Rosecrans. It was now the
afternoon of the 17th of September. The battle of Chickamauga was to
begin in the early morning of the 19th and to end disastrously on
the 20th. One full day for the marching of troops was all that
intervened, or two at most, if they were only to reach the field
upon the second day of the battle. And where were Burnside's men?
One division at Greeneville and above, more than two hundred miles
from Chattanooga, and the other near New Market and Morristown, a
hundred and fifty miles. Burnside's "twenty-odd cars" were confined
to a section of the railroad less than eighty miles long, and could
hardly carry the necessary baggage and ammunition even for that
fraction of the way. The troops must march, and could not by any
physical possibility make a quarter of the distance before
Rosecrans's fate at Chickamauga should be decided. The authorities
at Washington must bear the responsibility for complete ignorance of
these conditions, or, what would be equally bad, a forgetfulness of
them in a moment of panic.

But Burnside did not know and could not guess that a battle was to
be fought so soon. All he could do was to prepare to carry out the
wishes of the War Department as speedily as could be, without the
total ruin of East Tennessee and all he had accomplished. Such ruin
might come by the fate of war if he were driven out by superior
force, but he would have been rightly condemned if it had come by
his precipitate abandonment of the country. He did more to carry out
Halleck's wish than was quite prudent. He stopped the troops which
had not yet reached Greeneville and ordered a countermarch. He
hastened up the country to make the attack upon the Confederates
with the force he already had in their presence, and then to bring
the infantry back at once, hoping the cavalry could hold in check a
defeated enemy.

The necessity of delivering a blow at General Jones was afterwards
criticised by Halleck, but it was in accordance with the sound rules
of conducting war. To have called back his troops without a fight
would have been to give the enemy double courage by his retreat, and
his brigades would have been chased by the exulting foe. They would
either have been forced to halt and fight their pursuers under every
disadvantage of loss of prestige and of the initiative, or have made
a precipitate flight which would have gone far to ruin the whole
command as well as the Tennessee people they had just liber