Cecily Zander

He kind of maneuvers, he fights a couple of battles against Buell, and then he gets himself into a fight that takes place at the end of the year, sort of 1862, over Christmas and into New Year's, in which he potentially sort of fights to a tactical stalemate.

Again, Buell's not a great military genius,

But he's so worried about what Buell has in reserve, he's imagining Buell has this sort of massive great army to bring to bear.

He sort of skedaddles from Kentucky, abandons something like 10,000 rifles he had brought with him because he expected the people of Kentucky to sort of flock to the Confederate banner and sort of begin to march with his army.

And he essentially abandons Kentucky for the remainder of the war for the Confederacy.

That's a problem.

Because we have evidence of both Lincoln and Davis saying that really Kentucky is the key.

I mean, Lincoln says multiple times to lose Kentucky is to lose the whole thing.

You know, Lincoln says, I have to have Kentucky on my side.

Any real Confederate occupation of Kentucky is a threat to the Union war effort.

And Brad gives it up after about six weeks.

And Bragg begins a sort of a very swift retreat on the back of that through Tennessee.

And Tennessee is a Confederate state.

And Bragg is the reason the Confederacy loses sort of that bounty as well.

I mean, Tennessee is just as important in terms of its rivers, its geography, and its potential bounty for supplying the Confederate war effort.

It's his only win, so it's an easy list to remember for trivia if you're out at the pub.

But even then, it was more a failure of the Union commander, William Rosecrans, who we're not going to talk about, though we certainly could.

William Rosecrans, inexplicably, in the middle of the Battle of Chickamauga, pulls a regiment of about 1,000 men out of the center of his line and moves them to a flank that he thinks is under threat.

It's a miscommunicated order.

It's a problem.