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| Region of military movements in Eastern Kentucky.1 |
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miles across Southern Kentucky, and within the Tennessee border from Cumberland Gap to Columbus on the Mississippi, that when General Thomas had accomplished the first part of the work he was sent to perform, it was thought expedient not to push farther, seriously, in the direction of East Tennessee just at that time.
It was evident that the Confederates were preparing to make an effort to seize Louisville, Paducah, Smithville, and Cairo, on the Ohio, in order to command the most important land and water highways in Kentucky, so as to make it the chief battleground in the West, as Virginia was in the East, and keep the horrors of war from the soil of the more Southern States.
As Charleston was defended on the
Potomac, so New Orleans was to be defended by carrying the war up to the banks of the Ohio.
Looking at a map of Kentucky and Virginia, and considering the attitude of the contending forces in each at that time, the reader may make a striking parallelism which a careful writer on the subject has pointed out.2
Governed by a military necessity, which changing circumstances had created, it was determined to concentrate the forces of Halleck and Buell in a grand forward movement against the main bodies and fortifications of the Confederates.
Thomas's victory at Mill Spring had so paralyzed that line eastward of Bowling Green, that it was practically shortened at least one-half.
Crittenden, as we have observed, had made his way toward Nashville, and left the Cumberland almost unguarded above that city; yet so mountainous was that region, and so barren of subsistence, that a flank movement
1 for an account of other movements in Eastern Kentucky, see chapter III. of this volume.
2 “If Washington was threatened in the one quarter, Louisville was the object of attack on the other. As Fortress Monroe was a great basis of operations at one extremity, furnishing men and arms, so was Cairo on the west; and as the one had a menacing neighbor in Norfolk, so had the other in Columbus. What the line of the Kanawha was to Northern Virginia, penetrating the mountainous region, the Big Sandy, with its tributaries emptying also in the Ohio, was to the defiles of Eastern Kentucky. What Manassas or Richmond was, in one quarter, to the foe, Bowling Green, a great railway center, was to the other. As Virginia was pierced on the east by the James and the Rappahannock and the York, so was Kentucky on the west by the Cumberland and Tennessee; and as the Unionists held Newport News [Newport-Newce], a point of great strategic importance at the mouth of one of these streams, so were they in possession of Paducah, a place of equal or greater advantage, at the entrance to another.” --History of the War for the Union, by E. A. Duyckinck.
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