Lieutenant Chandler, of General Blair’s staff, was killed while leading a gallant and victorious charge. “The enemy’s force consisted of General McLaws’s detachment of Hardee’s forces; and were pushed out of Pocotaligo, the Seventeenth Corps occupying the railroad from the Coosawatchie to the Salkehatchie. So soon as this lodgment was effected, Sherman sent the First and Third divisions of Geary’s Twentieth Corps, of Slocum’s column, across the Savannah, so as to hold the railroad continuously from Savannah to the lines of the Seventeenth Corps. On the 16th, also, the Fifteenth Corps embarked at Thunderbolt for Beaufort.” On the legions swept toward Branchville, more than half way to Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and northwest of Charleston. The threatening front of our army against Charleston at the same moment, kept occupied and apart Generals Beauregard and Hardee. General Kilpatrick hung like a thunder-cloud around Augusta, keeping General D. H. Hill with his troops there, while General Howard’s right wing reached and cut the railroad below Branchville; General Blair’s Seventeenth Corps crossed the Salkehatchie, wading waist deep through the current, defeating the enemy in the very water, and seizing River’s Bridge; and General Slocum had gone above Branchville, cutting the railroad there. This was during the first week in February. Sunday night, the 11th, the enemy finding Branchville hopelessly encircled, cutting the paths of communication, fled from the town, and the next day our victorious troops, with flying banners, entered it. Over streams, into which they plunged with a shout; through morasses, building corduroy roads in swamps, destroying railroads for nearly a hundred miles of a single line, the brave boys had got within reach of the “tempting prize,” as the Columbia _Guardian_ called it, now seventy miles distant, and a hundred and forty-three from Augusta, Georgia.