[176] and Roddy's cavalry, from seven to ten thousand (7,000 to 10,000), are now in the neighborhood of Tuscumbia and Florence, and the water being low, are able to cross at will. * * * * ‘General Thomas has near Athens and Pulaski, Stanley's corps, about fifteen thousand strong, and Schofield's corps, ten thousand, en route by rail, and has at least twenty to twenty-five thousand men, with new regiments and conscripts arriving all the time, also. General Rosecrans promises the two divisions of Smith and Mower, belonging to me, but I doubt if they can reach Tennessee in less than ten days. * * * * I have retained about fifty thousand good troops and have sent back full twenty-five thousand, and have instructed General Thomas to hold defensively Nashville, Chattanooga, and Decatur, all strongly fortified and provisioned for a long siege.’ * * * *The points to be noted in connection with this telegram are, that Hood's forces were then estimated by Sherman at from thirty-seven to forty thousand, while Thomas' troops were stated to be from forty-five to fifty thousand besides new regiments, conscripts arriving all the time, and the two divisions of A. J. Smith. Instead of Smith's troops reaching Thomas in ten days, they did not reach him for thirty days. General Sherman instead of retaining fifty thousand troops retained over sixty-two thousand. Thomas was instructed to hold Nashville defensively. To write at this late day of General Thomas being in Nashville ‘seemingly passive,’ and ‘quietly engaged in reorganizing his army,’ is, in view of the almost superhuman efforts which he with the ‘somewhat broken forces at his disposal’ was making to prepare for the defeat of Hood, to perpetrate an injustice to the dead which the General of the army could easily have avoided. And, as if to make this ‘passiveness and quiet’ apparent to all and the more inexcusable, and the great risk which he saw in leaving Thomas to grapple Hood at every disadvantage less apparent, the Memoirs present the estimate given below of Thomas' strength, which agrees neither with the dispatch of November 1st, already quoted, nor with the fact as recorded in the official records. A summing up of the statement will
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Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co. 1875.
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