Was General Thomas Slow at Nashville? Part 2

The capture of the city resulted in the destruction of a great quant.i.ty of war material, over 60 guns, the ram _Jackson_, mounting 6 guns, a large number of small arms, 125,000 bales of cotton, 15 locomotives, 250 cars, a navy yard and armory, 2 rolling mills, 1 a.r.s.enal and nitre works, 2 powder magazines, 2 iron works, 3 foundries, 10 mills and factories turning out war material, 100,000 rounds of artillery ammunition, and a great quant.i.ty of machinery used in the manufacture of war material.

THE CAVALRY AT COLUMBUS.

Columbus was the great manufacturing center of the Confederacy, and this destruction inflicted irreparable damage. While little was known at the North of this sweep of Wilson's columns through the industrial centers and military storehouses of the Confederacy, it is easy to understand that these fatal blows at vital points of interior military supply added to the demoralization and discouragement attending the evacuation of Richmond and the gathering storm about the armies of Lee and Johnson.

The column moved swiftly for Macon, and about eighteen miles out from it the officer in advance was met with a flag of truce carrying a note from General Beauregard notifying the commander of the forces of General Sherman's truce with General Johnston, stating that an agreement had been entered upon that the contending forces were to occupy their present positions till forty-eight hours' notice had been given of the resumption of hostilities. As General Wilson was eight or ten miles in the rear with his main command, the note was sent to him, and the officer in the advance pushed to and into Macon, taking possession of the city. When General Wilson arrived in the city he went at once to the city hall, where Generals Howell Cobb, Gustavus W. Smith, and others had been confined.

General Cobb demanded that he and his command should be released, and that General Wilson should retire to where the flag of truce had met his advance. General Wilson declared that after receiving the note he had lost no time in pushing on to the head of his column, and found it in full possession of the city. He could not accept notification of a truce through the Confederate authorities, as they were not his channel of communication with General Sherman, and ended the conference by a positive refusal to acknowledge the armistice, to retire from the town, or to release his prisoners. When he announced this decision he said to General Cobb that he could conceive of but one adequate reason for the truce, and that was that Lee's army had surrendered. Cobb, however, declined to give any information, but General Smith, to whom Wilson addressed the same remark, answered that Lee had surrendered, and that peace would soon follow. Thereupon General Wilson announced his decision to remain at Macon and conduct his future operations upon the principle that every man killed thereafter was a man murdered.

This interview was held on the 20th of April just before midnight, and was the first definite knowledge which Wilson's column had obtained of the events which had occurred in Virginia.

The surrender at Macon included a large number of small guns and a great quant.i.ty of military stores and supplies. The next day the Confederate authorities opened communication over their own telegraph lines between Wilson and Sherman, and the former received orders from the latter to desist from hostilities pending an armistice. Soon after he received orders from the Secretary of War, through Thomas, to disregard this armistice and resume operations, but before this order reached him he learned that Johnston had surrendered all the Confederate forces east of the Mississippi, and that peace was a.s.sured.

The closing act of General Wilson's campaign was the capture of Jefferson Davis by regiments from his command. Thus ended the most noted cavalry movement of the war.

The above is of necessity a very concise presentation of the salient points of General Wilson's remarkable campaign, conducted alone by mounted troops. It is not claimed that the account is new. I have published it heretofore in extended form, though not in the press. This briefer story cannot but be a repet.i.tion of the facts and a synopsis of the fuller statement of them. It is a chapter in our war history than which no other is more replete with thrilling and brilliant incident, with skillful planning, and bold and successful execution. No purely cavalry campaign in our war approached it in these features. It is doubtful whether its parallel can be found in the cavalry annals of any modern nation. And to this general statement should be added that the officer who commanded it, who was its organizer and its controlling spirit, the one upon whom General George H. Thomas leaned as one of his most trusted lieutenants and advisers, was only twenty-seven years old.

It is not strange that Lee's and Johnston's surrender fixed the attention of the country and turned it away from General Wilson's campaign. Had these two events been delayed a month the land would have rung with Wilson's praises and with new honors for General Thomas. Indeed, had the withdrawal from Richmond and the events which so quickly followed it been only delayed in their beginning by a few days necessary to have informed the country of Wilson's marvelous successes, it is certain that his breaking up of these interior storehouses of military material, and the destruction of these many plants for producing more, would have inseparably and largely connected themselves in the minds of the people with the eastern surrender as cause and effect.

It was a campaign whose success would have been the same had Lee been able to hold on to Richmond, and had Johnston so eluded Sherman as to prolong the contest in Virginia and North Carolina.

THOMAS'S PLAN THOUGHT OUT AND FOLLOWED.

From the first this cavalry campaign had proceeded according to a clearly formed plan. It was made after full conference with General Wilson. First, it was decided that to render an attack upon Hood's line certain of success a sufficient cavalry force must be in hand to turn his flank. The next requirement, that of pursuing so effectively as to break up Hood, could not be met without sufficient cavalry. So General Thomas held on in the face of what has been related till he was so nearly ready to strike that he felt certain of success. As a result, the ends in view were attained. The cavalry flanking circuits made possible the driving of the enemy from his extended position. The pursuit by a thoroughly equipped cavalry force made possible and secured the virtual destruction of Hood's army.

The next campaign, urged by Wilson and approved by Thomas, had for its objective the destruction of the military storehouses and manufactories, and the fatal crippling of the Confederacy. How complete was the success of this second campaign the outlines already presented sufficiently attest.

In summarizing this attempt to again direct attention to this wonderful cavalry campaign, it may be permissible to repeat the form in which I have heretofore set it forth in a volume (the concluding chapters of Colonel Donn Piatt's "Life of Thomas") covering the ground of this article at much greater length:

It should be remembered forever in the annals of war that Thomas insisted upon waiting to remount a portion of the (cavalry) corps before he would consent to deliver battle, and that when he did march forth against the veteran and almost invincible infantry of Hood, strongly intrenched in his front, it was the cavalry corps which broke through his left, and wheeling grandly in the same direction, captured twenty-seven guns from their redoubts on the first day, and which, continuing its movement on the second day, enveloped and took in reverse the left and left center of the Confederate intrenchments, and so shook their entire line as to make it a walkover for the infantry which Thomas finally hurled against them. It was the harra.s.sing pursuit of Hood by the cavalry corps which, notwithstanding the rains and sleet of midwinter and the swollen rivers, broke up and scattered the host which had so confidently invaded Middle Tennessee only a month before. Pausing on the banks of the Tennessee till the rough edge of winter had pa.s.sed, to gather in the distant detachments, to procure remounts, clothing, and equipments, and to weld the growing force into a compact and irresistible army corps of hors.e.m.e.n, the cavalry commander, with the full concurrence of Thomas, the beau ideal of American soldiers, began his final and most glorious campaign. No historian or military critic can read the story of the operations which followed without coming to the conclusion that they were characterized by the most remarkable series of successes ever gained by cavalry in modern warfare. They ill.u.s.trate, first, the importance of concentrating that arm in compact ma.s.ses under one competent commander, and in operations of the first importance; second, the tremendous advantage of celerity of movement, especially in modern warfare, where improved firearms play such a decisive part; third, that the chief use of horses, notwithstanding that they may in exceptional cases add to the shock of the charge, is to transport fighting men rapidly to the vital point of a battlefield, and especially to the flank and rear of the enemy's position, or deeply into the interior of the enemy's country against his lines of supply and communication, and also his a.r.s.enals, armories, and factories; fourth, that the best infantry armed with the best magazine carbines or rifles make the best mounted troops, irrespective of whether they be called cavalry, dragoons, or mounted infantry.

When the fact is recalled that the seven divisions of this corps at the close of the war mustered about 35,000 men for duty with the colors, and that had the war lasted sixty days longer they could, and probably would, have been concentrated in Virginia, it will be seen to what a high degree of perfection the organization had been brought, and that it fully justified Sherman's declaration that it was by far the largest, most efficient, and most powerful body of horse that had ever come under his command. But when the captures of the strongly fortified towns of Selma, West Point, and Columbus are considered, with all the romantic incidents of night fighting, together with the surrender of the no less strongly fortified cities and towns of Montgomery, Macon, and West Point, carrying with them the destruction of the last and only remaining a.r.s.enals, armories, factories, storehouses, and military munitions and supplies, and also the destruction of the railways connecting those places with their bridges and rolling stock, it will be seen that Johnston and his generals had nothing else left them but to lay down their arms and surrender. It was no longer possible for them to concentrate an army, or to supply it with food, or to keep it armed and equipped. With those places and the manufacturing plants which they contained still in their possession, and with the railways connecting them still unbroken, they might have collected together in the Carolinas a force amply able to cope with Sherman, and possibly to overwhelm him before reinforcements could reach him. That brilliant but erratic leader, with his splendid army, it will be remembered, had avoided Macon on the one hand and Augusta on the other, both the seats of important military industries, and by an eccentric and unnecessary movement from his true line of operations, had gone to Savannah, leaving the direct railroads and highways behind him open and free for the use of the remnants of Hood's army and of the other scattered detachments which were hastening to form a junction with Johnston, now the sole hope of the Confederacy.

Had it not been for Wilson's wide swath of victory and destruction through and not around the important cities in his way, during which he captured 8500 prisoners and 280 guns, and afterward paroled 59,000 rebel soldiers belonging to the armies of Lee, Johnston, and Beauregard, it would have been easy for Johnston and Beauregard, had they been so minded, to continue the war indefinitely. As it was, to continue it was simply impossible, and for this the country is indebted, first, to Wilson and his gallant troopers, and second, to Thomas, who insisted that they should have time to remount and prepare for the work before them. Neither the army nor the country ever appreciated that invincible body of hors.e.m.e.n, or their division, brigade, regimental, and company commanders, or the high character of the enlisted men, or the performances of the whole at their real worth. There were officers among them fit for any command that could have been given them, and as a body they were as gallant and capable soldiers as ever drew saber or wore uniform. Had the war lasted a few months longer their fame would have been a household word. The leaders, though young in years, were old in war. Wilson himself was at the close not yet twenty-eight. Kilpatrick was about the same age. Upton was several months younger. Winslow, Alexander, Croxton, La Grange, Watkins, Atkins, Murray, Palmer, n.o.ble, Kitch.e.l.l, Benteen, Cooper, Young, Bacon, and Weston were of the younger set, while McCook, Minty, Long, Hatch, R.

W. Johnson, Knipe, Kelly, Hammond, c.o.o.n, G. M. L. Johnson, Spalding, Pritchard, Miller, Harrison, Biggs, Vail, Israel Garrard, McCormick, Pierce, and Frank White were somewhat older, though none of them had reached middle life. Harnden, as st.u.r.dy as Balfour of Burleigh, and Eggleston, the type of those who rode with Cromwell at Marston Moor, were graybeards, but were full of activity and courage. Ross Hill and Taylor, although captains, were mere boys, but full of experienced valor.

The men in the ranks were mostly from the Western and Northwestern and upper slave States, and of them it may be truthfully averred that their superiors for endurance, self-reliance, and pluck could nowhere be found.

After they were ma.s.sed at Nashville they believed themselves to be invincible, and it was their boast that they had never come in sight of a hostile gun or fortification that they did not capture. Armed with Spencers, it was their conviction that elbow to elbow, dismounted, in single line, nothing could withstand their charge. "Only cover our flanks," said Miller to Wilson, as they were approaching Selma, "and nothing can stop us!" In conclusion, it may be safely said that no man ever saw one of them in the closing campaign of the war skulking before battle or sneaking to the rear after the action began. They seemed to know by instinct when and where the enemy might be encountered, and then the only strife among them was to see who should be first in the onset. With a corps of such men, properly mounted and armed, and with such organization and discipline as prevailed among them during their last great campaign, no hazard of war can be regarded as too great for them to undertake, and nothing should be counted as impossible except defeat.

When the "records" are all published and the story properly written, it will show that no corps in the army, whether cavalry or infantry, ever inflicted greater injury upon the "Lost Cause," or did more useful service toward the re-establishment of the Union under the Const.i.tution and the laws, than was done by the cavalry corps of the Military Division of the Mississippi.

THE END.