, and characteristically he never sent it. Step
by step Meade moved on Lee's track into the enemy's country. Indecisive
manoeuvres on both sides continued over four months. Lee was forced over
the Rappahannock, then over the Rapidan; Meade followed him, found his
army in peril, and prudently and promptly withdrew. In December the two
armies went into winter quarters on the two sides of the Rappahannock to
await the opening of a very different campaign when the next spring was
far advanced.

The autumn months of 1863 witnessed in the Middle West a varying conflict
ending in a Northern victory hardly less memorable than those of
Gettysburg and Vicksburg. At last, after the fall of Vicksburg,
Rosecrans in Middle Tennessee found himself ready to advance. By skilful
manoeuvres, in the difficult country where the Tennessee River cuts the
Cumberland mountains and the parallel ranges which run from north-east to
south-west behind, he turned the flank of Bragg's position at Chattanooga
and compelled him to evacuate that town in the beginning of September.
Bragg, as he retreated, succeeded in getting false reports as to his
movements and the condition of his army conveyed to Rosecrans, who
accordingly followed him up in an incautious manner. By this time the
bulk of the forces that had been used against Vicksburg should have been
brought to support Rosecrans. Halleck, however, at first scattered them
for purposes which he thought important in the West. After a while,
however, one part of the army at Vicksburg was brought back to General
Burnside in Ohio, from whom it had been borrowed. Burnside accomplished
the very advance by Lexington, in Kentucky, over the mountains into
Eastern Tennessee, which Lincoln had so long desired for the relief of
the Unionists there, and he was able to hold his ground, defeating at
Knoxville a little later an expedition under Longstreet which was sent to
dislodge him. Other portions of the Western army were at last ordered to
join Rosecrans, but did not reach him before he had met with disaster.
For the Confederate authorities, eager to retrieve their losses, sent
every available reinforcement to Bragg, and he was shortly able to turn
back towards Chattanooga with over 71,000 men against the 57,000 with
which Rosecrans, scattering his troops in false security, was pursuing
him. The two armies came upon one another, without clear expectation,
upon the Chicamauga Creek beyond the ridge whic