and 16th, Quarles's and Baldwin's brigades, “the last two sent from Mississippi,” returned