eral an analysis and review of these opinions, and urged an immediate movement against the enemy. For more than five months the army of Rosecrans had lain inactive at Murfreesboro', while the commanding general had haggled and bandied words. with the War Department. As chief of staff, General Garfield did all that adroit diplomacy could do to soften these asperities, and meanwhile give all his energy to the work of preparing the army for an advance, and ascertaining the strength of the enemy.

His Bureau of Military Information was the most perfect machine of the kind organized in the field during the war. When at last June came, the Government and the people demanding an advance, and the seventeen subordinate generals of Rosecrans advising against it, the analysis of the situation drawn up and submitted by General Garfield, met and overthrew them all. Speaking of this letter, Mr. Whitelaw Reid in his 'Ohio in the War,' says: 'This report we venture to pronounce the ablest military document known to have been submitted by a chief of staff to his superior during the war.' This is high praise, but it is history.

Twelve days after it was submitted, the army moved, against the will and opinion of Gene. 1 Crittenden and nearly all Rosecrans' leading officers. It marched into the Tullahoma campaign, one of the most perfectly planned and ably executed movements of the war. The lateness of the start, caused by the objections which General Garfield's letter finally overcame, alone saved Bragg's army from destruction.

There was a certain work to do, which might as well have been begun on the 1st of June as the 24th. Had it been begun on the first of these dates, Bragg's army might, in all probability, have been destroyed. As it was, the heavy rains intervened and saved him from pursuit.

With his military reputation thus strengthened, General Garfield went with his chief into the battle of Chickamauga. His influence over Rosecrans had by this time become almost supreme. His clear and comprehensive mind grasped every detail, and his opinions were invariably consulted on all important questions. He wrote many orders upon his own judgment, submitting them to Rosecrans for approval or alteration. On the field of Chickamauga, he wrote every order except one, and that one was the fatal order to General Wood which ruined Rosecrans' right wing and lost the battle. The order from Rosecrans to Wood, as the latter interpreted it, required him to move his command behind another division, leaving a wide gap in the line of McCook's corps, which held the right. Wood says that he knew this move would be fatal, but it was ordered and he felt impelled to execute it. Longstreet saw the blunder, hurled Hood's division into the gap, and within an hour McCook's corps was broken and streaming, a disorganized mob of men, back to Chattanooga. Trying vainly to check the tide of retreat, General Garfield was swept with his chief back beyond Rossville. But the chief of staff could not concede that defeat had been entire,

He heard the

roar of Thomas' guns on the left, and gained permission of Rosecrans to go round to that quarter and find the army of the Cumberland. While the commander busied himself with preparing a refuge at Chattanooga for his routed army, his chief of staff went back, accompanied only by a staff officer and a few orderlies, to find whatever part of the army still held its ground, and save what there was left. It was a perilous ride. Long before he reached Thomas one of his orderlies was killed. Almost alone he pushed on over the obstructed road, through pursuers and pursued, found the heroic Thomas encircled by fire, but still firm, told him of the disaster on the right, and explained how he could withdraw his right wing and fix it upon a new line to meet Longstreet's column, which had turned the right of Thomas' position and was marching in heavy column upon his rear. The movement was made just in time; but Thomas' line was too short, it would not reach to the base of the mountain. Longstreet saw the gap, drove his column into it and would have struck Thomas' line fatally in the rear, but in that critical moment General Gordon Granger came up with Steadman's division, which moved in heavy column, threw itself upon Longstreet, and after a terrific struggle, drove him back. The dead and wounded lay in heaps where those two columns met, but the army of General Thomas was saved. As night closed in upon the heroic army of the Cumberland, Generals Garfield and Granger, on foot and enveloped in smoke, directed the loading and pointing of a battery of Napoleon guns, whose