December 9, 1864---"Conditions are not propitious"

DECEMBER 9, 1864:        

 High winds, torrential rains, low temperatures, and driving sleet, turn the area around Nashville into a quagmire in which nothing can move. Wagons bog down to their axles while horses sink into the ooze up to their fetlocks. 

800 miles away, President Lincoln is demanding to know why General John Schofield has not completed the destruction of John Bell Hood’s decimated Confederate Army of Tennessee. When he sends Schofield a telegraph, Schofield’s laconic reply that conditions are not “propitious” for an attack puts Lincoln in mind of General McClellan on the Peninsula in 1862. And when the unknowing Schofield follows this up with a message that his horses need more fodder, Lincoln hears an echo of McClellan’s refusal to pursue Lee after Antietam because his horses were “fatigued.” In truth, conditions are not propitious for an attack, and Schofield does need the extra fodder, but Lincoln cannot know this. 

  

Fearing that Hood will slip away and that the war, measurably closer to its end, will be prolonged, Lincoln’s storied equanimity snaps in a most unusual blaze of rage. He no longer must tolerate McClellanesque generals, not with Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in the fight. He tells Grant that the commanders in Nashville (Schofield and George H. Thomas) must be replaced. 

Grant, a practiced campaigner nonpareil, is having weather problems of his own around Richmond-Petersburg (heavy snow, high winds, and biting cold) and suspects that conditions are just as bad, if not worse, far inland. After he receives a detailed report of conditions from Thomas, Grant shares it with the President, who by then has recovered his usual good humor and expresses characteristic concern for the men in the lines.