Bragg's force was considerably less than that which Buell had under his immediate command. Lee was at that time carrying on his tremendous campaigns in Virginia and Maryland so that no troops could be spared from that quarter to reinforce Bragg's undertaking. Price and Van Dorn had quite all they could do to hold their own against Grant at Corinth and Sherman at Memphis. It is true that Grant had been "stripped to the skin," as he expressed it, by calls upon him to reinforce Buell and to spare division after division for the army that was contending against Lee and doubtfully defending the Federal capital. But on the other hand Price and Van Dorn had been stripped equally bare to furnish Bragg with the troops with whom he was invading Kentucky. And while Bragg was thus marching into his enemy's country with a force only about three fifths as numerous as that of his adversary and with no prospect of important reinforcement from any quarter, Buell was retreating upon a city strongly held, whose garrison would furnish an instant and a very strong reinforcement, while the mere threat of Bragg's advance was inducing the hurrying of multitudes of fresh troops from all the northwestern states, to the menaced cities of Cincinnati and Louisville. For it was clearly seen in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and even in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, that should Bragg succeed in establishing himself on the Ohio river the states north of that stream must become the ravaged and trampled theater of the next year's campaign, with a Confederate invading force swelled by enlistments from Kentucky and Tennessee to enormous proportions and reinforced by the fifty or sixty thousand Southern veterans whom the conquest of the Ohio by Bragg would instantly release from defensive work farther south. In brief, if Bragg could have captured and held Louisville by defeating Buell, it was morally certain that the Confederates would have been able, during the following spring, to invade the Northwest with an effective force of tremendous proportions. For Kentucky and Tennessee would in that case have become wholly Confederate, and the whole South would have joined in an effort to make decisive use of such an opportunity to end the war in triumph. Tens of thousands of seasoned troops employed during the summer of 1862 in garrisoning towns and protecting railroad lines would in that case have been set free to aid in an aggressive movement north of the Ohio. With the Confederates established at Louisville and holding the Ohio river as their line, there would have been no choice but for Grant to withdraw from Mississippi, West Tennessee and Kentucky, thus setting free not only the 30,000 or 50,000 men confronting his present position, but also the garrisons and armies about Vicksburg and along the several railroads in Mississippi and in northern Georgia and Alabama. It is certainly not an exaggeration to estimate that had Bragg