Homegrown Yankees: Tennessee's Union Cavalry in the Civil War

18. North to Nashville

1. Sherman, Memoirs, 2:144–62. 2. B&L, 4:427; Boatner, Civil War Dictionary, 439–40; Thomas Robson Hay, Hood’s Tennessee Campaign (New York, 1929), 57; J. P. Young, “Hood’s Failure at Spring Hill,” CV 16 (Jan. 1908), 25. CHAPTER 18 North to Nashville W hen Sherman occupied Atlanta on September 2, Hood remained below the city. In early October he circled clockwise around the Union army. Sherman countered by shuffling detachments to North Georgia and Chattanooga. He deployed Thomas with his Army of the Cumberland to assume command in Middle Tennessee of a force eventually including nine divisions and four-fifths of Sherman’s cavalry. Then Sherman spent most of October pursuing Hood in northwestern Georgia before beginning his march to the sea in mid-November.1 Hood demonstrated in front of Decatur, Alabama, during late October before concentrating his army at Tuscumbia, close to Cherokee Station on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. He sent two divisions across on a pontoon bridge to Florence and waited for his new cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest. But Forrest was delayed by his amphibious raid on the port of Johnsonville, during which he ignited much of the facility’s huge store of supplies and ordnance. By the time Forrest had his troopers, in the words of one Confederate, “fairly well mounted and equipped,” it was mid-November. This delay enabled Thomas to collect and organize his force at Nashville.2 At Grant’s urging, during the final days of September 1864, Sherman appointed the twenty-seven-year-old James Harrison Wilson, former head of the U.S. Cavalry, as chief of cavalry of the Military Division of the Mississippi. The division included cavalrymen of the department’s three main field commands (the Armies of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio) in regi- 290 The Nashville Campaign 3. Wilson, Under the Old Flag, 2:4–5; Boatner, Civil War Dictionary, 930–31; Longacre, Grant’s Cavalryman, 160. 4. Wilson, Under the Old Flag, 2:13, 19–21, 23; B&L, 4:465; Longacre, Grant’s Cavalryman, 162, 164. 5. B&L, 4:465; Longacre, Grant’s Cavalryman, 164–65; Francis F. McKinney, Education in Violence : The Life of George H. Thomas and the History of the Army of the Cumberland (Detroit, 1961), 387. 6. B&L, 4:465; Wiley Sword, Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville (New York, 1992), 80–81. ments scattered from Southwest Missouri east to Knoxville and south to Atlanta . Grant predicted that the “slight . . . pinched fac[ed]” general would “add fifty percent to the effectiveness of [Sherman’s] cavalry.”3 In October Wilson visited Thomas in Nashville and Sherman at Gaylesville , Alabama. During that month he outfitted Kilpatrick’s cavalry at Marietta to accompany Sherman south. Perhaps reflecting the type of raid to Savannah that he had in mind, Sherman told Wilson, “I know Kilpatrick is a hell of a damned fool, but I want just that sort of a man to command my cavalry on this expedition.” Wilson studied his other field commanders, inspected their regiments, and created a new organization for his Cavalry Corps. The “Boy Wonder” relieved the cavalry chiefs of the three armies—Stoneman, Elliott, and Grierson—and abolished their corps, giving himself, as he put it, “direct control.” He sent his dismounted men to quartermaster depots at Nashville and Louisville to be mounted and equipped.4 Reaching Nashville in early November, shortly before the presidential election , Wilson found Thomas, a former officer in the 2nd U.S. Dragoons, to be supportive of cavalry as more than a reconnaissance wing of the army. Both generals agreed about its use as an important arm in waging major battles, favoring the use of massed cavalry to reach the enemy’s rear, to hold important positions until infantry arrived, and to engage in pursuit.5 Wilson had only 4,300 cavalrymen ready for action along Hood’s likely route north to Nashville: General Hatch’s division of 2,500 men at Pulaski, initially en route to join Sherman in Georgia; Croxton’s brigade of 1,000 troopers , including Dyer’s 1st Tennessee at Shoal Creek near Florence; and Col. Horace Capron’s brigade of 800 horse soldiers west of Pulaski. On November 6 Hatch joined Croxton and took command near Florence; eight days later Capron moved west of Waynesboro.6 Wilson—who intended to abolish the all-Tennessee Fourth Division— assigned Spalding’s 10th and 12th Tennessee to Hatch’s division. Hatch sent those men needing to...