as might attempt to navigate the river; he also told
how light batteries might move swiftly along the banks and, at
points commanding the channel, rain on the passing steamer unheralded
destruction. He was silent upon the really serious matter, the patrol
of the river by Federal gunboats which rendered commerce with the
Trans-Mississippi all but impossible.

This report, dated the 26th of November, gives a roseate view of the war
in Tennessee and enlarges upon that dreadful battle of Chickamauga which
"ranks as one of the grandest victories of the war." But even as the
report was signed, Bragg was in full retreat after his great disaster
at Chattanooga. On the 30th of November the Administration at Richmond
received from him a dispatch that closed with these words: "I deem it
due to the cause and to myself to ask for relief from command and an
investigation into the causes of the defeat." In the middle of December,
Joseph E. Johnston was appointed to succeed him.

Whatever had been the illusions of the Government, they were now at an
end. There was no denying that the war had entered a new stage and that
the odds were grimly against the South. Davis recognized the gravity
of the situation, and in his message to Congress in December, 1863, he
admitted that the Trans-Mississippi was practically isolated. This was
indeed a great catastrophe, for hereafter neither men nor supplies could
be drawn from the far Southwest. Furthermore, the Confederacy had now
lost its former precious advantage of using Mexico as a means of secret
trade with Europe.

These distressing events of the four months between Vicksburg and
Chattanooga established also the semi-isolation of the middle region of
the lower South. The two States of Mississippi and Alabama entered upon
the most desperate chapter of their history. Neither in nor out of the
Confederacy, neither protected by the Confederate lines nor policed by
the enemy, they were subject at once to the full rigor of the financial
and military demands of the Administration of Richmond and to the
full ruthlessness of plundering raids from the North. Nowhere can the
contrast between the warfare of that day and the best methods of our
own time be observed more clearly than in this unhappy region. At the
opening of 1864 the effective Confederate lines drew an irregular
zigzag across the map from a point in northern Georgia not far below
Chattanooga to Mobile. Though small Confederate commands st