reparing to fight one of the greatest battles of the war. At
Chickamauga, the "River of Death," he encountered Rosecrans. At the end
of two days of carnage the Union army was totally routed, right, left,
and center and hurled back from Georgia into Chattanooga. Polk's wing
captured twenty-eight pieces of artillery and Longstreet's twenty-one.
Eight thousand prisoners of war were taken, fifteen thousand stand of
arms and forty regimental colors.

Rosecrans' army of eighty thousand men was literally cut to pieces by
Bragg's fifty thousand Southerners. No more brilliant achievement of
military genius illumines history. Chickamauga was in every way as
desperate a battle as Arcola--and in all Napoleon's Italian campaigns
nothing more daring and wonderful was accomplished by the Man of
Destiny.

Bragg had justified the faith of Davis. Rosecrans was hemmed in in
Chattanooga, his supplies cut off and his army facing starvation when he
was relieved of his command, Thomas succeeding him. Grant was hurried to
Chattanooga with two army corps to raise the siege.

With his reenforcements Grant raised the siege, surprised and defeated
Bragg's army which had been weakened by the detachment of Longstreet's
corps for a movement on Knoxville.

Bragg withdrew his army again into Georgia and resigned his command. The
stern, irritable Confederate fighter was disgusted with the constant
attacks on him by peanut politicians and refused to hear Davis' plea
that he remain at the head of the Western army. The President called him
to Richmond and made him his Chief of Staff.

The disaster to the Confederacy at Chattanooga which gave General Grant
supreme command of the Union forces, brought to the Johnston junta at
Richmond its opportunity to once more press their favorite to the front.
Since his Vicksburg fiasco the President had isolated him. Davis
resisted this appointment with deep foreboding of its possible disaster
to the South.

In the midst of this bitter struggle over the selection of a Western
Field Commander, the President of the Confederacy received the first
and only recognition of his Government accorded by any European power.

His early education at the St. Thomas Monastery had given the Southern
leader a lofty opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. Davis had always
seen in the members of this faith in America friends who could not be
alienated from the oppressed.

Failing to receive recognition from the great powers of Euro