4

THE MARCH TO THE SEA.

tions would be necessary. These would naturally be suchas would turn to good use the auxiliary efforts which Canbyand the Navy were making to reduce Mobile, and, by reach-ing a hand to Sherman from the South, put the whole ofAlabama and Mississippi behind a wall of national bayonetsmoving Eastward, and driving the Confederate Army beforethem. This was the course of events which would be thenatural sequence of what had gone before, if no disasterbefell us; and had things worked in this way, we shouldnever have had the almost absurd debate upon the questionof intellectual authorship.

It was Hood’s audacious movement upon Sherman’s com-munications that changed all that. His design was to carryback the war from Central Georgia to Tennessee , as, onceand again, Lee had carried it back from Central Virginia tothe Potomac. A weak general would have made haste toput the National Army on the north side of the Tennessee to cover and protect his communications; and Hood’s pur-pose would have been successfully accomplished. It wouldhave been much better than this to have followed Hoodacross Alabama , striving to get between him and his owndipots of supply, though this might have had no really deci-sive results. To provide for a sufficient force to keep himfrom reaching the Northern States before the rapidly col-lecting recruits should swell Thomas’s army to a size fullyable to deal with him, and with sixty thousand veteransstrike for the very heart of the Confederacy , was completelyto turn the tables upon the enterprising Southern general,and make his very audacity prove at once his own ruin andthe ruin of the cause for which he fought. This was whatSherman did, and the determination to do it, in the actualsituation, before any base upon the distant seacoast had beensecured, called for the very highest qualities in a commander.