KULP HOUSE, 5.30 P.M.

General SHERMAN:  We have repulsed two heavy attacks, and feel confident, our only apprehension being from our extreme right flank.  Three entire corps are in front of us.

Major-General HOOKER.

Hooker’s corps (the Twentieth) belonged to Thomas’s army; Thomas’s headquarters were two miles nearer to Hooker than mine; and Hooker, being an old army officer, knew that he should have reported this fact to Thomas and not to me; I was, moreover, specially disturbed by the assertion in his report that he was uneasy about his right flank, when Schofield had been specially ordered to protect that.  I first inquired of my adjutant, Dayton, if he were certain that General Schofield had received his orders, and he answered that the envelope in which he had sent them was receipted by General Schofield himself.  I knew, therefore, that General Schofield must be near by, in close support of Hooker’s right flank.  General Thomas had before this occasion complained to me of General Hooker’s disposition to “switch off,” leaving wide gaps in his line, so as to be independent, and to make glory on his own account.  I therefore resolved not to overlook this breach of discipline and propriety.  The rebel army was only composed of three corps; I had that very day ridden six miles of their lines, found them everywhere strongly occupied, and therefore Hooker could not have encountered “three entire corps.”  Both McPherson and Schofield had also complained to me of this same tendency of Hooker to widen the gap between his own corps and his proper army (Thomas’s), so as to come into closer contact with one or other of the wings, asserting that he was the senior by commission to both McPherson and Schofield, and that in the event of battle he should assume command over them, by virtue of his older commission.

They appealed to me to protect them.  I had heard during that day some cannonading and heavy firing down toward the “Kulp House,” which was about five miles southeast of where I was, but this was nothing unusual, for at the same moment there was firing along our lines full ten miles in extent.  Early the next day (23d) I rode down to the “Kulp House,” which was on a road leading from Powder Springs to Marietta, about three miles distant from the latter.  On the way I passed through General Butterfield’s division of Hooker’s corps, which I learned had not been engaged at all in the battle of the day before; then I rode along Geary’s and Williams’s divisions, which occupied the field of battle, and the men were engaged in burying the dead.  I found General Schofield’s corps on the Powder Springs road, its head of column abreast of Hooker’s right, therefore constituting “a strong right flank,” and I met Generale Schofield and Hooker together.  As rain was falling at the moment, we passed into a little church standing by the road-side, and I there showed General Schofield Hooker’s signal-message of the day before.