Sept. 22, 1863. |
October. |
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beside, was about one hundred.1 Longstreet now nearly invested Knoxville, and began a close siege.
Wheeler, Forrest, and Pegram were sent to cut off Burnside's supplies and line of retreat.
While Longstreet was pressing the siege of Knoxville, stirring events occurred in the vicinity of Chattanooga, which had an important bearing upon the Confederate cause in East Tennessee.
Grant, as we have observed, intended to attack Bragg immediately after Longstreet left him, so as to relieve Burnside, but such was the condition of his army — not yet supplied with food and munitions of war, his artillery horses mostly broken down, and few others remaining fit for active cavalry service — that he was constrained to wait for the arrival of Sherman with the most of the Fifteenth Army Corps, then on the-line of the Memphis and Charleston railway, eastward of Corinth, repairing the road as' they moved toward Stevenson.
They were there in obedience to an order of General Grant, on the 22d of September, then at Vicksburg, to proceed immediately to the help of Rosecrans at Chattanooga.
Sherman's corps was then lying in camp along the line of the Big Black River.2 He was first directed to send only one division; and on the same afternoon Osterhaus was moving to Vicksburg, there to embark for Memphis.
On the following day
Sherman was ordered by Grant to the same destination, with the remainder of his corps.
Tuttle's division was left behind, with orders to report to General McPherson; and a division of the corps of the latter, under General J. E. Smith, already on the way to Memphis, was placed under Sherman's command.
The water was low in the Mississippi, and the vessels bearing the last of Sherman's troops did not reach Memphis until the 3d of October.
There he received instructions from Halleck to conduct his troops eastward, substantially along the line of the Memphis and Charleston railway, to Athens, in Alabama, and then report by letter to General Rosecrans, at Chattanooga.
The troops were moved forward, and on Sunday, the 11th,
Sherman left Memphis for Corinth, in the cars, with a battalion of the Thirteenth Regulars as an escort.
When, at noon, he reached the Colliersville Station, he found a lively time there.
About three thousand Confederate cavalry, with eight guns, under General Chalmers, had just attacked the Sixty-sixth Indiana (Colonel D. C. Anthony), stationed there.
Osterhaus had already pushed on to the front of Corinth, and had aroused to activity the Confederates in that region.
This attack was one of the first fruits.
With his escort Sherman helped beat off the assailants, and then, moving on, reached Corinth that night.
1 In this engagement Mr. Armstrong's house was considerably injured, it being filled with sharp-shooters, upon whom volleys of bullets were poured. These passed through windows and doors. When the writer visited and sketched the house, in the spring of 1866, he saw a bullet lodged in the back of a piano, and the blood-stains upon the stairs leading down from the tower, made by the ebbing of the life-current of a young amateur sharp-shooter, a nephew of Judge Gist, of Charleston, South Carolina, who had been amusing himself by firing from a window in the tower. He was shot between the eyes, the ball passing through his head and into the wall behind him. He died while his comrades were carrying him to a bedroom below.
2 The Fifteenth (Sherman's) Corps was composed of four divisions, commanded respectively by Generals B. J. Osterhaus, M. L. Smith, J. M. Tuttle, and Hugh Ewing.
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