Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/657

170 duty, 1,400 Officers and 15,809 enlisted men, out of a grand total of 36,000 enrolled. Nearly half of these were cavalry. The organizations represented were sixty-one regiments, nine battalions and twelve batteries.

Maj. W. H. Dameron, chief commissary of subsistence, was finding trouble in obtaining supplies, and made a contract with a reliable person to purchase hogs within the enemy’s lines. Col. Frank P. Powers, commanding cavalry in southwest Mississippi, reported that trade in cotton was being carried on between Confederate citizens and soldiers, and the enemy. This procedure was not unknown to other parts of the State and was defended by General Chalmers, who declared that the Federals were essentially a trading nation, and would sell gunboats, he believed, and he was in favor of using the cotton to secure needed supplies for the army.

There now remains to be noted the services of Mississippi soldiers in the battles of 1863 of the army of Tennessee, and the career of those who served in the army of Northern Virginia.

In the cavalry operations in Tennessee early in 1863, the First and Twenty-eighth Mississippi cavalry regiments and the Fourth, Col. James Gordon, took a prominent part in Van Dorn's defeat and capture of Coburn's brigade at Thompson's Station, March 5th. Later in the same month the Fourth cavalry shared in the brilliant capture of the Federal force at Brentwood, by Forrest's command.

At the organization of Bragg's army preceding the battle of Chickamauga, the Fifth Mississippi, Lieut.-Col. W. L. Sykes, and the Eighth, Col. John C. Wilkinson, formed part of the brigade of John K. Jackson, Cheatham's division, Polk's corps. The artillery of this division, under command of Maj. Melancthon Smith, included Smith's battery, under Lieut. W. B. Turner, and Stanford's battery, Capt. Thomas J. Stanford. The Thirty-second and Forty-fifth Mississippi, under Col. M. P. Lowrey, and the