ly seen, no comment seems to be necessary on this feature
of his report.

In respect to the statement in my report that I had in the night
of December 15 "waited upon the commanding general and received
his orders for the pursuit," that was simply a fact without which
there was possible no rational explanation of what occurred, or
did not occur, the next day. I must have taken it for granted that
General Thomas would make some frank and candid explanation of all
those matters in his own report, and I could not have imagined that
I might incur his displeasure by telling the simple truth. My
opinion of his character forbade the possibility of any supposition
that he would desire to conceal anything, even if concealment were
possible, of facts to which there were so many witnesses. Hence
my astonishment at the discovery of so much that I cannot even
attempt to explain.

It was publicly stated, soon after the death of General Thomas,
that his mortal stroke occurred when he was trying to write something
in regard to the use made of the Twenty-third Corps in the battle
of Nashville. If he then saw, as it would seem he must have done,
the wrong into which he had been betrayed, his sudden death is
fully accounted for to the minds of all who knew his true and honest
and sensitive nature. He had been betrayed by some malign influence
into an outrage upon his own great reputation which it was not
possible to explain away, while the slight wrong he had done to
me, even if he had intended it, had already proved utterly harmless.
His own great record could not possibly suffer from my discussion
of the facts, unless those facts themselves proved damaging to him;
and he had been too much accustomed to such discussion to be
disturbed thereby. There seems no possible explanation of the
great shock General Thomas received but the discovery that he had
apparently done an irreparable injury to himself. But I do not
believe General Thomas himself was the author of those acts which
were so foreign to his nature.

FALSE REPRESENTATIONS MADE TO GENERAL THOMAS

At Nashville, in December, 1864, and afterward, General Thomas
appears to have been made the victim of a conspiracy to poison his
mind by false accusations against his senior subordinate. A press
report of a conversation said to have taken place in San Francisco
in the year 1869, between General Thomas and General Halleck, gave
some indication