By late August, Sherman had realized that he simply could not stretch his lines far enough to the southwest to cut Hood’s railroads. Nor would a cavalry raid suffice since horse soldiers on a raid in enemy territory could rarely afford to stop in one place long enough to make a thorough job of destroying the tracks. Nothing would suffice but getting a major force of infantry onto the tracks, and, since the trench lines could not stretch that far, the force that struck the railroad would have to cut loose from the rest of his armies, as well as its own supply lines, in order to make the raid.
It was one of Sherman’s greatest strengths as a general that when the situation in front of him required bold action, he took it. So he drew up a plan to leave only a single corps, Major General Henry W. Slocum’s Twentieth, astride the tracks north of Atlanta, maintaining the Union hold on the Western & Atlantic. Sherman would lead the remaining two corps of the Army of the Cumberland, plus all of the smaller Army of the Tennessee and Army of the Ohio, in a broad turning maneuver, casting loose of supply lines and all connection with Slocum to pass around the west side of Atlanta and reach the vital railroads directly south of the city.
The plan worked exactly as Sherman had hoped, and all three of his armies made firm lodgements on and across the railroads before the Confederates could react in force. Belatedly Hood discovered Sherman’s purpose and moved to counter him, dispatching Hardee with two of his three corps south to the railroad town of Jonesboro, twenty miles south of Atlanta, where the Army of the Tennessee had made its lodgement on the Macon & Western, the easterly of Atlanta’s two remaining rail lines. On August 31 Howard’s troops repulsed the Rebel assault more easily than they had at the battles of Atlanta and Ezra Church the month before. The next day, September 1, the Federals went over to the attack and routed Hardee’s large detachment. That left Hood with little choice but to retreat and give up Atlanta.
Sherman occupied the city the next day without making much effort to catch and capture Hood’s retreating army, but a well-developed killer instinct was not among the red-bearded Ohioan’s many strengths as a general. He was content, for now, with Atlanta and for good reason. Sherman’s capture of the city was exactly the sort of major, tangible progress that the northern voters needed in order to be assured that the war was not, as the Democrats claimed, a failure. It is possible that Lincoln would have won the election that November, even if Sherman had not taken Atlanta first. It is also possible that even if Lincoln had lost the election the Union might have won the war anyway, either before or after McClellan’s inauguration. Yet the best, almost the only remaining Confederate hope of independence lay in Lincoln’s defeat and McClellan’s election to the presidency, and after Sherman took Atlanta, Lincoln’s reelection was all but assured.
In the wake of Sherman’s victory, other Union victories seemed to cluster during the late summer months. Some had preceded the capture of Atlanta but had gone relatively unnoticed amid the prevailing northern gloom at the apparent continued futility of Union efforts in front of Richmond and Atlanta.
On June 19 the day of reckoning had finally come for the Confederate navy’s notorious CSS Alabama. The sleek commerce raider had been built in Britain under a false name, taken to sea, armed, and commissioned into the Confederate navy on August 24, 1862. Her twenty-four officers hailed from the Confederate States, but her 120-man crew was a motley collection from the seafaring nations of the world, most being British. Over the next twenty-two months the Alabama had roved the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, hunted by a total of twenty-five Union warships. She had captured sixty-six U.S. merchant vessels worth millions of dollars, burning most of them. She had also sunk a smaller Union gunboat in battle.
Alabama was in harbor at Cherbourg, France, where her captain, Raphael Semmes, had tried and failed to get the French authorities to ignore their nation’s neutrality and allow him the use of their dockyards to overhaul his vessel, when on June 14, 1864, the USS Kearsarge arrived and stood off the harbor entrance, obviously awaiting the Alabama. Five days later Semmes took his vessel to sea, and the two fairly evenly matched men-of-war fought the most spectacular ship-to-ship battle of the conflict, watched by thousands on the French shore. In a little more than an hour, the Kearsarge sent the Alabama to the bottom, ridding the seas of the greatest nuisance and threat to Union trade.
A little less than seven weeks later the U.S. Navy had scored another success, this time in American waters. On August 5 the old sea dog Farragut, in his wooden flagship Hartford, had boldly led his squadron of ironclads and wooden ships into Mobile Bay past two powerful Confederate forts. One of his most powerful ironclads, the monitor USS Tecumseh, struck a mine (then called a torpedo) and went down, but the rest of Farragut’s ships got through. Inside the harbor they met the CSS Tennessee, the most powerful ironclad the Confederacy ever built, and pounded it until it surrendered. With that, the Confederacy’s only remaining major Gulf Coast port was closed beyond hope of further use by blockade-runners. Union presence in the bay posed a constant threat of further offensive action against the city of Mobile itself.
Additional Union successes followed close in the wake of Sherman’s capture of Atlanta. After Early’s raid on Washington, the Confederate had withdrawn into the lower (northerly) Shenandoah Valley and there had remained as a continuing nuisance to Union operations in Virginia, with an ongoing threat to make another lunge toward Washington or Baltimore. Dissatisfied with the apparent inability of the Union generals in that area to see Early off for good and all, Grant assigned Sheridan to take two divisions of his cavalry and take command of all of the Union forces operating against Early and unite them into a hard-hitting Army of the Shenandoah that would neutralize both Early and the valley whose name it bore. Sheridan’s new army would include the Federals previously operating in West Virginia under Major General George Crook as well as the Sixth Corps and the Nineteenth Corps, the latter recently transferred to Virginia from the Department of the Gulf, where it had soldiered grimly through Banks’s dismal Red River Campaign.
Sheridan took over his new army in early August and took several weeks preparing his force and feeling for Confederate weak points. Though badly outnumbered, Early seemed to believe he had little to fear from Sheridan. He found out otherwise when on September 19 the new Union commander attacked the Confederates near Winchester. In the war’s third battle to take its name from that town, the opposing forces slugged it out in a daylong fight. Then as the Rebels began to fall back under heavy Union attacks, the Union cavalry came thundering down on the Confederate flank, turning the retreat into a rout. Early’s army survived though badly battered and suffering the loss of experienced officers such as Major General Robert E. Rodes, one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most aggressive division commanders, who was killed in the fighting.
Early fell back twenty miles to the vicinity of Strasburg, where he took up a strong position with his right flank anchored on the North Fork of the Shenandoah and his left on Fisher’s Hill. Sheridan followed aggressively and again engaged the Confederates on September 21. After heavy skirmishing that day and the next morning, Sheridan, at Crook’s suggestion, launched a flank attack that crumbled the Confederate line. Defeated again—and more soundly than before—Early retreated all the way up the valley, another eighty miles to the vicinity of Waynesboro. This left virtually the whole length of the Shenandoah Valley open for Sheridan to begin to implement the second part of the instructions Grant had given him when assigning him there.
For three years the Shenandoah Valley had been the granary of Virginia, and its thriving farms had provided food for Confederate armies passing through it on their way to gaining positions of leverage over the Union forces operating east of the Blue Ridge. In the spring of 1862 it had been Jackson’s small army throwing a scare into Washington by its sudden move down the valley. That fall Lee had planned to draw supplies through the valley to support his invasion of Maryland. In the summer of 1863, the valley once again provided food for Lee’s army as it marched through on its way to invade Pennsylvania. A year later, Early had made use of the valley in the same way for the raid that took him to the outskirts of Washington and forced the diversion of the Sixth Corps from Grant’s operations around Petersburg. In each case the agricultural abundance of the Shenandoah Valley had enabled Confederate commanders to operate without the constraints of logistics—the laborious task of supplying an army in the field—that would otherwise have slowed their movements and limited their reach. Thus, in the strange ways of war, it was the idyllic farms and rich harvests of the Shenandoah Valley that had made possible things like the appearance of Early’s army on the doorstep of Washington and the burning of Chambersburg.
Now Grant was determined to put a stop to that, at least until the next year’s harvest came in. “Eat out Virginia clean and clear,” he had ordered Sheridan, “so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their own provender.” With Early having abandoned the lower hundred miles of the valley, Sheridan was now free to carry out that order, and he did his best. He later reported that during the first two weeks of October his troops slaughtered thousands of cattle, sheep, and hogs and burned “2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements” as well as “over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat.”
It sounded like a great deal, and if one happened to own one of the targeted barns or mills, it was a severe loss. Yet it was far short of a total devastation of such an abundant farming district. For the most part, the Yankees did not burn houses. Furthermore, letters and diaries reveal that for most inhabitants of the valley, life went on in its accustomed way, with the usual round of dances and other celebrations, and farmers were taking wagon loads of grain to market only weeks after the passage of Sheridan’s army. No evidence exists that anyone starved, either in the Shenandoah Valley or anywhere else in the South, outside of prison pens such as Andersonville. Like other instances in which Union forces struck at Confederate logistics during the final year of the war, “the Burning” of the Shenandoah, as it came to be called, grew larger in legend than in life, as passing generations exaggerated its destructiveness with each retelling.
Throughout Sheridan’s operations in the valley, as in other Union campaigns in the South, valley residents, though often frightened at the approach of the enemy, were in fact quite safe in their persons, as the killing or injuring of noncombatants was all but unheard of. Rapes were as rare as elsewhere in the presence of the armies of either side, a rate that compared favorably to that of most major cities. Indeed, as nineteenth-century mores dictated, women enjoyed immunity even when they demonstrated hostility to Union troops. Such hostility was most often verbal, but even when a woman swung a broom at a foraging bluecoat, the result was usually that the assailed soldier ducked and his buddies laughed.
When civilians became combatants, however, the situation was quite different. Men who implicitly claimed immunity as civilians when large numbers of Union troops were present but then bushwhacked isolated soldiers forfeited not only that immunity but also any right to be treated as prisoners of war. If captured, they could, under the laws of war, face summary execution. Their actions also exposed the surrounding neighborhood to greater destruction of property. When on October 3 Sheridan learned that his engineer officer, Lieutenant John R. Meigs, had been murdered by bushwhackers near the village of Dayton, he ordered the burning of every house within a five-mile radius but relented and canceled the order after his troopers had torched only about thirty houses and barns. Confederate guerrilla leader John S. Mosby and his troopers continued to be a constant thorn in Sheridan’s side.
While Sheridan’s men strove to destroy the valley’s usefulness for future Confederate offensive operations, Early planned a comeback. He marched his army, somewhat recovered from its previous drubbings, down the valley until he neared the town of Strasburg. Sheridan’s army was encamped just north of Strasburg, along Cedar Creek, a tributary of the North Branch of the Shenandoah River. In a well-conceived plan for a surprise flanking attack, Early marched his troops through the night of October 18 and struck the Union left out of the dawn mists the next morning. Crook’s contingent folded quickly under the surprising onslaught, and the Nineteenth Corps, in the center, gave way after a somewhat harder fight. On the Union right, however, the Sixth Corps was able to rally and hold its ground. Early was delighted nonetheless as the fugitives of the two routed Union corps streamed down the valley toward Winchester in retreat. He was confident that the Sixth Corps would soon follow its comrades to the rear without his having to hurl his thinned gray ranks against it in potentially costly attacks.
Sheridan had not been present for the early morning fight. He had traveled to Washington to confer about future operations and had been on his way back to the army. He was in Winchester that morning, twelve miles from the battlefield, when the sound of the guns reached him. Mounting his large black stallion Rienzi, Sheridan galloped southward along the Valley Pike toward Cedar Creek. He began to meet stragglers heading the other way. The men recognized the small general on the big horse and cheered wildly, but Sheridan roared for them to turn around and march back toward the enemy. And they did.
Arriving on the battlefield around 10:30 a.m., Sheridan found the Sixth Corps steady and Early apparently not inclined to press his advantage. Sheridan spent the middle hours of the day getting his army back in order and then at 4:00 p.m. launched an assault that crushed Early’s army, recapturing the eighteen guns the Union had lost in the first phase of the battle and taking twenty-five more that had belonged to the Confederates that morning. For the Confederate infantry, what had started as a battle ended as a footrace to escape the pursuing Federals. Early retreated far up the valley with what was left of his command, but it would never again pose a threat to Sheridan or anyone else, and the Confederacy would never again make use of the Shenandoah Valley.
The Union victories in the English Channel and at Mobile Bay, Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, Cedar Creek, and, above all, the capture of Atlanta cut the ground out from under the Democrats’ claim that the war was a failure and could never be won. On the contrary, Union forces were striding toward victory with seven-league boots, and the Confederacy’s days were clearly numbered. This had been true for some time, but the fall of Atlanta focused the public’s attention and brought the progress of the war into perspective so that its trend became unmistakable even for civilians who understood little of military affairs.
The month of September also brought political developments that made McClellan’s chances for the presidency appear noticeably slimmer. John C. Freémont and others among his new Radical Democracy Party had been appalled by the Democratic Party platform with its promise to save slavery and tepid hopes of saving the Union. Freémont did not like Lincoln but knew he would like McClellan even less. In mid-September he arranged a deal with Lincoln. Lincoln dropped from his cabinet Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, whom the Radicals despised, and Freémont withdrew from the presidential race. With Freémont gone, Lincoln’s chances of reelection rose still higher.
The presidential election of 1864 was the first to occur while the nation was in the midst of a major war, and the very fact that it came off as scheduled and that the government allowed the people what amounted to a referendum on the conflict that had been raging for the past three and a half years was a major triumph for self-government and a testament to the resilience of what Lincoln had called “the Great Republic.” The fact that the election was taking place during wartime also meant that for the first time in the nation’s history a significant percentage of the eligible voters were in the army. Soldiers in the field had never before voted in U.S. elections, but for 1864 most of the northern states passed laws enabling them to do so. In Indiana the Democrats controlled the legislature and stubbornly refused to allow soldiers to vote anywhere except in their home counties. Lincoln hinted in a letter to Sherman, whose armies included most of the state’s regiments, that it would be helpful if he could furlough as many Indiana soldiers as possible without jeopardizing military operations. In the lull that followed the fall of Atlanta, Sherman, who fully sympathized with Lincoln’s desire not to see the Hoosier soldiers disenfranchised, furloughed them en masse.
Sherman also furloughed two of his best corps commanders. Both Frank Blair and John A. Logan had been politicians before the war, though neither was a political general in the purest sense of the term. Blair was the brother of fired Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and Logan had been a Democrat before the war. Now both returned to their home states, Blair to Missouri and Logan to Illinois, to campaign for Lincoln.
When election day came, Lincoln garnered just over 2.2 million votes to McClellan’s 1.8 million. Lincoln’s 55 percent share of the popular vote borders on being a landslide. The wide distribution of his support throughout the loyal states turned that margin into a major electoral landslide, with Lincoln receiving 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21. The Democratic candidate captured his electoral votes in his home state of New Jersey, plus the border slave states of Delaware and Kentucky. Otherwise, Lincoln’s statewide margins of victory were under five percentage points only in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.
Notably, while 55 percent of the voters nationwide chose Lincoln, 78 percent of Union soldiers did so. As it turned out, their votes did not decide the election, as Lincoln would have won even without them. Yet it was significant in another way. Cynical historians write as if all wars are decided and directed by politicians who carefully keep themselves out of harm’s way while herding the unwilling masses to their deaths as cannon fodder, and there were those on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War who looked at the Union and Confederate draft laws and complained that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Yet the overwhelming majority of Union soldiers, men who by then knew firsthand what war meant and who would bear the burdens and losses of its continuance, announced with their votes that this was their war and their fight and that they believed the causes of Union and emancipation were worth pressing on to final victory, cost what it might.
A victory for McClellan in the election of 1864 might or might not have led to Confederate independence, but such an event was the Confederacy’s last realistic hope of survival beyond the meager few months that its dwindling armies might be able to keep some fragment of its claimed territory out from under the boots of blue-clad soldiers. Lincoln’s victory meant that Confederate defeat, with the attendant restoration of the Union and abolition of slavery (a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the entire United States had already passed the Senate and was pending consideration in the House), was as certain as nearly any future event could ever be in the course of human affairs. The Union was now committed to prosecuting the war more vigorously than ever, if need be until at least 1867 if not 1869, and the Confederacy could not hope to survive even to the earlier of those dates.
All that remained now was to convince the people of the Confederacy that the end was at hand for their slaveholders’ republic and that they ought to give up and accept it. The question was how many more men would have to die or be maimed before that end arrived.
In Virginia, Grant’s and Lee’s armies continued to face each other from their trenches stretching from the north side of Richmond, down the east side of Richmond and Petersburg, and around to the south of Petersburg. Fighting flared every few weeks as Grant either reached farther west across the south side of Petersburg or jabbed at Lee’s lines either north or south of the James River to force the Confederate general to keep every sector of his line manned, thus hamstringing Lee’s efforts to match Grant’s repeated grabs for Petersburg’s one remaining southern rail connection, the Southside Railroad, southwest of town. Elements of the battle-weary Army of the Potomac turned in several strikingly poor performances in these operations, but with each passing month Grant weakened and stretched Lee’s army and fastened his own grip more tightly than ever on it and on Richmond and Petersburg.
In Georgia, once the euphoria of capturing Atlanta had worn off, Sherman experienced several weeks of frustration as he tried to hold what he had gained and figure out what to do next. His biggest problem was one that had plagued him all the way down from Chattanooga, and that was his reliance, for every hardtack cracker and piece of salt pork his men ate, on a single set of rails leading all the way back to Louisville. The problem was worse now not only because the distance was longer than it had been at any time during the campaign but also because, at least as it appeared initially, Sherman would have more mouths to feed. As was typical when a southern city fell under Union control, the Confederates left behind a population of thousands of noncombatants, including many families of Confederate soldiers, who were thus destitute. Rather than see them starve, Union officers in places such as Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans had provided them regular rations. Thus, the northern taxpayer got to pay not only for the feeding and maintenance of the nation’s army but also for the feeding of a large number of the families of those bearing arms against the nation.
Sherman was determined that it would be different in Atlanta, and so on September 7 he ordered the evacuation of the remaining civilian population of the city either south into Rebel lines if they chose or else north to someplace where, if the government did have to feed them, it could at least do so more conveniently and without impinging the flow of supplies to its own armies. He offered the assistance of his troops and their supply wagons to transport the evacuees and their possessions. The mayor and city council protested the order, and Hood, on being informed by flag of truce to be ready to receive the refugees, wrote a letter condemning the action. Sherman was unmoved. To the mayor he wrote,
We must have peace, not only at Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies which are arrayed against the laws and Constitution that all must respect and obey. To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses, provided with the arms and instruments which enable us to accomplish our purpose.1
That would mean that Atlanta would have to serve as a supply depot rather than a home for families, and the families might as well leave now, when they had a good opportunity of doing so. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” Sherman continued:
War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride. . . . I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success. But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.
The order stood, and Union troops helped the remaining citizens of Atlanta in moving their belongings out of town, either to the railroad for the trip north or to Confederate lines, whence they could continue their journey south.
In the weeks that followed, Hood chose not to attempt to defend the two-thirds of the state of Georgia Sherman had not yet taken but instead moved his army into northeastern Alabama. From there he advanced into North Georgia and attempted to cut Sherman’s railroad supply line somewhere north of Atlanta. Sherman left enough troops to hold the city and with the rest of his force marched north to counter Hood and protect the railroad.
For the next several weeks, Union and Confederate forces maneuvered around northwestern Georgia without coming to grips while both commanders grew increasingly frustrated. Hood’s men could tear up railroad tracks, but Sherman’s repair teams had them running again within hours. What Hood could not do was destroy a facility, such as a tunnel, that would not be easily repairable. Nor could he seize and hold a position astride the railroad. Always the approach of Sherman’s larger army compelled him to relinquish his grip on the railroad and beat a hasty retreat. Sherman, for his part, was confident that he could crush Hood’s army in battle, but Hood would not hold still long enough, and Sherman could not catch him. Meanwhile the armies were marching up and down the same swath of country over which they had campaigned earlier that year.
Despite his success in keeping Sherman occupied in North Georgia and preventing any further Union offensive movements deeper into the Confederacy, Hood was the first to lose patience and tire of the game. He decided to march his army back into Alabama, then turn north and cross the Tennessee River. From there he planned to invade Middle Tennessee and possibly go all the way to the Ohio River or beyond. He began the movement in late October.
While Hood’s army marched west, Sherman was contemplating movement in a different direction. He had for several weeks been corresponding with Grant about what his own next step should be. Sherman’s proposal was to detach Thomas with two corps, plus the various Union garrisons in Tennessee, to deal with Hood while he, Sherman, took the remainder of his force, about sixty thousand men, on a march southeastward across nearly three hundred miles of Georgia to reach the sea at Savannah. Along the way, Sherman’s troops would destroy factories, railroads, and public buildings and requisition food and livestock. The effect would be not only to destroy the South’s logistical infrastructure but also to demoralize the white southerners in its path—as well as those who heard of it, including soldiers in the Confederate army far away in Virginia. “I can make this march,” Sherman wrote to Grant, “and make Georgia howl.”
In later generations, popular legend would have it that Sherman invented destructive warfare specially for use on this operation, and the claim would be taken up by some historians who ought to have known better. In fact, the practice of attacking an enemy’s economy and infrastructure and thereby also his morale was as old as warfare, nor had it gone into disuse during the supposedly limited wars of the eighteenth century, much less those of the Napoleonic era. Such wars were certainly not limited in that way. All that Sherman proposed to do in Georgia was well within the existing laws and customs of war and not all that different, at least qualitatively, from what Lee and his army had practiced in Pennsylvania the preceding summer.
What was new and bold about Sherman’s proposed operation was that it involved leaving an intact enemy army to his rear while marching his own army deep into the enemy’s territory without any lines of supply or communication at all and on a scale of distance that would have been equivalent to Lee taking his army not merely to Gettysburg but all the way to New York City. True, Sherman had the advantage in numbers over Hood, but in an operation of this type, the more men he had, the sooner he would run out of supplies if enemy action should force him to halt. His army could continue living off the land only as long as it kept moving. To the trained military minds of the day, the plan seemed like asking to have his army trapped and captured. Grant was hesitant, but eventually his confidence in his old friend and faithful lieutenant prevailed, and he gave Sherman permission to go ahead.
On November 9 Sherman gave his army orders for the march, stating famously, “The army will forage liberally on the country during the march.” He went on to state, however, that such gathering of foodstuffs was to be carried out by regularly organized foraging parties under the command of officers and that they were not to enter private dwellings or abuse civilians. The decision to burn a house, mill, or cotton gin was not to be made below the level of corps commander, and generally such destruction was to be reserved for neighborhoods in which overt acts of hostility—such as the burning of bridges—took place. Sherman told his men they could seize livestock as needed but admonished them, as in all their takings, to target the wealthy, slaveholding class and spare the poor and middling farmers.
The march began on November 15. Sherman had his men cut the telegraph wires and burn the railroads behind them as well as any installations of military usefulness left in Atlanta. Sherman’s troops marched in two separate columns. As Sherman rode at the head of one of them that first day, he paused at the top of a rise and looked back at the smoke rising from Atlanta. He noticed that the troops marching past him were singing with one of the regimental bands the song “John Brown’s Body.” “John Brown’s body lies amouldering in the grave,” the lyrics repeated three times and then added, “His soul goes marching on.” The tune was the same as that of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the chorus had the same words. Sherman later reflected that he had never heard the words sung “with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place.”
For the most part, the troops obeyed Sherman’s orders. They foraged so efficiently that the army never had to halt to gather supplies but continued its march at an average of about ten miles per day. Food was abundant, and the men ate well, afterward fondly remembering the hams and sweet potatoes of Georgia. Railroads, depots, factories, and the like went up in flames, as did the plantation house and outbuildings of Confederate cabinet member Howell Cobb but relatively few other private homes. A few soldiers fell out of ranks and foraged individually without orders. The troops referred to such men as bummers but later appropriated that name for all who had marched with Sherman. As in Sheridan’s just concluded “Burning” in the Shenandoah Valley and all other Union operations in the South, peaceful civilians were safe from personal abuse or injury.
The march met little armed opposition. Hood had left his cavalry, under the command of Major General Joseph Wheeler, to harass Sherman, but Sherman’s own cavalry was more than sufficient to keep Wheeler’s horsemen well off the marching columns. Since the Confederate cavalrymen were also living off the land, the inhabitants of Georgia soon came to regard them as at least as bad a scourge as the passing Union army. Near Griswoldville, a division of Georgia militia composed mostly of middle-aged men and teenaged boys attacked a brigade of Sherman’s troops. Despite the militia’s almost four-to-one advantage in numbers, experience proved to be the decisive factor, as the battle-hardened Union veterans easily repulsed the attack.
Near the town of Millen, one of Sherman’s columns came upon one of the infamous Confederate prison pens where thousands of Union prisoners of war had been cooped up inside a stockade, open to the weather, with neither tents nor adequate food. The Confederates had evacuated the place, but the mass graves as well as the emaciated corpses the Rebels had not had time to bury told the story all too plainly. Angry Union soldiers burned the town of Millen in retaliation.
Slaves welcomed the advancing Federals with demonstrations of joy that even the crusty Sherman found touching. Sherman was a racist in the abstract and sometimes said or wrote ugly things on the subject, but when he encountered blacks face-to-face, their humanity touched his, and always he treated them kindly. In conversations all along the march, he urged blacks to remain at their homes and await the imminent end of the war to give them freedom. In this daring raid deep into enemy territory, his army did not have the wherewithal to feed, shelter, or transport them. They would be safer, he urged, if they stayed put for now. But it was no use. Former slaves flocked after the army in long columns that trailed behind each of Sherman’s corps, oblivious to prospects of food or shelter in their longing for freedom at the earliest possible moment.
Their presence led on at least one occasion to the sort of bad result that might be expected when masses of civilians followed an army deep in enemy territory. The march was nearing the coast when the Fourteenth Corps had to deploy its portable pontoon bridge to cross a broad stream known as Ebenezer Creek. Rumor had it that Confederate cavalry was shadowing the corps. If the corps commander left his pontoon bridge in place after the last of his soldiers got over, he ran the risk that the Confederates would capture or destroy it. That would trap his corps, which would then be unable to cross any of the remaining creeks and rivers that lay between it and the coast. No one could say how far the straggling column of fleeing slaves stretched out behind his last soldier. So he gave the order to take up the bridge. Blacks who had by then reached the bank panicked at the prospect of being returned to their contented way of life on the plantations and threw themselves into the creek, where a number of them drowned.
On December 10 Sherman’s army reached the outskirts of Savannah, where Confederate Major General William J. Hardee held the fortifications with ten thousand men. On the thirteenth Sherman had one of his divisions storm outlying Fort McAllister. The assault lasted fifteen minutes, and when it was over the fort was in Union hands and the Ogeechee River open to the supply vessels and warships of the U.S. Navy, which had been cruising offshore awaiting Sherman’s arrival. With a regular supply line and his men once more eating regular army rations of hardtack, salt pork, and beans, Sherman could take his time and besiege Hardee. Not relishing the prospect, the Confederate commander on December 20 withdrew into South Carolina before Sherman could close off that escape route. Sherman sent a telegram to Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
While Sherman had marched through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, Hood had proceeded with his preparations for a campaign into Tennessee. Logistical problems and poor planning delayed Hood’s crossing of the Tennessee River until the third week of November, by which time Sherman had already left Atlanta behind and was deep in Georgia. Hood’s army marched north from Florence, Alabama, on November 21. By that time Thomas, with his headquarters in Nashville, was well apprised of Hood’s whereabouts and apparent intentions and had dispatched Schofield, whom Sherman had also detached for the defense of Tennessee, with two corps and orders to delay Hood’s march. Schofield awaited Hood on the north bank of the Duck River near Columbia, Tennessee, squarely athwart the road to Nashville and about fifty miles south of the city.
Hood arrived on the south bank of the Duck at Columbia, and his troops skirmished with Schofield’s. Well screened by Confederate cavalry commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest, Hood on November 29 moved two of his three corps around Schofield’s left and across the Duck east of Columbia. Before the Federal commander realized what was happening, most of Hood’s army was bearing down on his line of communication and retreat near the village of Spring Hill, eleven miles north of Columbia. Around 3:00 that afternoon Schofield started his army marching north, out of Hood’s trap, but the last of his units was not able to file out of the entrenchments along the Duck River until 10:00 that night.
Meanwhile, Hood’s lead elements reached Spring Hill late that afternoon and skirmished with light Union forces guarding Schofield’s line of communication. With their overwhelming advantage in numbers, the Confederates could easily have driven the Federals out of Spring Hill, capturing the town and thus cutting off Schofield’s retreat. They could even more easily have moved directly against the Columbia Pike just south of Spring Hill, seizing the road and accomplishing the same purpose. Instead they did neither. The officer corps of the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee had never been characterized by mutual trust and cooperation but rather by backbiting, blame shifting, and a concern for protecting one’s own record regardless of the consequences for the army or its mission. The result outside Spring Hill during the late afternoon and evening of November 29, 1864, was confusion and cross-purposes. Some officers thought their objective was the Columbia Pike. Others thought it was the town of Spring Hill itself and insisted that the movement against the pike be diverted in that direction. In the end, after indecisive skirmishing, they halted as darkness fell, just short of both objectives.
Hood arrived in person shortly thereafter, having ridden strapped to the saddle (because of his missing leg) since shortly after 3:00 that morning. Exhausted, he ordered a staff officer to find the two corps commanders and tell them to cooperate. Then, at about 9:00, he went to bed. About 2:00 in the morning Hood was awakened with a report that Union troops could just be seen somewhere out in front moving northward through the darkness, but Hood ignored the report and went back to sleep. North of Spring Hill Confederate cavalry patrols encountered Union supply wagons moving north along the road, but escorting Union infantry drove the Rebel horsemen back.
The next morning, November 30, Hood awoke to learn that during the night Schofield’s entire army had marched up the Columbia Pike and through Spring Hill, passing along the front of the Confederate army within as little as a hundred yards of its outposts. Hood was, in the words of one of his officers, “as wrathy as a rattlesnake,” and in a meeting with his generals that morning denounced them and their men as cowards. He ordered an immediate pursuit, and his army marched north, its generals enraged and humiliated.
They found Schofield at bay with his back to the Harpeth River at the town of Franklin, thirteen miles north of Spring Hill and about twenty miles south of Nashville. The Union commander had found the Harpeth River bridges badly damaged and needed time to repair them before he could continue his retreat. During previous operations in the area, Union troops had already built a substantial line of breastworks around the south side of Franklin, so Schofield put his troops into them, and into additional entrenchments they hastily dug, with orders to hold until the engineers could repair the bridges and the supply wagons were rolling toward Nashville again. Throughout the day the engineers made steady progress, and some of the wagons crossed via a nearby ford. With the bridges finished more wagons rolled north. Schofield was optimistic that by 6:00 p.m. he could pull all his troops back out of the entrenchments and evacuate the town, continuing his withdrawal to Nashville.
Hood and his unhappy army began arriving in front of the Union breastworks around 1:00 that afternoon and took up a position on Winstead Hill, about two miles south of town. Despite the absence of nearly a third of his infantry and most of his artillery, which had not caught up after diverting Schofield’s attention on the south bank of the Duck during Hood’s turning maneuver the previous day, Hood ordered an immediate all-out assault on the entrenched Federals.
Several of his generals protested the obvious folly of this course of action, and Forrest in particular claimed that with his cavalry plus a single division of infantry he could easily turn this position as they had turned Schofield’s position at Columbia. Hood, still seething from the affair at Spring Hill, would hear none of it and grimly insisted on the massed frontal assault. The sun would set around 4:30 that afternoon, and its rays were already steeply slanting as the twenty thousand Confederates advanced across the open plain two miles wide with colors flying while their bands played “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag.”
The assault should have had no chance of success at all. However, that afternoon the last Union division commander to bring his troops into the position, Brigadier General George D. Wagner, had mistaken his orders, possibly because, as some who were present later asserted, he was drunk, and had ordered his three brigades to take up a position straddling the Columbia Pike in the open field about half a mile in advance of the breastworks. Veteran brigade commander Colonel Emerson Opdyke had chosen simply to ignore his obviously addled division commander and had taken his brigade inside the breastworks, assuming a reserve position behind the point where the Columbia Pike entered the fortifications. Wagner’s other two brigade commanders had obeyed orders and deployed in the hopeless position he had assigned.
Hood’s troops deployed from column to line and swept forward, engulfing Wagner’s two ill-fated brigades. Hundreds of Wagner’s men surrendered, and the rest fled toward the main Union position, half a mile to the rear. The Confederates raced after them amid shouts of “Go into the works with them!” As the running mass of humanity neared the Union breastworks, the defenders held their fire rather than loose their volleys into the faces of their fleeing comrades. Yet the Confederates were only a few steps behind—in some cases almost among—Wagner’s panting fugitives, and they surged over the works and swept the defenders back in a sector immediately on either side of the point where the Columbia Pike entered the lines. Opdyke led his brigade forward to fill the breach and drive back the Rebel penetration. Other Union troops rallied to join him. Hand-to-hand fighting raged around the buildings of the Carter plantation just inside Union lines. The Federals drove the Confederates back to the line of the breastworks, and then the two sides slugged it out across the parapet much as Lee and Grant’s troops had done at the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania though for a much shorter duration.
The fighting ceased after nightfall, and the Confederates who had been pinned down in front of the Union breastworks withdrew to a safer distance. In other sectors of the line the attack had made no headway at all, with the attackers being mowed down by the intense fire coming from the breastworks, where some of the defenders had repeating rifles. During the night, Schofield completed his withdrawal to the north bank of the Harpeth and continued his march to Nashville, leaving the town and battlefield to the Confederates, who took possession the next morning.
Hood’s soldiers and Franklin civilians alike then busied themselves tending the 3,800 wounded and burying the more than 1,700 dead Rebels lying on the battlefield. Members of the Carter family found Captain Theodric “Tod” Carter of the Twentieth Tennessee Regiment lying badly wounded in front of the breastworks and brought him to the house that had been his boyhood home and the center of the previous evening’s fiercest fighting. He died the next day, across the hall from the room in which he had been born, twenty-four years before.
In all, including missing and captured, Hood had lost more than 6,200 men. Among them were six generals killed or mortally wounded, seven more generals who would survive their wounds, and an additional general who was now on his way to Nashville as a prisoner of war—a loss of fourteen generals. Among the dead generals was Patrick R. Cleburne, widely believed, then and since, to be the best division commander in the Confederacy. In addition, Hood’s army lost fifty-five regimental commanders. The Army of Tennessee was a wreck. Schofield’s casualties, which had come mostly in Wagner’s division and around the Carter house and outbuildings, numbered little more than one-third that many.
Since Schofield had left the battlefield in his hands, Hood claimed Franklin as a victory, though if Hood could have restrained his aggressiveness and perhaps his rage, Schofield would have been more than happy to have left Franklin and its environs to him without any battle at all. With little else to do in the wake of his Pyrrhic victory, Hood pursued Schofield to Nashville and encamped his army south of the town as if he could hope to besiege it with the thirty thousand or so men he still had left in the Army of Tennessee. Inside the extensive defenses of what was by then the most heavily fortified city on the continent other than Washington, D.C., Thomas by this time had some fifty-five thousand men. While Hood waited like Dickens’s Mr. Micawber for something to turn up, Thomas spent the next two weeks getting his army ready to take the offensive.
As day stretched into day of the odd standoff at Nashville, back in Virginia Grant grew concerned. He could see clearly that Hood’s best move was not sitting in front of Nashville, where he could accomplish nothing but rather slipping past Thomas and setting off on a raid that might penetrate all the way to the Ohio River. Such a raid would be a desperate endeavor, but in the Confederacy’s current state, as Grant’s clear military insight perceived, no lesser effort made any sense for the Rebels. Though extremely unlikely to change the outcome of the war, such a raid could make a world of trouble for Grant, who feared that Hood might see as much and that any day Thomas might find his large army facing empty Confederate breastworks while Hood’s army marched north bent on mischief. Grant sent Thomas one prodding message after another, each more pointed than the last, but nothing could budge the general whose army nickname was “Old Slow Trot.”
On December 8 a heavy ice storm swept through Middle Tennessee, virtually paralyzing movement on roads or cross-country and ruling out an attack. Back in Virginia, Grant’s impatience continued to mount. For him, the ice storm was just one more item in Thomas’s long litany of reasons why he could not act promptly, and Grant had heard that song from Thomas before. On December 13 Grant decided he had waited long enough. John Logan, commander of the Fifteenth Corps in the Army of the Tennessee, happened to be on leave in Washington at the time, and Grant dispatched him to Nashville with orders to relieve Thomas and take command in Nashville unless Thomas had launched an attack by the time he arrived. Logan had no sooner started on his journey than Grant decided that nothing but his own presence would suffice and prepared to set out for Nashville himself.
In the end, neither man made the trip. Grant had not started and Logan had not gone far when word arrived that Thomas had finally launched his long-awaited attack against Hood. On Thomas’s orders, two divisions of the U.S. Colored Troops, whose enlisted ranks were composed entirely of former slaves, advanced before dawn on December 15 and opened the battle with a diversionary attack on the Confederate right. Thomas’s main attack struck the Confederate left and drove it back throughout the afternoon. The early end of a mid-December day gave Hood respite to regroup his army on higher ground about two miles to the rear of the position he had tried to hold that day. He anchored his new line on Shy’s Hill on the left and Overton Hill on the right. It was a more compact position than the previous one, which was a necessity for his by now badly depleted army.
Thomas renewed the assault the next day. His troops spent the morning hours moving up to confront Hood’s new position. Then the attack once again opened against the Confederate left, followed by an even stronger Union assault against the right on Shy’s Hill. After several hours of fighting, the Confederate lines crumbled on Shy’s Hill, and then Hood’s entire army collapsed. What had been a battle became a footrace, as individual Confederate soldiers sought to escape the pursuing Federals.
Once again early nightfall came to Hood’s rescue, along with the onset of a steady rain. The Army of Tennessee regrouped again, this time to begin its long, weary trek out of its namesake state. In the days that followed, Union forces did their best to harass the retreat, which was ably screened by Forrest’s cavalry and the ongoing spell of cold, rainy weather. The Battle of Nashville cost Thomas a total of about three thousand casualties and Hood twice that many. Three-quarters of the soldiers Hood lost at Nashville were missing or captured. Continuing his retreat through northern Alabama, Hood on Christmas Day crossed back to the south bank of the Tennessee River with roughly half of the thirty-six thousand men he had taken with him bound north little more than a month before. Three weeks later Hood formally asked to be relieved of command, and Davis promptly complied.
In the wake of Hood’s crushing defeat in Tennessee and Sherman’s capture of Savannah as the culmination of his March to the Sea, heavy blows rained down on the nearly prostrate Confederacy, and it hardly seemed to matter if one of them failed to land squarely. In that same month of December 1864, Union forces attempted to take Fort Fisher, a powerful Confederate bastion guarding the approaches to Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major southern port open to blockade-runners. Because the operation lay technically within Ben Butler’s department, Grant had to allow that dismal political general to direct it, and the predictable result was failure. On December 27, Butler’s troops reembarked on the powerful fleet of transports and warships that had brought them and returned to their bases.
Disgusted with Butler’s performance and convinced that the political situation had now progressed to the point that this particular ambitious politician in uniform was no longer needed, Grant sacked Butler and ordered a new expedition against Fort Fisher, to depart immediately, this time under the command of Major General Alfred H. Terry. Like Butler, the thirty-eight-year-old Terry had been a lawyer without military background before the war. Unlike Butler, he had not been a politician and had started the war not as a general but rather as colonel of a regiment he had recruited. Several battles and two promotions later, Terry was a competent commander. Once again Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter and the strength of the Navy’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron would be on hand to support the assault with four monitors, the ironclad steam frigate USS New Ironsides, three of the fifty-gun steam frigates that had been the pride of the fleet when the war began, and more than fifty other warships.
Terry landed his troops on January 13. Two days later, under cover of the heaviest naval bombardment ever fired in American waters, the assault went in. A naval landing party composed of two thousand sailors and marines staged a direct assault across the beach against the fort’s eastern, or sea, face, distracting the defenders’ attention, while the nine thousand army troops launched the main attack against the fort’s northern face. They fought their way into the fort and then fought their way through its multiple three-walled bays as the Confederates bitterly defended every inch of the fort. The battle lasted eight hours, and the two top-ranking Confederate officers were incapacitated by wounds before the fort was finally securely in Union hands.
With Fort Fisher lost, so too was the port of Wilmington as a haven for blockade-runners. That meant a final end to foreign manufactured war supplies for the Confederacy, including British Enfield rifles and Whitworth cannon. It even exacerbated the already dismal food supply situation for Lee’s army, a strange development in view of the fact that the Confederacy was still full of food, as Sherman had just demonstrated and was about to demonstrate again. So wrecked was the Confederacy’s transportation system that it was sometimes easier to feed Lee’s troops by importing foreign food through Wilmington rather than moving abundant domestic produce up from points farther south. With Wilmington closed, Lee’s scarecrow soldiers would have to take in their belts another notch.
Despite the steady drumbeat of military disasters, Davis would not even consider any negotiated peace agreement that did not begin with a clear acceptance of Confederate independence. Given Davis’s known stubbornness, that fact was not really as surprising as the very fact that the opportunity for a negotiated peace still existed with the Confederacy nearing complete collapse. Indeed, Lincoln had not initially thought the prospect was worth the effort. As early as his December 1863 address to Congress on Reconstruction, in which he had spelled out his Ten Percent Plan, Lincoln had opined that nothing was to be gained by talks with Davis since “the insurgent leader,” as Lincoln carefully styled him, had made clear on many occasions that he believed it his duty to accept nothing less than independence. Talks with Davis or with his emissaries would therefore be pointless, and the only hope lay in persuading the southern people to make peace without Davis and his administration.
Near the end of 1864 the intervention of two unusual men changed that. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley had noticed that a peace movement of sorts existed within the Confederacy. Weak, scattered, disorganized, and diverse in its motivations and proposals, the Confederate peace movement included such men as North Carolina newspaper editor William Holden and Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. Like the peace movement in the North, these men generally claimed, perhaps disingenuously, that the chief national war aim, in this case, independence, could be achieved through an immediate cease-fire followed by negotiations. As war weariness grew and the Confederacy visibly tottered toward its ruin, the presence of such a peace movement became an increasing threat to Jefferson Davis and his determination to fight to the bitter end and beyond.
Greeley saw in this an opportunity and on December 15 suggested to Francis Preston Blair Sr., former adviser to the late President Andrew Jackson, that he should go to Davis with a half-baked proposal for the Union and the Confederacy to stop fighting each other and jointly turn on the French in Mexico. After they had whipped the forces of Napoleon III, concluding a formal peace agreement between North and South would presumably follow easily. Blair took the matter to Davis on January 12. The concept was the brightest glimmer for independence that the Confederate president had seen in some time, so he readily gave Blair a letter to Lincoln offering to appoint commissioners to a conference for the purpose of “securing peace to the two countries.”
Blair brought the letter to Lincoln. The president dismissed the absurd notion of the Mexican gambit but, eager to try any realistic possibility of ending the bloodshed sooner, thought the idea of a peace conference sounded interesting. He gave Blair a letter, dated January 18, expressing his willingness to meet with whatever commissioners Davis might appoint “with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” Three days later Blair was in Richmond meeting with Davis. The Confederate president did not like Lincoln’s reference to “one common country” and seized on an off-hand suggestion of Blair’s about settling the war through a military conference between Grant and Lee. Maybe Grant could be persuaded in the name of soldierly camaraderie to give up essential Union war aims. Lincoln quickly extinguished even that forlorn hope by immediately nixing the idea of any such military conference.
That left Davis nothing but to appoint peace commissioners. He shrewdly chose Stephens to lead the mission since it would almost inevitably demonstrate the hollowness of the claims of the Confederate peace movement that peace could be had without reunion. Having the most visible leader of the peace movement heading the delegation would discredit the peace movement that much more. To accompany Stephens, Davis chose Confederate secretary of war (and former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) John A. Campbell and president pro tem of the Confederate senate, Robert M. T. Hunter. Davis, on January 28, 1865, gave them a written commission to meet with Lincoln “for the purpose of securing peace to the two countries.”
That wording nearly got them turned back when they tried to pass through Union lines under a flag of truce, but Grant intervened to let them through anyway. They met with Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward on February 3 on board the steamboat River Queen on the body of water called Hampton Roads at the mouth of the James River. The meeting opened with pleasantries about Lincoln’s and Stephens’s former associations in the old Whig Party, but when it turned to business the predictable impasse arose immediately as Lincoln explained that peace was possible only with reunion. Stephens brought up the Mexican business, but Lincoln dismissed it. Campbell asked what terms the southern states could expect in case of reunion at that time, and Lincoln replied that he would be as lenient as possible and would urge Congress to provide compensation to the former slaveholders for their lost human chattels.
Asked about such things as the continued existence of West Virginia or the ongoing validity of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln replied that the courts would decide such things. This he could do since he had recently replaced the late Chief Justice Roger B. Taney with the old-line abolitionist Salmon P. Chase. He advised Stephens to go home and take Georgia out of the Union and then have it ratify the recently introduced Thirteenth Amendment, which would end slavery throughout the United States. The Confederate vice president would do nothing of the sort. Carp as Stephens might against the Davis administration, he lacked nerve for so bold a step. After four hours the conference ended, and the members took their leave of one another.
When the Confederate commissioners returned to Richmond, Davis skillfully exploited the outcome of the Hampton Roads Conference as proof that Lincoln would grant them no peace without their “submission,” a term unspeakably odious to a ruling class comprised of slaveholders. Davis invoked the verbal imagery of slavery in an opposite sense in a fiery and impassioned speech at a mass meeting attended by an estimated ten thousand citizens in Richmond a few days later. The Confederacy would, Davis promised, “teach the insolent enemy who had treated our proposition with contumely in that conference in which he had so plumed himself with arrogance, [that] he [Lincoln] was, indeed talking to his masters.” Even Davis’s political enemies within the Confederacy had to confess that it had been “the most remarkable speech of his life,” and Stephens, attending the meeting despite his despair, called the speech “brilliant,” though he thought Davis “demented.” Nothing more was heard from the Confederate peace movement. Confederate morale rose as reports of the conference and of Davis’s remarks were read throughout the South. Even recently ravaged Georgia experienced a revival of fighting spirit, as southern whites rallied behind their president to follow the dream of a slaveholders’ republic to its conclusion in blood and fire.2