Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/98

 from southeastern Kentucky into eastern Tennessee. Burnside had not long been kept in retirement after leaving the Army of the Potomac, but in March was put in command of the Department of the Ohio, comprising all the States between the Alleghenies, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, as well as Kentucky, with headquarters at Cincinnati. During the spring and until late in the summer, he was occupied with suppressing active manifestations of rebel sympathy in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, fighting the rebel leader J. H. Morgan's new raid in July, and organizing an army for East Tennessee. He started from central Kentucky in the middle of August with about 15,000 men, organized as the Twenty-third Army Corps, and reached Knoxville on September 4 without having encountered the enemy. The Confederate troops in East Tennessee were under command of General Buckner and not much inferior to Burnside's, but withdrew down the Tennessee, fearing a front movement from him and a simultaneous one to their rear by the force detached from the Army of the Cumberland for the feint against Chattanooga hereinafter mentioned.

The Cumberland Mountains divide the waters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, and extend from eastern Tennessee in a general southwesterly direction to near Athens, Alabama, rising to a height of 1000 to 2000 feet. The chain is cleft in two, for fifty miles from where it abuts on the Tennessee, by the parallel valley of the Sequatchie River, with an average breadth not exceeding four miles. The portion of the Cumberland Mountains between the Sequatchie and the Tennessee bears the specific name of Walden's Ridge. Both the main range and the ridge are masses of rock, rising to a height of 1500 to 2000 feet, with steep sides furrowed by numerous ravines, and wide but broken and timbered crests. The average distance from the line occupied by the army to the Tennessee did not exceed from sixty-five to seventy miles, but the formidable natural barriers and the character of the means of communication