While all the records show that General Grant planned that Atlanta campaign which was finally executed, and that from its inception, it was in his mind a march to the sea, designed to divide the Confederacy; it is also true that this question of cutting through the territory of the rebels from the West, had been discussed at one or two prominent headquarters in the East, sometime before General Grant, in a different way from any suggested at these discussions, entered practically upon the work. Notes are in existence of a conversation at General McDowell's headquarters, on the day following the battle of Cedar Mountain in August, 1862, upon the policy of severing the Confederacy by an army operating from the West through Atlanta, a movement on Savannah and Charleston from the rear, and a march up the coast. These were General McDowell's ideas, though no definite combinations of troops were suggested for carrying them out. Early in the following year, General Pope wrote Secretary Stanton presenting a very elaborate plan for an advance from Murfreesboro to Mobile, through Atlanta. It involved the immediate abandonment of Grant's move against Vicksburg, and the transfer of his army to Rosecrans' front, an advance by Burnside through Cumberland Gap, the occupation of Chattanooga with a permanent garrison of sixty thousand men, and a movement thence on Atlanta with a force at least one hundred and fifty thousand strong. At the same time he proposed that forty thousand men from the Eastern army should be thrown into Pensacola, and marched north on
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Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co. 1875.
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