The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (82 page)

Hill took his leave, pleased to learn that two more stout positions had been prepared for the army to defend before it retired across the Chattahoochee, some fifty-four to sixty days in the future, according to his Johnston-approved calculations, or in any case “a long time” from now. Delayed by personal matters, he took a train for Virginia before the end of the following week, passing en route a group of public men proceeding by rail on a mission similar to his own, except that the two were headed in opposite directions toward diametric goals. Hill was going from Atlanta to Richmond in hope of impressing Johnston’s views on Davis, while they were going from Richmond to Atlanta in hope of impressing Davis’s views on Johnston. Congressmen all, they had been delegated by their colleagues, as friends of the general, to warn him that his conduct of the Georgia campaign was under heavy attack in the capital and to urge him to disarm these rearward critics by taking aggressive action against the enemy in his front.

Reaching Atlanta on the evening of July 8 they proceeded next morning to army headquarters for a conference with Johnston, who by then had fallen back through Smyrna, the first of his two stout positions south of Kennesaw, to his bridgehead on the north bank of the Chattahoochee, which was his second. The Virginian received them graciously, heard them out, and replied, alas, as if they had been dispatched for irksome purposes by the President himself: “You may tell Mr Davis that it would be folly for me under the circumstances to risk a decisive engagement. My plan is to draw Sherman further and further from his base in the hope of weakening him and by cutting his army in two. That is my only hope of defeating him.”

There was silence at this until one delegate, a Missourian, remarked that what was required, both for the country’s sake and the general’s own, was for him to strike the Yankees “a crushing blow,” and then went on — tactlessly, but apparently in hope of jogging
Johnston into action — to say that lately he had heard the President quoted to the effect that “if he were in your place he could whip Sherman now.” The general was jogged into action, all right, but not of the kind intended. He bridled and did not try to hide his scorn.

“Yes,” he said icily, “I know Mr Davis thinks he can do a great many things other men would hesitate to attempt. For instance, he tried to do what God failed to do. He tried to make a soldier of Braxton Bragg, and you know the result. It couldn’t be done.”

This might have wound up the matter then and there, to no one’s satisfaction, but a courier arrived at that point with news of a development to which Johnston’s response provided the conference with an upbeat ending. Schofield had effected a south-bank lodgment yesterday, seven miles upriver, the courier reported, and this morning he had continued the crossing with what appeared to be most, if not all, of his command.… If the general’s visitors expected him to react with dismay to this information that he had been flanked, they were agreeably disappointed. Pointing out that Sherman had thus divided his army, north and south of the deep-running Chattahoochee, Johnston declared that the time at last had come to strike and “whip him in detail.”

The delegates returned to Atlanta expecting to hear before nightfall the roar of guns that would signal the launching of the attack. It did not come, either then or the following morning, July 10, when all that broke the sabbath stillness was the peal of church bells, summoning the city’s dwindling population to pray for a deliverance which Johnston himself seemed less and less willing to attempt.

Bells were tolling that Sunday morning in Richmond, too, when Benjamin Hill stepped off the train from Georgia. He went straight to his hotel and stayed there only long enough to wash up before going to the White House for the appointment he had secured by wiring ahead. Having, as he said, “repelled the idea that any influence with the President was needed, if the facts were as General Johnston reported them,” the senator was convinced that all the situation required was for him to relay the general’s requests to Davis; “I did not doubt he would act promptly.”

He was ushered without delay into the Chief Executive’s residential office, and as he advanced across the white rug that was said to provoke temerity in the breasts of men who called in unscraped boots, the Mississippian rose to greet him with a geniality that matched the Virginia general’s own, nine days ago in Marietta. Davis heard him out, his smile fading when Hill spoke of Morgan and Forrest as presumably lying more or less idle in Southwest Virginia and North Mississippi. As for Morgan, he replied, it was true that he was where Johnston said he was, having just returned, sadly depleted, from just such an expedition as Johnston recommended, whipped and in no condition for anything more than an attempt to pull his few survivors
together for operations necessarily weeks in the future. Forrest too was unavailable, Davis said, although for different reasons. Having disposed of Sturgis at Brice’s Crossroads in mid-June, he now was engaged in opposing a 15,000-man Union force that had left Memphis two weeks ago under A. J. Smith, bound either for Georgia to reinforce Sherman, in front or in rear of Atlanta, or for Mobile in conjunction with an even larger blue column reported to be on the march from New Orleans under Canby; he not only could not be spared for the proposed raid into Middle Tennessee, but his superior, Polk’s successor Stephen Lee, was protesting hotly — as Johnston had only recently been informed — that he needed “his troops now with Johnston more than the latter can need Forrest.”

Hill’s hopes, which had been so high on the ride east, declined rapidly while he listened to this double-barreled refutation of the “facts” behind them. But presently they took an even sharper drop when Davis paused and asked: “How long did you understand General Johnston to say he could hold Sherman north of the Chattahoochee River?” Fifty-four to sixty days, the senator replied; whereupon Davis took up and read to him a telegraphic dispatch received just before his arrival. It was from Johnston and it announced that, a part of Sherman’s army having crossed upriver two days ago, several miles beyond his right, he had begun his withdrawal across the Chattahoochee last night and completed it this morning.… Hill retired in some confusion, which was increased next day when the Secretary of War called on him “to reduce my interview with General Johnston to writing, for the use of the Cabinet.”

He perceived now that his trip to Richmond, designed to help the Atlanta commander, had resulted instead in furnishing the general’s Confederate foes with ammunition they could use in urging his removal from command. Three days later, after taking a still closer look at the attitude of those in high positions at the capital, he wired Johnston by way of warning: “You must do the work with your present force. For God’s sake do it.”

Just as the pressure had been greater, so now was Johnston’s time even shorter than Hill knew — unless, that is, the general was somehow able to follow his friend’s advice and “do the work.” Atlanta, with its rolling mill and foundries, its munition plants and factories, its vital rail connections and vast store of military supplies, was the combined workshop and warehouse of the Confederate West, and as Sherman closed down upon it, Davis later wrote, the threat of its loss “produced intense anxiety far and wide. From many quarters, including such as had most urged his assignment, came delegations, petitions, and letters,” insisting that the present army commander be replaced by one who would fight to save the city, not abandon it to the fate which Johnston seemed to consider unavoidable without outside help. “The clamor for
his removal commenced immediately after it became known that the army had fallen back from Dalton,” Davis added, “and it gathered volume with each remove toward Atlanta.”

Nowhere was this clamor more vociferous than at meetings of the cabinet, not one of whose six members was by now in favor of keeping the Virginia general at his Georgia post. Some had advised against sending him there in the first place: including the Secretary of State, who afterwards told why. “From a close observation of his career,” the shrewd-minded Benjamin declared, “I became persuaded that his nervous dread of losing a battle would prevent at all times his ability to cope with an enemy of nearly equal strength, and that opportunities would thus constantly be lost which under other commanders would open a plain path to victory.” Still, those who had opposed his selection were not nearly so strident in their demands for his removal, at this stage, as were those who had been his supporters at the outset. The Secretary of War, for example, explained that, having made “a great mistake” seven months ago, “he desired to do all he could, even at this late date, to atone for it.”

Davis resisted — now as in the case of that other Johnston, two and a half years ago, after Donelson and on the eve of Shiloh — both the public and the private clamor for the general’s removal; Seddon later revealed that though “the whole Cabinet concurred in advising and even urging” the change, the President moved toward a decision “slowly and not without much hesitation, misgiving and, even to the last, reluctance.” His concern was for Atlanta, for what it contained and for what it represented, not only in the minds of his own people, but also in the minds of the people of the North, who would be voting in November whether to sustain their present hard-war leader or replace him with one who might be willing, in the name of peace, to let the South depart in independence. A military professional, Davis knew only too well, as he put the case, “how serious it was to change commanders in the presence of the enemy,” and he told Senator Hill flatly, in the course of their Sunday conference at the White House, that he “would not do it if he could have any assurance that General Johnston would not surrender Atlanta without a battle.”

In this connection, he had sent his chief military adviser, Braxton Bragg, to determine at first hand, if possible, what the intentions of the western commander were. Bragg had left the previous day, July 9, but before he reached Atlanta — a three-day trip, as it turned out — the War Department received from Johnston himself, on July 11, a telegram which seemed to some to answer only too clearly the question as to the city’s impending fate: “I strongly recommend the distribution of the U.S. prisoners, now at Andersonville, immediately.”

Andersonville, a prisoner-of-war camp for enlisted personnel, established that spring near Americus, Georgia, and already badly
crowded as a result of the northern decision to discontinue the exchange of prisoners, was more than a hundred miles due south of Atlanta. That distance, combined with the use of the word “immediately,” gave occasion for alarm. For though Davis knew that what mainly caused Johnston to recommend the camp’s evacuation was fear that Sherman, finding it within present cavalry range, might send out a flying column to liberate its 30,000 Federal captives — and thus create, as if by a sowing of dragon teeth, a ferocious new blue army deep in the Confederate rear — still, following hard as it did on the heels of news that Atlanta’s defenders had retired in haste across the Chattahoochee, the telegram was an alarming indication of the direction in which Johnston’s mind had turned now that Sherman was about to leap the last natural barrier in his path. For the first time since the clamor for the Virginian’s removal began, two months ago, Davis agreed that his relief seemed necessary, and he said as much next day in a cipher telegram asking R. E. Lee’s advice in choosing a successor: “General Johnston has failed and there are strong indications that he will abandon Atlanta.… It seems necessary to remove him at once. Who should succeed him? What think you of Hood for the position?”

Lee replied, also by wire and in cipher: “I regret the fact stated. It is a bad time to relieve the commander of an army situated as that of Tenne. We may lose Atlanta and the army too. Hood is a bold fighter. I am doubtful as to other qualities necessary.” That evening he expanded these words of caution and regret in a follow-up letter. “It is a grievous thing,” he said of the impending change. “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.” As for the choice of his former star brigade and division chief as his old friend’s successor out in Georgia, second thoughts had not diminished his reservations. “Hood is a good commander, very industrious on the battlefield, 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.” Further than this Lee would not go, either in praise or detraction, but he added suggestively: “General Hardee has more experience in managing an army. May God give you wisdom to decide in this momentous matter.”

A series of telegrams and letters from Bragg, who reached Atlanta next morning, July 13, confirmed the need for early action, either by Johnston or the government. “Indications seem to favor an entire evacuation of this place,” he wired Davis on arrival, and followed with a second gloomy message a few hours later, still without having ridden out to the general’s headquarters in the field: “Our army is sadly depleted, and now reports 10,000 less than the return of the 10th June. I find but little encouraging.” Two days later he was able to report more fully on conditions, having paid two calls on Johnston in the
meantime. “He has not sought my advice, and it was not volunteered,” Bragg wired. “I cannot learn that he has any more plan for the future than he has had in the past. It is expected that he will await the enemy on a line some three miles from here, and the impression prevails that he is now more inclined to fight.… The morale of our army is still reported good.”

In a letter sent by courier to Richmond that same day he went more fully into this and other matters bearing on the issue. Johnston’s apparent intention, now as always, Bragg declared, was to “await the enemy’s approach and be governed, as heretofore, by the development in our front.” What was likely to follow could be predicted by reviewing what had happened under similar circumstances at Dalton, Resaca, Cassville, and Marietta — or, indeed, by observing what had happened in and around Atlanta just this week; “All valuable stores and machinery have been removed, and most of the citizens able to go have left with their effects.… Position, numbers, and morale are now with the enemy.” Which said, Bragg moved on to the problem of choosing a successor to the general who had brought the army to this pass. Hardee had disqualified himself, not only because he had declined the post seven months ago (and thereby brought on Johnston) but also because he had “generally favored the retiring policy” of his chief. Alexander Stewart, who had been promoted to lieutenant general and given command of Polk’s corps on the retreat to the Chattahoochee, was too green for larger duties yet, despite the commendable savagery he had displayed at New Hope Church. That left Hood, who had “been in favor of giving battle” all the way from Dalton and who, in fact — aside, that is, from the peculiar circumstances that prevailed at Cassville — had done just that whenever he was on his own. By way of evidence that this was so, Bragg included a letter he had received from the young Texan the day before, expressing regret that the army had “failed to give battle to the enemy many miles north of our present position.”