The Mockingbird's Ballad

Seeing Lou, turning over the last year and her place in it caused him pause. He couldn't name it but there was something new and different in his thoughts and feelings. It was a threatening thing and it was troubling.

Putting off the image and the feelings accompanying it, he wrote: "The cavalry of the AOT is a mighty pale version of itself these days. We've been stinging the Yankees, trying to give them some pain, but not having much success, skirmishes from McMinnville to south of Nashville, Franklin, Columbia, Pulaski and near Fayetteville, but this has been a fool hardy, mostly trifling adventure. Too many lost, half the command, too little accomplished. Wish I could have seen some folks in Lincoln Co. but I've been gone near 20 years now!"

The next day General Wheeler and his cavalry forded the Tennessee and held up in Tuscumbia, Alabama. John Bell Hood recalled his less than 2,000 (down from 4,500) horse soldiers to the Atlanta area. Hood gave up Atlanta September 2 and moved west to come up and around to pounce hard on Sherman's line of communications from Nashville to Chattanooga and to Atlanta. The plan was to cut Sherman off in Atlanta, draw him out and give battle somewhere in the mountains of north Georgia. Wheeler and Hood joined up Oct. 8 fresh from Tuscumbia with new recruits brought out of middle Tennessee. Along the way near Decatur, the major's journal notation read, "Oct.4, 1864, Courtland, Ala. Partook of the Jones' hospitality for the afternoon. The general and Mrs. Sherrod went for a long walk in the garden. He saddled up with a lightness I had not seen for a very long spell."