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10 The Indictment If, as I hear, the promotion of Colonel Turchin is contemplated, I feel it is my duty to inform you that he is entirely un¤t for it. I placed him in command of a brigade, and I now ¤nd it necessary to remove him from it in consequence of his utter failure to enforce discipline and render it ef¤cient. —Major General Don Carlos Buell to Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton, June 29, 1862 Don Carlos Buell spent the middle two weeks of June 1862 marching his men from the area of Corinth, Mississippi, eastward toward Chattanooga. As had been the case with virtually every prolonged movement of his army, the advance had the pace of molasses running along a 3 percent grade. Henry Halleck had ordered Buell to move out on June 9. On June 25 the headquarters of the Army of the Ohio had gotten only so far as Tuscumbia. Buell had the additional job of repairing the Memphis & Charleston main line as he went along. That work provided another excuse, if not quite a valid reason, for the snail’s pace of the advance. (On June 20 Buell let Ormsby Mitchel know that it was going to take his troops a week to repair a bridge over a creek.) The extra work served as an irritant, but reliable rail lines would be essential if the army was to avoid raiding Southern farms for food and fodder. Buell suggested switching his base of supply to the north and McMinnville, but the idea fell on deaf ears. So the Army of the Ohio continued inching its way to the east.1 With the mail on the evening of June 25 came, as always, current newspapers . The enlisted men and junior of¤cers of Turchin’s command and many of their midwestern comrades probably favored the Chicago Tribune. However , the usual mailbag also included recent editions of the Louisville Journal, the creation of the renowned conservative editor George Dennison Prentice. A New Englander who ¤rst came to Kentucky to write an admiring biography of Henry Clay, Prentice let his paper’s columns re®ect the debate raging in his own mind, pitting slavery’s supposed virtues against the evils of secession . The resulting clash, which so clearly re®ected the dynamic of the crisis for Kentuckians, who took great pride in their traditional role as compromisers , made his an important voice in the ensuing commentary about General Mitchel and Colonel Turchin. In this favored paper the senior of¤cers would have noticed a short news item in the edition for June 23: “Col. Turchin, of the 19th Illinois, and Col. Briggs, of Mass., have been nominated BrigadierGenerals .”2 This notice alone would have grated on Don Carlos Buell. As long ago as April 11, he had recommended seven of his colonels for promotion to brigadier , and John Basil Turchin had not been on that list. What was more, thus far only one of Buell’s men had been con¤rmed.3 Buell, like McClellan before him, faced a predicament. Washington politicians had usurped the management of his command. Rather than encouraging him to use his experience and expertise to make decisions crucial to the structure of his command, the War Department and the president, with the collusion of the Senate, were naming his subordinates. Were they competent? Were their commands disciplined and ef¤cient? Had they been effective in implementing of¤cial orders and policies? The lack of action on Buell’s candidates and the putting forth of others in their stead indicated only too clearly that Buell’s opinion on these subjects was not of overriding concern. General Buell and his entourage reached Athens on Friday evening, June 27, making camp just outside of the town. Buell’s chief of staff, James Barnet Fry, busied himself in Athens, arranging the transfer of ammunition and meeting with Colonel Jesse Norton of the Twenty-¤rst Ohio, always a citizen ’s advocate. Complaints about the treatment of the local residents by Turchin ’s men surfaced almost instantly.4 Those complaints took no time at all to reach Buell himself, and they struck a raw nerve. He quickly assured the people of Athens that the men under his direct command would give them nothing to fear. He stopped the supply trains well out of town to keep the men orderly and, notably, issued an express order to his subordinates to allow “no depredations.” During the train ride to...

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