It was easy enough to get
there; the trouble was to stay. Buell's original lesson in
logistics, in which he gave the War Department a computation of the
wagons and mules necessary to supply ten thousand men at Knoxville,
was a solid piece of military arithmetic from which there was no
escape. [Footnote: _Ante_, p. 199. Official Records, vol. vii. p.
931.]
When Burnside reached Cincinnati and applied himself practically to
the task of organizing his little army for a march over the
mountains, his first requisitions for wagons and mules were a little
startling to the Quartermaster-General and a little surprising to
himself. He began at once an engineering reconnoissance of the
country south of Lexington and Danville, as far as it was within our
control, and employed an able civil engineer, Mr. Gunn, to locate
the preliminary line for a railway. [Footnote: _Id_., vol. xxiii.
pt. ii. p. 610.] These surveys were the starting-points from which
the actual construction of the road between Cincinnati and
Chattanooga was made after the close of the war.
Burnside also urged that the troops in Kentucky, exclusive of the
Ninth Corps, be organized into a new corps with General Hartsuff as
its commander.
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