Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 1

The army felt as if it had been miraculously relieved. Its spirit revived at once; the depression of Chickamauga was shaken off, and the unshackled giant stood erect. The soldiers saw that they had a commander who could perceive and relieve their necessities. They became buoyant and hopeful, and the very men who had dragged themselves sick and half-despairing around their camps only two days before, were now quite ready, at Grant's command, to assault the rebels on Missionary ridge. On the 28th, Grant said: ‘If the rebels give us one week more time, I think all danger of losing territory now held by us will have passed away, and preparations may commence for active operations.’

But, although the immediate emergency was met at Chattanooga, there were still other and instant needs which required the attention of the new commander. His military division reached from Natchez to Knoxville, more than a thousand miles, and included two hundred thousand soldiers. Burnside's army, numbering nearly twenty-five thousand men, was more than a hundred miles from any navigable river by which it could be supplied, and still further from a railroad. He needed rations and ammunition and clothing at once, and the problem of providing these was difficult. They were ordered from St. Louis, up the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, to the mouth of the Cumberland, and thence, convoyed by gunboats five hundred miles, up the Cumberland to Big South fork; there Burnside was to meet them, and transport them, in wagons, a hundred miles