This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [237]
Everything was working. Lee’s lines at Petersburg still held, but now his rear was unsafe. Sherman’s army was nearer to Richmond now than it was to Vicksburg, and there was no conceivable way to keep it from coming up. As the year came to an end, the Confederacy had just under four months to live.
4. The Enemy Will Be Attacked
It is possible that the Confederate General Hood made a very serious error in judgment.
When Sherman stopped chasing him in the middle of October and took his men back to Atlanta to prepare to march to the sea, Hood concluded that his own cue was to invade Tennessee from northern Alabama. This invasion might cause the Federal authorities to call Sherman back from his gigantic raid and order him north to meet Hood’s threat. If that failed, Hood could perhaps overwhelm Thomas and regain Tennessee for the Confederacy; he might even be able to drive on north into Kentucky and all the way to the Ohio River in a dazzling counterstroke that would upset the balance and put the Confederacy back into the running again. For reasons that seemed good, then, Hood let Sherman go, pulled his army together below the southernmost loop of the Tennessee River, and at last — late in November, heavy rains and a scarcity of supplies having imposed delay — he took off, crossing the river and moving up toward Nashville.
With hindsight it can be argued that this was a strategic error of the first magnitude. Hood’s offensive was doomed. Thomas had enough strength to stop him, and although the expedition caused uneasy moments in Washington (and proved especially disturbing to no less a person than U. S. Grant) it ended in sheer Confederate disaster. But the simple fact is that Hood had no good choice to make. The Confederate armies were coming to the end of the tether. There was a good deal of killing still to be done — deaths on battlefield and in hospital, men slain in meaningless little crossroads skirmishes, typhoid and dysentery and scurvy doing their stealthy work behind the lines — but the verdict was just about in. Confederate armies now could do little more than play out the string.
In any case, Hood made his march, and for the last time the starred red battle flags of the Confederacy moved north, as if the world were still young and hot gallantry could still go up the road with undaunted hope. Hood himself was morose; he was saying that Johnston’s defensive tactics on the campaign down toward Atlanta had got the men so full of the notion that trenches were invulnerable that they had lost their élan and would no longer attack in the old-time Confederate style. (The furious attacks they had made against odds in his own battles around Atlanta might have shaken him out of this idea but had not done so; it is conceivable that he was excusing his own failure.) Still, his prospects could have been worse. The Federal forces in Tennessee were scattered and needed reorganizing, and there was a chance that he could move in between them and cause much trouble.
Thomas was in Nashville, trying to reassemble his army. Some of his stout Cumberland soldiers had gone off to Savannah with Sherman, and he did not have all of his old command. Reinforcements were on their way, and he would presently have a first-rate cavalry corps — young James H. Wilson, the former staff officer who had fumed so mightily when the sailors failed to get their gunboats down through the Yazoo Delta swamps a year and a half earlier, was putting together a mighty force of mounted men, all of them to be armed with repeating carbines — but Thomas was not quite ready yet and he wanted time. He had sent John Schofield with approximately twenty-two thousand men down near the Tennessee-Alabama border to delay Hood and gain a little of this time for him, and for twenty-four hours it looked as if Hood might eat Schofield’s force at