Southern Storm (67 page)

“This last trip through Rebeldom had made letters a priceless boon,” contributed a Wisconsin man, who also engaged in the complementary pleasure of responding. “I never knew what luxury there was in writing, until I was debarred the privilege,” he said. The postmaster for the First Division, Fourteenth Corps, reported that the “three hundred dollars’ worth of stamps which I obtained for the Division was only a fraction of what were wanted for the first mail out from Savannah and I was kept busy franking letters that there were no stamps for.” Homesickness washed across the letter-reading camps, a feeling accentuated that evening when a Rebel band on the other side played “Home, Sweet Home.” Confessed one Yankee after that performance: “Some of us felt blue.”

Included among this day’s letter writers was William Tecumseh Sherman, who wrote to his wife, Ellen. Sherman’s pride in his own accomplishments and that of his men was evident as he described the cheers the sailors gave him (“the highest honor at sea”), the trust his men placed in him (“The soldiers think I know everything and that they can do anything”), and his strong feelings for them (“I never saw a more confident army”). It was clear to the General what his army had accomplished in the March to the Sea and why: “We have destroyed nearly 200 miles of Railroad and are not yet done…. We lived Sumptuously, turkeys, chickens and sweet potatoes all the way, but the poor women & children will starve. All I could tell them was, if Jeff Davis expects to found an empire on the ruins of the South, he ought to afford to feed the People.”

Sherman also shared insights with his wife regarding his next military moves. “I have some heavy guns coming from Port Royal, and as soon as they come I shall demand the surrender of Savannah, but will not assault, as a few days will starve out its Garrison about 15,000, and its People [about] 25,000,” he told her. In closing, he revealed an impish side not often seen by his men or staff: “Await events and Trust to Fortune. I’ll turn up when & where you least expect me.”

Sherman didn’t mention the visit he’d had with his postmaster, Colonel A. H. Markland. “I’ve brought you a message from the President,” Markland said at their meeting. “He asked me to take you by the hand wherever I met you and say ‘God bless you and the army.’ He has been praying for you.” Sherman thought a moment. “I thank the President,” he said at last. “Say my army is all right.”

In a subsequent reference to Lincoln’s gesture, Sherman added that he felt “thankful for his high favor. If I disappoint him in the future, it shall not be from want of zeal or love to the cause.”

Argyle Island was the hot spot along the opposing lines. Taking full advantage of the limited sanction Sherman granted him, Major General Slocum upped the Union presence there from two regiments to a full brigade. By now Colonel Carmen and his staff had a system of transferring men across from the Georgia mainland down to a fine art, so little time was lost in transporting them. Once they were landed, the newcomers were treated to a somewhat unsettling sight for soldiers used to seeking cover. “A rice field as far as the eye could reach,” was a New York soldier’s assessment, “level as a plain.” A diarist in a companion Empire State regiment added that the troops crossed the broad rice fields in single-file formation.

Once they reached the small building complex where the rice was being processed, the Yankee boys encountered the local slaves, who were getting a crash course in capitalism. At first, commented a Federal, “any quantity of rice was to be had, and at almost any price, as the negroes did not know a ten-cent stamp from a five-dollar bill.” Before long, however, the slaves “knew enough to say ‘one dollah’ whenever they were asked the price of rice.” Hardly had the brigade assembled near the mills when the Rebels across the river opened an artillery battery from the opposite shore; meanwhile, a gunboat downriver joined in the chorus, catching Colonel Carmen’s men in a vicious crossfire.

A Massachusetts soldier termed the enemy’s barrage “annoying, stopping the rice-mill, and forcing the troops to lie all day behind a dike.” “They made excellent practice & set one of the storehouses on fire, burning it to the ground,” confirmed a comrade in the Bay State regiment. “Even while lying near that old mill under the splinters flying thick in every direction,” chimed in a New Jersey officer, “[I] had to
laugh at a negro, dropping in, get under a big load of bed clothes as a shell whistled occasionally by me.”

Colonel Carmen decided to do something about his predicament by detailing some riflemen from the 3rd Wisconsin to harass the land-based gunners. “I was sent with my Company to get as close as possible to them on our side of the river, and either silence them or drive them off,” reported Captain Julian Hinkley. “I got up within about a hundred and fifty yards of them and opened fire. They immediately turned their guns on us, and for a few minutes gave it to us hot.” Hinkley’s firing line was along the riverbank, with the men standing in the cold water. One of the shooters later avowed that the “lads of the company made it interesting for the rebels, in spite of chattering teeth.” By the time a relief party from the 2nd Massachusetts replaced the Wisconsin riflemen, the enemy battery had departed for more peaceful climes. “We blazed away, but were replied to only by musketry,” said a Bay Stater. “I think we hit some of them as we could hear them holler several times just as we fired.”

The exchange of gunfire eventually sputtered into a sullen silence. For what it was worth, Carmen’s brigade was now in undisputed possession of Argyle Island, though most of the soldiers who had made it so could not imagine why anyone cared. Observed one New Jersey officer: “Gen. Sherman does not seem in any hurry to take the city.”

One officer who was in a hurry to get into Savannah was General Beauregard, who left Charleston at 8:00
A.M
. bound for the city. He tarried a bit at the headquarters of Major General Samuel Jones, whose troops were holding the roadway open between those two points. When Beauregard got near Pocotaligo, he detrained for a transfer to wagons in order to sidle past the section of track threatened by the Yankee batteries. The long-distance enemy fire had yet to damage the line, but Beauregard did not want to risk a lucky hit that could close the passageway. Once beyond the danger zone, Beauregard’s staff piled onto another train that carried them near to the now destroyed Savannah River Bridge, where they took to the roads.

When Beauregard reached the city at 11:00
P.M
., he could not help but notice that the pontoon bridge he had told Hardee to build was, in the estimation of one of his aides, “only about one-third con
structed.” The problem was a lack of boats. Hardee’s engineers had decided that the flat barges used to transport rice or cotton would serve the purpose, so the search was on to find enough of them. When one of Hardee’s subordinates protested that assigning troops to gather in the craft would disrupt plans he had to strike the enemy occupying Argyle Island, the general answered that the “attack is of no importance when compared with that of getting the flats into the river and down to Savannah.”

The clock was ticking. There were ominous signs that Savannah’s once firm resolve was beginning to soften. Anticipating the orders to evacuate, some overeager officers ordered warehouses stocked with army provisions opened, “and all persons were told to help themselves.” A soldier on the scene thought it a “very questionable mode of defending a city, but a good example to be followed in good time and in good order by any who prefer to give or sell provisions to Confederate soldiers and their families rather than to hoard them up for raiders and Yankee invaders and plunderers.” Even more chilling, there were additional desertions from the battalion of enemy POWs—twenty-seven of them in one instance. Two of the unfortunates, captured before reaching the Union lines, were subjected to interrogation, where they revealed a plot that threatened to compromise Savannah’s defenses.

S
ATURDAY
, D
ECEMBER
17, 1864

The officer commanding the leading division in the Gulf and Savannah Railroad wrecking expedition was less than pleased with his assignment. “My time [for this operation] was limited to five days,” complained Major General Joseph A. Mower. “This limitation of time would make it necessary for me to march twenty miles per day, and give me one day in which to destroy twenty miles of railroad.” Still, orders were orders. “Broke camp at daylight,” recorded an Illinois soldier, “heavy fog—country flat—bog—trees dripping with dew—small bridge broke through—halt.” The forced pace took its toll. “Saw Men sun struck,” scrawled an Illinois diarist. Mower’s command camped for the night around Midway Church, where the foraging began to resemble former times during the March to the Sea. “We got some sweet potatoes and negro peas so we had a good supper,” commented a Hoosier in the 25th regiment.

Those soldiers in Brigadier General William B. Hazen’s Fifteenth Corps division, part of the same mission, were no more pleased with their assignment than was Mower. “Leaving camp before the steamers with commissary supplies had arrived at King’s Bridge, the regiment could draw no government rations and the country afforded very little besides rice,” growled an infantryman in the 55th Illinois. “The very fatiguing labor of tearing up the track, added to the insufficiency of food, proved severe upon the men.” An officer in the nearby 47th Ohio reported that one “man in Company B gave out on this march and died tonight.”

Moving in parallel with these two divisions was a brigade of soldiers from the Fourteenth Corps whose sights were set solely on foraging. These columns moved through “a low level[,] wet & mostly timbered country” that so disoriented the men that several were certain that “we are in the state of Florida.” For most it was a hungry tramp until late in the day, when they struck bonanza. “I shot a hog as the Regiment camped and skinned out a ham and Lieut. Starbuck had some yams and we got a square meal and we done it Justice,” sighed a contented member of the 75th Indiana. “I thought I was hollow to my toes.” A comrade in the 105th Ohio agreed that “there was plenty & such a time as we had eating. It’s wonderful how often & how much a half-starved man can eat in a given time.”

Back along the siege lines more and more regiments bid welcome to their mail carriers. “Card-playing stopped,” noted an Indiana man in the 22nd regiment, “and all read the news from home.” In the 85th Illinois “the hearts of the men were made glad” by the mail, while a soldier in the 147th Pennsylvania would affirm “how glad we were to hear from our loved ones again.” “The 29th presents the appearance of a vast reading room today,” marveled an Ohioan, “as our mail has once more arrived and it is greedily devoured after some five weeks being passed without hearing from the ‘outer world.’” One reader-respondent was rather rudely reminded that there was a war going on. “Rebels shell while I was writing and [hit] the limbs of a tree right over me so I change position,” recorded a nonchalant correspondent in the 16th Wisconsin.

Almost all the Confederate defensive effort this day was limited to artillery. “We lie in a swampy piece of woods within good musket [range] (though for the heavy timber out of sight) of the Rebel works,” wrote an Ohio soldier. “By way of amusement they shell the heavy
timber we are in and [today]…they fired half a dozen times into our camp with grape-shot. Nobody was hurt. These shells splinter the trees nastily.” “Our pickets are so close that they call to each other,” added a New Yorker, “and when they send a shell the rebels will say ‘How do you like that, Yanks?’ and the first thing you know, over goes a shower of bullets from our boys.”

On Argyle Island, Colonel Ezra Carmen began the day with orders to land a hundred-man recon force on the South Carolina shore. To his immense frustration, the tide was ebbing, dropping the river level too low for the heavy barges he intended to use; since there simply weren’t enough shallow-draft craft to be found, the operation had to be scrubbed. Today’s main accomplishment was to keep the rice mills operating despite harassing fire from a Rebel horse battery that once more appeared across the way. “One of ours answered,” noted a Massachusetts soldier, “& soon shut them up.”

In sharp contrast to taking Fort McAllister, Major General Sherman initially approached the capture of Savannah in a very methodical and thorough manner. With a supply line now open, he was already receiving the heavy-caliber siege cannon he needed to pound the city into submission. The bulky, unwieldy tubes took time to wrestle along the marshy roads into firing positions, which also had to be prepared. Still, Sherman saw no reason why he shouldn’t go on the record with an official call to Lieutenant General Hardee to capitulate in order to save Savannah’s citizens from harm. Accordingly, as Sherman recollected, “I rode from my headquarters…over to General Slocum’s headquarters,…and thence dispatched (by flag of truce) into Savannah, by the hands of Colonel [Charles] Ewing, inspector-general, a demand for the surrender of the place.”