And there was Forrest, too. One main factor Thomas was counting on to thwart Hood’s expected movement into Tennessee was the barrier of the Tennessee River held by a strong flotilla of Union gunboats. These heavily armed ships could move swiftly to almost any point on the river and blast a crossing army with a deathly rain of shells the caliber of which no land artillery could hope to match. But while Hood was languishing around Tuscumbia waiting to ford the river into Tennessee, Forrest and his cavalry were wreaking havoc with the proud Union navy and its fancy gunboats.
The Tennessee River curves like a big letter U stamped about in the center of the state of Tennessee, and about midway up the left side of the U is the port town of Johnsonville, where the federals had established a strong main terminal for river traffic. Fresh from a remarkable raid into downtown Memphis, where his men literally chased Union generals from their bedrooms, Forrest now descended on the unsuspecting environs of Johnsonville, destroying forty federal gunboats, transports, and barges and disrupting movement all along the river. Sherman branded him a “devil,” but when Thomas asked for reinforcements, what he received instead were suggestions and advice. All in all, Thomas didn’t like the looks of things and wasn’t ashamed to say so, wiring Sherman, “There is one thing, however, I don’t wish—to be in command of the defense of Tennessee, unless you and the authorities at Washington deem it absolutely necessary.” This sentiment fell on deaf ears as far as Sherman was concerned. In any event, on November 12, a couple of days before Sherman embarked on his “big raid,” the telegraph lines between Atlanta and Nashville went dead for good. Thomas was on his own.
Pap Thomas was a methodical man of the old school of military science. He was also an old-line Virginian, which, at least in the early stages of the war had caused his loyalty to the United States to be questioned in the North and, at the same time, cast him as a pariah in his native Southland; he was one of the few Southern officers of the old army who refused to join the Confederacy.
Born in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1816, Thomas was the scion of a prosperous plantation family and might have led the life of a Southern cavalier but for an independent, if not rebellious, streak that led him into such frowned-upon activities as teaching school and giving church lessons to slave children. He was a meticulous boy who taught himself the patience to make fine saddles, boots, and other leather goods, as well as furniture. Undoubtedly, this methodical and painstaking nature was partially the cause of Grant’s later description of him as “slow beyond excuse.”
Thomas graduated from the Military Academy in the class of 1840, standing twelfth of forty-two cadets, six places behind William Tecumseh Sherman. He had developed into a tall, square-shouldered, handsome man with blue eyes and brown hair. He served in Florida during the Seminole Wars and in 1846—47 was an artillery officer in the Mexican War in a unit that included his future enemies Braxton Bragg and Sam French. His conduct there won him renown both in the army and in his native state. Southampton County presented him with an ornate sword of gold, silver, and precious stones.
In 1855 the Second Cavalry was formed by then U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and Thomas became a major in it. The regiment was largely officered by Southerners—in fact, of the seventeen generals the Second U.S. Cavalry furnished during the Civil War, twelve served the Confederacy—leading many, including Thomas, to suspect that Davis had deliberately organized the unit with a future war between North and South in mind. As one of his junior officers, Thomas had a young Kentucky lieutenant, John Bell Hood.
In 1860 Thomas took a year’s leave of absence from the army, and in early 1861, with many Southern states seceding, he applied for the post of commandant of the Virginia Military Institute. The post had already been filled, but Thomas was then offered a position as chief of ordnance for the state of Virginia, which, of course, would require him to resign from the U.S. Army. He replied, “As long as my native State remains in the Union it is my purpose to remain in the army, unless required to perform duties alike repulsive to honor and humanity.” Thus, a conclusion can be fairly reached that on the eve of war Thomas was certainly toying with the idea of placing his loyalty with the South. But in the end he took the oath to the Union, forever dissolving his ties of family and friends in Virginia, who not only never spoke to him again, they never even spoke of him.
After the outbreak of hostilities Thomas was promoted to brigadier general and, along with his old pal Cump Sherman—who, in fact, had interceded with the government to get him promoted—was sent to Kentucky, where he commanded a training camp. It wasn’t long afterward that Sherman supposedly went crazy, and Thomas was ordered to lead a force into the southeastern part of the state to contend with a Southern army under General George Crittenden that was anchoring the eastern end of a Confederate line stretching from the Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi River. While Grant was hammering the opposite end of the line, Thomas, in early January 1862, advanced on the brigades of General Felix Zollicoffer, who had unwisely posted his men in a fairly untenable military position with their backs to the rain-swollen Cumberland River. When Crittenden discovered Zollicoffer’s mistake, he sent an order for the Tennessean to remove to the south bank; but when he personally took the field, he discovered to his consternation that the order had not been carried out. Thomas, by now encamped in a driving rainstorm, had divided his force on opposite sides of Fishing Creek, and Crittenden decided to launch a sneak dawn attack on the left wing.
From the Confederate standpoint, the battle was a series of disastrous errors and ill luck. First off, Thomas was not surprised as intended because a cavalry patrol he sent out detected the advance of Crittenden’s army. This allowed him time to unite his divided forces and rout the cold and muddy gray-clad attackers. In the melee, Zollicoffer was shot down when he mistakenly rode into the Union lines, and Crittenden, a West Point man, afterward was convicted of drunkenness during the battle. It was the first Union victory of the war, and Pap Thomas had won it. In its gratitude, the government promoted him to major general.
At Shiloh, next spring, Thomas did not take part in the battle but commanded a division of Buell’s army that arrived after the fight was over. By this time the reports of Grant’s incompetence and intoxication had reached the ears of the department commander, Halleck, and that was when he personally took charge and placed Grant in the humiliating vice commander position. Thomas was installed in Grant’s place as commander of the Army of the Tennessee.
Thomas occupied that position for several months, after which Halleck restored Grant, and Thomas returned to his old division under Buell. By late summer 1862, he was made second in command of Buell’s Army of the Cumberland. That September, Washington had become disenchanted with the ponderous maneuvering of Buell and ordered him replaced by Thomas, but Thomas himself had the order rescinded, saying it was fair neither to Buell nor to him at that time. When the War Department really got around to canning Buell a month or two later, Thomas was passed over in favor of General William S. Rosecrans. That incensed the Virginian to the extent that he filed a protest to Washington, but Halleck persuaded him to withdraw it.
All this time Thomas was establishing himself as a soldier of proven field merit, an earnest and methodical workhorse who was absolutely indifferent to danger but without the flair of a “Rosy” Rosecrans or Don Carlos Buell. He served as Rosecrans’s assistant commander without further complaint.
On New Year’s Eve, 1863, one of the bitterest battles of the war exploded about forty miles south of Nashville, near Murfreesboro, beside a stream called Stones River, where Confederate General Braxton Bragg had drawn up the three corps of the Army of Tennessee and, in essence, dared Rosecrans to attack him. The night before the battle, bands on both sides struck up their favorite tunes, “Dixie,” “Yankee Doodle,” and so on, finally ending the evening with “Home, Sweet Home,” which was played by both sides. Thomas commanded three divisions in the center of Rosecrans’s army, opposite some names that would b
ecome increasingly familiar to him as the war dragged on—Bishop Polk, Frank Cheatham, Pat Cleburne, William Hardee.
At sunrise the Confederates emerged from woods and flew into the Army of the Cumberland, causing the two corps of Thomas and General A. M. McCook to recoil on the rest of the army. It was an even bloodier day than the day at Fredericksburg, Virginia, had been three weeks earlier. That night, as the exhausted armies tried to rest beneath a frigid rainstorm, the grim Union generals gathered for a council of war in a house beside the Nashville Pike. Retreat to Nashville was being discussed when Thomas, who had fallen into a half sleep in a chair, perked up and grumbled, “This army doesn’t retreat.” With this pronunciation in mind, they stuck it out for three more days, until Bragg and the Confederate army sullenly drew off southward to a position about midway between Nashville and Chattanooga.
All through that winter and spring Rosecrans’s army remained inert, but finally in June, after much prodding by Washington, the Army of the Cumberland, with Thomas’s corps in the lead, began to move southward in a series of drenching rainstorms, pushing Bragg’s Army of Tennessee before it. In early September, Bragg abandoned Chattanooga and moved his army south beyond Lookout Mountain to an area defined by Chickamauga Creek. Going for the kill, Rosecrans pushed after him, advancing his army in three widely separated columns, with Thomas in the middle. What he did not know was that Bragg had finally divined a scheme to wreck him. With reinforcements expected any day from Longstreet’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia—including the division of John Bell Hood—Bragg designed a trap he hoped would destroy the Army of the Cumberland. While parts of his army held up Rosecrans’s two farthest separated corps, the bulk of it would pounce on the unsuspecting Thomas as he emerged from a gap in the mountains, grind him up, and then turn on the other two corps in similar fashion.
But the plan did not work out that way. Through confusion in some orders and failure to carry out unconfused orders, the trap was sprung, but the bait was not taken. Thomas quickly realized his peril and drew back. An angry Bragg ordered a similar attack on the northern wing of Rosecrans’s army, but it, too, pulled back before any damage was done. The two armies faced each other for a week, until Longstreet arrived. The federals had drawn up their four corps with Thomas’s occupying the left center. The Confederates hit them with a fury on September 19, but by day’s end nothing much had been gained except the spilling of a great amount of blood. Thomas had held fast but braced for a renewal of savagery in the morning.
It came not at sunrise—owing to more confusion on the part of Confederate commanders—but about 9:30, when Bishop Polk’s screaming divisions swooped out of the woods on the left of Thomas’s line, which he had been trying without success to get Rosecrans to reinforce all morning. As Thomas contended with this threat, and begged again for reinforcements, Longstreet launched his assault on Thomas’s right. Here Hood received his mutilating leg wound but not before he saw his troops smash through the Union lines and rout the enemy in front. At this point, half the Army of the Cumberland seemed to melt away, including Rosecrans himself, who, along with his staff, scrambled back toward Chattanooga. But George Henry Thomas, after even his commanding general had fled the field, defiantly kept his corps fighting all through that long hot Sunday afternoon, saving the Army of the Cumberland from a total rout.
For this heroic effort he became idolized as “the Rock of Chickamauga” and a month later was promoted to command of the Army of the Cumberland, which, by the spring, would become the anvil for Sherman’s pulverizing attacks on the road to Atlanta.
No matter how loud Sherman crowed to Washington about giving Thomas all the troops he needed should Hood march on Nashville, Thomas didn’t see it that way at all. Reports came filtering up to him that Hood was beginning to advance across the river with forty to fifty thousand men, while he had barely more than thirty-one thousand effective infantry available. He had sent most of his cavalry up to Louisville to meet shipments of animals and equipment, and the divisions of A. J. Smith had still not shown up. More disturbing was information that the Rebel General Kirby Smith was on his way to Hood with up to twenty thousand fresh troops from the trans-Mississippi theater. And now his old pal Sherman had taken the bulk of the army and marched totally and unalterably out of reach.
Thomas was said to be imperturbable, a virtual man-mountain who inspired universal confidence. But it was also recorded that in times of stress—such as the battles at Murfreesboro and Atlanta—he had a habit of roughing up his whiskers with his hands, then smoothing them out when things calmed down again. In those early days before Nashville, with the gathering storm of Hood on the horizon and his own forces in disarray, Pap Thomas’s whiskers remained for him irritatingly ruffled.
9
It Is Almost Worth Dying
Way back in July, when Hood took command of the Army of Tennessee, Buck Preston had received the news not as a proud fiancée might but with a good deal of apprehension: “Things are so bad out there,” she said. “They cannot be worse, you know . . . they have saved Johnston from the responsibility of his own blunders—and put Sam in. Poor Sam.”
And it continued to be “poor Sam” as the days wore on. With the arrival of Grant’s army at the gates of Richmond, Buck and Mary Chesnut had fled home to South Carolina, but that was not far enough to escape the unflattering gossip and carping that came at Hood’s expense. He was “too rash,” or he “lacked refinement,” or he “intrigued to be put over Joe Johnston’s head,” or he was “Jeff Davis’s pet.” Even worse were the snide remarks about Hood and Buck: “Will she marry that man? He has no manners, no fortune. He is only a lucky soldier,” or, “She is throwing herself away—to marry a maimed man,” or, “Her family are mute as mice. They know he is unfit for this high command.”
Naturally it got worse when Atlanta fell. There were calls for Hood’s removal, accusations that he had butchered his army, and so on. Even his old friend Dr. John Darby—after returning from France with Hood’s new wooden leg—reportedly expressed shock at Hood’s “lack of refinement.” Not that he didn’t have his defenders; there were many—including Mary Chesnut, who always took up for him—and men of high and low rank in and out of the army. In her diary, Mary Chesnut recorded the story of one, a maimed old veteran on his way back to the front:
One man had hair as long as a woman’s. A vow, he said. He has pledged himself not to cut his hair until war [is] declared [over] and our Southern country free.
Four of them had made this vow. All were dead but himself. One was killed in Missouri, one in Virginia, and he left one at Kennesaw Mountain. This poor creature had one arm taken off at the socket. When I remarked that he was utterly disabled and ought not to remain in the army, he answered quickly.
“I am First Texas. If old Hood can go with one foot, I can go with one arm.”
When it became plain that Hood was going after Thomas in Tennessee, leaving Sherman an open door to the heartland of the South, there arose another public outcry. One day, Mary Chesnut recorded, she “found Buck in bed, with a diamond ring from Hood. She needs something, for her beloved’s star is under a cloud.”
It may have been so, but John Bell Hood did not see it in those terms. Cloud or no cloud, he was embarking on the greatest march of his star-studded career—the youngest of the eight full generals of the Confederacy leading forty thousand-odd men northward to fame or destruction, nothing less momentous was on the table for this roll of the dice.
On Sunday, the 20th of November, 1864, Hood sent Stephen Dill Lee’s corps across the newly constructed pontoon bridge over the Tennessee, and at dawn the next day the entire army went into motion, with cheering and the music of many bands. Hood had lost nearly a month waiting for the railroad repairs that would bring him twenty days’ supplies and ammunition, a dangerous but necessary decision, for he was well aware that Thomas would not be idle in the preparations for his unstringing. But he was immensely heartened by his perception that the army “
had entirely recovered from the depression that frequent retreats had created.” When they reached the Tennessee state line, they were greeted by a sign that read, TENNESSEE—A FREE HOME OR A GRAVE, and they cheered again.
It was Hood’s immediate campaign plan to outflank by rapid movement the federal army at Pulaski, about thirty miles to the northeast, which he now knew was under the command of Major General John Schofield, his old friend and West Point classmate. Once that was accomplished, Schofield’s only choice would be to fight a battle with Hood, which the Southern commander was confident he would win because his army was nearly a third larger than Schofield’s, or to retreat hurriedly to Thomas at Nashville, in which case Hood proposed to cut him off and wipe him out. With Schofield’s force disposed of, the Army of Tennessee could then march unopposed to defeat Thomas’s divided forces at Nashville. An important part of this plan was that Schofield should be dispensed with south of Columbia and the barrier of the Duck River, and Hood had set his army moving with this in mind.
Various participants recorded their feelings as they crossed the high swirling river, many back into their native state. Tennessee boasted thirty-two regiments of the army; Alabama was next with thirty-one; Mississippi had twenty-eight; Georgia fifteen; Arkansas thirteen; Texas seven, plus seven of cavalry; Louisiana seven; Missouri four, plus eight of cavalry; Florida five; South Carolina four; and North Carolina two. Of the Confederate states, only Virginia went unrepresented; all of her sons were fighting with Lee up around Richmond. The march of Hood’s army is a soldiers’ story, told in soldiers’ words.