CHAPTER XIV.

THE ARMY OF THE CENTRE.

As the army corps had relieved the commanders of departments from the care of the great mass of minor and personal details relating to the troops under them, so the organization of military divisions, now for the first time introduced into our service-although something similar had been intended when General McClellan was first called to Washington—left the generals selected to command them entirely free to devote their minds to the organization, administration, and movement of their armies against the enemy. Tactical details devolved upon the department commanders. The unit habitually contemplated by the commander of the military division became an army; his detachments were army corps.

The military division of the Mississippi, in the personal command of which Sherman had just relieved the lieutenantgeneral, consisted of the four large departments of the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and Arkansas. Embracing the great central belt of territory from the Alleghanies to the western boundary of Arkansas, it included the entire theatre of war from Chattanooga to Vicksburg. Four large Union armies occupied this central zone.

The army of the Ohio, consisting of the Ninth and Twentythird Army Corps, was at Knoxville. Major-General John M. Schofield had just taken command of it. Longstreet had disappeared from its front, and was retreating into Virginia to join Lee, and the Ninth Corps was on the way to re-enforce the army of the Potomac. The Twenty-third Corps, as it presently took the field, consisted of the divisions of Brigadier-Generals Miles S. Hascall and Jacob D. Cox. Three divisions remained to garrison East Tennessee and Kentucky.

The Army of the Cumberland was at Chattanooga, under the command of Major-General George H. Thomas. It consisted of the Fourth, Fourteenth, and Twentieth corps, commanded respectively by Major-Generals Oliver O. Howard, John M. Palmer, and Joseph Hooker. The Fourth Corps included the divisions of Brigadier-Generals D. S. Stanley, John Newton, and Thomas J. Wood; the Fourteenth, those of Jefferson C. Davis, R. W. Johnson, and Absalom Baird; and the Twentieth, those of A. S. Williams, John W. Geary, and Daniel Butterfield.

The Army of the Tennessee, comprising the Fifteenth, and portions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth corps, under Major-Generals John A. Logan, George M. Dodge, and Frank P. Blair, Jr., was at Huntsville, commanded by McPherson. The remaining divisions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Corps were at Memphis and Vicksburg, under Hurlbut and Slocum, except those absent on the Red River expedition. The Fifteenth Corps embraced the divisions of Generals P. J. Osterhaus, Morgan L. Smith, John E. Smith, and Harrow; the Sixteenth, those of Thomas E. G. Ransom, John M. Corse, and Thomas W. Sweeney; and the Seventeenth, those of Charles R. Woods and Miles D. Leggett.

The cavalry consisted of McCook's division of the Army of the Ohio, Kilpatrick's and Garrard's divisions of the Army of the Cumberland, and Edward McCook's brigade of the Army of the Tennessee.

The Department of Arkansas, including the whole of that State, was commanded by Major-General Frederick Steele, who, with the main portion of his troops, was at Little Rock, holding the line of the Arkansas River, with the object of keeping an army of the enemy away from the Mississippi and out of Missouri. This department, however, did not long continue attached to Sherman's command, being added to the Military Division of West Mississippi, under Canby, when that organization was formed in May.

John McAllister Schofield, the son of a clergyman, the Reverend James Schofield, residing in Chatauqua County, in