Submitted by James M. Burton

THE NEW-YORK TIMES
NEW-YORK, SUNDAY, NOV. 29, 1863.
Page 4,
East Tennessee - The Rebel Resources Failing Them,

The rebel journals say truly enough that their government never appreciated the importance of East Tennessee to the Confederacy until they had lost it. Their former want of appreciation is shown by the feeble resistance they made to the advance of Gen. Burnside; and their subsequent change of mind is indicated by their desperate efforts to recover what, by that advance, they had lost. Not to dwell at present on the military view, and on the incalculable strategic value of such points as Cumberland Gap, Knoxville, Cleveland, and the line of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad, it is beyond doubt that the mountainous regions of Eastern Tennessee and of Southwestern Virginia are of essential value to the rebels in the furnishing of resources for maintaining the war.

Eastern Tennessee not only furnishes mines of iron, copper, lead, salt, and coal, but a very large amount of sulphur and saltpeter. Hundreds of caverns exist along the limestone slopes and in the gorges of the Cumberland table land, which contain nitrous earth in immense quantities. A company was formed years ago, for the purpose of separating this nitrate from the dress with which it was amalgamated, but like many profitable and proper enterprises in slave States, if failed for want of general interest or means of easy communication with markets. The nitrate used in this country for the manufacture of gunpowder has hitherto been imported from India, and probably few dealers in the article had any knowledge of the vast stores existing in the bosom of the United States. The same maybe said of sulphur which comes hither from Sicily. It also exists in great quantities around the mineral springs of East Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, but no one thought of mining it to any extent. The war awoke the rebels to the immense importance of these deposits. None exist in either of the Carolinas, in Georgia, nor Alabama, which yet remain to the Confederacy; and thus, in this respect, the losses to the rebellion in the loss of East Tennessee is incalculable.

The material of life, which East Tennessee furnished to the Confederate Army, was no less necessary to it then the we have just named.

Immense quantities of bacon have been down during the last thirty months from that region, to feed the armies of Lee in the East and of Bragg in the Southwest. Parson Brownlow has recently given some statistics on this subject, which have astonished those that were not familiar with the animal products of East Tennessee. Since the beef of Texas became unattainable to the rebel army, through our command of the Mississippi River, the bacon of East Tennessee has been very nearly all the animal food they have had or could get. Now that this in turn has been cut off, we have many proofs as to how hard up they are.

Now that Grant's magnificent operations have secured us control of East Tennessee, and of all Tennessee, the rebels will speedily begin to feel their loss even more keenly then their late howlings indicate. Without munitions of war, without animal food and with closely blockaded ports, a continuance of rebel hostilities will be a problem difficult of solution.