During the spring and summer of 1862, and after Buell's main army had marched westward to reinforce Grant at Pittsburg Landing, there had been almost ceaseless campaigning and fighting along the upper Tennessee river, in Alabama, and around Cumberland Gap. Generals O. M. Mitchell, G. W. Morgan and Negley were the active agents in this campaigning on the Federal side; Kirby Smith was the Confederate chieftain with John Morgan and N. B. Forrest for his enterprising cavalry raiders. The fighting was often severe and the maneuvers brilliant on both sides, but in the absence of strong armies it was after all scarcely more than skirmishing, involving no battle of importance and no movement of strategic consequence enough to require mention in a general history of the war. The struggle was the outcome of a purpose on either side to maintain the strategic status quo, or if possible to improve it here and there where opportunity offered. Substantially the result was to leave matters about as they had been, except that the continual activity and the frequent encounters of arms served to discipline and steady the raw recruits who were coming in on both sides. The operations of that spring and summer served to make soldiers of the new men North and South. It was not until after Halleck sent Buell to seize upon the strategic position at Chattanooga, and Bragg, seventeen days later, withdrew his main body from Grant's front and set out by the roundabout way of Mobile to anticipate Buell, that the war in that part of the country again assumed strategic and historical importance. Buell's march eastward was necessarily very slow and halting, and during its continuance he was compelled to scatter his forces in a very dangerous fashion. There had been two blunders made at the outset--both of them made by General Halleck against General Buell's protest. One of them was in making Corinth the base of supplies for Buell's army and depending for communication upon a long east and west line of badly broken railroad which was exposed at almost every point to frequent and destructive incursions of the enemy. Buell had asked to make Nashville his base instead. That point was connected with Louisville by rail and still more securely by river, and the river route was at all points adequately guarded against interruption by an effective gunboat fleet. From Nashville south and east there were railroads which Buell could have guarded effectually with one fifth the force necessary to the very ineffectual protection of the east and west line of the Memphis and Charleston road. But Halleck was imperative in his orders and Buell had to submit, with the ultimate result of having to scatter his forces widely in order to guard both lines and repair both, on pain of bringing actual starvation upon his army.