Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (81 page)

Defensive warfare, however, was Joseph Johnston’s long suit, and from the moment Sherman’s army clanked out of Chattanooga on the roads toward Atlanta until the middle of July, Johnston and the Army of Tennessee tick-tacked across northern Georgia as if it were a gigantic chessboard, holding defensive positions Sherman dared not attack, waiting for Sherman to waste time maneuvering around them, and then slipping back to a new position just as Sherman was about to spring the trap. On June 27, seething with frustration, Sherman risked an all-out frontal attack on Johnston’s positions on Kennesaw Mountain. In two hours Johnston’s men mowed down 3,000 Federals, and Sherman went back to the chessboard war. It took Sherman until the middle of July to cover the 120 miles that separated Chattanooga from Atlanta, and when at last the Federal army arrived there, it found Johnston securely
entrenched around the city, waiting for Sherman to commence a lengthy and futile siege.
⁵¹

Sherman, with a vulnerable 300-mile-long supply line stretching back through Chattanooga to the Ohio River, could not easily afford such a siege. He “did not fear Johnston with reinforcements of 20,000 if he will take the offensive,” but so long as Johnston was safely cooped up inside Atlanta, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry, now based as an independent command in northern Mississippi, could easily slip northward into Tennessee and slice Sherman’s jugular in half-a-dozen places. Sherman tried to forestall the threat of such a raid by dispatching Brigadier General Samuel Sturgis and 8,100 cavalry and infantry to find and destroy Forrest. But Forrest, with no more than 3,500 men, found Sturgis first at Brice’s Crossroads, and on June 10, 1864, Forrest routed Sturgis’s men, capturing most of Sturgis’s artillery, 176 wagons full of supplies, and 1,500 prisoners. “The panoplied and militant host of Sturgis consumed nine days in the march from Memphis to Brice’s Cross-Roads,” smirked one satisfied Confederate, “but, with Forrest on its trail, what was left of that host covered the same distance on the return in two nights and one day.” If Forrest could now get loose on Sherman’s supply lines while Sherman was bogged down in front of Atlanta, Sherman would have no alternative but to withdraw back into Tennessee, and the last prop of Grant’s great offensive would collapse.
⁵²

At this moment, however, Jefferson Davis stepped in to present Sherman with an unlooked-for gift. However successful Johnston’s campaign might have seemed as a defensive operation, it appeared to Davis, who had no incentive to think well of Johnston in the first place, as though Johnston was performing nothing more than a halfhearted retreat when the object of the war in the west was to push the Federals back into Tennessee. So on July 17 Davis abruptly relieved Johnston and turned the Army of Tennessee over to John Bell Hood. No one could have been more the opposite of Johnston, both temperamentally as well as professionally. Hood had spent most of the war in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding a brigade of Texans whom he happily and recklessly threw at whatever Union position lay before him. Personally brave to a fault, Hood knew nothing of caution, and one of Sherman’s scouts (or one of his colonels, depending on the version of the story) recalled seeing Hood bet $2,500 in a poker game “with nary a pair in his hand.” In 1863, he had lost the use of his left arm while leading his men at Gettysburg, and three months later, as part of Longstreet’s corps at Chickamauga, lost his right leg to a bullet while personally leading his men into the teeth of Federal fire.

Aggressiveness like that was just what Davis wanted for the Army of Tennessee, and since Hood was still on the spot in Georgia, it seemed only natural to give the army to Hood to be sure something would be done with it. Not a little of that conclusion was helped by Hood’s own ambitious backstabbing of Johnston. “Here is Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s reward for shielding his soldiers and inflicting losses in Gen. Sherman’s army until his own little army could successfully offer battle and turn back the advancing hosts of Sherman’s invaders,” Douglas Cater complained. “This change of commander… had an effect on the army that was hard to overcome,” and from that point on Cater was convinced that Hood would simply drown the Army of Tennessee in blood. “This order sounded the death knell of the Confederate States of America,” he added. “The mistake that our soldiers then made was in not laying down their arms and stopping further bloodshed.”
⁵³

For Sherman, Hood’s appointment was good news: it meant that the Confederates would at last come out and fight in the open, where Sherman was sure he could beat them. Sure enough, only three days after assuming command, Hood took the Army of Tennessee out of its Atlanta defenses and flung them at the heads of Sherman’s columns. Between July 20 and 28, Hood launched three major assaults, at Peachtree Creek (north and slightly west of the city), near Decatur (east of the city), and at Ezra Church (west of the city), each of which failed to stop Sherman, and all of which taken together cost Hood 19,000 casualties. Hood now slumped wearily into the defenses Johnston had prepared, and settled down to the siege he had been appointed to avoid.
⁵⁴

For Sherman, a siege was still a risky proposition; but with Hood in command, he counted on less vigilance than he would have expected from Johnston. Sherman spent the first half of August using his cavalry to feel around behind Atlanta, looking to cut Hood’s rail line south of the city. Sherman’s cavalry were no match for the rebel horsemen commanded by General Joseph Wheeler, however, and at the end of August, Sherman finally concluded that he would have to do the job with infantry instead. On August 25, leaving only one corps in front of the Atlanta lines, Sherman stole around below Atlanta to Jonesboro, on the Atlanta & Macon Railroad. There his men tore up the railroad tracks, heated the iron rails over bonfires of crossties, and twisted the rails around tree trunks in what became known as “Sherman neckties.” Looking out over the deserted Federal lines around Atlanta, Hood at first
thought Sherman had retreated and that he had won a great victory. “Last night the enemy abandoned the Augusta railroad and all the country between that road and the Dalton railroad,” he jubilantly reported to Secretary of War Seddon. Too late, he realized where Sherman really was, and by the time Hood got his army down to Jonesboro, Sherman had finished with the railroad and was ready to deal with Hood. After a stiff, two-day fight at Jonesboro on August 31 to September 1, during which Hood ordered his “men to go at the enemy with bayonets fixed, determined to drive everything they may come against,” Hood decided to abandon Atlanta and withdraw southward. “Hood… blew up his magazines in Atlanta and left in the night-time,” Sherman telegraphed Halleck on September 3. “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
⁵⁵

With the fall of Atlanta, the first of Grant’s strategic objectives was at last in hand. Ironically, the second of these also dropped into Federal hands at nearly the same time. On August 5, David Farragut sailed a combined flotilla of wooden warships and ironclad monitors into Mobile Bay, and hammered the Confederate forts around the Bay into silence. Although a minefield of Confederate “torpedoes” blocked him from penetrating all the way into the Bay, Farragut took his own flagship,
Hartford
, to the head of the line and plunged into the minefield with the memorable order “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.”
⁵⁶
The mines sank one of Farragut’s monitors, the
Tecumseh
, but most of the mines turned out to be ineffective and the rest of the fleet passed safely into the bay. On August 23, 1864, Mobile was effectively sealed off to blockade-runners.
⁵⁷

The question now was what to do with Sherman. It was the navy and not Banks’s infantry that had locked up Mobile, and so Grant’s old idea of Federal infantry linking up with Sherman from Mobile was rendered moot. There was little point in stopping with Atlanta, and Sherman urged Grant not to waste his time and men garrisoning northern Georgia. Instead, Sherman proposed to launch a gigantic raid down through Georgia to Savannah, where he could link up with the Federal forces occupying the Carolina coastline. “The possession of the Savannah River is more than fatal to the possibility of Southern independence,” Sherman argued to Grant over the telegraph. “They may stand the fall of Richmond but not all of Georgia.”
⁵⁸

The reasons Sherman listed behind that argument were threefold. First, he could fan out across the rich Georgia countryside between Atlanta and Savannah and destroy everything of any possible logistical value to the Confederacy. The capture of Atlanta had effectively cut off the northern Confederacy (and with it, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia) from its communications with the arsenals and foundries of northern Alabama. Now Sherman would put the torch to the fields and farms that fed the Confederate armies. Second, he could demonstrate to foreign nations and to the Confederate people how weak and powerless the Richmond government had become, when it could not stop a Federal army from trampling across its geographical abdomen. “I propose to act in such a manner against the material resources of the South as utterly to negative Davis’ boasted… promises of protection. If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist,” Sherman told Grant again on November 6. “This may not be war but rather statesmanship, nevertheless, it is overwhelming to my mind that there are thousands of people abroad and in the South who reason thus: If the North can march an army right through the South, it is proof positive that the North can prevail.”
⁵⁹
Third, Sherman expected that by putting a major Federal army at the mouth of the Savannah River, he would be in a position to swing north and take Charleston, which had resisted Federal land and sea attacks for two years, from behind.

This was, obviously, an outrageously risky proposition, and both Grant and Lincoln objected that such a march would string out Sherman’s already lengthy supply lines to even more vulnerable lengths. Also, they pointed out, Sherman made no mention of what might happen if Hood and the Army of Tennessee decided to imitate Bragg’s maneuver of 1862 and swing an end run around Sherman back up into Tennessee. Sherman’s reply was the essence of military daring: he did not propose to use a supply line. He was going to conduct a large-scale infantry version of one of Forrest’s raids. Like Forrest, he would strip his army down to the bare essentials and encourage his men to forage off the Georgia countryside for whatever else they needed until they struck the coast. “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!” Sherman assured Grant. “We have on hand over 8,000 cattle and 3,000,000 [rations of] bread,” and for anything else, “we can forage in the interior of the State.” As for Hood, Sherman did not particularly care what the southern general did. Sherman would detach 60,000 men under George Thomas to return and hold Tennessee, but he would keep the rest of his army (nearly 62,000 men) on the road to Savannah come what may. “Damn him,” Sherman snarled at the mention of Hood. “If he’ll
go to the Ohio River, I’ll give him rations. Let him go north. My business is down south.”
⁶⁰

Grant mulled the proposition over, and on October 13 persuaded Lincoln to approve it. One month later Sherman marched out of Atlanta, his bands playing “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” and one-third of the city of Atlanta going up in flames behind him. Moving in four immense columns, Sherman swept aside the feeble resistance of the Georgia militia and burned a swath fifty miles wide across the state. He instructed his men to “forage liberally on the country during the march,” an order they obeyed with gusto. “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure expedition ever planned,” exclaimed one Illinois captain. “We had a gay old campaign,” wrote another soldier. “Destroyed all we could not eat… burned their cotton & gins spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R[ail] roads and raised Hell generally.” On December 10 Sherman turned up outside Savannah, and on December 21 the Confederate defenders evacuated the city before Sherman could trap them inside. “I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah,” Sherman telegraphed Lincoln, “with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”
⁶¹

Along the way, Sherman’s men confiscated nearly 7,000 mules and horses, 13,000 cattle, 10.4 million pounds of grain, and 10.7 million pounds of animal fodder. All told, Sherman estimated that his march to the sea cost the Confederacy all “the corn and fodder in the region of country thirty miles on either side of a line from Atlanta to Savannah,” plus “the sweet potatoes, cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry, and… ten thousand horses and mules, as well as a countless number of their slaves.” On a rough estimate, that set “the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at one hundred millions of dollars; at least twenty millions of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.” Sherman admitted that “this may seem a hard species of warfare.” But it would concentrate Southern minds wonderfully, and bring “the sad realities of war home to those who have been directly or indirectly instrumental in involving us in its attendant calamities.”
⁶²

Meanwhile, just as Sherman had expected, Hood took the Army of Tennessee off on a diversionary campaign through northern Mississippi and up into Tennessee, hoping to compel Sherman to break off his march and follow him back out of Georgia. “Unless the Army could be heavily reinforced,” Hood reasoned, “there was, in the present emergency, but one plan to be adopted: by manoeuvres to draw Sherman back into the mountains, then beat him in battle, and at least regain our lost territory.” Contrary to Sherman’s expectations, Hood’s opportunities for causing serious damage in Tennessee were far greater than had been expected. For one thing, Hood had Forrest’s cavalry with him, and that was danger enough on its own terms; for another, George Thomas, who was supposed to be covering Tennessee on Sherman’s behalf, was slow to get the infantry Sherman had left him concentrated in one place. If Hood moved fast enough, it was entirely possible that he could isolate parts of Thomas’ command while they were still on the roads back to Nashville, and annihilate them by pieces.
⁶³