By the end of November the Federal troops threatening Tennessee numbered
fifty thousand and they were rapidly reenforced until they aggregated a
hundred thousand.
General Albert Sidney Johnston sent the most urgent appeals for arms to
the Governors of Georgia and Alabama, to General Bragg at Pensacola and
to the Government at Richmond. He asked for thirty thousand muskets and
got but one thousand. The guns were not in the South. They could not be
manufactured. Fully one-half his men had no arms at all. Whole brigades
remained without weapons for months. The entire force at his command
never numbered more than twenty-two thousand during this perilous fall.
And yet, by the masterly handling of his little army, its frequent and
rapid expeditions, he kept his powerful opponents in constant
expectations of an attack and produced the impression that he commanded
an enormous force.
In the meantime the sensational newspapers were loud in their demands.
The Richmond yellow Journal shouted:
"Let Johnston muster his forces, advance into Kentucky, capture
Louisville, push across the Ohio and carry the war into Africa."
Swift and terrible the blow fell.
And always the navy's smoke on the horizon. From the Ohio, the Tennessee
and Cumberland rivers could be navigated for hundreds of miles into
Tennessee and Alabama.
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