f him but to secure evidence to disprove
statements that I knew to be false, dishonoring the brigade to which I
belonged. These had been made by General Cox in _The March to the
Sea--Franklin and Nashville_, and by Captain Scofield, a member of Cox's
staff, in a paper entitled "The Retreat from Pulaski to Nashville,"
published in the second volume of _Sketches of War History_, issued by the
Ohio Commandery of the Loyal Legion.

"Misery loves company," and these two officers of the twenty-third corps,
undoubtedly working in collusion, sought to mitigate their misery by
putting two brigades of the fourth corps into the same class with their
corps, whose battle line had proved unequal to the strain of the two
brigades passing over it when driven in from the front by the assaulting
rebel army. That part of Cox's line broke in a panic at the sight of what
was coming and abandoned a good line of breastworks before firing a single
shot. Cox and Scofield wished to make it appear that the two brigades also
became panic stricken and that they never stopped running until they were
stopped by the river. That they were both capable of deliberately bearing
false witness needs no other proof than that furnished by themselves--by
Cox in the contradictory statements made in his two official reports of
the Battle of Franklin, and by Scofield in his false map of Spring Hill,
which he claimed was drawn to scale, but which he had forged to uphold his
claim for extraordinary services rendered by the regiment to which he
belonged in the Battle of Spring Hill the day preceding the Battle of
Franklin.

The discovery of the discreditable part played by General Schofield in the
Battle of Franklin was the greatest find of my investigation. There is not
a bit of doubt that he remained heedless at his headquarters in Franklin
while the enemy was engaged in preparations for assault in plain sight of
our front. If he had given the proper attention to the important reports
of General Cox, delivered in person, and of Colonel Lane, delivered by
Captain Whitesides, he would have ridden to the front, which he could have
done in less than ten minutes, to see for himself what was going on there.
One look must have convinced him of the mistake he was making as to
General Hood's intention. He then might have remedied the blunder he made,
when he ordered Wagner's division into the position occupied by the
brigades of Lane and Conrad. Yet his blunder went on to