Memoir of Louis Trezevant Wigfall part 3

Trezevant Wigfall

Part 3

General Hood also insists that the army at Atlanta was greatly demoralized by the loss of men and officers, and by constant falling back. I do not recollect any general officer, except General Polk, who was killed while Johnston was in command; there may have been others, but certainly not many. What were his losses in general officers from Atlanta to Nashville? His march from Jonesboro to the Tennessee line was a retreat, and from Nashville to Tupelo; yet he lost by desertion but three hundred, and left the army in fine spirits. The demoralization of Johnston's
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army cannot be accounted for on this theory. But was it demoralized? It fought well when he first took command. His disasters around Atlanta are not attributed by him to a want of spirit in the men, but to incompetency in the officers. He could not have his orders executed. I incline to the opinion that he is mistaken as much as to his facts as he is in his theory.

General Hood insinuates that General Johnston attempts to dodge an acknowledgment of his full losses by "excluding the idea of prisoners," and charges that his official returns show more than seven thousand under the head of "absent without leave." This is a very grave charge against an officer and a gentleman -- General Hood should know that the usual, if not only, mode of stating the loss of prisoners is in a marginal note opposite the column of "absent without leave." It can never be other than an approximate estimate; for no general can know how many of his "absent without leave," after a battle, have gone voluntarily to the enemy, and how many have been captured. General Hood should know also that the absent and prisoners of an army are continued on its rolls from time to time, as the "field-returns" are made out, without reference to a change of commanders, and that it is very possible, therefore, that a part, or even the whole, of the seven thousand prisoners may have been lost when the army was under the command of General Bragg. The rout at Missionary Ridge had occurred before General Johnston took command. This is a matter, however, which especially concerns General Hood. The field return of the 10th of July shows a loss of not quite seven thousand prisoners (six thousand nine hundred and ninety-four). Opposite General Hood's corps is this note: "Two hundred and thirty-eight officers and four thousand five hundred and ninety-seven men, prisoners of war, are reported among the `absent without leave.'" This shows that, out of not quite seven thousand prisoners of war, nearly five thousand (four thousand eight hundred and thirty-five) were captured from his corps. He knows whether they were lost by him under Johnston, or by some
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one else, under Bragg. For the accuracy of the statement, he, and not General Johnston, is responsible. The return of the army is only a consolidation of the returns of the corps commanders.

But if there were seven thousand prisoners taken during the retreat from Dalton, how does he account for the fact shown by the official returns that General Johnston had, at Atlanta, on the 10th of July, leaving out his killed and wounded, within twenty-five hundred men of the number put under his command previously? How can this excess of loss in prisoners over his total loss (except in killed and wounded) be explained? Upon no other hypothesis than that his army increased by recruiting more rapidly than it decreased by straggling and loss of prisoners. The morale of the army, then, could not have been very bad -- at least not as bad as it is supposed by General Hood to have been. Nor could the people of the territory which General Johnston was "abandoning" have lost all confidence in him. It must have been from them that his recruits were gathered.

It is alleged that at Dalton "the enemy was but little superior in numbers, none in organization and discipline, and inferior in spirit and confidence." The army which is described as "inferior in spirit and confidence" to Johnston's was the one which had lately routed it at Missionary Ridge, under Bragg. An army flushed with victory is not usually wanting "in spirit and confidence." Did the presence of Johnston cause them to doubt their future success? What infused "spirit and confidence" into the Army of Tennessee? Was it the consciousness that it, at last, had a commander who, careless of his own blood, was careful of that of his men, who knew when to take them under fire and how to bring them out, and whose thorough soldiership would save them from ever being uselessly slaughtered by being led to battle, except when some good purpose was to be accomplished, or some brilliant victory achieved? If the "discipline and organization" of the army were as perfect as described, who produced it? For four months it had been under the control
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of Johnston. What evidence has General Hood to sustain his assertion that at Dalton the enemy was but little superior to us in numbers? He relies upon Sherman's statement that he was as strong at Atlanta as when the campaign opened. His army at Missionary Ridge was estimated at eighty thousand. He was afterward reënforced by the army from Knoxville and the troops from North Alabama, besides other. Our scouts reported that he had been reënforced with at least thirty thousand men. General Sherman told General Govan, or said in his presence, that he commenced the campaign with one hundred and ten thousand. I have never heard it estimated at less than ninety thousand infantry and artillery. In July General Wheeler estimated it between sixty-five and seventy thousand. The Northern papers, about that time, admitted his losses to be forty-five thousand. His cavalry was estimated by General Wheeler at not less than fifteen thousand. Johnston in the mean time, under orders of the War Department, sent off two brigades and received one.