In October, Anderson, who had never recovered from the strain of defending Fort Sumter, turned over to Sherman the very troublesome Kentucky command. Sherman pointed out to the visiting Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, that while McClellan had a hundred thousand men for a front of a hundred miles in Virginia, and Frémont had sixty thousand for about the same distance, he (Sherman) had been given only eighteen thousand to guard the link between them, although this link stretched out three hundred miles. Sherman then asked for sixty thousand men at once; and said two hundred thousand would be needed later on. "Good God!" said Cameron, "where are they to come from?" Come they had to, as Sherman foresaw. Cameron made trouble at Washington by calling Sherman's words "insane"; and Sherman's "insanity" became a stumbling-block that took a long time to remove. Grant, in command at Cairo, began his career as a general by cleverly forestalling the enemy at Paducah, where the Tennessee flows into the Ohio. Then, on the seventh of November, he closed the first confused campaign on the Mississippi by attacking Belmont, Missouri, twenty miles downstream from Cairo, in order to prevent the Confederates at Columbus, Kentucky, right opposite, from sending reinforcements to Sterling Price in Arkansas. There was a stiff fight, in which the Union gunboats did good work. Grant handled his soldiers equally well; and the Union objective was fully attained. Halleck, the Federal Commander-in-Chief for the river campaign of '62, fixed his headquarters at St. Louis. From this main base his right wing had rails as far as Rolla, whence the mail road went on southwest, straight across Missouri. At Lebanon, near the middle of the State, General Samuel R. Curtis was concentrating, before advancing still farther southwest against the Confederates whom he eventually fought at Pea Ridge. From St. Louis there was good river, rail, and road connection south to Halleck's center in the neighborhood of Cairo, where General Ulysses S. Grant had his chief field base, at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio. A little farther east Grant had another excellent position at Paducah, beside the junction of the Ohio and the Tennessee. Naval forces were of course indispensable for this amphibious campaign; and in Flag-Officer Andrew Hull Foote the Western Flotilla had a commander able to coöperate with the best of his military colleagues. Halleck's left--a semi-independent command--was based on the Ohio, stretched clear across Kentucky, and was commanded by a good organizer and disciplinarian, General Don Carlos Buell, whose own position at Munfordville was not only near the middle of the State but about midway between the important railway junctions of Louisville and Nashville.