previous next
‘ [174] towards Selma, as far as you can transport supplies.’ Thomas replied on the 12th: ‘I have no fears that Beauregard can do me any harm now, and if he attempts to follow you, I will follow him as far as possible. If he does not follow you, I will then thoroughly organize my troops, and I believe, shall have men enough to ruin him, unless he gets out of my way very rapidly.’ The wires were cut that night, and no further communication was sent or received by Sherman before his army moved.

As he rode towards Atlanta, the last railroad trains were going to the rear with furious speed; the engineers waved him adieu, and turning his back on Thomas and Hood, Sherman set out on his march to the sea.

The military situation at once entirely changed. The two armies which had been contending for half a year were now marching in diametrically opposite directions, Sherman south-east and Hood northwest; while, as soon as Sherman started from Kingston, Grant became anxious not to capture the rebel capital, and not to drive Lee out of Petersburg. On the 13th of November, he said to Stanton: ‘I would not, if I could, just now, do anything to force the enemy out of Richmond or Petersburg. It would liberate too much of a force to oppose Sherman with.’ His whole effort at this juncture was to protect and aid the Western armies; to make a clear path for Sherman, to intercept reinforcements for Hood, and to concentrate whatever force it was possible to give to Thomas, on whom the brunt of the next fighting was certain to fall.

The rebel government was known to be urging

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Selma (Alabama, United States) (1)
Kingston, Ga. (Georgia, United States) (1)
Atlanta (Georgia, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
William T. Sherman (6)
George H. Thomas (3)
Hood (3)
Edwin M. Stanton (1)
Robert E. Lee (1)
Butler Grant (1)
Beauregard (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
November 13th (1)
12th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: