rned by way of Franklin to my old camp at Murfreesboro',
passing over on this march the ground on which the Confederate
General Hood met with such disaster the following year in his attack
on Stanley's corps.

My command had all returned from the Franklin expedition to
Murfreesboro' and gone into camp on the Salem pike by the latter part
of March, from which time till June it took part in only the little
affairs of outposts occurring every now and then on my own front. In
the meanwhile General Rosecrans had been materially reinforced by the
return of sick and wounded men; his army had become well disciplined,
and was tolerably supplied; and he was repeatedly pressed by the
authorities at Washington to undertake offensive operations.

During the spring and early summer Rosecrans resisted, with a great
deal of spirit and on various grounds, these frequent urgings, and
out of this grew up an acrimonious correspondence and strained
feeling between him and General Halleck. Early in June, however,
stores had been accumulated and other preparations made for a move
forward, Resecrans seeming to have decided that he could safely risk
an advance, with the prospect of good results. Before finally
deciding, he called upon most of his corps and division commanders
for their opinions on certain propositions which he presented, and
most of them still opposed the projected movement, I among the
number, reasoning that while General Grant was operating against
Vicksburg, it was better to hold Bragg in Middle Tennessee than to
push him so far back into Georgia that interior means of
communication would give the Confederate Government the opportunity
of quickly joining a part of his force to that of General Johnson in
Mississippi.

At this stage, and in fact prior to it, Rosecrans seemed to manifest
special confidence in me, often discussing his plans with me
independent of the occasions on which he formally referred them for
my views. I recollect that on two different occasions about this
time he unfolded his designs to me in this informal way, outlining
generally how he expected ultimately to force Bragg south of the
Tennessee River, and going into the details of the contemplated move
on Tullahoma. His schemes, to my mind, were not only comprehensive,
but exact, and showed conclusively, what no one doubted then, that
they were original with him. I found in them very little to
criticise unfavorably, if we were to move at all, an