siderations render a prompt movement in force on Eastern Tennessee imperative. . . . I think we owe it to our Union friends in East Tennessee to protect them at all hazards.” He followed up this letter two days later with a despatch: “I urge movement at once on Eastern Tennessee unless it is impossible.” But Buell did not budge. He pleaded that his troops were anything but ready to take the field. He described them as “little better than a mob.” The fact that he was being vainly urged to move became public, and he was attacked in the press and in Congress. But this did not influence him any more than the orders and remonstrances of his superiors. These continued to reach him by mail and wire, but he contrived to find excuses for not complying.
In the latter part of December, the pressure from Washington at last extracted from him the admission that he had never really thought a movement into East Tennessee advisable, and that his programme was a defensive one in an eastern and an offensive one in a western direction. Finally, President Lincoln lost his long-tried patience, and on January 4 wired him: “Please tell me the progress and condition of the movement in the direction of East Tennessee. Answer.” Buell, in his reply, amplified his previous admission that the East Tennessee movement had been decidedly against his judgment from the very first, as likely to render doubtful the success of “a movement against the great power of the Rebellion in the west, which is mainly arrayed on the line between Bowling Green and Columbus.” President Lincoln replied by mail, commencing his letter thus: “Your despatch of yesterday has been received and disappoints and distresses me,” and then argued that, in his judgment, the possession of the rail road between Virginia and East Tennessee seemed to him more important and more to be desired than that of Nashville. Next he lamented the sad fate of the loyalists, if left without help. “But my distress is,” he said, “that our friends in East Tennessee are being hanged and driven
