… was concluded on this date in 1864, when James Steedman (above), US major general of volunteers, brought down a relief force by train from Chattanooga to drive off the 4,000 Confederate cavalry raiders under Joseph Wheeler who were besieging Dalton in northwestern Georgia. Confederate General John Bell Hood hoped Wheeler's raid would lift the ongoing siege of Atlanta by sufficiently disrupting Major General William T. Sherman's supply line -- which it failed to do.
Steedman was a colorful character with a combat record dating back to West Virginia in 1861, and including the heroic relief of George Thomas at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. After Dalton, in December 1864, he would lead a division under Thomas at Nashville. While that battle was an overwhelming victory, Steedman's African-American troops suffered heavy casualties.
In-between, still at Chattanooga, Steedman encountered an unimpressed regular, Major General David Stanley, who wrote in his memoirs:
"At the time he was living in very high style, holding a gay court. The Princess [Agnes] Salm Salm was his guest and occasionally the Prince, who was colonel of a New York regiment stationed about twenty miles from headquarters, dropped in. The Princess was a very beautiful woman, afterwards mixed up with the tragedy of Maximillian. Steedman was dead in love with the woman and such an idiot that I could not get any work out of him. In fact he was so taken up with making love to the Princess and drinking champagne that it was difficult to see this great potentate of Chattanooga."
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