";s:4:"text";s:6280:" On November 23 Thomas occupied Orchard Knob, high ground before Missionary Ridge, and, the day after, Hooker’s men handily drove the Confederate defenders from Lookout Mountain. 3 The Rock Of Chickamauga 19th Infantry Pinbacks Military. Many biographies of that vintage lose value as new information comes to light. For instance, the coverage of the battle at Nashville is much more detailed in the latter. I prefer the more contemporary work by Einolf, "George Thomas: Virginian for the Union." At first everything went off splendidly. Thomas slept long and deeply of a night. A Union division pulled out of the line just as James Longstreet and his brigades, newly arrived from Gettysburg, hit. Organized 30 September 1861 at Indianapolis, Indiana. But Thomas had put out an elaborate trip-wire alert system. Rock of Chickamauga: The Life of General George H. Thomas Grant was free to choose his successor in the West.If generalships were awarded like civil service positions, on the basis of test scores and previous experience, Thomas would have gotten the job. It was an impressive gesture, but surely a mounted troop could figure out a way to subdue a lone, unhorsed Comanche bowman without suffering four casualties.Thomas made himself into the most meticulous commander of the war. Result . The question was how to end the campaign.His original orders were to hound the Army of Tennessee to its death, but Sherman was starting to think about salt water. Bragg lost control of his men as they poured off the field in panic. His record in the field was without blemish. But those were the assigned roles. No one likes surprises on a battlefield, and Thomas did what he could to see there were as few as possible. Once the Cumberland men got the pits, however, they were on their own. Grant wrote off Thomas' army as used-up during the Battle for Chattanooga. In this battle General Thomas earned his legendary nickname The Rock of Chickamauga. As units of the old Army of the Cumberland rolled by in their insolent western gait, Thomas whispered to no one in particular, “They made me.”After the war Thomas found himself briefly caught up in the turbulent politics of the Reconstruction. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948. The Army of Tennessee, the bravest, unluckiest, and most poorly led military force in American history, had ceased to exist.Sherman, fresh from his capture of Savannah, sent Thomas a wonderfully self-congratulatory Christmas Day message saying that “had any misfortune befallen you I should have reproached myself for taking away so large a proportion of the army and leaving you too weak to cope with Hood. It was a daring plan, and it might well have worked against a less careful adversary. The entire Confederate army tried for the rest of the day to break up this patched-up force and failed. “Turn it every way he would,” Mrs. Thomas later recalled, the most important consideration for her husband was “his duty to the government of the United States.”Coming from a Confederate state and fighting for the Union put Thomas in a difficult position. by University of Oklahoma Press
But the main battle had to be postponed for a day so Sherman could get his men in place to assault the Confederate position at Tunnel Hill.
However, this volume, authored by Freeman Cleaves, holds up pretty well.
Johnston understood that Sherman held the whip hand. Most of these sentiments, however, were written well after the war was safely won, and it is possible Sherman may have been made uneasy by the change of command. But nobody said so then.From his command post at Orchard Knob, Grant could see the battle was getting away from him. Thomas suffered a massive stroke and collapsed. He disobeyed Crittenden’s order to use the Cumberland as a shield and placed his troops between Thomas and the river.
He knew the rules. March 15th 1986 I prefer the more contemporary work by Einolf, "George Thomas: Virginian for the Union."
Sherman, rid of Thomas’s circus tents, could really fly, while Thomas, whose specialty was the calculated sledgehammer blow, could pound the life out of John Hood.Sherman stripped the Virginian of some of his best troops and headed for the ocean while Thomas turned to face Hood. Thomas' relative obscurity is an injustice to such a remarkable man, although the man himself might not mind that much if he knew. In fact there was little to choose between them.