As if that weren’t enough, Thomas soon became embroiled in a great controversy with Grant, Halleck, and Lincoln himself that very nearly cost him his job.
Hood, of course, was crippled by the losses at Franklin but was still dangerous, like a wounded beast. Since Sherman and his sixty-thousandman army had completely vanished from the map and the public eye, all attention in the North was now focused on Thomas at Nashville. The newspaper reports ranged from the merely frightening to the hysterical. A huge Confederate army, it was written, was advancing—perhaps to Chicago, or Cleveland, or who knew where—and the only thing standing in its way was George Thomas at Nashville. Thomas himself was not frightened, but he was prudent, which others nervously translated into “slow.”
On the day of the battle of Franklin, however, Thomas had been frightened. He knew Schofield was going to have a tough time of it with Hood, and the only word he had of the fifteen thousand reinforcements under A. J. Smith was that they were delayed at Paducah, Kentucky. All he commanded otherwise were smatterings of units that had been called in from outposts, raw recruits, supply garrisons, convalescents from Sherman’s army, and eight regiments of untried U.S. Colored Troops—none of which constituted a combat army. But Thomas’s assistant quartermaster later remembered that about nine o’clock on the night of the Franklin fight, Thomas received a telegram from Schofield saying Hood was defeated, to which Thomas reacted thusly: “His broad brow cleared up and his strong and massive face began to shine with the fierce light of impending battle.” Two hours later steamboat whistles from Smith’s fifty-nine-boat river armada began tooting along the Cumberland levee, followed by Smith himself, whom Thomas greeted with a wild bear hug.
At this point, Thomas was confident of being able to successfully fight a defensive battle, but he still did not feel strong enough to go on the offense against Hood. His reasoning was that a sizable part of his cavalry was still in Kentucky dragooning citizens’ horses in an attempt to remount themselves. Thomas wanted them back and in good order before launching an attack. Further, he wanted time to organize all his various units into a cohesive fighting force. Also, he was operating under the misinformation received from Schofield that Hood’s army was far larger than it was and that Forrest’s cavalry numbered twelve thousand, which was ridiculous.
Thus, the day Hood arrived before Nashville, Thomas telegraphed Halleck in Washington that he wished to delay an attack on the Confederates for a few days, but the very notion of that sent Grant and everybody in Washington into an uproar.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton opened the furor as soon as he got into his office next morning by immediately wiring Grant, who was down by Richmond, that Lincoln was particularly worried by Thomas’s telegram and wanted Grant to order an attack. “This looks like the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing, and let the enemy raid the country,” Stanton fumed.
The same day he received this dispatch, Grant wired Thomas with dire predictions that by not attacking Hood forthwith he might “have to abandon the line of the Tennessee River, and lose all the roads back to Chattanooga.” Furthermore, Grant told Thomas to arm private citizens and civilians working for him and put them in the trenches to hold the city while he moved out with his forces to fight the Confederates.
Evidently not satisfied with that, two hours later Grant telegraphed Thomas again, warning of “incalculable injury upon your railroads” and further complaining that Thomas should have ordered Schofield to attack Hood immediately after the battle of Franklin, instead of retreating to Nashville.
Thomas answered this rebuke with a long and painful explanation, detailing all his woes over supplies, the weaknesses of his army, lack of cavalry, and so forth. He closed with a promise to try to fight Hood “in a few more days.”
Grant let the matter rest for “a few more days” but then resumed his haranguing. On December 5 he wired Thomas, “Hood should be attacked where he is. Time strengthens him, in all probability, as much as it does you.” Next day, his patience sorely tried, Grant telegraphed, “Attack Hood at once. . . . There is great danger of delay resulting in a campaign back to the Ohio River.” Next morning, Secretary of War Stanton wired Grant in a dither, “Thomas seems unwilling to attack because it is hazardous, as if all war is anything but hazardous. If he waits for Wilson to get ready, Gabriel will be blowing his last horn.” Grant replied that if Thomas dallied any longer, he should be replaced by Schofield. “There is no better man to repel an attack than Thomas,” Grant said, “but I fear he is too cautious to ever take the initiative.” Then Grant wired Thomas again, “Why not attack at once. By all means, avoid the contingency of a footrace to see which, you or Hood, can beat to the Ohio.”
Meantime, the authorities back in Washington were getting panicky. Halleck was gravely telegraphing all western commands to send reinforcements to Thomas, and it was even suggested that governors of northern states be called on to raise sixty thousand troops in case Hood started for the Ohio River. Finally, on December 9, Grant blew his fuse.
Schofield, or so it was alleged, had been undermining Thomas by sending secret and uncomplimentary telegrams about him to Grant. It was misinformation in such a telegram—though it has never been positively laid at Schofield’s door—that caused Grant to decide to fire Thomas. The previous night someone had erroneously wired Grant that Hood’s army was “scattered for seventy miles down the River,” and he fumed that Thomas had still not attacked. Of course, the information was absurd, since Hood’s army was concentrated directly in front of Nashville at the time.
Thomas’s chief of staff, General William D. Whipple, began to smell a rat, and he prevailed on General James B. Steedman, fresh in from Chattanooga, to investigate. Steedman got one of his aides to snoop around and see what he could find out, and sure enough, the aide discovered a copy of a telegram in the wire office from Schofield to Grant that said, “Many officers here are of the opinion that General Thomas is certainly too slow in his movements.” That assertion appears to be a bald-faced lie. Only a day or so earlier, at the height of an ice storm, when the telegrams were flying thick and fast between Washington and Nashville, Thomas had called a council of war in his room at the St. Cloud Hotel. There, he laid out for all his senior generals what was going on between him and Washington and wanted to know what they thought. Wilson, the cavalry commander, first stated his case, which was that Thomas should wait until the ground thawed before attacking. Otherwise, horses, men, and equipment would dangerously slip and slide on the frozen ground. One by one the other corps commanders agreed—all, that is, except Schofield, who, Wilson said, “upon this notable occasion sat silent.” As the officers were leaving the room, Wilson said, Thomas asked him to stay for a moment, and when they were alone, Thomas said painfully, “Wilson, the Washington authorities treat me as if I were a boy.” What Thomas sorely wanted to do at that moment was find out why Grant was so adamant about him attacking Hood immediately, when, for the past six months, Grant himself had been sitting outside Petersburg, Virginia with one hundred thousand troops mostly just looking at Robert E. Lee’s fifty thousand inside the city. But it was a question that never got asked.
In any case, Grant had by now made up his mind to relieve Thomas and drew up orders to that effect. A presidential directive was simultaneously written handing over command of the Army of the Tennessee to Schofield. But then another strange turn of events intervened. A few hours later, Grant changed his mind and decided to “suspend the order relieving him,” he said, “until it is seen whether he will do anything.” At the same time, something apparently changed Grant’s mind about Schofield, too, because he dispatched General John Logan, who was visiting his headquarters, to hurry on the train to Nashville and be prepared to assume command of the army if necessary.
Meantime, Steedman had shown Thomas Schofield’s telegram to Grant, and the imperturbable “Rock of Chickamauga” stared at it in disbelief. “Can it be possible that Schofield would send such a telegram?” he wondered, a
nd when Steedman pointed out Schofield’s signature on the document, Thomas asked, “Why does he send such telegrams?” Steedman, the politician, smiled at “the noble old soldier’s simplicity” and replied, “General Thomas, who is next in command to you and who would succeed you?” Thomas sadly shook his head as it dawned on him. “Oh, I see,” he said.
That Schofield was ambitious was no secret, but there might have been an even darker motive for his behavior. Way back when he was a cadet at West Point, he had gotten himself into some trouble that had to do with breaking regulations and might have involved lying. He was sentenced to be dismissed from the academy, but the members of the court-martial voted to remit the sentence—with two exceptions, and one of them was George H. Thomas. Schofield said that at the battle of Franklin he had repaid Thomas’s “stern denial of clemency to a youth” by saving Thomas’s army from disaster and Thomas himself “from the humiliation of dismissal from command.”
In any case, just because Grant had decided for the moment not to relieve Thomas was no reason to stop nagging him, and the wires sang daily with his pestering impatience. As the ice storm continued to rage outside, Thomas wired both Grant and Halleck that he had done all he could until the weather broke, adding, “If you should deem it necessary to relieve me, I shall submit without a murmur.” But Grant railed on, unconvinced, “If you delay attack longer the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a rebel army moving for the Ohio River, and you will be forced to act, accepting such weather as you find. Let there be no further delay.”
16
Like a Lot of Beasts
Down at Murfreesboro, about twenty-five miles from Nashville, Forrest and his people had been having a hard time of it. When Bate had marched off toward the town the day after the battle of Franklin, he expected little or no trouble in his mission of ruining the railroad from Nashville south to Chattanooga, but that expectation was rudely dispelled by the presence of General Rousseau and his eight thousand bluecoats at Murfreesboro itself. Forrest and two of his cavalry divisions arrived to Bate’s assistance shortly afterward, as did two small infantry brigades from Lee’s and Stewart’s corps, but even then the Confederate force numbered only about six thousand, and Rousseau was strongly entrenched in the town.
Bate had been successfully performing his mission of tearing up rails and destroying bridges and federal strongpoints along the track, when along came Forrest to assume command with the surprising orders that they were now to attack the federals at Murfreesboro. Not liking what he saw there, Forrest baited Rousseau to come out of his stronghold and fight, which he did, sending more than half his force under General Robert H. Milroy, a forty-eight-year-old Indiana lawyer who until recently had been under disgrace for letting his command get “gobbled up” by Lee on the way to Gettysburg. Seeing a chance to exonerate himself, Milroy boldly marched his brigades into Forrest’s left flank and routed the startled Confederates, causing losses of two hundred men and two guns.
Forrest reported, “From some cause which I cannot explain, [the infantry] made a shameful retreat,” while Bate counter-complained, “If the cavalry on either flank were engaged, I was not aware of it.” It was not a particularly important engagement strategically, tactically, or otherwise, except to produce a gloomy omen regarding the state of mind of Hood’s army.
Next day, Milroy marched his men back to Murfreesboro, and Bate and his people were sent back to Hood at Nashville. Forrest, meantime, resumed destruction of the railroad, burning blockhouses and capturing supplies and hundreds of prisoners—including an entire federal regiment from Chattanooga and the thirteen-car train it rode in on.
By mid-December, Hood’s army was as strong as it was going to be. Most of those soldiers who after Franklin had taken “French leave” (later called awol) to visit the families and homes they had not seen in two years had returned to their units. Bate was back with Cheatham, and the Confederate soldiers huddled in their trenches and fortifications while bitter winds howled around them and the ground remained covered with “a perfect sheet of ice.”
They had been there for two weeks, and as in any army that has a chance to sit still for a length of time, things began to assume some appearance of wistful normalcy. They could hear the town clock striking in Nashville and the whistles of steamboats and locomotives and the Union bands playing. “Very tantalizing indeed,” said James Cooper of the 20th Tennessee, “to be in sight of home and not allowed to be there.” Captain Thomas Key, the artillerist in Lee’s corps who had mercifully missed the carnage at Franklin, devoted at least some of his time to sparking local girls. Key entertained them, he reported, by “giving them some interesting particulars of a flower called the ‘carnation,’ which was examined with the help of the microscope of Sir John Hill.”
Others plied more utilitarian pursuits. Captain Sam Foster, of Cleburne’s old division, described the establishment of a shoe shop, “not to make new shoes, for there was no leather, but,” he went on, “they take an old worn out pair of shoes and sew moccasins over them of green cow hide with the hair side in. The shoe is put on and kept there and as the hide dries, it draws closer and closer to the old shoe.” Meantime, several grain mills that had been liberated by Bate in his Murfreesboro expedition, were put to work grinding out flour for biscuits and bread, and numerous hogs were rounded up for bacon. Beef was not so plentiful. Thomas B. Wilson, one of the cavalrymen assigned to drive the herd behind the army, reported that the cattle had mostly been fed on dried corn stalks, and that they only butchered the ones that had died or were dying. These were so dry and devoid of fat, Wilson said, “that the boys would amuse themselves by throwing thin stakes of it against trees to see it stick in the bark.” This pastime did not last long, however. The freezing weather necessitated such a clamor for firewood by the hundred thousand men of both armies that by mid-December the once lovely and forested hills around Nashville were completely denuded of trees, and they would remain that way for decades to come.
All was not tranquil on the lines, either, where there was vicious skirmishing and sharpshooting day and night. Sam Foster reported several federals killed so close to Confederate lines they could not be carried back, “So they remain where they fell, froze as hard as a log.” Federal batteries regularly shelled the southern trenches, but the graycoats had to take it without reply because Hood had ordered no return of fire to save ammunition. At one point, Chalmers’s cavalry captured two Union gunboats about twelve miles below Nashville, and brought off fifty-six prisoners and nearly two hundred mules and horses “belonging to the United States Government.” And despite a few rawhide shoe shops like Sam Foster’s, as much as half of the Confederate army hobbled around unshod. “Their bloody tracks could be plainly seen on the ice and snow,” wrote James Cooper. “I had read of such things occurring during the Revolutionary War, but here were scenes eclipsing in suffering all that I had ever imagined.” Furthermore, the immoderate winter weather not only continued, but got worse, according to a private in Bate’s division, who said, “We had to take the weather like a lot of beasts.”
Daybreak on December 14 brought a warm sun and clear skies, and the ice and snow began to melt. That afternoon, Thomas called a meeting of his corps commanders to issue final orders for the attack against Hood, only to be interrupted by yet another needling telegram from Washington. This time Halleck tried a new tack. After going on about Grant’s “great dissatisfaction” over Thomas’s handling of matters, Halleck proceeded to inform Thomas that his lack of action was disturbing the overall policy for the conduct of the war across a five-hundred-mile front from Savannah to Vicksburg, even jeopardizing Sherman’s expedition to the sea. Thomas responded with the simplest of replies: “The ice having melted away today, the enemy will be attacked tomorrow morning.”
In ten short paragraphs of Special Field Order 342, Thomas outlined his plans for the destruction of the Army of Tennessee, which for two weeks had defiantly reposed in the Nashville outskirts, daring him to come out and
fight. The strategy was to be a feint at Hood’s far right by Steedman’s corps and the pinning down of his center by Schofield’s and T. J. Wood’s corps, with the major blow to come as a classic turning movement against Hood’s left flank by the newly arrived Sixteenth Corps of A. J. Smith. All this was to be encased by a wide sweep around Hood’s far left by Wilson’s cavalry corps, now about twelve thousand strong. It was the same strategy Sherman had used to break Hood’s final grasp on Atlanta and similar to the one Grant had employed to drive Lee back into the Petersburg defenses. In fact, it was the same strategy the Union had employed since 1861 in its grand design for winning the war in the west, from western Kentucky to western Tennessee to western Mississippi at Vicksburg: to turn the Confederate left flank.
In essence, what Thomas was preparing to spring on Hood was a great right wheel that would hook around his line to the west and crowd him back on himself. Schofield was the only one to raise an objection. Being assigned to hold Hood’s center, along with Wood (who now commanded Stanley’s corps, after Stanley’s wounding at Franklin), Schofield argued that his men would be too cramped to be of any use and recommended that they be placed along with Smith’s corps in the right wheel movement. Thomas readily acceded to this. The agreed-upon time of the attack was to be 6 A.M. Just before daylight, Thomas packed his suitcase, paid his bill at the desk, “as any ordinary traveler,” and checked out of the St. Cloud Hotel an hour before the movement was to commence.
To demonstrate something of Thomas’s confidence and stability at this point, even though he would shortly be fighting the biggest battle of his career—which was very much on the line—as he rode with his staff through the foggy Nashville streets, he saw standing on the sidewalk a Major Mills, the quartermaster officer assigned to the fuel depot. Thomas halted his entourage and beckoned Mills over, asking him, “Have I drawn all my allowance for coal for this month?” When Mills replied that he had not, Thomas said, “Will you please send fourteen bushels of coal to Mr. Harris, my neighbor? I was out of coal and borrowed that number of bushels from him the other day.” That important business out of the way, the commanding general of the Army of the Tennessee then rode off into the fog toward his field headquarters to fight the battle of Nashville.