Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/136

 130 Southern Historical Society Papers.

The losses of the Confederate forces from disease during the siege of Corinth equalled, if they did not exceed, the casualties of the battle of Shiloh.

General Beauregard, by his masterly evacuation of Corinth, eluded his powerful antagonist. The Armies of Mississippi and Tennessee, under the leadership of General Bragg, inaugurated the campaign of 1862 for the recovery of Tennessee and Kentucky.

At the battle of Perryville, Kentucky, October 8, 1862, the Army of Mississippi, under the command of General Leonidas Polk, lost, killed, five hundred and ten ; wounded, two thousand six hundred and thirty-five; missing, two hundred and fifty-one; total, three thousand three hundred and ninety-six.

In the Kentucky campaign of 1862, the Confederate troops under the command of Generals Braxton Bragg and E. Kirby Smith mani- fested their powers of endurance on long and fatiguing marches, and their excellent discipline in retreating in good order in the face of overwhelming hostile forces.

At the battle of Murfreesboro, December 31, 1862, and January I, 1863, the Confederate army lost nearly one-third of its number in killed and wounded.

General Bragg, in his official report of this battle, estimates the number of his fighting men in the field on the morning of the 3131 of December at less than thirty-five thousand, of which about thirty thousand were infantry and artillery. During the two days' fighting General Bragg's army lost one thousand six hundred killed and eight thousand wounded ; total, nine thousand six hundred killed and wounded.

From the 6th of April, 1862, to the close of the year 1863, the Army of Mississippi and Tennessee lost in the battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro and Chickamauga six thousand and forty-six killed on the field, and thirty-two thousand and thirty-five wounded ; total killed and wounded, thirty-eight thousand and eighty-one.

We do not include in this estimate the loss sustained at Perryville, in Bragg's Kentucky campaign, or in numberless skirmishes and cavalry engagements. More than fifty thousand wounded men were cared for by the medical officers of the Army of Tennessee during a period of less than twenty-one months.

The deaths from disease exceeded those Irom gun-shot wounds, and the sick from the camp diseases of armies greatly exceeded the wounded, in the proportion of about five to one ; and during the