Was General Thomas Slow at Nashville?

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R.M. Boynton. Was General Thomas Slow at Nashville?

PREFACE

WAS GENERAL THOMAS SLOW AT NASHVILLE?

THOMAS ORGANIZING HIS ARMY

CONCENTRATING IN FRONT OF HOOD

THE PANIC AT WASHINGTON

THE ATTACK ON HOOD

THE CAVALRY IN THE BATTLE

THOMAS TURNS ON HIS NAGGERS

THE CAVALRY AFTER NASHVILLE

THE CAPTURE OF MONTGOMERY

THE CAVALRY AT COLUMBUS

THOMAS’S PLAN THOUGHT OUT AND FOLLOWED

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A new generation has come upon the stage since our civil war. It has its own writers on the events of that struggle. Some of these, careful students as they are, make proper and effective use of the stores of material which the Government has collected and published. Others, stumbling upon interesting dispatches of notable campaigns, read them in connection with the ill-considered and hasty criticisms of the hot times which brought them forth, and, finding questions settled twenty years ago, but entirely new to themselves, they proceed to reveal them as new things to the new generation. By this process it has recently been announced that General Thomas was slow at Nashville. To give this echo of thirty-two years ago sufficient voice, several columns of dispatches – which a quarter of a century since formed the basis of discussions that demolished the theory they are now brought forward to sustain – are gravely presented as something new.

Nothing better illustrates this situation than the very familiar story of the Irishman who assaulted the Jew for the part he took in the Crucifixion, and upon being remonstrated with upon the ground that the event occurred eighteen hundred years ago, replied that it was nevertheless new to him, as he had only heard of it the day before.

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Naturally, the part played by the cavalry in our great battles was often concealed or minimized, while the infantry operations filled the public eye and for the time dimmed the credit due to the cavalry arm. The history of the war does not afford another case where the cavalry formed the determining factor, and, notwithstanding this, where it was so largely overlooked in the distribution of the honors.

It is necessary to a full understanding of the brilliancy, efficiency, and completeness of Thomas’s final movements to have in mind the situation after General Sherman had marched away from Hood and left Thomas in Tennessee to stand between that veteran Confederate army and the Ohio.

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