Matthew Forney Steele

Franklin and Nashville Campaign and Sheridan's March to the Sea Matthew Forney Steele

Publisher Marketing: General Sherman admits that in taking Atlanta he had not accomplished all, for Hood's army, the chief objective, had escaped. Yet Hood's demoralized army was left unmolested for three weeks at Lovejoy's Station, only thirty miles from Atlanta, and, was itself the first to resume offensive operations. The Union army spent this time of truce mainly in resting from the fatigues of the three-month campaign, and in making itself secure and comfortable at Atlanta. General Sherman says in his Memoirs: "All the army, officers and men seemed to relax more or less, and sink into a condition of idleness. Generals Blair and Logan went home to look after politics. Many of the regiments were entitled to, and claimed, their discharge, by reason of the expiration of their term of service; so that with victory and success came also many causes of disintegration." Sherman ejected all the inhabitants from the city, and turned it into a military camp, about which he built a close circle of fortifications. He had not decided what to do next. His line of communications, which had to be guarded all the way back to Louisville, was already 400 miles long. To pursue Hood further southward would only result in prolonging the Union communications without destroying the Confederate army. Wheeler, who had gone into Tennessee to harass those communications, was still there; and Forrest took his command thither from Mississippi about the middle of September for the same purpose. To oppose these.forces, and to prepare for "any other emergency," Sherman dispatched Newton's. division [Fourth Corps] and Morgan's division [Fourteenth Corps] to Tennessee, and Corse's division [Seventeenth Corps] to Rome; and he instructed Rousseau at Nashville, Granger at Decatur, and Steedman at Chattanooga, to employ the most active measures to protect the railways. Meanwhile several letters passed between Sherman and Grant concerning Sherman's future operations. At this time Grant was with the Army of the Potomac in front of Lee at Petersburg; General Canby, at New Orleans, was preparing to act with a land force against Mobile in conjunction with Admiral Farragut's fleet; and a combined land and naval force was preparing for the capture of Fort Fisher and Wilmington, at the mouth of Cape Fear River, in North Carolina. "What you are to do with the forces at your command," General Grant wrote in a letter to Sherman dated September 12, "I do not exactly see." In his reply, dated September 20, General Sherman, after suggesting that Savannah should be captured immediately after Wilmington, said: "I should keep Hood employed and put my army in fine order for a march on Augusta, Columbia, and Charleston; and start as soon as Wilmington is sealed to commerce, and the city of Savannah is in our possession."