Simultaneous with the Army of the Potomac’s offensive that Grant supervised in Virginia, Sherman launched an offensive of his own with the Union’s three prime western armies—the Army of the Cumberland, under the command of Major General George H. Thomas; the Army of the Tennessee, under the command of Major General James B. McPherson; and the Army of the Ohio, under the command of Major General John Schofield—about one hundred thousand men in all. On the same May 4 that the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan on its way to encounter Lee in the Wilderness, Sherman’s armies began to advance from their camps around Chattanooga. They made contact with main-body Confederate forces on May 7.
Except for the absence of Robert E. Lee on this front, the challenge facing Sherman in North Georgia was even more daunting than the tangled Wilderness and the succession of rivers that lay in front of Grant in Virginia. Three significant rivers lay athwart Sherman’s path: the Oostanaula, the Etowah, and the Chattahoochee. Between them high, sometimes craggy ridges barred the way. Across all this Sherman would have to depend for all his supplies on a single-track railroad, the Western & Atlantic, which ran from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Even north of Chattanooga his supplies would still have to travel down a single set of rails all the way from Louisville, Kentucky, three hundred miles farther north, and almost the whole route, from the depots at Louisville to the rear areas of Sherman’s armies, would be within striking range of raiding Rebel cavalry who had already demonstrated their propensity for tearing up tracks. Sherman had small garrisons in blockhouses guarding key bridges and trestles and had pre-positioned spare parts and repair crews to keep the trains rolling and the hardtack reaching the haversacks of his soldiers. An important element of Sherman’s genius was his skill at logistics, the business of keeping his army supplied.
The first obstacle Sherman would have to negotiate was steep and rugged Rocky Face Ridge, lying across the Western & Atlantic and stretching many miles on either side. Sherman’s opponent, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, had entrenched his army, named the Army of Tennessee but not to be confused with the Union Army of the Tennessee, along this seemingly impregnable position with its greatest strength flanking the gap through which the Western & Atlantic crossed the ridge, a deep declivity the locals called the Buzzard Roost. Johnston devoutly hoped Sherman would hurl his troops against it so that he could slaughter them. Johnston had not, however, taken the trouble to reconnoiter the southwestern reaches of Rocky Face, where a winding narrow valley called Snake Creek Gap pierced the ridge and emerged only a few miles from the Western & Atlantic fifteen miles behind Johnston’s position and about five miles north of where the railroad crossed the Oostanaula River at the little town of Resaca.
Sherman did know about Snake Creek Gap. Among this remarkable general’s many striking qualities were a strong memory and a sharp eye for terrain. As a junior officer back in the 1840s Sherman had been stationed in North Georgia and had ridden all over these hills on army business. The consequence was that in this campaign in the Deep South, the Union commander knew the terrain better than his Confederate opponent. Sherman planned to turn Johnston’s powerful position on Rocky Face Ridge by sending the Army of the Tennessee through Snake Creek Gap while the Army of the Cumberland and the Army of the Ohio feigned an all-out frontal attack.
Sherman had won all of his Civil War success thus far in the Army of the Tennessee, and he had taken over command of that army when Grant had moved up to command of all of the western armies the previous autumn. Now that Sherman in turn had taken over command of the all the western armies, he still had great confidence in his old outfit, which he knew would march fast, strike hard, and overcome most natural obstacles. Sherman planned for the Army of the Tennessee to debouch from the gap and tear up the Western & Atlantic well behind Johnston’s army, then pull back slightly and assume a strong defensive position. With his supply line broken, Johnston would have to retreat. As he did so the Army of the Tennessee would fall on his flank, and the rest of Sherman’s forces would crash down from the north to complete the destruction of Johnston’s army.
Commanding the Army of the Tennessee now was thirty-six-year-old Major General James B. McPherson. An Ohioan like Grant and Sherman, McPherson had risen from childhood poverty to graduate first in the West Point class of 1853, and in the Civil War he had risen rapidly in rank. Suave, polished, handsome, and genial, as well as genuinely concerned for the welfare of his men, the young general was as popular with his troops as he was well liked by his superiors. McPherson seemed nearly perfect in every way, and if he had any fault as a general it may have been that his perfectionism did not allow him to feel comfortable in situations that were not completely within his control.
On May 9, as five hundred miles to the northeast Grant’s and Lee’s armies were taking up their positions outside the Virginia hamlet of Spotsylvania Court House, McPherson, in his first independent operation as an army commander, led the Army of the Tennessee through Snake Creek Gap undetected by Johnston and with all the speed and resourcefulness Sherman had expected. He emerged from the gap and was approaching Johnston’s vital Western & Atlantic supply line before he encountered the enemy and then only light forces guarding the Confederate rear. His lead elements were within half a mile of the tracks and driving the enemy easily when McPherson became worried and ordered his troops to fall back, leaving the railroad intact. Brilliant as he was, McPherson had assumed his enemy was equally perspicacious and therefore reasoned that Johnston must be about to descend on him with most of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. McPherson kept his Army of the Tennessee entrenched in a strong position in the mouth of Snake Creek Gap for the next two days, while Johnston finally learned of his dilemma and hurried troops south to confront McPherson and protect the Confederate line of communication and retreat.
Sherman was deeply disappointed at the failure to cut Johnston’s communications and gently chided McPherson that he had lost the opportunity of a lifetime. Nonetheless, adjusting to the partial failure of his plan, Sherman took his other two armies around via the route McPherson had taken so as to come up behind the Army of the Tennessee at the mouth of Snake Creek Gap and support it in a much more powerful move to cut the Western & Atlantic.
Meanwhile, because of Banks’s failure in the Red River Campaign and consequent failure even to launch the campaign Grant had ordered against Mobile, Confederate Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk was free to bring nineteen thousand Confederate reinforcements up from central Alabama, arriving in Resaca just in time to secure the town and with it the Oostanaula River bridge. Johnston made good his escape from Rocky Face Ridge and fell back twenty miles to confront Sherman with more than sixty thousand men in extensive entrenchments anchored on the Oostanaula below Resaca and stretching in a long arc across the western and northern sides of the town. Heavy skirmishing, sometimes escalating to battle intensity, occupied the next two days as Johnston hoped once again that Sherman would send his troops to their deaths in hopeless frontal assaults, and Sherman again declined to oblige him.
Instead, Sherman had a brigade of the Army of the Tennessee stage a cross-river assault upstream from the Confederate entrenchments on the north bank. There Johnston had posted fewer defenders. Even at that the river crossing was difficult, with teams of soldiers lugging heavy boats down to the bank under fire and then rowing across the Oostanaula to storm the Confederate lines. The rest of the Army of the Tennessee quickly followed, and Johnston was turned again. Rather than risk being trapped on the north bank by Sherman’s Federals seizing the crossing from the south side, the Confederate general once again put his army in retreat. His troops crossed the Oostanaula during the predawn hours of May 16 and burned the railroad bridge behind them. Sherman’s expert and well-equipped railroad repair crews got to work immediately and soon had supply trains rolling into Resaca and ready to proceed southward in the wake of Sherman’s now rapidly advancing armies.
Johnston’s army marched steadily southward, as the Confederate general looked for a defensive position he liked. Sherman followed with his three armies spread out on three different roads, five to ten miles apart. The great host could march more rapidly that way, and the formation offered Sherman the chance of bringing one of the side columns crashing down on Johnston’s flank if the Confederates were to turn and “show fight,” as the Civil War soldiers put it.
In fact, under Richmond’s nearly constant prodding to turn and fight, Johnston decided to do just that. He believed he saw an opportunity of catching the Army of the Ohio, smallest of Sherman’s armies, isolated on the Union left near the town of Cassville. He positioned Hardee’s corps to screen off Sherman’s other two armies and massed Hood’s and Polk’s corps to fall on Schofield’s single-corps army. With preparations complete, Johnston issued a grandiose proclamation to his troops, to be read aloud to every regiment in the Army of Tennessee, expressing confidence that God was supporting the Confederate cause and the intention of leading the army in an offensive that would crush its enemies.
Then events took an unexpected turn. Sherman’s armies possessed the intangible advantage of momentum. A brigade of Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland had missed its road some miles to the north and had veered out of the column and far out to the Union left, behind the route of Schofield’s Army of the Ohio. On realizing his mistake, the commanding officer of the errant brigade had decided not to backtrack but rather to keep his men tramping south and seek roads that would angle back to the southwest and reunite him with the main column.
As Hood’s corps, on the Confederate right, waited to spring the ambush on the unsuspecting Schofield, Thomas’s wandering brigade bumped into the rear of Hood’s right flank. Hood had a reputation for all-out aggressiveness, and it was that reputation that had won him his present assignment, as Davis had hoped the young Texan’s relentless combativeness would counterbalance Johnston’s excessive caution and propensity for retreat. But Hood had won his reputation in old Virginia, and the Yankees back there had seemed to belong to a different breed, not the kind that suddenly appeared on one’s flanks and rear just when one was expecting to flank them. Hastily Hood redeployed to defend his flank and sent word to Johnston that, threatened as he was, he now could not take part in any attack. Shocked, Johnston called off the offensive.
Meanwhile, the commander of the off-course Union brigade, taking stock of the mass of Confederate troops his advanced units had spotted ahead, decided that perhaps a little backtracking might be in order after all. Thus, Confederate reconnaissance turned up nothing on Hood’s flank, but by that time the day was well spent, and Sherman’s separate columns were converging in front of the Confederate position. Johnston met with his corps commanders to try to sort out the situation. Hardee urged that they once again stand their ground and dare Sherman to assault their position, but Hood and Polk claimed that their positions were indefensible, enfiladed by Union artillery, and that the best course of action was to attack the enemy the next day, though by now the temporary local advantage in numbers that had initially lured Johnston to attack was long gone. Johnston weighed his generals’ advice and decided to split the difference and retreat.
On May 20 the Army of Tennessee once again turned its back to the enemy and marched southward, this time crossing the Etowah, while some of the Confederate soldiers wept openly in their disappointment and the abandoned citizens of towns like Cassville and Kingston fled in confusion or waited in mute astonishment for whatever a Yankee occupation might bring. Already Johnston’s retreats had uncovered not only the towns along the Western & Atlantic but also those that lay downstream along the southwestward-slanting rivers in the Confederacy’s infant military-industrial complex in northwestern Georgia and northern Alabama. Union troops had recently taken possession of Rome, Georgia, with its vital iron mills and cannon foundries.
Two of the three river barriers were now behind Sherman, but the highest and steepest of the ridges lay just ahead, and Johnston was heading for the narrow defile where the railroad crossed the highest of them, Allatoona Pass, determined to establish the most formidable defensive line he had yet placed in Sherman’s path. Once again Sherman’s knowledge of the North Georgia terrain stood him in good stead. Aware that Allatoona Pass would be impregnable, he chose not to approach it at all but rather to undertake his boldest turning movement thus far in the campaign. Loading the supply wagons with as much hardtack as they could carry, he cut loose from the Western & Atlantic and struck out due south while the tracks angled off to the southeast toward Allatoona and the eagerly waiting Johnston. Sherman hoped to swing wide around Johnston’s left (western) flank and, if Johnston did not react promptly, reach the Chattahoochee in less than a week, trapping the Confederate Army of Tennessee.
Johnston, however, was alert this time and quickly swung his own army west to meet Sherman. On May 26, the same day that up in Virginia Grant decided there was little more to be gained on the North Anna lines and launched the turning movement that would take the Army of the Potomac to Cold Harbor, Sherman’s and Johnston’s armies made contact south of Pumpkin Vine Creek, along a line stretching from Dallas, Georgia, on the west through New Hope Church to Pickett’s Mill on the east. On that day and the next, Sherman launched corps-sized probes at the latter two places, finding the Confederates entrenched and suffering more than a thousand casualties in each of the two encounters. Johnston surmised that Sherman’s vigorous testing of the eastern end of his defenses might mean that Sherman’s own lines were thin at their western end and ordered William B. Bate’s division to test the hypothesis on May 28. Bate’s men suffered a repulse that differed only in scale from the rebuffs Sherman’s men had received at New Hope Church and Pickett’s Mill.
Days of heavy skirmishing followed, with neither side gaining much of an advantage and conditions made still more miserable by steady rain. With rations running low, Sherman needed to get back to the railroad, so he tried another turning movement, this time lunging east and passing Johnston’s right flank. Again Johnston was quick to react and June 9 was in position again astride the Western & Atlantic, blocking Sherman’s road to Atlanta. Yet despite Johnston’s success in blocking Sherman’s sidelong moves, each one had brought him a little closer to his goal. The net effect of his zigzag from the Etowah River bridge west to Dallas and then back east to the railroad had been to move the Union forces fifteen miles closer to Atlanta and, most significantly, past the impregnable defensive position at Allatoona Pass.
By now Sherman’s armies had reached Big Shanty (the present-day town of Kennesaw) ninety miles from their starting point at Chattanooga and only twenty-five from Atlanta. Ahead of them, however, lay another ten miles or so of terrain only marginally less forbidding than the range they had bypassed around Allatoona. Johnston’s Confederates held a line anchored on the heights of Brush Mountain with a bulge in the center to include Pine Mountain, from which Rebel officers could survey every move Sherman’s forces made. Despite the progress of his armies, the red-bearded Union general was frustrated that he had not been able to trap Johnston’s army or bring it to battle in the open field. On June 14 as he studied Pine Mountain through his field glasses, he was annoyed to see a cluster of gray-clad officers on the mountaintop serenely scrutinizing his positions. “How saucy they are,” he exclaimed in disgust, and turning to a subordinate he ordered him to have a battery open up on the summit and at least make the cheeky Rebels take cover.
The Union gunners already had the range. Indeed, the main goal of Union operations for the day or two before had been to find artillery positions from which the crest of Pine Mountain could be taken in crossfire and made untenable. How close they had already come to doing so was demonstrated by the identities of the officers Sherman had seen, though he could not have recognized them at that distance. Hardee had recommended to Johnston the evacuation of the mountain, and the two had come to survey the terrain in person, with Polk tagging along. The Union gunners’ first round was a near miss, and Johnston ordered the group to scatter and take cover. A second shell exploded closer still as Johnston and Hardee scurried for safety and Polk paced solemnly away with the dignity befitting a lieutenant general and an Episcopal bishop. The third round struck him squarely, killing him instantly.
Later that day, Union signalmen intercepted a Confederate wigwag message from the mountaintop summoning an ambulance to retrieve Polk’s remains, and the next morning Federal skirmishers probed forward to find that the Rebels had abandoned Pine Mountain. Sherman wrote with grim satisfaction in a dispatch to Washington that day, “We killed Bishop Polk yesterday and made good progress today.” The bishop-general’s death was a blow to Confederate morale, especially within the Army of Tennessee and in the Confederate White House, off in Richmond, where Jefferson Davis, the admiring underclassman of Polk’s West Point days, lamented the loss as one of the worst that had befallen the Confederacy. White southerners had viewed the presence of a bishop among the leaders of their armies as evidence of the holy nature of their cause. Northerners had seen the prelate’s service as a sacrilege in the causes of slavery and rebellion. Whatever the moral impact of his Confederate career and sudden death, Polk, by his incompetence and stubborn willfulness as a general, had done much damage to Rebel fortunes west of the Appalachians, in the heartland of the South, where the decisive action was taking place. Thus, the shot Sherman’s gunners had fired produced mixed results.
Using the same methods that had persuaded the Rebels to relinquish Pine Mountain, Sherman, by stretching his line around one flank or the other and taking up advantageous artillery positions, succeeded in prying the Confederates out of several other segments of their line. Yet to the Union commander’s heightened frustration, his nemesis Johnston merely pulled his line back a few miles to an even stronger position anchored by Kennesaw Mountain. This time it seemed no amount of hitching and sidling would give Sherman the leverage he needed to dislodge Johnston from his lofty defenses. Sherman surmised that if Johnston had stretched his smaller army as far as Sherman’s larger forces had yet stretched, the Confederate line must be fatally thin somewhere, perhaps in the sector that included Kennesaw, where the natural strength of the position might have convinced the Confederate general he could afford to do so. A Union assault had driven this same Confederate army off of Missionary Ridge the preceding November. Perhaps it would work again. In any case, Sherman thought his repeated turning movements were becoming too predictable.
The attack went in on June 27. While elements of the Army of the Tennessee feinted against Johnston’s right and Schofield’s Army of the Ohio did the same on the Rebel left, one corps of the Army of the Tennessee assaulted the Confederate entrenchments on Kennesaw, and one corps of the Army of the Cumberland hit Johnston’s lines in the sector next door to the mountain. Both assaults ended in bloody failure before mid-morning.
The factor that Sherman had underestimated was the magnitude of the multiplying effect of the elaborate entrenchments both sides were routinely building this summer. Given the weapons technology of that era, the entrenchments made the tactical defensive all but invincible to anything less than a five- or six-to-one superiority in numbers by the attacking force. The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, as it came to be called, would go into the history books as Johnston’s greatest victory and Sherman’s worst blunder. As a set-piece defensive battle fought from entrenchments, it was characteristic of the Confederate general; as an ill-advised assault, it was out of character for his Union counterpart. The cost in casualties, about three thousand Union to about one thousand Confederate, was lower and less lopsided than most failed major assaults of the war. In Virginia that spring and summer, it would have been just another day of campaigning, but it stood out in Georgia because Sherman preferred other methods, and Johnston, happy in his entrenchments, let him use them.
Indeed, even as the assaults on the Kennesaw lines were running their bloody course, Schofield was finding that with Johnston’s attention focused on defending the Confederate center, the Army of the Ohio was able to pass around his left flank, several miles southwest of the scene of that day’s heavy fighting. In that sense, even the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain was a Union success, as Sherman shifted the Army of the Tennessee—his “whiplash,” as he called it, because of this army’s tactical flexibility and lightning speed— around to that end of the line to exploit Schofield’s success and turn the Kennesaw Mountain line.
Once again, as throughout the campaign to this point, Johnston faced the choice of either retreating or taking the offensive against Sherman in a battle in the open field. As before, Johnston chose retreat. Tramping down the back slopes of Kennesaw Mountain and their other positions along the line, the Confederates marched through Marietta under the eyes of its dismayed civilian population and took up a position several miles south of the town, near the hamlet of Smyrna, Georgia. Again Sherman threatened Johnston’s flanks, and again the Confederate retreated, this time to a semicircle of very strong fortifications on the north bank of the Chattahoochee River, covering the Western & Atlantic bridge. Johnston had had his chief engineer officer direct the construction of these works in advance and hoped from this position to be able to pose an insurmountable threat to any attempt Sherman might make to cross the river either upstream or down.
It proved a vain hope. Sherman, who in this campaign was demonstrating himself to be the war’s master of turning movements, successfully turned Johnston again, this time using Schofield’s army and crossing the Chattahoochee upstream from Johnston’s fortifications. Johnston, with his back to the river and in danger of being cut off should Schofield move in behind him on the south bank, quickly made his retreat, falling back behind Peachtree Creek, a tributary of the Chattahoochee. As in his previous retreats starting all the way up at Dalton, Johnston made the movement skillfully, but Johnston’s excessive willingness to retreat and surrender territory had previously hurt the Confederacy both in Virginia and in Mississippi and was part of the reason for the critical situation it now faced in Georgia.
Johnston’s army was backed up almost into the suburbs of Atlanta, and Peachtree Creek was the last natural obstacle left to defend. From hills on the north bank of the Chattahoochee, Sherman’s men could see the city toward which they had been marching and fighting for the past two months. The next time Sherman successfully turned Johnston, the Confederate general’s options would be either battle in the open field, as Sherman had been seeking throughout the campaign, or else the abandonment of Atlanta.
Far off in Richmond, Jefferson Davis was deeply dissatisfied with the course of the campaign thus far. Back in the spring, before Sherman’s advance started, Davis had wanted Johnston to launch an offensive of his own, turning Sherman and perhaps finally recovering the vast territory and strategic advantage that the Confederacy had lost in its heartland. The president had offered to reinforce Johnston heavily if the general would undertake such a program. Johnston had refused every suggestion of offensive action but had insisted that Davis ought to send him the reinforcements anyway. When Sherman had advanced, Davis had indeed reinforced Johnston, ordering Polk to join him with his nineteen thousand, virtually the entire force that had been defending Alabama. Yet Johnston had still fallen back in the face of Sherman’s repeated turning movements, and despite almost constant skirmishing and the occasional repulse of a Union assault or two, the Confederate general had attempted nothing like the kind of all-out battle that might have had the potential, if all went well, to destroy Sherman’s force or compel it to retreat.
Though more than five hundred miles away, the Confederate president had kept close track of the campaign through various sources of information. Johnston’s reports, as was typical of that general, were relatively uncommunicative and gave no clue at all as to what Johnston might be planning in order to stop Sherman, but their very datelines, each progressively closer to Atlanta, told the story. Davis heard more about it from Georgia politicians, who were by now bombarding him with complaints and demands for a change of command in their state as more and more of their constituents passed under Union control or fled southward as refugees. Davis also had a source within the high command of the Army of Tennessee. Hood and Davis had become personally acquainted during the former’s convalescence in Richmond after his Chickamauga wound. Throughout the campaign in Georgia that spring and summer, Hood had sent Davis a steady stream of letters, reporting on operations in the kind of detail Johnston would not provide and presenting events—and his own performance—as he wished the president to perceive them.
Throughout the campaign Johnston’s dispatches to Richmond touted a single remedy for the situation in Georgia, and that was that the Confederate high command should send Nathan Bedford Forrest and his division of cavalry from Mississippi into Middle Tennessee, there to cut Sherman’s supply line. Davis rejected the proposal every time. Forrest was needed to protect Mississippi from Union forays, and besides, Johnston had his own cavalry and should send them to break the railroad in Tennessee. Johnston’s assertion that he could do nothing and that someone else ought to win the war for him was by this time all too familiar to the Confederate president. Johnston, for his part, claimed that he needed his own cavalry and could not spare them for the raid he wanted Forrest to make.
Sherman had, since before leaving Chattanooga, been concerned about the possibility of Forrest raiding his supply lines. Besides leaving small garrisons in blockhouses at key bridges and culverts along the railroad and pre-positioning repair crews and replacement parts for the tracks, Sherman had also arranged for Union expeditions, larger than Forrest’s command, to launch raids into Mississippi. Their goal was to destroy Forrest if possible but at all events to keep him busy in Mississippi. Major General Samuel D. Sturgis had led the first such venture, but he proved woefully inferior to Forrest in cunning and mental toughness. On June 10, while Sherman was facing Johnston’s lines on Pine, Brush, and Lost mountains, the wily Confederate scored his greatest tactical masterpiece, trouncing Sturgis at the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads near Tupelo, Mississippi. Sherman was disgusted when he heard the news, but as far as he was concerned even a tactical fiasco like Brice’s Crossroads was a strategic success if it kept Forrest in Mississippi and off his supply line in Tennessee. If necessary, Sherman could afford to send one such expedition after another for Forrest to thrash, as long as the ruthless Confederate stayed in Mississippi to do the thrashing.
For a second Mississippi expedition Sherman tasked Major General A. J. Smith commanding one of the corps of Sherman’s old Army of the Tennessee veterans that Banks had taken with him on his Red River Expedition. Smith’s competence and the hard-fighting skill of his troops had saved Banks from an even worse disaster in Louisiana. Now that that dismal campaign was at last over, Smith and company were available for other duty, and Sherman ordered him to go find Forrest and whip him. Smith did just that, getting the better of the Confederate raider and inflicting heavy casualties on his force at the July 14 Battle of Tupelo. Smith’s supply situation required him to return to his base immediately after the battle, without completing the destruction of Forrest’s command, but when Forrest tried to harass Smith’s return march the next day, one of Smith’s doughty midwestern soldiers shot the Confederate general in the foot, inflicting a minor wound but compounding Forrest’s frustration. Unlike Sturgis’s expedition, Smith’s had been both a tactical and a strategic success.
By that time, with the Army of Tennessee on the outskirts of Atlanta, Davis’s patience with Johnston was nearing an end. He had every reason to believe that the general would, within the next few weeks, abandon Atlanta with no more of a fight than he had put up during any of his other pauses in the long retreat from Dalton to the Chattahoochee, apparently content that despite whatever disasters had befallen the Confederacy on his watch, he was not to be blamed. Davis was well aware of the enormous transportation and manufacturing importance of Atlanta to the Confederacy and of the city’s even greater significance to the morale of both sides, and he was not willing to allow it to be given up the way Johnston showed every indication of being about to do. He sent a pointed telegram to Johnston demanding that the general spell out his plans for the defense of the city “so specifically as will enable me to anticipate events,” a clear indication that Davis expected Johnston to take the initiative against Sherman.1 Johnston replied that he was so badly outnumbered that he could do nothing but stand on the defensive and react to the enemy’s movements. This was exactly what he had been doing all the way down from Dalton, and every reaction had been a retreat.
Davis dispatched Braxton Bragg, who had by then become his top staff general in Richmond, to travel to Atlanta to investigate the situation and possibly replace Johnston with either of the Army of Tennessee’s two senior corps commanders, Hood or Hardee. Hardee’s near-mutinous behavior had helped to undermine Bragg during that general’s tenure in command of the Army of Tennessee, and he had turned down command of the army the preceding December. His army nickname, Old Reliable, was probably more of a commentary on the low average quality of the generals in the Army of Tennessee than it was a testimony to Hardee’s merits. Nothing in his career suggested him as a candidate for leading the kind of desperate fighting that was now going to be necessary if Atlanta were to be saved.
Hood was just the man for desperate fighting. The tall, tawny-bearded Texan had graduated forty-fourth in the fifty-two-man West Point class of 1853 and had turned thirty-three years old during the campaign down from Dalton. He had first ridden to fame in the second year of the war as commander of the Texas Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia, Hood’s Texas Brigade, as some still called it, renowned as the hardest-hitting unit of Lee’s army. From there Hood had risen to lead a division and suffered at Gettysburg a wound that paralyzed his left arm. Promoted to corps command and transferred to the Army of Tennessee in time for Chickamauga, Hood had taken a bullet in the right thigh that had necessitated amputation just below the hip. He now had to be helped into the saddle and strapped there to ride, but no one would ever question his combativeness. Queried by Davis as to Hood’s fitness to take the reins of the Army of Tennessee now with its back to Atlanta, Robert E. Lee responded that Hood was “a bold fighter, very industrious on the battlefield, careless off.”2
Both Davis and Bragg believed that Hood was the man they needed for the present crisis or at least the best man they could get at the moment. On July 17 Davis sent orders by telegraph relieving Johnston of command and appointing Hood in his place. Hood’s letters to Davis over the preceding three months had helped to undermine Johnston with the president, but ultimately Johnston had been the author of his own downfall by refusing to risk a battle that might mar his reputation and by showing concern only for ensuring that everyone knew that the bad results achieved on his watch were not his responsibility. Whatever Hood’s intentions might have been in writing his letters, he was appalled to learn that he had been thrust into the command with the army backed up against Atlanta. First individually and then in concert with his two fellow corps commanders, he appealed first to Johnston to ignore the order, at least temporarily, and then to Davis, via telegraph, to rescind it. Neither complied, and Hood found himself irrevocably in command of an army in desperate circumstances.
After several days of rest along the banks of the Chattahoochee, Sherman’s armies advanced once more toward Atlanta. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland approached the city directly from the north, while McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee, again playing its role as Sherman’s whiplash, swung wide to the Union left to strike the Georgia Railroad near Decatur and then approach Atlanta from the east. Schofield’s Army of the Ohio advanced between its two larger partners, maintaining contact with both by its skirmishers. As had been the case most of the way from Dalton to the Chattahoochee, the Army of the Tennessee would be turning the Rebels, threatening to cut an important line of communication between Confederate forces in Georgia and Virginia.
As the movement was in progress, Sherman learned of the change of commanders on the Confederate side. He was not familiar with Hood, but his subordinates were. Thomas had been one of Hood’s instructors at West Point, and McPherson and Schofield had been his classmates there. The latter had even been his roommate and had coached the academically challenged future Confederate general through some of his more difficult mathematics courses. Hood was a fighter, the three generals assured Sherman, “bold to rashness” and very likely to attack someone at the first opportunity. Sherman was pleased. Johnston’s repeated slippery retreats had prevented Sherman from coming to grips with the Rebel host in Georgia on any but the most disadvantageous terms, with the Confederates firmly ensconced behind impregnable breastworks that Johnston obviously longed for Sherman to assault. True, Johnston had fallen back all the way to Atlanta in order to avoid any different sort of encounter with Sherman, but the result had been to deny Sherman the opportunity of fulfilling Grant’s orders to hammer the Army of Tennessee. Now, with Hood in command, Sherman was confident he would be able to get a stand-up fight out of the Rebels.
At about the same time Sherman was learning of Hood’s accession to command, Hood was learning that Sherman had turned him again. Like Johnston with each of Sherman’s turning movements, Hood now faced the choice of either fighting or retreating, but unlike Johnston, Hood never had the chance of retreating without giving up Atlanta. The necessity of the situation, the president’s obvious expectations, and his own nature all dictated Hood’s next move. The questions were where and when he would strike.
Hood’s answer came at 4:00 on the afternoon of July 20 in the form of an all-out assault of the Army of the Cumberland, which at that time had just finished crossing to the south bank of Peachtree Creek. Hood hoped to catch Thomas in the act of crossing the creek, giving the Confederates a numerical advantage against the part of the Army of the Cumberland already on the south bank and catching the Federals before they could dig entrenchments. It might have worked if it had been launched several hours earlier, and Hood had meant it to be. Confederate armies, by law, never had enough staff officers, so that it was always difficult for a commander to translate his ideas into action, often requiring him to invest much personal attention in preparations.
When Davis sought Lee’s advice about replacing Johnston with Hood, Lee had characterized Hood as being “careless” off the battlefield, and the fiery Texan’s lack of attention to detail was no doubt exacerbated by his crippling wounds. To make matters worse, Hood had to depend much on Hardee, his only experienced corps commander. Hardee was uninspired at the best of times, but at this time he was in an extended sulk over having been passed over in favor of his junior, Hood, for command of the army. At Peachtree Creek he was more than usually slow in getting his troops into position. The result was an attack that was several hours late. The Army of the Cumberland was already united on the south bank of the creek, and much of it was entrenched. Where it was not, the Confederate attackers scored a few temporary local successes before being driven back by Union counterattacks. Where the defenders were already behind breastworks, the attack made no headway at all. When the firing stopped that evening, Confederate losses totaled 4,796 men, while Thomas’s casualties were scarcely more than one-third that many.
Sherman’s turning movement continued apace the next day, with the Army of the Tennessee gaining the railroad east of Atlanta and then pushing westward toward the city, driving the Confederate defenders before them. With the failure of his first offensive, Hood faced again the unpleasant choice of either attack or retreat, with the latter meaning the abandonment of Atlanta. Again Hood chose to fight. During the thirty-six hours after the fighting had stopped along Peachtree Creek, Hood hastily shifted his troops through the city from the north side to the east for a blow against McPherson. Doing the hardest marching was Hardee’s corps, which had been the most heavily engaged at Peachtree and now had the assignment of marching all the way around McPherson’s left (southern) flank to hit the Army of the Tennessee in the rear. Hood was trying to make war the way he had seen Lee and Jackson do it in the Army of Northern Virginia. His plan for the attack on McPherson was very similar to what Lee and Jackson had done to Hooker at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Hardee would attack the Federals in flank and rear while the rest of the army, save for light forces detailed to hold the lines in front of Thomas and Schofield, would attack the Army of the Tennessee in front.
Across the lines, Sherman believed Hood had gotten all the aggressiveness out of his system in the July 20 assault along Peachtree Creek and would shortly retreat and abandon Atlanta. The Union general’s chief concern now was the possibility that Lee in Virginia might send reinforcements to Hood. Grant had recently telegraphed to warn that in the deadlocked situation on the Petersburg front he could no longer guarantee that Lee could not do so, and everyone remembered Rosecrans’s painful discomfiture at Chickamauga the preceding fall, in large part due to the arrival of troops detached from the Army of Northern Virginia. To forestall the repetition of such an event, Sherman wanted the Georgia Railroad, the most likely avenue for the approach of troops from Virginia, thoroughly destroyed for many miles east of Atlanta. On the morning of July 22, he decided that the single cavalry division he had working on that task of destruction was not going to be enough, and he told McPherson that he wanted an entire corps of the Army of the Tennessee, the Sixteenth, assigned to the job.
McPherson thought otherwise. His skirmishers had advanced that morning and found that although the Confederates had pulled back from some of the more advanced positions on his front, they were still present in force, well dug in, and showing no signs of being ready to evacuate Atlanta. Furthermore, McPherson believed his old classmate Hood was going to attack again, soon, and against the Army of the Tennessee’s exposed left (southern) flank, where McPherson proposed to post the Sixteenth Corps. Sherman was unconvinced, but he liked and respected McPherson and so agreed to let him keep the Sixteenth Corps on his left flank until midday and then, if nothing happened, to dispatch it on the track-wrecking mission.
Midday came and no attack from Hood. McPherson with a number of his officers was sitting in the shade of a grove of trees. Some were finishing up lunch while McPherson prepared to write an order shifting the Sixteenth Corps from flank protection to railroad destruction. Just then firing broke out on the army’s flank and rear, exactly where McPherson had predicted. The rapid crescendo of the sound indicated a major assault, and McPherson hastily rode off to inspect his lines. The Sixteenth Corps was just where it needed to be, and it stopped the first onset of the Confederate flanking attack. Between the Sixteenth Corps and its neighboring unit to the right, the Seventeenth Corps, was a gap in the Union line, and as McPherson reconnoitered and issued orders to bring up reserves to plug it, Confederate attackers swarmed through the gap and fatally shot the Union general.
The action that would come to be called the Battle of Atlanta was the largest and most hotly contested of the several clashes around the city. Hardee’s flank march was a hard one for his battle-weary troops, and once again, this time with a better excuse, they were late in getting into position. That was the reason the attack had not come when McPherson had predicted. Now with its commander dead, the Army of the Tennessee felt the full weight of the Confederate attack, both in front and via the gap in its line, against its flank and rear.
Hood had indeed succeeded in doing something very much like what Lee and Jackson had done to Hooker at Chancellorsville, but Lee and Jackson had not been up against the Army of the Tennessee. Organized by Grant and seasoned by two years of hard but successful campaigning, the army refused to believe it could be beaten. Its new commander, in place of the fallen McPherson, was a striking contrast to the badly frightened Hooker of Chancellorsville. Major General John A. Logan, commander of the Fifteenth Corps, was an Illinois politician in uniform. Nicknamed “Black Jack” by his men because of his swarthy complexion, Logan combined adequate military acumen with an amazing ferocity and an even more amazing ability to infuse his own fighting spirit into the men he commanded.
Throughout the remainder of the day the men of the Seventeenth Corps fought both front and rear, leaping from one side of their breastworks to the other to direct their fire against whichever threat seemed most pressing at the moment. Only when the Confederates succeeded in achieving a simultaneous coordination of their attacks were they able to push the stubborn Federals on the left of the Seventeenth Corps out of their breastworks, while the corps’ center and right held firm. The left pivoted back so that the corps’ line formed an angle with its apex on a key piece of high ground the soldiers called the bald hill. The focus of repeated desperate Confederate assaults, the Union’s hilltop position held.
A mile north of the bald hill, Confederate attackers made use of a brush-choked railroad cut to penetrate and break the lines of the Fifteenth Corps, once again threatening the Army of the Tennessee with destruction. The Federals rallied, however, and Logan himself arrived from the other end of the battlefield at the critical moment to shouts of “Black Jack! Black Jack!” from his men. The Union counterattack swept the Confederates back out of the Union position, securing that sector. The firing continued around the bald hill until nightfall obscured the targets, but Hood’s attack had clearly failed. Casualties in the Army of the Tennessee came to 3,641, including McPherson, while Confederate losses totaled 8,499.
After the Battle of Atlanta Hood’s army drew back into the fortifications ringing Atlanta. Sherman’s turning movement had worked insofar as it had achieved the destruction of the Georgia Railroad east of Atlanta, and it had induced Hood to come out and fight twice. It had not destroyed Hood’s army, though it had resulted in total casualties amounting to about a quarter of his strength. It had also failed to drive Hood out of Atlanta. The Confederates still had a railroad running into the city from the southwest and with it could supply their army in Atlanta.
This railroad Sherman immediately proposed to cut, and he gave the order to his old whiplash, the Army of the Tennessee, though bloodied by its recent fight and having lost a much loved commander in McPherson. The army would pull out of the positions it had fought for in the recent battle and swing around behind Schofield’s and Thomas’s armies in a long, counterclockwise march around the city from its southeast side to its southwest, where Sherman hoped it could cut the railroad somewhere between Atlanta and the hamlet of East Point, where the railroad forked into two diverging lines. During the march the army received a new commanding officer. Sherman appreciated Logan’s fine service, but he believed the commander of the Fifteenth Corps lacked the expertise to handle the entire army. The job therefore went to thirty-four-year-old Major General Oliver O. Howard, who had graduated fourth in the West Point class of 1854. Howard had lost his right arm in the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, commanded the unlucky Eleventh Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg, and more recently had served as a corps commander in the Army of the Cumberland.
Sherman rode with Howard on July 28 as the Army of the Tennessee passed beyond Thomas’s right flank and marched down the west side of Atlanta. As they heard firing flare up near the head of the column, Howard, remembering Hood from their West Point days, observed that the Confederate general was about to attack again. Sherman demurred. Hood would hardly dare to attack them again, he thought. But Howard was right. The Rebels were advancing in force for the third time in eight days. While Sherman rode back to get reinforcements started on their way from his other two armies, Howard quickly got his lead corps, Logan’s Fifteenth, into line along a low ridge that ran roughly perpendicular to his route, crossing the road near a Methodist meetinghouse called Ezra Church. The soldiers had no time to entrench or to build up proper breastworks and had to content themselves with throwing together a few fence rails and whatever else they could find for protection in the few minutes before the Confederate attack struck.
Faced with yet another of Sherman’s turning maneuvers, Hood had indeed chosen fight rather than retreat. After the battles of Peachtree Creek and Atlanta, Hardee’s corps was fought out and needed rest, so Hood gave this attack to his other two corps, both of which had been engaged at Atlanta though less intensely than Hardee’s. The corps commanders, Stephen D. Lee and Alexander P. Stewart, both had good records at lower ranks but were new to the job of directing a corps in battle. Hood’s orders called for them to take up a specified position in front of Sherman, blocking his flanking movement and forcing him to attack. When the Confederates approached their assigned position, however, they found that Howard had just occupied it. Faced with this situation, Stewart urged that they follow the spirit of the orders and take up a different position, farther back, but Lee, who was the senior of the two, insisted that they would just have to attack and drive the Yankees out of the position Hood had assigned to them.
The fighting began in mid-afternoon, and the Confederates launched wave after wave of assaults against Logan’s line without making any gains at all. By evening when the fighting sputtered out, the Confederates had lost some three thousand men, while Logan’s corps, the only one engaged on the Union side, had suffered little more than one-sixth that many. The skill of the Union generals and their soldiers, the inexperience of the Confederate generals, and Hood’s inability to supervise personally the movements of his army had all combined to produce one of the most lopsided battles of the entire campaign.
Hood had accomplished at least one thing by the movement that resulted in the Battle of Ezra Church: he had compelled Howard to stop short of Atlanta’s last railroad lifeline. Over the days and then weeks that followed, Sherman tried to stretch his line far enough down the west side of Atlanta to reach the railroad southwest of the city, while Hood extended his entrenchments and stretched his lines farther and farther to counter him. In some ways the situation was similar to what Sherman had faced when his armies were stalled in front of Johnston’s mountaintop positions north of Marietta. The stout fortifications of Atlanta now served the place of Brush, Pine, and Kennesaw mountains. Without letting go his grip on his railroad supply line, Sherman could not extend his lines far enough to get to the railroad behind Hood, who, having the inside position, always had a shorter distance to cover. Both sides were unwilling to assault the other’s breastworks, and Sherman, with his three armies stretched to the utmost, could not make another turning movement that might force Hood into a fourth stand-up fight. As July gave way to August, the situation around Atlanta was a stalemate.
Back in Virginia the situation around Richmond and Petersburg looked much the same, as Grant strove to stretch his own lines around the south side of the latter city, reaching for the rail lines that fed Lee’s army. A late-June probe toward the Weldon Railroad, easterly of the two leading into Petersburg, ended disastrously when Lee aimed a counterstrike and the Union troops in the operation fought poorly, ran away, or simply surrendered. The loss of fighting spirit and leadership in the Army of the Potomac was more obvious than ever. Some divisions had taken more casualties than they had had members when they marched into the Wilderness scarcely four weeks before. They continued to exist thanks to the steady influx of replacements, many of them draftees, bounty jumpers, or other poorly motivated recruits, but they were not the same fighting forces they had been.
Late July saw another Union effort to break the deadlock around Petersburg. A colonel who had been a mining engineer in civilian life hatched a plan to run a mine shaft more than five hundred feet to reach a Confederate fort and blow it up from below, opening a gap that attacking Union troops could exploit. Military engineers were familiar with the concept but judged the distance to be wildly impractical. To their surprise, the colonel and his regiment, with minimal support from army headquarters, succeeded in building their tunnel and planting four tons of gunpowder under the Confederate fort.
The mine lay within the sector of Burnside’s Ninth Corps, and Grant ordered Burnside to follow up the explosion of the mine with an all-out assault. Burnside selected and trained one of his divisions, composed entirely of black troops, to lead the attack. When Meade learned of the plan, he insisted that another division lead the way. If the blacks went first, he thought, they might take heavy casualties, and northern public opinion might think the former slaves had been deliberately sacrificed. Burnside appealed to Grant, who backed Meade. So Burnside had his other division commanders draw straws for the honor. The worst of them drew the short straw, made no effort to prepare his troops or instruct his officers, and spent the morning of the attack getting drunk in a bomb shelter in the rear.
While he did, the mine blew with spectacular effect, and then his division advanced and dissolved into confusion. The Confederates recovered and launched a counterattack, which proved successful despite the advance of Burnside’s other divisions, including the black one, to join the attack. Driven back into the crater itself, the attackers suffered appalling casualties before some of them could escape back to Union lines. As at Fort Pillow and other places during the last year and a half of the war, the incident degenerated into a racial massacre, as Confederate troops refused to take black prisoners and instead shot down or bayoneted men who had ceased to resist. Grant later sadly described the event, known as the Battle of the Crater, as “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.”
Thereafter Grant continued to slug at Lee’s positions, alternating right jabs direct at Richmond north of the James with roundhouse swings beyond his left flank aimed at taking and holding a section of the Weldon Railroad, which he succeeded in doing late in August. Confederates subsequently carried supplies around the breach via a thirty-mile detour in wagons. It was a painfully slow and difficult way to get the cargoes to the city, but what it did bring in helped to eke out what the single remaining railroad, the Southside, could carry. Meanwhile, the drumbeat of Grant’s operations continued, another every few weeks, each testing the remaining strength of Lee’s lines or stretching them a little farther in the direction of the final railroad.
While Grant strove to tighten his grip on Richmond and Petersburg and Sherman did the same with Atlanta, Lincoln was fighting a war on a different front. This was an election year, and the Union cause could lose at the polls much more easily than on the battlefield. Even within his own Republican Party the president did not enjoy unanimous support. Radical Republicans, the party’s vanguard on issues of emancipation and civil rights for the newly freed slaves, were dissatisfied with Lincoln’s caution about the potential political and legal pitfalls that lay in the path of goals that he largely shared with them.
Those among the Radicals who were most dissatisfied with Lincoln but despaired of denying him the Republican nomination for another term chose instead the quixotic alternative of launching a third party. A convention of the most discontent of the Radicals met in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 29, styling itself the Radical Democracy Party. On May 31 the four hundred or so delegates in attendance gave their presidential nomination to the 1856 Republican candidate and more recently failed general John C. Freémont. In his June 4 letter of acceptance, Freémont stated that he would step down as candidate if the Republicans nominated someone other than Lincoln.
The Republican convention met in Baltimore that same first week of June, styling itself the National Union Party in hopes of attracting the votes of war Democrats. To strengthen the appeal to members of the Democratic Party who supported at least the war to restore the Union, the Republicans set aside Lincoln’s first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, in favor of Tennessee senator and occupation governor Andrew Johnson, the only senator from a seceding state to keep his seat in the Senate and remain loyal to the Union. Johnson was a lifelong Democrat and admirer of Andrew Jackson. Lincoln was, of course, renominated by a resounding majority, drawing 494 of 516 votes on the first ballot. The rest went for Grant but promptly switched to Lincoln to make the nomination unanimous. In his own acceptance letter, written June 9, while Grant’s army still lay before Cold Harbor, Lincoln wrote, “I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.’ ”3
The part of the Democratic Party that the Republicans did not succeed in drawing into the National Union Party—and it was much the larger part— was increasingly dominated by the so-called peace Democrats, who had never sympathized with the war or its purposes, least of all emancipation, and were now more determined than ever to bring it to an end at once, without freedom for the slaves and, perhaps, without even the preservation of the Union. They met in their own convention that August in Chicago, where the Republicans had joyously nominated Lincoln four years before, and adopted a platform, written by Clement Vallandigham, that called the war a failure and demanded an immediate cease-fire along with the opening of negotiations with the Confederate government. Some of their prominent leaders advocated that the reunion negotiations should include a constitutional convention to make whatever changes might be needed in that venerable document to satisfy slaveholders that their peculiar institution would be safe forever under a new Union and constitution. Whatever followed in the wake of a Democratic victory would almost certainly not be “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.”
In a stroke of cynical political genius, the Democratic delegates chose as their presidential nominee George B. McClellan. The general was still tremendously popular with the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac and perhaps with other elements of the population as well. As a general, he would, by his presence at the top of the ticket, somewhat counteract the impression the platform would naturally create that the party was lacking in patriotism, fortitude, or both. Indeed, upon accepting the nomination McClellan wrote a public letter, more or less repudiating the platform on which he had just agreed to run. The political professionals who ran the Democratic Party were not concerned. Once elected, McClellan would be politically beholden to them and compelled to adopt at least some of their policies, even if his protestations against the platform were more than just campaign rhetoric. The convention that nominated him had announced that Vallandigham would be his secretary of war.
As the campaign progressed, Lincoln had to deal with practical difficulties presented on both sides, by those who believed he was prosecuting the war too vigorously and with too much concern for the freedom and rights of blacks and those who believed he was displaying exactly the opposite fault. The Radical Republicans in Congress found a way to make Lincoln’s summer difficult by challenging him for control of Reconstruction, the process by which the rebellious states were to be restored to their proper relationship to the nation as a whole and to the national government.
The process of Reconstruction had begun as soon as Union armies had made their first strides in reconquering Rebel states. Lincoln had directed the establishment of loyal state governments in the Union-held areas of Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana. In order to encourage the citizens of the rebellious states to rally around the new governments and withdraw their support from the Confederacy, Lincoln in December 1863 issued a proclamation on Reconstruction, containing what came to be called his “Ten Percent Plan.” Lincoln’s program offered a lenient, gentle return for the Union’s erring southern citizens. At its heart was a provision that as soon as a number equal to 10 percent of a state’s 1860 voters took an oath henceforth to be loyal to the Union, those who had taken the oath could participate in the formation of a loyal state government.
The challenge from the Radical Republicans came in the form of the Wade-Davis Bill, introduced the preceding December and passed by Congress on July 2. Its entire approach to Reconstruction contrasted sharply with Lincoln’s. Whereas the president believed the rebellious states had never left the Union and needed only to be restored to their proper practical relationship with it, the Radical Republicans, including the bill’s sponsors, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, maintained that the states claiming to be part of the Confederacy had committed “state suicide” or were “conquered provinces.” Either way, they were to be administered by the national government until they met stringent requirements for readmission as states. The Wade-Davis Bill stipulated that a southern state could form a loyal state government when a majority, not 10 percent, of its total number of 1860 voters took an “Ironclad Oath,” swearing that they had never voluntarily supported the rebellion. Under those terms, no Confederate state could have formed a government without a great deal of perjury—unless it extended the vote to black former slaves, virtually all of whom could have taken the Ironclad Oath with complete honesty.
Although the bill’s provisions were in many ways reasonable and just (and included much that was later incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution), it clashed with Lincoln’s ideas not only by claiming congressional rather than presidential authority over the process of Reconstruction but also by making it more difficult to entice wavering southerners to abandon their rebellion and return their allegiance to the United States, as had been Lincoln’s goal in issuing the Ten Percent Plan. It also posed a threat to the Union-loyal governments Lincoln had already established in the Union-held sections of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Since Congress had adjourned for its summer recess a few days after passing the bill, Lincoln was able to give it a “pocket veto” by simply declining to sign it. He later issued a statement explaining that the Wade-Davis Bill offered a fine plan of Reconstruction for any southern state that might choose to adopt it, but he did not wish to make it the only available choice. As usual, Lincoln was balancing justice against practicality. The war continued in all its fury, and to the president even a bit of excessive leniency might be acceptable if it could still the guns sooner while preserving Lincoln’s two nonnegotiable goals of Union and emancipation.
The Radicals were furious. On August 4, the sponsors of the bill issued a manifesto denouncing Lincoln, and the next day Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune printed it. Wade and Davis denounced Lincoln in strident language, complaining of presidential encroachment on the powers of Congress as if the Constitution had said nothing at all about the veto power. Wade and Davis accused Lincoln of ruling the country as a despot and trying to use Reconstruction to set up his own reelection.
As for Horace Greeley, he was finding additional ways to make Lincoln’s reelection more difficult, with the assistance of Jefferson Davis. In early July, while Early’s Confederates were rampaging through Maryland and bearing down on Washington, Greeley informed Lincoln that he had received a missive from two men in Niagara Falls, Ontario, purporting to be agents of the Confederate government with powers to negotiate a peace settlement. Greeley made an emotional appeal to Lincoln to follow up this contact. Professing to know that the Confederate people universally longed for peace, Greeley “ventured to remind” the president “that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscription, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” This was entirely in keeping with the severely defeatist tone of Greeley’s editorials of late.
Lincoln realized that the affair offered precisely no chance at all of bringing about peace with reunion and emancipation, his minimum terms, and that if the men actually were agents of the Confederate government, their mission was merely to depict Lincoln as a warmonger who would not accept a reasonable peace agreement and further to demoralize the northern people into giving up the war and voting for McClellan. Wisely, the president replied, “If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and the abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you.”
This was not what Greeley expected, and he tried to beg off in a letter complaining that the Rebel envoys were unlikely to show him their credentials, much less share with him their terms. “I was not expecting you to send me a letter,” Lincoln wrote in reply, “but to bring me a man, or men.” To sound the matter to its bottom, Lincoln dispatched one of his private secretaries, John Hay, to carry his letter to Greeley and then accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls to meet with the purported Confederate agents. To Greeley, Lincoln added, “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.”
Quite unwillingly, Greeley accompanied Hay to the Canadian border, and together they found that the Confederate agents had no peace proposals to make or any intention of serious negotiation. Not surprisingly, the pair was hardly on its way back to Washington before the rumor was abroad that Lincoln had turned down a perfectly reasonable peace proposal. Lincoln would have liked to counteract the rumor by publishing excerpts of his correspondence with Greeley, but to this Greeley would not agree unless his own defeatist outburst was published as well. Lincoln thought it best to forbear and endure the rumor.
With the Republican Party splintered by the defection of the Radicals and Lincoln denounced as a despot by Republican congressmen while the editor of the nation’s most-read newspaper tried to make the president look like a warmonger who would not accept peace even though the enemy was supposedly eager for it, the prospects of Lincoln’s reelection looked grim. Meanwhile the Democrats appealed to the country’s war weariness while at the same time running a famous and popular, once-idolized general for president.
Much more important than all of this, however, was the continuing stalemate on both major military fronts, in Georgia and Virginia. Hopes for quick and easy victory had been far too high that spring, and the casualty lists from Virginia had been far too long ever since the campaign started. Now with both of the Union’s major fighting forces seemingly stalled short of their objectives, national morale sank to perhaps its lowest ebb of the war. Trained military men who understood strategy might recognize that Grant and Sherman had their opponents pinned down and that final victory was, as Lee himself realized, only a matter of time, but the public back home, knowing little of strategy and only what newspapers like Greeley’s told them about the war, could see only futility amid ongoing slaughter.
The Confederate military situation was desperate, with no hope of survival unless the Union tired of the fight and gave up, but by the dog days of August, it was looking more and more as if that was exactly what the northern electorate would do. McClellan might claim that he would continue the war until the Union was restored, but nearly everyone else in the country, both North and South, seemed to understand that a vote for McClellan was a vote for peace with neither Union nor emancipation and that such would follow his accession to office, almost regardless of whether McClellan wished it or not.
By August Lincoln himself, one of the most astute politicians of his day, believed the prospects of his own reelection were very dim. On the twenty-third of the month, Lincoln wrote, “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.” He folded the sheet of paper and placed it in an envelope, then sealed it. Later that day, he produced the envelope at a cabinet meeting and asked each member of the cabinet to sign across the flap of the envelope without knowing what was inside. Apparently Lincoln hoped that after losing the election, he might, by displaying the statement to McClellan with proof that it was dated from before the election, gain the cooperation of the president-elect in securing the political support necessary for an all-out effort to win the war before inauguration day. Yet if the nation had voted for McClellan and thus voted to give up the war as lost, further efforts to win it would have been desperate indeed.
Then on September 2 a telegram arrived from Sherman: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”