om these headquarters in the
field when witnesses not at present to be had can be brought
forward." Upon learning this, after I assumed command of the
department I ordered Herron to report for duty to General Grant
before Vicksburg. In the meantime Herron wrote to the War Department
protesting against serving under me as department commander, and
got a sharp rebuke from the President through the Secretary of War.
This brief explanation is all that seems necessary to show the
connection between the several events as they appear in the official
records.

COMPELLED TO BE INACTIVE

After the battle of Prairie Grove, being then in St. Louis, I asked
General Curtis to let me go down the Mississippi and join the
expedition against Vicksburg, saying that as Blunt and Herron had
won a battle in my absence, I did not wish to resume command over
them. But Curtis would not consent to this; he said he wanted me
to command the Army of the Frontier. He thus invited the confidence
which he afterward betrayed, and for which he rebuked me. I felt
outraged by this treatment, and thereafter did not feel or show
toward General Curtis the respect or subordination which ought to
characterize the relations of an officer toward his commander.
This feeling was intensified by his conduct in the Herron affair,
and by the determination gradually manifested not to permit me or
my command to do anything. He for a long time kept up a pretense
of wanting me to move east or west, or south, or somewhere, but
negatived all my efforts actually to move. The situation seemed
to me really unendurable: I was compelled to lie at Springfield
all the latter part of winter, with a well-appointed army corps
eager for active service, hundreds of miles from any hostile force,
and where we were compelled to haul our own supplies, in wagons,
over the worst of roads, 120 miles from the railroad terminus at
Rolla. I could not get permission even to move nearer the railroad,
much less toward the line of which the next advance must be made;
and this while the whole country was looking with intense anxiety
for the movement that was to open the Mississippi to the Gulf, and
the government was straining every nerve to make that movement
successful. Hence I wrote to General Halleck the letters of January
31, 1863, and February 3. These appear to have called forth some
correspondence between Generals Halleck and Cu