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Savannah or Mobile be preferred; but I also want to know if you are willing that I should destroy Atlanta and the railroad.’
And on this very date (October 17) he had received the following from
General Grant:
‘The moment I know you have started south, stores will be shipped to Hilton Head, where there are transports ready to take them to meet you at Savannah.
In case you go south I would not propose holding any thing south of Chattanooga, certainly not south of Dalton.
Destroy in such case all of military value in Atlanta.’
As early as October 13th, two weeks before
General Sherman claims that he finally decided on this march,
General Grant had ordered cooperating forces to proceed to the coast below
Savannah and move inland against the Gulf Railroad.
This appears in the following from
Halleck to
Grant, dated
Washington, October 22d:
‘I had prepared instructions to General Canby to move all available forces in Mobile Bay and elsewhere to Brunswick and up the Savannah and Gulf Railroad, as directed by you on the 13th, but on learning that Sherman's operations were uncertain I withheld the order.’
October 19th
Sherman telegraphed
Thomas:
* * * * ‘I propose with the Armies of Ohio, Tennessee, and two corps of this, to sally forth and make a hole in Georgia and Alabama that will be hard to mend.
I will, probably, about November 1st, break up the railroads and bridges, destroy Atlanta, and make a break for Mobile, Savannah, or Charleston.’ * * * *
Under date of October 19, 1864,
General Sherman wrote
General Halleck as follows:
I must have alternatives; else, being confined to one route, the enemy might so oppose, that delay and want would trouble me; but, having alternatives, I can take so eccentric a course that no general can guess my objective.
Therefore, when you hear I am off, have lookouts at Morris Island, S. C., Ossabaw Sound, Ga., Pensacola and Mobile Bays.
I will turn up somewhere, and, believe me, I can take Macon, Milledgeville, Augusta, and Savannah, Ga., and wind up with closing the neckband of Charleston so that they will starve out.
