which
had the advantage of position, showed 37,700 ready for battle. The
Southern Army was greatly superior in cavalry, for this arm of the service
had not, as yet, received in the North the attention it warranted. On the
other hand, the Northern Army was greatly superior in artillery. While the
bulk of both armies was made up of veteran troops, each had considerable
percentages of raw levies.

Gen. Braxton Bragg had the advantage,--somewhat doubtful in his case,--of
long service with his Army of the Tennessee. He was a splendid organizer
and disciplinarian, thoroughly versed in the technique of his profession,
brave, honorable, devoted to his cause, and a strategist of no mean order.
But he united a high, imperious temper and a saturnine disposition with a
martinet's passion for the letter of military regulation and etiquette. As
a consequence, he was frequently embroiled with those near him in stations
of authority,--officers who did not hesitate to accuse him of finding
convenient scapegoats for his own errors. His controversies with those
under him form an interesting chapter of Confederate records. It is but
just to him to add that there were those that fought under him who
testified to warm admiration for his soldierly abilities and who
entertained high personal esteem for his qualities as a man.

Bragg's army was divided into two corps. One of these corps was commanded
by Lieutenant-General William J. Hardee, who had won a conspicuous
position in the Army of the United States before he had come to offer his
sword and talents to the Confederacy. He was the author of a book of
tactics employed in the United States Army long after the Civil War,--a
system said to have been founded on the drill regulations devised by
Napoleon. The other corps was commanded by Lieut.-Gen, Leonidas Polk, who
was Bragg's pet aversion, and who spent much of the next twelve months in
writing to Richmond about his superior and extricating himself from the
latter's orders of arrest.

General Polk had been educated at West Point, but had afterward entered
the Episcopal Ministry. When the war broke out he was Bishop of Louisiana;
but he speedily exchanged the surplice for the uniform, and attained high
rank in the Southern Army. He was a man of considerable warlike talent,
though perhaps short of first-grade.

One of Bragg's division commanders was Major-General John C. Breckinridge,
of Kentucky, who, as Vice-President of the United States