Southern Storm (36 page)
Authors: Noah Andre Trudeau
This soldier’s editorial riposte: “Let’em come!”
S
UNDAY
, N
OVEMBER
27, 1864
I
n Richmond, President Jefferson Davis made an effort to sort out the tangle of overlapping and interlocking jurisdictions that were undermining any effective response to Sherman’s march. With General Beauregard west of the Oconee giving every indication of remaining there for the present, even as Sherman’s forces maneuvered east of the river, Davis wanted some centralized decision-making out in front of the Yankee horde. Military protocol dictated that the job go to the senior officer on the scene, so General Braxton Bragg in Augusta was informed today that he had been given full authority over “all combinations [aligned] against the present movements of the enemy.”
Accepting the assignment with great reluctance, Bragg in his blunt assessment made it clear that his heart wasn’t in the effort. “In assuming it I must candidly express my belief that no practicable combinations of my available men can avert disaster,” he prophesied. Monitoring these changes in Virginia, an experienced War Department clerk and observer of political infighting anticipated a scrap when Beauregard returned east to pick up the reins. “Here, then, will be war between the two B.’s—Bragg and Beauregard,” he snorted; “and the President will be as busy as a bee. Meantime, Sherman may possess the land at pleasure.”
In Washington, planners were sifting through the conflicting Confederate press reports, trying to predict where along the Atlantic coast
Sherman would appear. It was anticipated that the Union force would be short of munitions and supplies, so the objective was to stage everything in depots located close to where Sherman was expected to show himself. This day, President Lincoln’s military adviser, Major General Henry W. Halleck, directed the Commissary and Ordnance departments to begin stockpiling goods at Hilton Head, South Carolina. In a related move, the officer responsible for getting the mail delivered to Sherman’s men felt that he no longer had to maintain the pretense that the general was going into Tennessee. All deliveries intended for Sherman’s force had been forwarded to Nashville, but now that it was patently obvious that the Federals were not headed in that direction, the postal authorities were authorized to reroute everything to Baltimore, Maryland. From there it could quickly be put onto ships for transport to any port on the Atlantic coast.
Combined Left/Right Wings
For the first time in the current campaign, the two halves of Sherman’s grand army were operating in close concert. Although still functioning as independent wings, their movements were those of a single entity headed in one direction. Today each wing assigned a division to wreck the railroad; each sent a division to guard its wagon train (both moving along the main road through Davisboro), and each sent divisions off on parallel routes—the Left Wing swinging around toward Louisville by way of Fenn’s Bridge, the Right Wing using plantation roads to reach Riddleville, some six miles southwest of Davisboro.
Brigadier General John W. Geary’s division (Twentieth Corps) had the railroad duties for the Left Wing, tasked with demolishing the stretch between Tennille and Davisboro. “Here tearing the track, burning ties, twisting iron, &c.,” wrote one of Geary’s Ohio soldiers. It was Brigadier General John M. Corse’s men (Fifteenth Corps) who were handed the same job, but from the Oconee River to Tennille. There was something about this work that prompted three different members of the 50th Illinois to consider it worth mentioning. Frederick Sherwood, a musician in the ranks, thought it “Good work for a Sunday’s job.” Charles F. Hubert, who later wrote a history of the regiment, remembered that the men carried out their task to a rhythmic chant: the line, “Soldier, will you work?” answered by, “No, I’ll sell my shirt first.” All this labor gave Lewis F. Roe cause for ironic reflection. “This is the Sabbath, a day set apart for the worship of God & probably my folks have been to Church to-day, while I have been engaged in a far different occupation, that of tearing & burning the Macon Railroad.”
Other soldiers were set to work on the South’s reigning cash crop, fondly known as King Cotton. A Massachusetts soldier noted that “a great deal of cotton was destroyed,” while a Minnesota boy marching with a different column recalled passing two “large buildings stored full of bales of cotton [which] were burning.” This may well have been the Hodgson plantation, where a meticulous staff officer counted 580 bales incinerated. “As the dense columns of smoke roll up toward the sky,” related an Illinois soldier, “we mentally exclaim ‘Cotton is
not
King’!”
The columns moving slowly, Sherman’s hungry men scattered across the countryside. “Country very level, fertile & well cultivated,” recorded an Ohio soldier. “Great abundance of forage, provisions, mules, horses &c. captured to day.” By now the ever pragmatic infantrymen had adapted to the official and unofficial ways of carrying out the “forage liberally” directive. “There is strict orders for soldiers in the ranks to do no private foraging,” declared an Iowa man, “but there is scarcely a private that does not forage from noon till night if he can get a chance.” “Country good, abounds in sweet potatoes, yams, molasses, fresh pork,” added an Illinoisan. “Desolation we leave behind in their stead.” The tendency toward casual excess was beginning to bother some of the Yankee farmers. “I think we destroy as much or more than we eat,” worried an Ohio soldier. The image was even starker for an Iowan in the Seventeenth Corps, who wrote this day: “I think a katydid, following our rear, would starve.”
It was another deadly day for the unfit horses and mules rounded up after the river crossing. “These animals were in daily use,” explained a Fifteenth Corps brigadier, “but every regiment had an excess of pack animals beyond the alIowance in orders, and while forage was now easily obtainable for all of them, it would only be a few days when the whole army would be on short rations for both men and animals…. I was informed the orders were that these [extra or unserviceable] animals were to be killed by the rear guard after the balance of the troops had passed. This was not a pleasant duty, but the order was imperative, and was obeyed to the letter.”
*
One small item on Sherman’s personal agenda was a ride into Tennille to investigate a cryptic remark made the previous evening by a local black man. Recounting what he had seen of the various waves of destruction visited upon the railroad station, the slave concluded by exclaiming that not only did the Yankee soldiers burn the depot and wreck the tracks, but they “sot fire to the well!” Checking it out this morning, Sherman found the well was more a pit lined by wooden scaffolding with steps leading down to a “fine copper pump.” Thorough Federals had filled the pit with flammable material and, as the black had accurately described, “sot fire to the well!”
Sherman’s anecdote in his
Memoirs
masked a grim awareness throughout the ranks that the black refugee problem was not going away. A “great crowd of miserable squalid negroes, women and children, are following us,” wrote a Wisconsin diarist. “I do pity these poor helpless creatures…. I hope they may gain what they so ardently desire—their freedom—but I fear they will in the thousands of cases, find their freedom in death.” “Women came with large bundles on their heads, children also carried quite large packages on their heads, and some of the larger ones carried the little ones,” contributed another Wisconsin man. “They would not leave us if told to do so,” added a third Midwesterner. “Where they lived from I don’t know, but they managed to live somehow.” Their eagerness to help was exploited by soldiers who took them along as personal servants. “It makes but little difference to the private what wages he’s agreed to pay,” commented one observer; “he won’t do it.”
Sherman’s overall scheme moved the combined wings in as tight a formation as possible. That meant taking advantage of every available parallel route, far more than were shown on any of the maps in use. The result was that both halves experienced some serious cases of faulty navigation. In the Fifteenth Corps, Brigadier General John E. Smith’s division was a good two miles along the wrong road before anyone noticed. “If ever Old Smith got a cursing he got it today,” growled a limping Illinois soldier.
Making matters worse for the officers leading the Twentieth Corps was the fact that the person who discovered that an entire brigade had gone astray was their Left Wing commander, Major General Henry W. Slocum. “About noon Slocum came along at full speed and halted our Reg[imen]t and kept on calling for the Brig[ade] to halt until he reached the head of the Brig[ade],” recorded a member of the 102nd Illinois. “Had quite an exhibition of General Slocum’s temper,” added a soldier from the 105th Illinois. Lieutenant Alfred Trego was close at hand when Slocum encountered the errant guide. “Gen. Slocum came up and gave one of his aid[e]s a terrible cussing for leading the column on the wrong road. He was very angry—told him he was unfit to be an aide and sent him to headquarters under arrest.”
The Right Wing finally completed crossing the Oconee River this day; the Seventeenth Corps was done early, the bigger Fifteenth Corps took until noon. When they had finished, the Missouri engineers
pulled up the bridges, packed their gear, and readied themselves to do it all over again at the Ogeechee. As the last Fourteenth Corps units pulled out of Sandersville, they burned several government warehouses that had been used overnight by Federal soldiers for shelter. Most of the town’s citizens were glad to be rid of the men, but Mrs. “L.F.J.” was actually sorry to see them go. The youth assigned to guard her house had shown sympathy toward the young woman and her child, making sure they obtained a generous helping of rations, including flour and real coffee. Special permission was granted allowing the sentry to join “L.F.J.” and her mother for a home-cooked meal. She never forgot how, “asking God’s blessing upon our food, he ate his supper.”
*
William Tecumseh Sherman was among those departing Sandersville, traveling only as far as Tennille, where he set up his headquarters. While short in distance, the journey was greater in symbolism, since he was also shifting his flag from the Left Wing to the Right. For the moment the General and his staff would accompany Blair’s Seventeenth Corps.
It was a pensive day for Sherman, who was anxiously reviewing his troop dispositions in light of the enemy’s recent combativeness. One of the Confederacy’s more skilled officers, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, had been as close as Tennille on November 26. Residents living near the station claimed to have heard Hardee vow to hold the line of the Ogeechee River at Louisville, a possibility that had to be treated with sober consideration. Sherman rode so lost in thought that, as Major Hitchcock watched with openmouthed astonishment, he ignored a woman standing at her front gate frantically trying to get his attention. “If she spoke, it was not audible,” remembered Hitchcock, “and he rode along looking straight forward
and did not see her
.”
Among Sherman’s other frustrations this day was the sketchy nature of the maps he had to use. Another was making certain that his generals were literally burning their bridges behind them to bolster the
security of the trailing wagon trains. When a casual conversation with one division commander suggested that the Oconee River and Buffalo Creek crossings hadn’t been destroyed, Sherman fired off a petulant dispatch to the wing commander to make certain that they had. His mood wasn’t helped by some of the information contained in recent Rebel newspapers confiscated in Sandersville. Several reprinted accounts taken from Northern dailies accurately gauged the size of his force, how it was organized, and his likely objectives. Speaking with Major Hitchcock, Sherman had complained, “It’s impossible to carry on war with a free press.”
He was presently moving his forces in three columns, the middle and right ones supporting each other as they tramped to take up a line between Davisboro on the left and Riddleville on the right.
*
The third, a pair of divisions from the Fourteenth Corps, followed a slightly diverging route north of the others. This column’s aim was to get across the Ogeechee River at a place called Fenn’s Bridge. If Hardee was making a stand at Louisville, they would turn his flank; if Wheeler came pounding down from Augusta hoping to pounce on the wagons, they would block the thrust, so much depended on how well the column carried out its mission, and how lucky it was.
Major James A. Connolly, a Third Division staff officer riding at the head of that column, was hoping for a little excitement. The morning’s march had been without incident, the men even joking about eating too many of the persimmons that littered the roadsides. Matters became decidedly more serious as they drew near to the Ogeechee River, where scouts pointed out to Connolly how the Rebel cavalry tracks they had been following (easily visible in the sandy road) suddenly split left and right, suggesting an ambush ahead. The column halted while a skirmisher screen nosed forward with Connolly following. “Being as full of curiosity as a woman, and being anxious to get the first sight of the rebels, I rode along with the skirmish line, watching every tree and stump, listening very intently, and moving as quietly as a cat in the sandy road, expecting every moment to hear the crack of a rifle from some concealed rebel.”