Never Call Retreat (50 page)

This was not Missionary Ridge. Instead of taking panic and running away Johnston's men coolly waited in their trenches and sent down a storm of fire that broke the Federal lines to pieces. Johnston paid a soldier's tribute to the Federals' courage, remarking that "the characteristic fortitude of the northwestern soldiers held them under a close and destructive fire long after reasonable hope of success was gone," but the courage only increased the casualty list. The attack barely dented Johnston's line, the Confederates shot down more than 3000 Yankees while losing fewer than 500 of their own men, and by the middle of the afternoon Thomas sent a warning to Sherman: "We have already lost heavily today without gaining any material advantage; one or two more such assaults would use up this army." This was a little strong, perhaps, because by the grim economics of 1864 a loss of 3000 men in battle was by no means excessive, but Thomas was entirely right in the belief that the position in front of him could not be carried. Sherman accepted the fact and called off the offensive, giving Thomas the cold comfort of a philosophic remark, "At times assaults are necessary and inevitable. At Arkansas Post we succeeded; at Vicksburg we failed." General Howard was less philosophical but more to the point: "We realized now, as never before, the futility of direct assaults upon entrenched lines already well prepared and well manned."
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There was nothing for it, obviously, but to start maneuvering again. The long rains had stopped, the roads dried, and Sherman returned to the old formula: pin Johnston's army in position with Thomas' massive host, and use the others to reach out beyond the Confederate flanks. So the Federal host began to sidle to the right, Schofield and McPherson fading back and then going south, and by July 1 their advance elements were beyond Johnston's left, actually closer to Atlanta than he was. Johnston took the alarm at once, and on July 3 Sherman found the terrible Kennesaw Mountain lines empty, with Johnston occupying new works (prepared well ahead of time) around the hamlet of Smyrna, five miles to the southeast. Sherman tapped these lines, found them substantial, and again sent his right out past the Confederate left. Once more Johnston saw his danger and retreated—going this time to the last barrier before Atlanta, the Chattahoochee River.

At first Sherman was jubilant, citing the military axiom that a wise general does not offer battle when a wide river flows across his immediate rear. This case, however, was somewhat special. On the west side of the Chattahoochee Johnston had had constructed what one Federal officer considered the strongest defensive works encountered in the entire campaign: an entrenched line six miles long, covering the railroad bridge and the principal highway crossings, with cavalry screens extending upstream and downstream to guard more remote crossings. Johnston got his army into these works and awaited developments. The memory of Kennesaw Mountain being fresh, Sherman made no attack. He kept on maneuvering, did it skillfully, and was blessed by a stroke of good luck.

Ranging upstream several miles above Johnston's right, Schofield found a gap in the Confederate cavalry screen, got down to the river, laid pontoon bridges, and put two infantry divisions across before Johnston knew what was happening.

Now the last barrier was broken. With Yankee infantry on the Atlanta side of the river Johnston had to retreat in a hurry. He did so, burning the bridges behind him, and as he entered the fortified lines about Atlanta he considered what was going to happen next. His army was on high ground behind Peachtree Creek, a few miles north of the city. When Sherman got across the Chattahoochee he would have to find some place to cross this creek, which was just enough of a stream to be an obstacle to a smooth military movement, and it seemed likely that when he crossed it, with Johnston on his flank, he would expose himself to attack. Johnston believed that he might be able to hold the Atlanta lines with Georgia militia and, with his own army as a mobile striking force, make at last the hard counterblow that he had not seen a chance for since that day at Cassville.
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Sherman spent several days repairing bridges and amassing supplies, then made the move across the Chattahoochee. On the night of July 17 his entire combat force went into bivouac east of the river, almost on the doorsteps of Atlanta. And on the same night Johnston got a telegram from Richmond ordering him to turn command of his army over to General John B. Hood.

2. Sideshows

ITIS EASY NOW to see that the removal of General Johnston was a mistake, but Mr. Davis was operating under a fatal limitation. His narrowing horizon left him little chance to see anything but the purely military problem—the maps, the tracks made by the moving armies, the things done on fields of battle—and he made a wrong choice that arose from his own faulty concept of his responsibilities. The Federal government was applying an unendurable pressure, and if it was not quite using all of its strength—Mr. Lincoln too had made a mistake, and his armies were paying for it—it was nevertheless beginning to win. To play for time, risking all on the chance that victory deferred would make the North give up the struggle, might conceivably have worked, but Mr. Davis did not have much time to spare.

Removing the general, Mr. Davis was supported both by his natural impulses and by his most trusted advisers, and as a result he saw a picture that was oversimplified and hence distorted. He had to remember the past. Johnston had retreated up the Virginia peninsula before McClellan in 1862, and the Yankees had been checked only when Lee came in and took the offensive. A year later, in Mississippi, Johnston had felt unable to attack Grant, and Vicksburg had been lost; this winter he had felt unable to strike toward Chattanooga, and now Sherman had driven him down to the suburbs of Atlanta. To argue from all of this that the man could do nothing but retreat was grossly unfair, but it was perfectly natural: when Secretary of State Judah Benjamin argued (as he was arguing now, incessantly) that "Johnston is determined not to fight, it is of no use to re-enforce him, he is not going to fight," the President was apt to listen. By the time Johnston retired across the Chattahoochee the entire cabinet was urging his removal, and when the general told Secretary Seddon that he would use militia to guard Atlanta while he maneuvered against Sherman with his main army, the President misread this as indicating a fixed intent to abandon the city entirely.
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This prospect was wholly unacceptable. Not only was it painful to consider what such Georgians as Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs would say, in public and in unguarded privacy; Atlanta had in fact become a center of war industries which the Confederacy could not afford to lose. Equally important was the transportation network that centered there; after the war, Mr. Davis testified to "our dependence on the system of Georgia railroads for the food with which we were holding the field in Virginia."
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The plain fact was that the presence of a powerful Federal army on the edge of Atlanta was intolerable.

At the last minute, Mr. Davis sent the discredited General Bragg, of all people, to Atlanta for a confidential report, and after he got there and looked things over Bragg pointed out that it might be the Yankees who would play for time now. Sherman might not even try to capture Atlanta outright; he could elect to paralyze the place, and the central Confederacy along with it, and his position east of the Chattahoochee made it possible for him to do so. Bragg explained: "You will readily see the advantage the enemy has gained, and that it may not be his policy to strike on this side of the river unless he sees his success assured. Alabama and Mississippi will be devastated and our army will melt away. Our railroad communication with Montgomery is now at the mercy of the enemy, and a mere raid may destroy Montgomery." (The point here was that the railroad through Montgomery was the eastern Confederacy's last remaining link with Alabama, Mississippi, and the whole western country.) Bragg concluded: "There is but one remedy—offensive action."
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There was one adviser who lacked enthusiasm for the change. On July 12 Mr. Davis notified Lee that it was necessary to relieve Johnston "at once," and asked: "Who should succeed him? What think you of Hood for the position?" Lee immediately wired his reply: I REGRETTHE FACT STATED. IT IS A BAD TIME TO RELEASE THE COMMANDER OF AN ARMY SITUATED AS THAT OF TENNESSEE. WE MAY LOSE ATLANTA AND THE ARMY TOO. HOOD IS A BOLD FIGHTER. I AM DOUBTFUL AS TO OTHER QUALITIES NECESSARY. In a letter written a few hours after this, Lee enlarged upon these points: "It is a grievous thing to change commander of an army situated as is that of the Tennessee. Still if necessary it ought to be done. I know nothing of the necessity. I had hoped that Johnston was strong enough to deliver battle. We must risk much to save Alabama, Mobile and communication with the Trans Mississippi. It would be better to concentrate all the cavalry in Mississippi and Tennessee on Sherman's communications. . . . Hood is a good fighter, very industrious on the battle field, careless off, and I have had no opportunity of judging his action when the whole responsibility rested upon him. I have a high opinion of his gallantry, earnestness and zeal. Genl. Hardee has more experience in managing an army."
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Lee picked his words carefully when he wrote to the President, and Hood had been one of his most prized division commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia; altogether, Lee must have had powerful misgivings if that was the best recommendation he could write for Hood. But although he was thus warning that this choice would be a mistake, his advice was disregarded; inevitably so, probably, because Hood had been the heir apparent to the command ever since the campaign began. He had been in touch, all along, drawing attention to his commander's errors; much of what Richmond believed about Johnston's failure to accept good chances to bring Sherman to battle came direct from Hood. When Bragg visited Atlanta, Hood gave him a letter asserting that since leaving Dalton the army had lost 20,000 men without having fought a decisive battle, although chances to strike a blow had several times been offered. Atlanta, said Hood, should in no circumstances be given up, and he closed with the same note of diffident self-advancement that had been sounded for Mr. Lincoln under other circumstances by Secretary Seward and General McClellan: "I have, general, so often urged that we should force the enemy to give us battle as to almost be regarded as reckless by the officers high in rank in this army, since their views have been so directly opposite. I regard it as a great misfortune to our country that we failed to give battle to the enemy many miles north of our present position. Please say to the President that I shall continue to do my duty cheerfully and faithfully, and strive to do what I think is best for our country, as my constant prayer is for our success."
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With one point in General Lee's letter practically everybody agreed. The best way to stop Sherman was to turn the cavalry loose on his line of communications—and, specifically, not just any cavalry, but the cavalry commanded by Bedford Forrest, the one Confederate horseman who would be absolutely certain to concentrate on hurting the Yankees without having distracting thoughts about his own fame or the glamour of a dashing cavalry raid.

The railroad operation by which Sherman kept a steady stream of supplies coming all the way down from Nashville, via Chattanooga, was at the same time the gaudiest and the most vulnerable aspect of his entire campaign. It was wartime railroading of a kind never seen before and not often seen since, with everything subordinated to the need to get the required amounts of rations, forage, and ammunition laid down at the advanced depots on time. It was said that engineers on this railroad did not especially need to know much about operating locomotives but they did have to be daring and energetic, and few of them got any sleep to speak of. Trains came down without timetables or regular schedules, going when the dispatchers told them to go, and whenever there was a wreck or any kind of disabling accident the locomotive and cars were simply tumbled off the track to make room for the next train. It was asserted—with a degree of exaggeration impossible to assess properly, at this distance— that beside a long embankment, somewhere below Chattanooga, there was so much wreckage that a man could walk five miles on the debris, without once setting foot on the ground. Repair gangs were of fabulous speed and competence; the railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee, 900 feet long

(including the approaches) and 90 feet high, was rebuilt in four and one-half days, although all of the timbers used in the construction were living trees when the job began.
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Repairs were made so quickly that Johnston's soldiers used to say it did no good to destroy track behind Sherman because he carried spare tunnels. When Sherman called this campaign a big Indian war he used the wrong word; it was really a big railroad war.

Joe Wheeler had operated against this road all the way down from Chattanooga, but Sherman had his own cavalry protecting it, with infantry detachments at frequent intervals in blockhouses, and the damage Wheeler's men inflicted was an annoyance rather than a problem. As a matter of fact— and before he was much older Sherman would find that the same thing was true of his own troopers—cavalry in the Civil War was not very efficient when it came to railroad destruction. The job involved a little too much plain drudgery. Simply to remove a few rails and burn a bridge or two would not answer; that sort of damage could be made good before the cavalry raiders had got away far enough to start bragging properly.

But Forrest was different. One of his admiring troopers put the essence of him in one sentence: "Forrest never did anything as anyone else would have done or even thought of doing in regard to a fight." Forrest and his men were not recognizable as the romantic sabreurs of misty tradition; they were matter-of-fact people who believed that the object of all they did was to bring harm to their foes, and they went about their jobs with single-minded energy. When Forrest struck the Federal rear it took a real fight to keep him off; not just skirmish-line firing between galloping patrols but a grinding, man-killing battle in which everybody played for keeps. The admiring trooper told how, in action, Forrest "would curse, then praise, then threaten to shoot us himself if we were afraid the Yankees might hit us," and he remembered that the general was always telling people to hurry.
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When Forrest hit a railroad line with evil intent that line was obliterated, with as much care and effort devoted to its destruction as had gone into its original building. If Forrest ever got on Sherman's railroad line Sherman was likely to be in serious trouble.