im to hold on to all trains that arrived at Nashville
from Louisville, and to allow none to go back until he had secured
enough to fill the requirements of our problem. At the time he
only had about sixty serviceable locomotives, and about six hundred
cars of all kinds, and he represented that to provide for all
contingencies he must have at least one hundred locomotives and one
thousand cars. As soon as Mr. Guthrie, the President of the
Louisville & Nashville Railroad, detected that we were holding on
to all his locomotives and cars, he wrote me, earnestly
remonstrating against it, saying that he would not be able with
diminished stock to bring forward the necessary stores from
Louisville to Nashville. I wrote to him, frankly telling him
exactly how we were placed, appealed to his patriotism to stand by
us, and advised him in like manner to hold on to all trains coming
into Jeffersonville, Indiana. He and General Robert Allen, then
quartermaster-general at Louisville, arranged a ferry-boat so as to
transfer the trains over the Ohio River from Jeffersonville, and in
a short time we had cars and locomotives from almost every road at
the North; months afterward I was amused to see, away down in
Georgia, cars marked "Pittsburg & Fort Wayne," "Delaware &
Lackawanna," "Baltimore & Ohio," and indeed with the names of
almost every railroad north of the Ohio River. How these railroad
companies ever recovered their property, or settled their
transportation accounts, I have never heard, but to this fact, as
much as to any other single fact, I attribute the perfect success
which afterward attended our campaigns; and I have always felt
grateful to Mr. Guthrie, of Louisville, who had sense enough and
patriotism enough to subordinate the interests of his railroad
company to the cause of his country.

About this time, viz., the early part of April, I was much
disturbed by a bold raid made by the rebel General Forrest up
between the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers. He reached the Ohio
River at Paducah, but was handsomely repulsed by Colonel Hicks. He
then swung down toward Memphis, assaulted and carried Fort Pillow,
massacring a part of its garrison, composed wholly of negro troops.
At first I discredited the story of the massacre, because, in
preparing for the Meridian campaign, I had ordered Fort Pillow to
be evacuated, but it transpired afterward that General Hurlbut had
retained a small garrison at Fort Pillow to encourag