It was decided to retire. Bowling Green was evacuated and the Federal General Buell instantly occupied it. A little later Nashville was evacuated by the Confederates in behalf of a less exposed position. It was at the same time determined to withdraw from Columbus all the forces assembled there except a garrison sufficient to work the guns, and to defend the point for a time with the aid of Commodore Hollins's gunboats in the Mississippi. The new line of defense adopted by the Confederates was the Memphis and Charleston railroad, running through southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi, Alabama, etc. This line presented no natural advantages of defense, but it covered the most vitally important railroad communications of the Confederacy. Furthermore it will be observed that this line of defense lies almost exactly midway between the Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, under Grant's energetic aggressiveness, the Federal control had been pushed from the Ohio river nearly half way to the gulf. The process of "splitting the Confederacy in two," was already well advanced at the beginning of the spring of 1862. It was always the keynote of Grant's policy to "press things," and after his period of suspension from command he began again to carry out that obviously wise policy. As the dominant thought in General Grant's strategy from beginning to end of the war, he was strongly impressed with the fact that the North was vastly superior to the South in all military resources, and as a man of practical common sense it was his idea that this superiority in men, arms, ammunition, food supplies, and all else that tends to help military endeavor should be insistently and persistently utilized in the breaking of Confederate resistance within the briefest possible time. The ancient thought of divine arbitrament in arms had no place in his mind. The notion was incredible to him that two armies should stand still and do nothing while a David on the one side and a Goliath on the other should make a personal trial of conclusions. He was not lacking in chivalry or sentiment, as abundantly appeared on several conspicuous occasions, but he had besides an all-dominating common sense, and he used it. He fully agreed with the Confederate General Forrest in his definition of strategy as the art of "getting there first with the most men." He did not understand modern warfare to be in any wise akin to a medieval tournament in which equality of opportunity must be sought at all costs. Quite on the contrary he regarded war as a perfectly practical matter of business, to be carried on as such. He clearly saw it to be what it is and always must be, a cruel survival from barbaric times, a measuring of brute strength in that last appeal of humanity, to the arbitrament of arms.