ond and the South
and West.

General Albert Sidney Johnston was sent to meet these preparations,
with all the men that could be spared from Western Virginia and the
points adjacent to his line of operations. Still his force was very
inadequate in numbers and appointment; while to every application for
more men, the War Department replied that none could be spared him.

The Federal plan was to advance their armies along the watercourses,
simultaneously with their gunboats--light draught constructions
prepared expressly for such service; and, penetrating to any possible
point, there form depots with water communication to their base. The
Tennessee and Cumberland rivers were plainly their highways. The only
defenses of these streams were Forts Henry and Donelson--weak works
inefficiently garrisoned; for the half million appropriated by Congress
for their defense at the eleventh hour could not have been used in
time, even had the money been forthcoming from the treasury.

With scarcely a check to their progress, the Federals reduced and
passed Fort Henry on the 4th of February, pressing on to Donelson, into
and supporting which work, General Johnston had thrown General J. B.
Floyd with some ten thousand troops under Pillow and Buckner. After
three days' hard fighting, Floyd found the position untenable and
further resistance impossible. He, therefore, turned over the command
to Buckner--who refused to abandon the part of the garrison that could
not escape--and, with General Pillow and some five thousand men,
withdrew in the night and made good his escape.

During the siege of Donelson, Johnston evacuated Bowling Green and
awaited its issue opposite Nashville. The result being known, it
naturally followed that this city--undefended by works of any
description and with an army inadequate to its protection--had to be
abandoned. The retreat was at once commenced; and it was on that gloomy
march that Forrest first made the name that now stands with so few
rivals among the cavalry leaders of the world. Commanding a regiment of
cavalry from his own section, he seemed as ubiquitous as untiring.
Keeping a constant front to the enemy--now here, now there, and ever
cool, dauntless and unflinching--he gave invaluable aid in covering the
rear of that retreat. About this time, also, John H. Morgan began to
make his name known as a partisan chief; and no more thrilling and
romantic pages show in the history of the times, than those re