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

Burnside, absorbed in his chase after Morgan, no longer thought of delivering East Tennessee, and to the four weeks during which the Southern partisan had kept all of Burnside's troops on a rush, two were to be added to bring these troops back to the Cumberland Valley. Burnside would have liked to wait for the return of his old corps, the Ninth, sent to the assistance of Grant in the first days of June; but this body, detained at first on account of the brief campaign against Johnston, and subsequently by inexplicable delays, was being uselessly decimated by fever and dysentery on the sickly banks of the lower Mississippi. Grant's army also was wholly in like circumstances. In consequence of great and prolonged fatigue in a debilitating climate, it had been seized throughout its ranks with a feeling of weariness. It no longer had before it a serious enemy to stimulate its ardor. It would have promptly recovered this ardor if it had received orders to go on other battlefields to seek new adversaries; but such orders, which the fortunate victor of Vicksburg could not yet issue, came neither from the White House nor from the War Department.

With the exception of details as laborers on the railroad which were relieved from time to time, Rosecrans' infantry remained inactive. In the mean while his cavalry made an expedition south; but instead of seeking the enemy to fight him, it was content to subsist on the country, to pick up horses, and enroll in its ranks runaway negroes. Two columns, started from the neighborhood of Salem near Winchester, repaired on the 12th and the 13th of July, the one to New Market, the other, via Fayetteville and Pulaski, to Athens, where it met some of the enemy's cavalry, and the two columns united under the orders of General Stanley at Huntsville in Alabama. On the 23d they had returned to their quarters. The strict orders issued by Stanley to forbid pillage on the part of his soldiers would lead one to believe that their previous conduct rendered such orders necessary.

The authorities at Washington took no notice of Rosecrans' requests. Grant and Burnside not only did not prepare to support him, but he was receiving no reinforcement either from the army on the Mississippi or the camps of instruction. The superiors of General Rosecrans even denied him the authority to raise,