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purposely delayed at Kingston until General Thomas assured me that he was all ready, and my last dispatch from him of the 12th of November was full of confidence, in which he promised me that he would ruin Hood if he dared to advance from Florence, urging me to go ahead and give myself no concern about Hood's army in Tennessee.
‘Why he did not turn on him at Franklin, after checking and discomfiting him, surpasses my understanding.
Indeed, I do not approve of his evacuating Decatur, but think he should have assumed the offensive against Hood from Pulaski in the direction of Waynesburg.
I know full well that General Thomas is slow in mind and in action, but he is judicious and brave, and the troops feel great confidence in him. I still hope he will outmaneuver and destroy Hood.’
This letter, with the exception of the above extract, was printed in full by
General Sherman in the report he placed before the
Committee on the Conduct of the
War, in May, 1865.
The country was still ringing with the praise of
Thomas.
It would have been a serious thing to print it then; but now, when
Thomas is dead, and
Sherman is vindicating himself for history, this unjust paragraph is hunted up and given to the world, with the remark (page 207) that the letter now produced ‘is a little more full than the one printed in the report of the
Committee on the Conduct of the
War, because in that copy I omitted the matter concerning
General Thomas which now need no longer be withheld.’
Even if
General Sherman believed the paragraph was just when he wrote it, he well knew it to be cruelly unjust when he printed it.
On the 23d of December, only a few days after the date of this letter, he had written
General Webster in the one already quoted:
‘I approve of Thomas' allowing Hood to come north far enough to enable him to concentrate his own men, though I would have preferred that Hood should have been checked about Columbia.’
And in the text of his Memoirs, only a few pages in advance of where he reproduces this paragraph, after enumerating all
