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up to this time always been attached to the army of the West, known first as the army of the Mississippi and then as the army of Tennessee.
But now when General Hood with his army advanced north to attempt the capture of Nashville and to meet his Waterloo at Franklin, leaving Sherman to prosecute his ‘march to the sea,’ the brigade was detached from the army with which it had so long served, and left as part of the forlorn hope to impede Sherman's progress.
The effect of the new order mounting the brigade was inspiriting to the men, as they had long desired the change, and it meant to them a relief from the drudgery of marching and the gratification of an inborn partiality of the Kentuckian for the horse.
To the absentees of the brigade, the sick and wounded, and the men on detailed service, it acted as a healing balm for the first two, and brought applications from the last for return to active duty.
So that when the brigade was mounted in October, with recruits from this source, and exchanged prisoners, it numbered about nine hundred men. They were mounted on such horses as could be procured, generally too poor for dashing cavalry, but available for transferring their riders from point to point and enabling them to do efficient duty as mounted infantry.
There was practically no army with which to oppose the march of General Sherman except a weak corps of cavalry commanded by Gen. Joseph Wheeler, which served chiefly to hold in check the cavalry of the enemy and to protect the country from marauding expeditions.
The brigade was placed in the division of Gen. Alfred Iverson, of Georgia, and served there to the close of the war, the division a part of the time being commanded by Gen. Pierce M. B. Young.
The details of its operations were not of sufficient moment to follow minutely.
It began its service on the picket line near Atlanta, and from the middle of November, when Sherman took up his march, its movements were retrograde for a month until Sherman captured Savannah.
Then, when he turned
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
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