Southern Storm (61 page)

There was corresponding activity among the handful of Union vessels watching over Ossabaw Sound, where no less than three rivers—the Vernon, Little Ogeechee, and Ogeechee—terminated. Steam was up and the crew ready on the tug
Dandelion,
which had just been turned over to Lieutenant George A. Fisher of the army signal corps for his mission to establish contact with Sherman’s forces. Fisher logged the
time at 8:00
A.M
. when he came aboard. Following a discussion with the boat’s skipper, the party departed the anchorage. Their likely course followed first the Vernon River then the Little Ogeechee River before ducking into a narrow passageway called Harvey’s Creek. It wasn’t long before the eager signal officer was “looking closely in every direction with my glass for some signal or sign of General Sherman’s army.”

Not far south from Strathy Hall was the turnoff for Genesis Point and Fort McAllister, four and a half miles distant. It was near here that Hazen met up with Brigadier General Kilpatrick, whose men had carried out a crucial and largely unheralded assignment by keeping prying enemy eyes away from the approaching infantry column. The cavalrymen, Hazen noted, “had reconnoitered the fort and confirmed what General Howard was able to tell me about the situation.”

If Kilpatrick was unhappy at Sherman’s decision to deny him a role in the upcoming assault, he did not show it. Perhaps he shared his thoughts with Hazen about how the job should be done—use sharpshooters with fast-firing breech-loaders to suppress the enemy cannon, then rush the place. If he did pass anything along, Hazen never saw fit to acknowledge the fact, and Kilpatrick never tried to claim any credit. The best news was that the route was clear to within about a mile of the fort.

Hazen’s column made the turn toward Genesis Point. About a dozen mounted men—signal corps officers, some orderlies, and aides—galloped forward to scout the way.

For the moment, the tug
Dandelion
had gone as far as its captain was prepared to go. Across the marsh to the north and east, at long cannon range along the Little Ogeechee River, was the enemy’s Rose Dhu Island battery, making further movement foolhardy. Lieutenant Fisher, who could see nothing of Sherman’s army, realized that he needed to get closer to Fort McAllister. The
Dandelion
’s skipper agreed to loan him a lifeboat with four sailors to row. Accompanied by two other signal corps men, Fisher pushed off about 10:00
A.M
.

After passing along the plantation road through the marshland, Sherman, Howard, plus their staffs reached Cheves’ Rice Mill around 10:30
A.M
. The General’s first thought was of the Union navy just a few miles away. “Have you seen anything of the fleet?” he queried the post’s senior officer, Captain James M. McClintock, of Major General Howard’s signal detachment. “Nothing definite, General,” the captain replied; “but, at times have thought I could dimly discern the tops of masts far out upon the sound.” This was not the news Sherman wanted to hear. “I don’t believe they are looking for us,” he complained aloud. Sherman, McClintock observed, “was quite restless and seemingly impatient.”

There was a small shed attached to the rice mill that had a flat roof; without being directed there Sherman and some of those with him clambered onto it to better observe Fort McAllister. Their efforts were punctuated by DeGress’s gunners, who continued with their own program by occasionally blasting a round toward the enemy redoubt. From his perch atop the shed, Sherman noted that McAllister could be “plainly seen over the salt-marsh, about three miles distant.” A soldier with the group attested that with “the use of the glass I could see the fort[,] rebel flag & even the men very distinctly.” Added an officer with Major General Howard’s staff, the “timber in rear of the fort had been cleared off so, not only the fort, but the movements of the troops in rear of it, could be seen from the mill.”

For the moment, however, there was very little to see. Sherman, anxious for some sign that Hazen was on the case, could only mutter that “the place looked as peaceable and quiet as on the Sabbath.”

Perhaps three miles southeast of where Major General Sherman was glaring at Fort McAllister, Lieutenant Fisher’s party was picking its way through the marsh, struggling against the sharp-edged grass and the falling tide. There was nothing recognizable to navigate by at water level, so the boat stopped from time to time to allow the officer or one of his men to stand on some passably firm ground to fix their position. When the time came to write his report of this adventure, Fisher
described this process as taking “a careful and close reconnaissance of the forts and the surrounding country.”

It was a testament to the effectiveness of Kilpatrick’s cavalry that the dozen advance riders from Hazen’s column came within a mile or so of Fort McAllister before they encountered any of the enemy—a small mounted picket guarding the entrance to a narrow causeway running parallel to the river bank. Using the cover provided by the trees lining the road, the Federals, led by Lieutenant William H. Sherfy, overran the post before those manning it could react. When the captured Rebels showed a marked disinclination to walk on the causeway itself, the Union officers began to suspect the presence of torpedoes.

One of the captured Confederates, Thomas J. Mills, now confirmed the presence of the deadly devices. They had been laid here to draw first blood when the Union soldiers took to the causeway, as they had to do to reach Fort McAllister. When Brigadier General Hazen was notified of this, he halted the column to consult the helpful POW. Mills not only showed where the torpedoes had been placed, he also assisted in digging them up. “This humane and proper act gained for him, as it deserved, the kind consideration of all,” remarked Hazen.

While a detail gingerly excavated the deadly packages, Hazen directed his column into open fields near a house belonging to the Middleton family. It was apparent that he had more troops in hand than there was room for in the constricted area of dry ground across the causeway, so eight regiments took station at the Middletons’, which became Hazen’s headquarters. Thanks to the helpful Mills, Hazen had also gleaned several helpful details about McAllister’s armament and defensive scheme that would guide him in shaping his mission plan.

The time was approaching 2:00
P.M
. when the causeway was declared safe for passage. Hazen ordered forward the nine regiments he had selected to attack the fort, led by three from Colonel Wells S. Jones’s Second Brigade: 47th Ohio, 54th Ohio, and 111th Illinois. There was a slight rubbernecking delay as the men passed by the excavated mines, “and large, black, ugly-looking things they were,” wrote a gunner who saw them later in the day. Immediately upon debouching from the narrow causeway, Jones’s column fanned out to advance as skirmishers, quickly bringing Fort McAllister under direct rifle fire.
Hazen had decided against sending out a flag of truce with a surrender demand, “believing that it would merely advertise our intentions, and be met with a boastful refusal.”

As soon as Hazen’s men opened a scattering fire,
*
Major George W. Anderson understood that it was the beginning of the great trial for his little command. Considering, as he later reported, “the feebleness of the garrison of the fort,…it was evident, cut off from all support, and with no possible hope of reinforcements from any quarter, that holding the fort was simply a question of time.” Anderson reckoned his grim options as “death or captivity.”

Major General Sherman reckoned it as roughly 2:00
P.M
. when he “observed signs of commotion in the fort, and noticed one or two guns fired inland, and some musket-skirmishing in the woods close by.” A staff officer under Howard with an eye for the poetic took note of how the skirmish line was marked “by the little round puffs of blue smoke that roll out from the cover of the wood full rifle range away from the Rebel Fort, and which float lazily up towards the tree tops.”

The crescendo of musketry about Fort McAllister, punctuated by the boom of its landside cannon firing, caught Lieutenant Fisher’s full attention. Once he determined that the enemy wasn’t firing at him, he began to swing his binoculars over a wider area. “I…saw, about three miles northwest of where I was lying in the marsh, a flag upon the top of an old rice mill, but there being no air stirring I was unable to make out of what nature it was,” he reported. “I could then indistinctly see persons through a broken part of the roof, one of whom, taking hold of the end of the flag, drew its folds out so I could see our own glorious Stars and Stripes.” Taking a deep breath, the young officer told the sailors to row back to the
Dandelion
. He had found Sherman’s army!

Two mistakes had been made in designing Fort McAllister’s rear defenses and in preparing the ground adjacent to the earthwork that made matters even worse for the garrison. The landside guns, like most of those along the river and seawalls, were positioned behind an unnotched fort wall; in military terms, they were en barbette. While this allowed the individual cannon to traverse to a greater degree than those constrained by a narrow opening, or embrasure, it was hell on the men who operated the weapons. They were fully exposed while handling the reloads, which might not have been so fatal a miscalculation were it not for the other decision that had been made.

A fort ultimately depends upon the strength of its walls, the effectiveness of its firepower, and the courage of its garrison to survive. Adding to that defensive scheme were the obstructions placed outside the fort, designed to slow up any attackers, increasing the attrition as they came closer. Fort McAllister was not without these layers of defense.

There was a ditch running close to the walls, where the land was firm enough to support it; a dozen feet deep, nine feet wide at bottom, and twice that at top. Studded in a ragged row along the ditch floor were sharpened wooden stakes, four feet long, embedded perhaps two to three inches apart. Out from the ditch (ten yards at some points, up to twenty-five at others) was a ring of abatis—chopped trees left with upper branches intact, laid in parallel with the tops interlaced and pointing toward the enemy. Two more such rows were planned but not even begun by December 13. Just outside this barrier was a narrow field of sub-terra shells—torpedoes—diabolically sited where advancing troops would slow down and congregate to pick their way through the maze.

In the process of preparing the abatis, the fort’s garrison and slave laborers cleared a further field of fire by chopping down trees for several hundred yards more, as well as razing some wooden outbuildings. A detached mortar battery located off the fort’s southeast corner was to be dismantled to prevent its use by the enemy. Major Anderson’s men had not gotten around to removing the stumps, dismantling the mortar battery, or finishing the building demolition, an oversight that provided Federal sharpshooters with ample places of cover to shoot at the exposed artillerymen. In some cases, the riflemen were able to set up within 200 yards of the fort. A veteran marksman in the 47th Ohio
sized up the situation at once as his company scuttled ahead to bring McAllister under fire. Nestled safely behind one of the tree stumps, he brought his rifle to his shoulder with the comment, “watch me make the Johnnies get off the works.”

In his after-action report Major Anderson cited the worst case of one of his batteries along the landside wall where “out of a detachment of eight men three were killed and three more wounded. The Federal skirmish line was very heavy, and the fire so close and rapid that it was at times impossible to work our guns.”

It was Brigadier General Hazen’s intention to encircle the landside of Fort McAllister using nine regiments; three from each of his three brigades. The first across the causeway, Colonel Wells S. Jones’s Second Brigade, were assigned “position on the left of the road, the left resting on the river.” The next to arrive were the three from Colonel Theodore Jones’s First Brigade—30th Ohio, 6th Missouri, and 116th Illinois. In many ways theirs was the toughest task, for they had to pick their way through the swampy mire south and east of the fort in order to take their place on the extreme right. Last over the causeway were the 70th Ohio, 48th Illinois, and 90th Illinois from Colonel John M. Oliver’s Third Brigade, which were to link the two flanks.

(In addition, eight regiments were designated as reserves, shown on contemporary maps as positioned behind the first wave. However, given the constricted and congested staging area, and referencing regimental accounts, it seems that perhaps only three actually lined up to backstop the attack. Based on admittedly sketchy accounts, it appears that each battle line was directly supported by one regiment.)

Prior to leaving the Middleton house area, each colonel was briefed by Hazen on the deployment he intended to employ in the assault. “To make the chance of hits by the enemy as small as possible, the formation was in single rank, resembling a close line of skirmishers,” he later explained. Hazen had a special reminder for Colonel Theodore Jones, echoing Sherman’s admonition not to march his men “behind any creek, so that [they]…could not get forward.”

Hardly had the engagement begun when Hazen’s chain of command was struck a blow. Colonel Wells S. Jones and his acting assistant adjutant general, Captain John H. Groce, were advancing the skirmish line
when one “magic bullet” from a Rebel sharpshooter took both of them out. Groce was killed, Jones badly wounded with a ball lodged in his right lung. Command devolved to the next senior colonel, James S. Martin of the 111th Illinois, who took charge of the three regiments.

Matters were progressing, but slowly. Hazen, already stressed, now had Sherman breathing down his neck. About the time the working parties were clearing the torpedoes off the causeway, Hazen’s signal corps detachment established a station along the Ogeechee where they very quickly made contact with their opposite numbers at Cheves’ Rice Mill. Hazen’s first message was an inquiry whether or not Sherman was present. “On being assured of the fact,” the General continued, “and that I expected the fort to be carried before night, I received by signal the assurance of General Hazen that he was making his preparations, and would soon attempt the assault.” Hazen urged his subordinates to complete their deployments, fully aware that high-powered eyes were upon him.