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Rh cerned, lost to the Confederacy, but the question now was whether the war was not to be transferred from the ground west of the mountains to the rich fields of Georgia. Bragg had been compelled to fall back with most of his forces to Chattanooga, and had been expelled from that place, which was now in the hands of the Federals. All efforts on the part of the Federals to advance beyond Chattanooga, however, had utterly failed, and the opinion, at the time of which I am writing, was gaining ground that they had been caught in a trap, and would, in a short time, be incapable of either advancing or retreating.

While I was in the hospital, Bragg gained his great victory at Chickamauga, and great hopes were excited that he would be able to follow it up with effect, and succeed in destroying the army of Rosecrans. Had he succeeded in doing this, the war would have had a different ending, and the independence of the South would have been secured. It was felt by every body that the pinch of the fight was approaching, and that in the neighborhood of Chattanooga, rather than in that of Richmond, would the decisive battle of the war be fought, and, it was hoped, won for the Confederacy.

It was at Richmond and at Chattanooga that the contending forces were massed, although there was plenty of fighting going on elsewhere, and some of these minor campaigns were of great importance in their influence on the fortunes of the war, and did much to enable the Confederacy to prolong the contest for nearly eighteen months.

Much as we had lost, the situation was not an altogether discouraging one for the Confederacy. Richmond was apparently more secure than it had been two years and a half before, and nearly all the honors of the war in that vicinity had been carried off by the Confederates. Lee was making himself a name as one of the greatest generals of the age, while the Federals, although they changed the commanders of their army continually, were making no headway against him, and were in constant fear of an invasion of their own territory. In the South, Bragg had just achieved a great victory over Rosecrans, and had him now penned up in Chattanooga, from which it was next to impossible for him to escape in either direction, and to keep him there, and either fight him: or starve him into surrendering before sufficient re-enforcement to enable him to assume the offensive, was the task the Confederate army had before it.