On The Nineteenth Of January, One Wing Of General Buell's Army, Under General Thomas, Had Defeated The Secessionists Near Somerset, In The Southeastern District Of Kentucky, Under General Zollicoffer, Who Was There Killed.

But in that action the attack was made by Zollicoffer and the secessionists.

When we were at Louisville we heard of the success of that gun-boat expedition up the Tennessee river by which Fort Henry was taken. Fort Henry had been built by the Confederates on the Tennessee, exactly on the confines of the States of Tennessee and Kentucky. They had also another fort, Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River, which at that point runs parallel to the Tennessee, and is there distant from it but a very few miles. Both these rivers run into the Ohio. Nashville, which is the capital of Tennessee, is higher up on the Cumberland; and it was now intended to send the gun-boats down the Tennessee back into the Ohio, and thence up the Cumberland, there to attack Fort Donelson, and afterward to assist General Buell's army in making its way down to Nashville. The gun-boats were attached to General Halleck's army, and received their directions from St. Louis. General Buell's headquarters were at Louisville, and his advanced position was on the Green River, on the line of the railway from Louisville to Nashville. The secessionists had destroyed the railway bridge over the Green River, and were now lying at Bowling Green, between the Green River and Nashville. This place it was understood that they had fortified.

Matters were in this position when we got a military pass to go down by the railway to the army on the Green River, for the railway was open to no one without a military pass; and we started, trusting that Providence would supply us with rations and quarters. An officer attached to General Buell's staff, with whom however our acquaintance was of the very slightest, had telegraphed down to say that we were coming. I cannot say that I expected much from the message, seeing that it simply amounted to a very thin introduction to a general officer to whom we were strangers even by name, from a gentleman to whom we had brought a note from another gentleman whose acquaintance we had chanced to pick up on the road. We manifestly had no right to expect much; but to us, expecting very little, very much was given. General Johnson was the officer to whose care we were confided, he being a brigadier under General McCook, who commanded the advance. We were met by an aid-de-camp and saddle- horses, and soon found ourselves in the general's tent, or rather in a shanty formed of solid upright wooden logs, driven into the ground with the bark still on, and having the interstices filled in with clay. This was roofed with canvas, and altogether made a very eligible military residence. The general slept in a big box, about nine feet long and four broad, which occupied one end of the shanty, and he seemed in all his fixings to be as comfortably put up as any gentleman might be when out on such a picnic as this.

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