243 Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston--regarded by Jefferson Davis as a great military genius, and appointed to command the entire Confederate army in the West--had some idea of moving an army up through the swamps to these roads, flanking the Union position at Cairo and taking St. Louis. The St. Francis River would aid in supplying the army. His immediate subordinate, Maj. Gen. Polk, was still more in favor of the plan, and it went in this proportion down through Gen. Gideon Pillow, with his "Army of Liberation," to the most enthusiastic advocate, of the scheme, our poetical acquaintance, Gen. M. Jeff Thompson, file "Swamp Fox of Missouri." The idea was to move in concert with Price coming up from the southeast. Maj.-Gen. Leonidas Polk, C. S. A., who had been placed in command of the Mississippi River, and subsequently had the States of Arkansas and Missouri added to his Department, had gathered about him in the neighborhood of Memphis some 25,000 or 30,000 Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and other troops, with which, scorning Kentucky's claim of neutrality, he advanced to Columbus, Ky., the terminus of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, and 20 miles from Cairo, Ill. Upon the high bluff there he proceeded to construct one of those "Gibraltars" so numerous in the early history of the war. With the force at his command and the opposition he was likely to meet from the Union commanders in southeast Missouri, a march on St. Louis by the roads indicated was a promising venture. Besides the forces immediately around him, he had control of McCulloch's, Pearce's and Hardee's columns in Arkansas, and potential control of Price's and Thompson's Missouri forces, making altogether an aggregate approaching 70,000 men. 244 But he hesitated, while Pillow fretted and fumed, and wrote that while he honored his superior officer as a prelate and admired him as a patriot, he had small opinion of his military judgment. M. Jeff Thompson, who had no mean opinion of his own abilities, wrote to Jefferson Davis that what the Southern Confederacy needed in that quarter was "a first-class leader," and he cast a unanimous vote for himself for that position. In the meantime an event occurred as to the significance of which Polk, Pillow and Thompson were as unappreciative as the country at large.