“An inhuman barbarous proceeding”
The army was now well to the east of Macon and Augusta, with few signs of serious rebel opposition at hand, yet the pace of the march slowed perceptibly. The roads of the Georgia swamp country became softer and narrower, and the tidal streams deeper. Flimsy wooden causeways spanned the dark watercourses, and stream crossings were more frequent. Most exasperating of all to officers who sought to speed the march were the bands of black camp followers at the rear of each unit, hindering the progress of the army. Though many blacks who had joined in the early days of the march had grown weary and turned back homeward, more refugees streamed in from each plantation on the route. The newly liberated slaves began their trek with a resolve to find freedom in the distant North, beyond the reach of their masters.
General Jefferson C. Davis, the proslavery Indianian, had his own solution for the problem. On December 3, when his XIV Corps began crossing Ebenezer Creek on the northern flank of the advance, Davis ordered the blacks with his column to halt at the roadside and allow the troops to pass forward, ready to meet reported Confederate resistance in front. The Negroes ignored his order and traipsed along at their usual pace. Davis then moved his men ahead at the double-quick and left the blacks to the rear.
The creek, a brown swollen stream some one hundred feet wide, rose in the swamps near the village of Springfield, some thirty-five miles west of Savannah, and flowed north into the Savannah River. Confederates had burned a bridge to delay the army’s passage, but Colonel George Buell’s 58th Indiana Regiment had worked all night to lay a pontoon bridge, and the troops began crossing soon after sunrise.
The corps, some 14,000 strong, approached over an old causeway closely screened on either side by forests of cypress and gum. More than 500 slaves, most of them women and children, were turned aside by guards at the end of the pontoon bridge and forbidden to cross.
General Davis watched the crossing for a time, his lean hawk’s face half-concealed by a huge tufted beard and mustache. The profane and hot-tempered Davis, who had come up from the ranks, was determined that the blacks would no longer hamper the movement of his men and slow their march.
As Davis watched, chattering bands of Negroes, mostly women and children, appeared at the end of each division and were halted at the water’s edge, where they were held under guard while troops, wagons and guns passed over the creek. The swamp about them was quiet, but officers told the blacks that there was fighting ahead and that they were being held back for their safety.
Soon afterward, when Davis had disappeared toward the front, soldiers suddenly cut loose the pontoon bridge and pulled it to the opposite bank, abandoning the blacks. The scene was recorded by the Indiana chaplain John Hight:
“There went up from that multitude a cry of agony.” Women and children wailed, and men looked apprehensively to the rear, down the causeway through the impassable swamps, where, they feared, Wheeler’s cavalry awaited them.
Someone shouted, “Rebels!” and as Hight watched, “They made a wild rush … some of them plunged into the water, and swam across. Others ran wildly up and down the bank, shaking with terror.” Sympathetic soldiers on the far bank tossed logs and pieces of timber into the stream, and Negro men dragged them ashore and built a makeshift raft. Using a rope made of blankets, the blacks ferried dozens of women and children across the channel. The raft could carry no more than six at once, and sank several times. The raft had made numerous crossings when Private Harrison Pendergast of the 2nd Minnesota saw at least one hundred blacks waiting, “huddled as close to the edge of the water as they could get, some crying, some praying, and all fearful that the rebels would come before they could get over.”
One husky Negro who could not swim plunged into the stream and flailed in a frenzy, head high and eyes rolling in terror until he reached the far bank. Others pressed after him, several of them women who carried babies in their arms, and were swept downstream and drowned. Federal troops who had returned to the rear cut down trees, and some Negroes splashed across by clinging to trunks and branches.
A few minutes later Confederate riders came into sight and opened fire on the Negroes, but soon wheeled away.
A Negro woman crossing on the raft stumbled into deep water. Her husband dragged her back aboard, and they reached the shore dripping and laughing. “I’d rather drown myself than lose her,” the man said. Pendergast saw one old couple climb the bank to safety, having saved only the dripping garments they wore. The old man shouted: “Praise the Lord, we got away from them Rebels … We got troubles on our road but bless the Lord, it will be all right in the end.”
A huge black man continued to yank the raft back and forth over the stream until the last Federal soldiers had disappeared.
A company of Wheeler’s riders rode up a few minutes later and herded the stranded band of terrified blacks to the rear. Within a few days, so Wheeler reported, most of them had been returned to the owners from whom they had escaped. Emancipation for these survivors had been brief indeed.
The army’s reaction to the heartless abandonment of these blacks was mild; few soldiers seem to have mentioned the incident in letters or diaries, but the resentment of a few liberal-minded witnesses was enough to brew a controversy and provoke criticism of General Davis and of Sherman himself.
Private Pendergast was outraged by the order by Davis, “who I presume considers himself a Christian.” The Minnesotan expressed the resentment of many soldiers: “Where can you find in all the annals of plantation cruelty anything more completely inhuman and fiendish than this? Legree was an angel of mercy in comparison … this barbarous act has created a deep feeling against Davis in this division.”
Pendergast hoped the incident would be reported to President Lincoln and that the general would lose his commission. Chaplain Hight was incensed: “Davis is a military tyrant, without one spark of humanity in his makeup. He was an ardent pro-slavery man before he entered the army, and has not changed his views since.”
Major James Connolly could not contain his anger: “The idea of five or six hundred black women, children and old men being returned to slavery by such an infernal Copperhead as Jeff C. Davis was entirely too much … I told his staff officers what I thought of such an inhuman barbarous proceeding.”
Connolly expected a reprimand from “his serene Highness,” and perhaps loss of his brevet rank of lieutenant colonel, “for I know his toadies will repeat it to him, but I don’t care a fig; I am determined to expose this act of his publicly.”
Connolly wrote a letter of protest to the Senate Military Committee, ready to be mailed as soon as he reached the coast; he showed the letter to General Absalom Baird, who promised to write influential friends in New York and have Davis exposed in newspapers.
Sherman, who was not present, knew nothing of the incident at this time, and was to take no official cognizance of it until an outcry was raised in the North some weeks later.
The commander was riding with the advance of the XVII Corps of the northern wing this week on another road, but was not many miles from Ebenezer Creek when he discovered a new menace to the army’s progress—a novel rebel weapon, buried “torpedoes.” These were land mines, wicked explosive traps devised by the Confederate ordnance expert General Gabriel J. Rains after an earlier design by Samuel J. Colt.
It was a squad of the 1st Alabama Cavalry (U.S.) that set off the first explosions of these mines, a series of blasts that flung bodies of men and horses across a sandy roadway. The corps came to a halt.
Sherman moved to the head of the column and saw a dead horse in the road and several wounded men stretched beside a fence. One of the victims was a Lieutenant Tupper, a boy who gazed at the general from eyes glazed with shock and pain. Tupper’s right foot had been torn off and a knee and one hand were badly mangled. “How long have you been in, son?”
“Three years, sir. My time had just expired last week.” Hitchcock saw that Tupper’s leg, “horribly torn and mutilated,” was raw and bloody, with bone and muscle protruding and the knee shattered.
A squad of Confederate prisoners came up from the rear, ordered by General Frank Blair, the corps commander, to clear the road of the explosives. They begged Sherman for mercy.
“You can’t send us out there to get blown up—in the name of humanity, General!”
“Your people put ’em there to assassinate our men,” Sherman said. He pointed to Lieutenant Tupper. “Is that humanity?”
“It wasn’t us, General. We don’t know where the things are buried.”
Sherman was unmoved. “I don’t care a damn if you’re blown up. I’ll not have my own men killed like this.”
One of the prisoners was sent back into his lines to ask that no more shells be buried in the roads, to save the lives of captives. The other rebels went gingerly out in front of the column, working with hands, picks and shovels until they had uncovered seven more torpedoes, some of them copper cylinders over a foot long, triggered to blow up at the slightest touch. The bluecoats looked on expectantly, as if hoping to see an explosion.
Hitchcock was infuriated. “Perhaps when we take Savannah the 1st Alabama Cavalry won’t make somebody suffer for this!… These cowardly villains call us ‘barbarous Yanks’—and then adopt instruments of murder in cold blood when they dare not stand and fight like men.”
Skirmishing broke out in the woodlands ahead, and Sherman dismounted, handed his reins to an orderly, and disappeared before the staff noticed his movement. A few minutes later Hitchcock followed and found him waiting in a farmhouse where Lieutenant Tupper had been taken for treatment. Surgeons amputated the boy’s leg.
During the afternoon Sherman came upon a wagon mired in a mudhole. One of the mules was belly-deep in the black muck, and a teamster flailed her with a blacksnake whip.
“Stop pounding that mule,” the general said.
“Mind your own damned business.”
“I tell you again to stop. I’m General Sherman.”
“Hell, that’s played out,” the teamster said. “Every son of a bitch who comes along with an old coat and slouch hat claims he’s Sherman.”
Uncle Billy grinned and rode on.
Now, for the first time since the advance on Atlanta, there was an almost constant crackling of musket fire, and the infantry advanced but a few miles each day. Rebels had barricaded the roads with felled trees, and axes rang night and day as Sherman’s Negro pioneers cleared the way. Still; resistance was not serious. Prisoners reported that a small division under General Lafayette McLaws was in the front, retiring steadily toward the Savannah trenches. Negroes who came into the line said, “Them rebs is arunning now. They talked mighty big at first and said it was just a nigger army acoming—but when they found out it was Sherman’s they couldn’t get away fast enough.” The troublesome Confederate platform gun, last fired at the crossing of the Oconee, reappeared on its railroad car, running forward to fire a few rounds at the advancing blue column, then retreating from sight when Federal gunners appeared.
On December 10 Sherman rode to the front along the railroad cut and saw a rebel gun crew about eight hundred yards away.
“Scatter,” he said. “They’ll give us a shot.” He was to remember the moment for years: “I saw the white puff of smoke, and watching close, caught sight of the ball as it rose on its flight.”
An Illinois soldier was hypnotized by the cannonball: “It holds the gaze … it seems to be charged with a personal message. Its motion appears to be slow and deliberate … at first a small black blotch on the sky. It grows. It is as large as a tin cup—as a plate—a barrel. Now its immensity fills the entire field of vision, shutting out trees and sky.”
A Michigan soldier thought the sound of the projectile was “like a steam engine starting: ‘Wh … ew!… whh.… eew.… w-h-e-w!’… commencing slow and gradually growing faster and ending with a roar.”
Sherman stepped aside, but a Negro who was crossing the tracks a few feet away was struck under the jaw by the richocheting ball and was decapitated. Someone threw a coat over the body and the officers ran for cover.
By now the invaders were in a difficult country where fresh trials lay ahead. The army’s days and nights of feasting had ended abruptly when the columns entered the tidal swamp country between the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers. Plantations here were few, and those had been swept clean by cavalrymen of both armies. The fat farms of central Georgia, with rich harvests of corn, potatoes and fresh pork, were now tantalizing memories. Many of Sherman’s infantrymen went hungry, since little surplus food from the foraging parties had been saved, and it was to be almost a week before supply trains caught up with the leading infantry in the sandy swamp tracks. Rations were still in the ponderous wagons, and the beef herd still brought up the rear, but men at the front suffered.
Illinois troops begged quartermasters for food, and when they were turned away, besieged the tents of colonels and generals, clamoring for rations and threatening to raid the supply wagons. They were issued rations for three days, ordered to make them last ten days. William Grunert of the 129th Illinois said: “More than one Illinoisian wished himself back to the fleshpots of Egypt.”
Major Alfred B. Smith of the 150th New York was so moved when he saw his troops scratching in pine straw for grains of corn left by horses that he helped to feed the hungry men by dividing the few ears of corn issued for his own horse.
Private Francis Baker and his companions of the 78th Ohio had no rations except coffee for three days, and got little comfort from their colonel: “Well, boys, the only thing I can advise is to draw in your belt one more hole each day.”
The column passed a few bony cattle that had wandered into a bog in search of forage, had sunk into the muck, too weak to move, and were finally drowned. Soldiers floundered into the swamp and “perched upon their dead bodies cutting chunks of meat.” Sergeant Ed Smith of the 2nd Illinois artillery, an inveterate forager, solved his battery’s meat shortage by killing a fat mule and dividing it among the appreciative gunners, who thought it was “the best of beef.”
The column then entered the rice country, where the roads threaded past tidal marshes; but though enormous piles of harvested grain lay on every plantation, the troops went hungry until they learned to hull the rice.
One Iowa soldier, who hulled his rice by beating it with a bayonet and cleaning it by hand, protested that he spent one day getting enough rice for a meal, had a late supper, and went to sleep before he got hungry again. “Then in the morning I’m as hungry as a bitch wolf that’s been in a snowdrift twenty-four hours.” Men of the 3rd Wisconsin, who had no salt, seasoned their rice with gunpowder, an experiment they did not repeat.
The army lived on rice for more than a week—and for several days fed the grain to horses and mules. Captain Storrs, whose frontline Connecticut troops were shelled by rebel cannon almost daily, dug in with his men: “We played cards, laid low, and our diet was rice for breakfast, rice for dinner, rice for supper, and then more rice.” The only other edible item in the regiment’s headquarters baggage was mustard: “The guest who dined with us, if he declined rice, was simply given mustard.”
Savannah now lay only a dozen miles ahead, its approaches guarded by marshes, rice fields and canals. Five causeways led through this watery wilderness like arrows converging upon the city—three wagon roads and two railroad lines. Sherman pushed his army nearer the city in slow, deliberate moves, and formed a siege line across these arteries in the form of an irregular crescent. The new position lay some four miles outside Savannah itself, and was occupied without serious resistance from the rebels, who watched from their own earthworks, a formidable system of forts and rifle pits protected by rows of sharpened logs and by flooded lowlands whose water level could be altered by raising and lowering floodgates in the rice fields. A frontal assault along this line was all but impossible.
The 4th Minnesota approached its position before these works apprehensively: “Swamp on either side, pines, cypress, live-oak and magnolia … a chilly mist is above and around us, which, rising from the low water of the swamp and canal, gives a spectral appearance to the long lines of blue-coats. After marching ten miles we halted. Ahead of us was a swamp and a rebel fort.”
Confederate cannon fire drove the Minnesotans to earth, and they scraped out rifle pits where they lay all night in a cold rain, without fires or tents.
Captain Ephraim Wilson of the 10th Illinois, whose regiment was forced to wade a canal, remembered this as the worst night of the war: “We all plunged in and waded through, the water being like ice … up to our armpits … Our bones were fairly frozen and the marrow within them congealed.”
When the men halted and built fires to thaw their frozen clothing, rebel guns opened on them with rounds of grapeshot. Fires were stamped out in a fury, “and the balance of the night we were compelled to dance around in our wet clothes to keep ourselves from freezing to death.”
Men of the 58th Indiana, camped on a riverside rice plantation, saw Savannah in the distance—“a very beautiful city,” they thought. These troops worked from dawn until late at night to make hundreds of fascines—huge bundles of bamboo and rice straw that were to be thrown into ditches and canals when rebel lines were stormed. Other regiments built tiny one-man rafts and carved paddles, ready to cross canals in front of enemy trenches.
At night, when firing ceased, troops heard the rattling of wagons in Savannah streets and the clang of church bells striking the hours.
The cavalry, as usual, ranged widely, and were now prowling several miles to the south of the siege line that enclosed the city by land. Kilpatrick’s horsemen, loosed on the city’s southern flank, began to prey upon the rich farmlands of Liberty County, yet untouched by war. The troopers overran the villages of Hinesville, Walthourville, Dorchester, and Midway, and at last a few of them reached Sunbury, a village of a dozen houses on the coast overlooking St. Catherine’s Sound. Five-year-old James R. Morgan, who watched from a house, was summoned by a trooper: “Johnny, get me a piece of fire.”
The boy brought a glowing coal from the fireplace of his home and watched the soldiers ride to Sunbury Church: “I wondered where they were going to build the fire. I knew the church had no chimney. I followed them to the church. They took rails from a fence nearby and built the fire under the stair steps. Soon the church was blazing.”
This was a signal to gunboats anchored in Ossabaw Sound, vessels that anchored the next morning within sight of the most advanced Federal troops. The army had made its first contact with the U.S. fleet some two weeks in advance of the date Sherman had forecast in his message to Admiral Porter. Actual communication with the navy, however, must await the fall of Savannah or some of its outlying defenses—especially Fort McAllister, which dominated the Ogeechee, the only convenient deep-water approach to the city.
Cornelia Screven, a young widow with several children who met the enemy in the village of Dorchester, near Sunbury, discovered a good Samaritan who must have been the most tender-hearted man among the rude invaders.
At the sound of horsemen in her yard, Mrs. Screven opened her door and was pushed backward by a soldier who demanded her keys.
“I’m ordered to search the house for firearms.”
“I have none.”
“Give me your keys or I’ll break down every door in your house.”
Mrs. Screven gave up the keys, and the leader went up the stairs. Cornelia faced the others fiercely.
“I defy another man to put his foot on these steps. I’ve been promised protection, and I expect an officer any moment to guard my house.” The leader ordered his men back.
When raiders returned in greater numbers the next day, Cornelia Screven found a soldier taking the last of her cornmeal from the kitchen. “Please don’t take that meal, my children are very hungry, and we have nothing else to eat.”
The soldier turned savagely. “Damn you, I don’t care if you all starve; get outa my way or I’ll push you out the door.”
Cornelia’s niece, a Miss Maxwell, shouted at the soldier: “Oh, you intolerable brute! If I was a man I’d blow out every particle of your brains. If I had a pistol I’d do it anyhow, woman as I am.”
A bright-faced young Pennsylvania soldier known to the women only as Hughes offered them his help and patrolled the hall of the house with a drawn pistol until the raiders had gone. Hughes then entered the room where the weeping women sat: “Ladies, don’t cry. I never saw a woman cry in my life, but what I had to cry, too.” He wiped tears from his eyes. When the boy left at sunset the women stirred the fireplace ashes and roasted sweet potatoes, the only food left to them.
The small boys of Liberty County had disappeared. Women on plantations were terrified by a rumor flying ahead of the army that the Yankees would kill all male children, and at the first sign of the bluecoats mothers had disguised their young sons in girls’ clothing.
In one farmhouse Kilpatrick’s raiders admired a small child in a freshly starched dress who slid down the stair rail at breakneck speed. A distraught mother called sharply: “Bessie, my son, come down from there.”
The troopers burst into laughter. “I thought it was damn strange,” one of them said, “that all the brats in this neighborhood were girls.”
An infantry foraging expedition went into Liberty County during the week, a train of one hundred and fifty wagons under guard of the 100th Indiana.
As the column entered a small town in the marsh country, a man on a mule galloped out of a side street and fled ahead of them. Colonel R. M. Johnson shouted, “Halt!” but the rider did not pause.
“Shoot him!” Johnson called.
Sam Blanchard of Company B and one other man raised their muskets and fired. The rider toppled into the roadway, and the mule staggered a few steps and fell. When the soldiers reached the bodies they found that the dead man was quite old—eighty, some civilians said. The troops took up a collection and gave the old man’s family money to bury him. Private Theodore Upson grieved for the innocent victim, perhaps in memory of the death of his friend Uncle Aaron Wolford at the little battle of Griswoldville. “It was all we could do,” Upson said. “It was one of the accidents of war.”