The Man Who Saved the Union (50 page)

“
Dalton will be our first point, Kingston next, then Allatoona and then Atlanta,” Sherman explained to Ellen. “
Thomas is my centre and has about 45,000 men; McPherson my right, 25,000; and Schofield my left, 15,000—in all 85,000.” His destination was Atlanta, but his objective was Joe Johnston’s army. If Johnston would stand, they would settle the issue at once; if Johnston retreated, Sherman would follow.

Johnston chose to do a bit of both. With fewer men than Sherman, he couldn’t afford to fight in the open, so he prepared defensive positions and invited attack. Sherman accepted, and a series of small battles
ensued, in each of which Johnston fought awhile and then fell back. Engagements at Resaca,
Dallas and Kennesaw Mountain cost Sherman two to three thousand casualties each but left the overall balance between his and Johnston’s forces unchanged.

Sherman wished he could push the campaign harder but couldn’t see how to do so. “
I cannot leave the railroad to swing on Johnston’s flank or rear without giving him the railroad, which I cannot do without having a good supply on hand,” he told Ellen. Nor could he be careless with his men. “At this distance from home we cannot afford the losses of such terrible assaults as Grant has made.” The landscape, besides, favored the defenders. “
All of Georgia, except the cleared bottoms, is densely wooded, with few roads. And at any point an enterprising enemy can, in a few hours with axes and spades, make across our path formidable works, whilst his sharpshooters, spies, and scouts, in the guise of peaceable farmers, can hang around us and kill our wagon-men, messengers, and couriers. It is a big Indian war.” Yet Sherman was satisfied so far. “I have won four strong positions, advanced a hundred miles, and am in possession of a large wheat-growing region and all the iron mines and works of Georgia.”

In early July, Johnston retreated to the Chattahoochee, the last stream before Atlanta. Sherman readied what he hoped would be the final blow. “
I propose to study the crossings of the Chattahoochee, and when all is ready to move quick,” he wrote Halleck, for Grant’s eyes. “As a beginning I keep the wagons and troops well back from the river and display to the enemy only the picket-line, with a few batteries along at random.” Timing would depend on the weather. “The waters are turbid and swollen by the late rains, but if the present hot weather lasts the water will run down very fast.” Sherman’s engineers had pontoons ready for bridges. He expected resistance at the river and even more in Atlanta if he let Johnston fight from behind his fortifications. This he intended not to do. “Instead of attacking Atlanta direct, or any of its forts, I propose to make a circuit, destroying all its railroads.” Johnston would have to come out and fight or surrender the isolated city.

Johnston did neither. He fell back from the Chattahoochee, burning his bridges as he went. But before he took his next step, he was fired.
Jefferson Davis concluded that endless retreat would never win the war, and he replaced Johnston with
John Bell Hood. Sherman, surprised, sought information about the new man. “
I immediately inquired of General Schofield, who was his classmate at West Point, about Hood, as to his
general character, etc., and learned that he was bold even to rashness, and courageous in the extreme.”

Sherman took this as a good sign, for it might lead to the battle that would decide the war in the western theater. In the event, Hood gave him all he wanted. He came out of the city and struck Sherman’s lines furiously. The attack caught Sherman off guard and the Confederates got the better of the early fighting. But Sherman’s advantage in numbers and experience eventually told and Hood had to withdraw, leaving a large part of his army on the field or in Union hands.

O
ne Union casualty cost Sherman dearly. James
McPherson had become to Sherman what Sherman was to Grant: a close friend and invaluable lieutenant. Sherman remembered the last time he saw McPherson alive. Sudden artillery fire from an unexpected direction had caused the two officers to exchange puzzled looks. “
McPherson was then in his prime (about thirty-four years old), over six feet high, and a very handsome man in every way, was universally liked, and had many noble qualities,” Sherman wrote. “He had on his boots outside his pantaloons, gauntlets on his hands, had on his major-general’s uniform, and wore a sword-belt but no sword. He hastily gathered his papers (save one, which I now possess) into a pocket-book, put it in his breast-pocket, and jumped on his horse, saying he would hurry down his line and send me back word what these sounds meant.”

A short while later one of McPherson’s aides galloped breathlessly back, to report his superior either killed or taken prisoner. They had been riding behind the Union lines when McPherson entered a wood and got separated from the aide. His horse emerged shortly, wounded and without its rider.

“
Poor Mac, he was killed dead instantly,” Sherman told Ellen after the details became known. McPherson’s death revealed the essential caprice of war. “
He was not out of his place or exposing himself more than I and every General does daily. He was to the rear of his line, riding by a road he had passed twice that morning. The thing was an accident that resulted from the blind character of the country we are in. Dense woods fill all the ravines and hollows, and what little cleared ground there is is on the ridge levels, or the alluvion of creek bottoms. The hills are all chestnut ridges with quartz and granite boulders and gravel. You can’t find a hundred acres of level, clear ground between here and Chattanooga,
and not a day passes but what every general officer may be shot as McPherson was.” Sherman understood his own reputation in the South, and he recognized that for every bullet with McPherson’s name on it there were several with his. “
I know the country swarms with thousands who would shoot me and thank their God they had slain a monster.”

T
here was nothing to do except press on. “
We have Atlanta close aboard, as the sailors say,” he told Ellen. “But it is a hard nut to handle. These fellows fight like devils and Indians combined, and it calls for all my cunning and strength. Instead of attacking the forts, which are really unassailable, I must gradually destroy the roads which make Atlanta a place worth having. This I have partially done, two out of three are broken and we are now maneuvering for the third.”

The campaign became a
siege. “
Atlanta is on high ground and the woods extend up to the forts which look strong and circle the whole town,” Sherman observed during the first week in August. “Most of the people are gone—it is now simply a big fort.” The static nature of the contest made him more irritable than usual. He fretted that some of his soldiers would leave at the expiration of their terms of service and not be replaced. “
I have no faith in the people of the North. They ever lose their interest when they should act.” The regular army was too good for the nation it defended. “
I sometimes think our people do not deserve to succeed in war; they are so apathetic.” He refought old battles, telling his father-in-law how he had resolved a conflict in Nashville regarding civilian-military priorities. Merchants were crying for space on the trains that served the city, but he forbade anything that didn’t advance the war effort. “
It was the Gordian knot, and I cut it. People may starve, and go without, but an army cannot and do its work. A howl was raised, but the President and Secretary of War backed me, and now all recognize the wisdom and humanity of the thing.”

At length he severed Atlanta’s final link to the outside world. “
That night I was so restless and impatient that I could not sleep,” he remembered. “About midnight there arose toward Atlanta sounds of shells exploding, and other sound like that of musketry. I walked to the house of a farmer close by my bivouac, called him out to listen to the reverberations which came from the direction of Atlanta (twenty miles to the north of us), and inquired of him if he had resided there long. He said he had, and that these sounds were just like those of a battle.”

But the battle had already been fought. What Sherman and the farmer were hearing was Hood exploding the ordnance in Atlanta as he abandoned the city.

“A
tlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman telegraphed Washington on September 3. Lincoln proclaimed the nation’s thanks to Sherman and his men. “
The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations that have signalized this campaign must render it famous in the annals of war,” the president said.

Grant got the news via Washington. He congratulated Sherman for a mission well accomplished and said he had arranged a practical demonstration of thanks. “
In honor of your great victory I have ordered a salute to be fired with shotted guns from every battery bearing upon the enemy.”

Even as he congratulated Sherman, Grant urged him to fight all the harder. “
As soon as your men are properly rested and preparations can be made, it is desirable that another campaign should be commenced,” he said. “We want to keep the enemy continually pressed to the end of the war. If we give him no peace whilst the war lasts, the end cannot be distant.”

44

C
AVALRY COMMANDERS WERE THE POPULAR IDOLS OF THE
C
IVIL
War. They were typically young, invariably dashing, necessarily brilliant on horseback, temperamentally headstrong, famously brave and utterly irresistible to the smitten journalists who chronicled their exploits for rapt readers. J. E. B. Stuart captured the imagination of every Southerner and more than a few Northerners as he rode circles, literally, around the Union army, galloping across hundreds of miles of forest and farm, leaping and swimming creeks and rivers, seizing enemy soldiers, horses and supplies and sowing fright and confusion far behind Union lines. Lee called Stuart the “eyes of the army” and relied on him for intelligence regarding the disposition and movements of Union forces. A Stuart slip at Gettysburg, where he let the thrill of the ride distract him from his informational mission, cost the Confederates but didn’t alienate Lee, who saw much of his younger self in Stuart and continued to indulge the junior officer’s audacity.

Stuart’s exploits evoked envy and then emulation among the Union horse soldiers. Phil Sheridan complained to George Meade after the battle of the Wilderness that he hadn’t been allowed to do his job. He insisted—in language “
highly spiced and conspicuously italicized with expletives,”
Horace Porter remembered—that if he could concentrate his forces and strike directly at Stuart, he would whip the Confederate cavalryman. Meade told Grant of the exchange. “Did Sheridan say that?” Grant responded. “Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.”

Sheridan detached his cavalry from the main body of the Army of the Potomac and skirted Lee’s left en route to Richmond. Stuart raced
to cut him off. The battle Sheridan sought took place at Yellow Tavern, just north of the Confederate capital, and in a sharp clash he beat Stuart, who died of wounds suffered in the engagement. Sheridan might have entered Richmond, but, lacking the heft to hold the city, he veered off to disrupt Lee’s supply lines. He destroyed many miles of railroad and telegraph, liberated a large group of Union prisoners and killed or captured hundreds of Confederates.

His achievements inspired Grant to give him greater authority in a major campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. “
I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field”—infantry and artillery, as well as cavalry—“with instructions to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death,” Grant wrote Halleck in early August 1864. “Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”

Lincoln liked Grant’s plan. “
This, I think, is exactly right,” the president said. But he warned Grant that others in Washington would resist it. “It will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day and hour and force it.”

Halleck and Stanton proved Lincoln right, asserting that Sheridan was too young—at thirty-three—for command of an entire army. But Grant insisted, and he sent Sheridan off to the Shenandoah. Sheridan’s first objective was to keep
Jubal Early away from Washington; his broader mission was to deny Lee the resources of the valley, including its manpower. “
Carry off the crops, animals, negroes, and all men under fifty years of age capable of bearing arms,” Grant ordered. “All male citizens under fifty can fairly be held as prisoners of war and not as citizen prisoners. If not already soldiers, they will be made so the moment the rebel army gets hold of them.” Grant particularly wanted to neutralize the partisan forces mobilized by
John Mosby. “The families of most of Mosby’s men are known and can be collected,” he told Sheridan. “They should be taken and kept at Fort McHenry or some secure place as hostages for good conduct of Mosby and his men. When any of them are caught with nothing to designate what they are, hang them without trial.” In a subsequent dispatch Grant reiterated his basic message and described his desired outcome: “
Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”

Sheridan showed himself to be the general for the job. “
I endorsed the program in all its parts,” he recalled afterward, “for the stores of meat
and grain that the valley provided, and the men it furnished for Lee’s depleted regiments, were the strongest auxiliaries he possessed in the whole insurgent section. In war a territory like this is a factor of great importance, and whichever adversary controls it permanently reaps all the advantages of its prosperity.” Sheridan articulated the philosophy of modern war that was coming to summarize much of the Union approach. “I do not hold war to mean simply that lines of men shall engage each other in battle, and material interests be ignored. This is but a duel, in which one combatant seeks the other’s life; war means much more, and is far worse than this. Those who rest at home in peace and plenty see but little of the horrors attending such a duel, and even grow indifferent to them as the struggle goes on, contenting themselves with encouraging all who are able-bodied to enlist in the cause, to fill up the shattered ranks as death thins them. It is another matter, however, when deprivation and suffering are brought to their own doors. Then the case appears much graver, for the loss of property weighs heavily with the most of mankind—heavier, often, than the sacrifices made on the field of battle. Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.”