HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF EAST TENNESSEE,
Greeneville, Tenn., March 19, 1864.

Major General C. W. FIELD, Commanding Division:

The lieutenant-general commanding desires you to sent the Hampton Legion, Colonel M. W. Gary commanding, to this point at once. Send its transportation with it. The movement of the regiment may be considered permanent, and its baggage and equipments should be brought up.

I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

G. M. SORREL,

Lieutenant-Colonel and Assistant Adjutant-General.

GREENEVILLE, TENN.,

March 19, 1864.

Brigadier General J. B. KERSHAW, Commanding Division:

The commanding general directs that you move your division and King's battalion artillery back to your camp near this point.

I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient,

G. M. SORREL,

Lieutenant-Colonel and Assistant Adjutant-General.

HDQRS. DEPT. OF S. C., GA., AND FLA.,
Charleston, S. C., March 19, 1864.

General JAMES LONGSTREET:

GENERAL: Your letter of March 15, 1864, received in the absence of General Beauregard, will be forwarded to him by a special courier.

Since it was received, however, a dispatch from him has reached me to be communicated to you in connection with the subject-matter of your precious communication, handed him by Lieutenant G., to the following effect:

That the regrets he cannot assist you with animals or saddles, which are now totally insufficient for present wants of the service in this department; that if your were carried out and the enemy should seize and occupy Cumberland Mountain gaps how would you get supplies of ammunition, &c.? That, in his opinion, the maxims of war require us never to abandon our communications, but to act on those of the enemy without exposing our own.

In a plan he proceed in December last it was urged that all the forces available in the Confederacy should be assembled in your quarter, if practicable; if not, then at or about Rome or Dalton, and thrown thence into Middle Tennessee. He thought this could be most effectively done from your direction, because from it the line of march would conduct an army most directly on the enemy's flank or rear, and that there would in that case be no exposure of our communications. Without all the advantages possessed by East Tennessee as the point of departure or "breaking out," yet Dalton, being now favorably situated for purposes of concentration, he regarded that as a suitable point or base of operations. His plan was founded, however, on a combined movement in our army of all our forces, to the extent of about 100,000 men, who were to be moved in light marching order, and a renunciation of the evil system of keeping in the field separate armies, acting without concert on distant and divergent lines of operation, and thus enabling our enemy to concentrate at convenience his masses again our fragments. But, as I under