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overestimating those proposed to be left with Thomas, Sherman obtained the desired permission, and when Grant had thus been made to believe that Thomas would have ample force to meet Hood in the field and destroy him, and not till then, did he allow Sherman to go.
The overestimates of Thomas' forces, and underestimates (if Hood's were as follows:
November 1st Sherman telegraphed Grant (the dispatch not being given in the Memoirs), that Hood's force was thirty thousand infantry, and from seven to ten thousand cavalry, and that General Thomas would have (according to a summary of General Sherman's figures, as given in detail in this dispatch), from fifty-three to sixty thousand, beside a large force of cavalry—now stated in the Memoirs to have been about ten thousand—thus representing to General Grant that Hood's whole force was only from thirty-seven to forty thousand, while Thomas had from sixty-three to seventy thousand.
In the same dispatch he informed Grant that he had retained only fifty thousand men for his March to the Sea, when, as the official returns now printed in his Memoirs (Vol.
II, page 172), show, he retained over sixty-two thousand.
No wonder General Grant was finally persuaded to give up that part of his plan which, for its first step, involved the destruction of Hood.
General Sherman, in his book (Vol.
II, page 162), as already quoted, now that he deems it necessary for history to vindicate his march away from the very enemy that for five months had so stoutly resisted his combined forces, thus allowing Hood to turn upon the fragments left for General Thomas to gather up, states the forces available to General Thomas for a fight at Nashville at from sixty-five to seventy-one thousand, beside seventeen thousand seven hundred cavalry, or a total force of from eighty-two thousand seven hundred to eighty-eight thousand seven hundred.
This appears from a summary of his figures and not in direct terms.
The official returns of the forces actually available for the
Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co. 1875.
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