War Department,
Washington City, November 27, 1863.
Hon. C. A. Dana, Chattanooga, Tenn.:
The Secretary of War is absent and the President is sick, but both receive your dispatches regularly and esteem them highly, not merely because they are reliable, but for their clearness of narrative and their graphic pictures of the stirring events they describe.
The patient endurance and spirited valor exhibited by commanders and men in the last great feat of arms, which has crowned our cause with such a glorious success, is making all of us hero worshipers.
P. H. Watson,
Acting Secretary of War.
The enemy was now divided. Bragg was flying toward Rome and Atlanta, and Longstreet was in East Tennessee besieging Burnside. Our victorious army was between them. The first thought was, of course, to relieve Burnside, and Grant ordered Granger with the Fourth Corps instantly forward to his aid, taking pains to write Granger a personal letter, explaining the exigencies of the case and the imperative need of energy. It had no effect, however, in hastening the movement, and a day or two later Grant ordered Sherman to assume command of all the forces operating from the south to save Knoxville. Grant became imbued with a strong prejudice against Granger from this circumstance.
As any movement against Bragg was impracticable at that season, the only operations possible to Grant, beyond the relief of Burnside, were to hold Chattanooga and the line of the Hiwassee, to complete and protect the railroads and the steamboats upon the Tennessee, and to amass food, forage, and ordnance stores for the future. But all this would require only a portion of the forces under his command; and, instead of holding the remainder in winter quarters, he evolved a plan to employ them in an offensive winter campaign against Mobile and the interior of Alabama. He asked me to lay his plan before Mr. Stanton, and urge its approval by the Government, which, of course, I did at once by telegraph.
I did not wait at Chattanooga to learn the decision of the Government on Grant's plan, but left on November 29th, again with Colonel Wilson, to join Sherman, now well on his way to Knoxville, and to observe his campaign.