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alarmed at the seeming passive conduct of General Thomas; and General Grant at one time considered the situation so dangerous that he thought of going to Nashville in person, but General John A. Logan, happening to be at City Point, was sent out to supersede General Thomas.
Luckily for the latter, he acted in time, gained a magnificent victory, and thus escaped so terrible a fate.’
It seems never to have occurred to
General Sherman that much of this trouble came to
General Thomas through the misrepresentations he himself had made to
General Grant of
Thomas' force, in the dispatch of November 1st, and others of a similar purport.
After narrating the demand on
Hardee to surrender
Savannah, his refusal and subsequent escape, and the occupation of the city,
General Sherman again recurs to
Thomas before
Nashville, and in more generous terms:
‘Meantime, on the 15th and 16th of December, were fought, in front of Nashville, the great battles in which General Thomas so nobly fulfilled his promise to ruin Hood, the details of which are fully given in his own official reports, long since published.
Rumors of these great victories reached us at Savannah by piecemeal, but his official report came on the 24th of December, with a letter from General Grant, giving in general terms the events up to the 18th, and I wrote at once through my Chief-of-Staff, General Webster, to General Thomas, complimenting him in the highest terms.
His brilliant victory at Nashville was necessary to mine at Savannah to make a complete whole, and this fact was perfectly comprehended by Mr. Lincoln, who recognized it fully in his personal letter of December 26th, hereinbefore quoted at length, and which I also claimed at the time, in my Special Field Order No. 6, of January, 8, 1865, here given.’ * * * *
In comparing the above statements with the records, it is necessary to go back to the estimate
General Sherman placed upon the forces of
Hood, and those under the control of
Thomas, when the object was to procure
General Grant's permission to march for the sea without first destroying
Hood.
From
Resaca on November 1st, he telegraphed
Grant as follows:
As you foresaw, and as Jeff. Davis threatened, the enemy is now in the full tide of execution of his grand plan to destroy my communications and defeat this army.
His infantry, about thirty thousand (30,000), with Wheeler
