The march to the sea by Jacob Dolson Cox

Author:Jacob Dolson Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons

1 The author has been led by this examination to conclusions quite different from his own predilections. He had assumed, in common with most of his comrades in that campaign, that the Fourth and Twenty-third Corps were the only forces available to oppose Hood until the arrival of Major-General A. J. Smith with the Sixteenth Corps.

1 See tables in Appendix A.

the Sixteenth Corps present before decisive operations against Hood. When the battle of Nashville was fought, Rousseau's eight thousand or more at Murfreesboro were as wholly out of the account as if they had been north of the Ohio, and nearly five thousand of Craft's division, besides the post garrison, were kept in the works at the city with General Donaldson's employes, and were not brought into the action. The battle was fought, therefore, with a force numerically less than it would have been if Smith's corps had been entirely absent, and Rousseau and Craft had been in line instead. It is true that a good many new regiments had taken the place of old ones; but these were not what is commonly meant by raw recruits. They were always officered by men of experience, and many veterans were in the ranks. Four thousand of them swelled the old divisions of the Fourth Corps, and there was no complaint that they did not fight well. As to the provisional organization of convalescents and furloughed men of the different corps with Sherman, their conduct in Grosvenor's brigade in this action, and subsequently on the North Carolina coast, proved they were scarcely distinguishable from veteran troops under their accustomed flags. But if the troops had not been of the best quality, there would be no less need of handling them according to the principles which military experience has established, and a rapid concentration would still be proper.

When Hood began the campaign in earnest, the first movements of our forces were the reverse of concentric. Granger, instead of joining Schofield, was sent a hundred miles to the east, and the garrison at Johnsonville was taken to the rear of Nashville. This would seem to have been with the idea that it was necessary to protect the railways against expected raids. If so, it was an error, for had Hood been unwise enough to have detached Forrest for such a purpose, he would have been at the same disadvantage he subsequently was at Nashville, where the absence of the hostile cavalry made the opportunity which resulted so gloriously for our arms. No raid of Forrest's could have done more damage to the Chattanooga Kailroad than the forced retreat from Pulaski did to an equally important line, to say nothing of the damage actually done to the former while Hood lay in front of Nashville.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.