"But a few days ago," he said, "a large and powerful Rebel army lay at Corinth, with outposts extending to our very camp at Shiloh. They held two railroads extending north and south, east and west, across the whole extent of their country, with a vast number of locomotives and cars to bring to them speedily and certainly their reinforcements and supplies. They called to their aid all their armies from every quarter, abandoning the seacoast and the great river Mississippi, that they might overwhelm us with numbers in the place of their own choosing. They had their chosen leaders, men of high reputation and courage, and they dared us to leave the cover of our iron-clad gunboats to come to fight them in their trenches, and still more dangerous swamps and ambuscades of their Southern forests. Their whole country, from Richmond to Memphis and Nashville to Mobile, rung with their taunts and boastings, as to how they would immolate the Yankees if they dared to leave the Tennessee River. They boldly and defiantly challenged us to meet them at Corinth. We accepted the challenge, and came slowly and without attempt at concealment to the very ground of their selection; and they have fled away. We yesterday marched unopposed through the burning embers of their destroyed camps and property, and pursued them to their swamps, until burning bridges plainly confessed they had fled, and not marched away for better ground. It is a victory as brilliant and important as any recorded in history, and every officer and soldier who lent his aid has just reason to be proud of his part. "No amount of sophistry or words from the leaders of the rebellion can succeed in giving the evacuation of Corinth, under the circumstances, any other title than that of a signal defeat, more humiliating to them and their cause than if we had entered the place over the dead and mangled bodies of their soldiers. We are not here to kill and slay, but to vindicate the honor and just authority of that government which has been bequeathed to us by our honored fathers, and to whom we would be recreant if we permitted their work to pass to our children marred and spoiled by ambitious and wicked Rebels.