158 The Mississippi Valley in the Civil War

into the army to look after the interests of theIndiana men, exchange their arms without theknowledge of their commanders, and keep up acommunication concerning various matters whichwere none of their business. 1 Buell was not theman to endure such infringements of discipline,and when he suppressed them he incurred thedeadly hostility of the passionate Morton. As forAndrew Johnson , he wished to have all the otherobjects of the war postponed or sacrificed to theoccupation of eastern Tennessee , and he hatedBuell for entertaining broader views. Moreover,Buell was a strict disciplinarian, and insisted thatwar should he conducted upon civilized principles,and not upon those of Vandals and Bashi-bazouks.So when one of Mitchel’s brigades, in the summerof 1862, wantonly sacked the town of Athens, inAlabama , Buell visited the offence with wholesomeseverity ; by sentence of a court-martial the brig-ade was broken up and distributed, its command-ing colonel was dismissed, and other officers werevariously punished. For these praiseworthy mea-sures Buell was loudly abused in public meetingsand by many of the newspapers. He was accusedof sympathizing with rebels, and foul imputa-tions upon his loyalty were caught up and usedagainst him by Morton and Johnson . In Octo-1 See Fry, The Army under Buell , p. 86.