point, some 3 miles beyond Montgomery, where the wagons will be parked, under charge of Lieutenant Colonel C. N. Goulding, chief quartermaster. You will report your arrival to me in the front wherever I may be, and will have charge of the guarding and protection of the entire park here, and will send the necessary guards with wagons sent out for forage by Colonel Goulding. You will be careful not to forage exclusively for your own command, but all the forage you may hear or know of will be obtained and equitably distributed by Lieutenant-Colonel Goulding.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

GEO. L. HARTSUFF,

Major-General, Commanding.

HEADQUARTERS FIFTEENTH ARMY CORPS,
Camp on Big Black, Miss., September 2, 1863.

Major J. M. WRIGHT,

Assistant Adjutant-General, Louisville, Ky.:

MY DEAR FRIEND: Yours of August 25 is received. I am here guarding the line of Black River and drilling my corps after a short rest, made necessary by the preceding seven months of continuous labor. I have none of the books or memoranda of dates that would enable me to speak with precision of events or the state of facts in Kentucky at the time General Buell relieved me; nor am I willing yet to give my full ideas of the political and military state of affairs at that exact time, though always willing to say that I then regarded the task on which he entered a most difficult and delicate one. I feel toward General Buell great personal and official respect and will do all I can to secure to him the respect of his fellow-soldiers, and fellow-men, and with this remark I take the liberty to add that I do not believe that General Buell as a soldier or citizen will be benefitted by a publication which will be regarded as a mere personal matter. The time for history is after the end is attained. That end may yet be far off in the future, and when war is over, and people settle down to the arts of peace, they will regard all questions according to the new state of affairs.

I fear the Northern people are again settling back into one of their periodical states of apathy, on the supposition that war is over, whereas we all know and feel that the leaders of the South are buckling on their armor and preparing for a new, and it may be a more successful, display of desperate physical energy.

General Buell's friends may will and very properly collect all facts illustrating his important part of the great whole, but to segregate his administration and connect it with the former and subsequent periods of the war, may raise personal controversies that will further embarrass him and impair his future usefulness. The record of the court,* which sat so long in Cincinnati in his case and his own answer, which I and all his friends have read with satisfaction, are full and comprehensive; but even then the claim set up, that he saved Grant's army at Shiloh, has raised a prejudice against him in the minds of many worthy officers who have gone on and strengthened their fame, so that if a controversy should arise, Buell would get the worst of it. I advise Buell and all men to stop writing, but

---------------

*See Series I, Vol. XVI, Part I.

---------------