, had declared the
count of the electoral vote whereby Lincoln was chosen President, and who
had left his seat in the United States Senate,--months after the outbreak
of hostilities,--to cast his fortunes with the South. Afterward, as
Confederate Secretary of War, he accompanied Jefferson Davis on his flight
from Richmond, and assisted Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in arranging the terms
for the surrender of the latter's army to William T. Sherman,--terms that
were repudiated by the Washington authorities.

Other notable figures in Bragg's army were the impetuous Gen. "Pat"
Cleburne, who was to lose his life in the wild charge on the
fortifications of Franklin two years later; Gen. John H. Morgan, the
Kentucky partisan raider, and Gen. Joseph Wheeler, the cavalry leader,
who had so managed the rear-guard in the retreat from Kentucky as to
preserve intact the rich booty of the "Blue Grass" region borne by the
retiring Confederates. Wheeler was one of the Southern generals who later
saw service under the "old flag" in the Spanish-American war, commanding a
division in Shafter's Army before Santiago.

Maj.-Gen. William S. Rosecrans was one of the contradictions of the war. A
graduate of West Point, he had resigned from the army and was practising
his profession of engineering, when the outbreak of hostilities called him
to arms again. He had achieved considerable success in 1861, when, having
taken up a work left unfinished by McClellan, he cleared the Confederates
out of West Virginia, thereby placing in temporary eclipse the military
reputation of Robert E. Lee. His assignment to the command of the Army of
the Cumberland was chiefly due to his defense of Corinth during the fall,
though he was criticised by Grant,--then his immediate superior,--for not
having achieved greater results in this engagement. As a strategist
Rosecrans was of the first order; indeed, one of his campaigns still
stands as a model for the study of professional soldiers. But brave,
warm-hearted, and impulsive, he was prone to lose his poise in battle, as
the melancholy outcome of Chickamauga was later to prove.

Rosecrans had divided his army into right wing, centre and left wing,--for
convenience designated as corps. The centre was commanded by Maj.-Gen.
George H. Thomas, the idol of the army, and probably the most complete
soldier that the Union produced. It was said of him that he never made a
mistake. At Mill Springs he had given the Union cause its