Indeed, had Bragg achieved his purpose of pushing his columns into Louisville in advance of Buell's coming, it would have been almost a miracle for him to have failed in his resistance to the outmarched Federal commander's attempts to recapture the lost stronghold. It was one of those fearful crises of the war,--like Sharpsburg and Gettysburg--in which the whole outcome of the struggle hung trembling in the balance, and the future alike of the Union and of the Confederacy was risked, as it were, upon the hazard of a die. For while Bragg was thus dragging Buell back from northern Alabama and Georgia to the Ohio river and more than seriously threatening to make of that river the fortified frontier of the Confederacy, Lee was in Maryland, after having overthrown McClellan before Richmond and Pope at Manassas, and the National capital itself seemed in sore danger of capture. The year which had opened with the Union victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, presently followed by Grant's success at Shiloh, while McClellan's overwhelming divisions were near enough to Richmond to see the spires of that city's churches, seemed about to draw to a close so disastrous to the Federal cause as to leave it in worse case than at the beginning of the war or indeed at any time since the first defeat at Bull Run. The National credit was impaired as it never had been before. The Confederates were moved to make of the eighteenth of September a day of Thanksgiving for a deliverance which they regarded as in effect accomplished. Enlistments at the North had so far fallen off that drafts must be made in order to maintain that great superiority of numbers without which the North, fighting aggressively, could not hope to make head against Southern defense, as all the operations of the war up to that time had shown, and as the later course of the contest additionally proved at every point. But Bragg's effort to seize Louisville before Buell could throw himself into that city's defenses, failed of its purpose. By virtue of a wonderful march Buell reached the city first, near the end of September, the last of his forces arriving there on the twenty-ninth. Bragg was at Bardstown, not far away and in a very threatening position. In the meanwhile Grant held his own at Corinth in spite of the dangerous depletion of his forces, and the whole of West Tennessee remained in possession of the Federals. Buell found heavy reinforcements awaiting him at Louisville, while Bragg at Bardstown had not yet been joined, as he had expected to be, by Kirby Smith's force from eastern Kentucky. The conditions of the campaign were thus reversed. Buell, who had been on the defensive and in enforced retreat, was able now to take the offensive, while Bragg, who had been advancing with high hopes was now in a position from which he must retreat promptly on pain of having his army overwhelmed and destroyed.