“I can whip Joe Johnston”
In the central North Carolina back country a few miles to the north of Sherman’s position, Confederates were already gathering in strength to challenge the Federal invaders. His recall to command had reached Joe Johnston in Lincolnton, North Carolina, far to the west of Sherman’s track. Mrs. James Chesnut, the fugitive from South Carolina, saw Johnston that day, when, still humiliated from his loss of command at Atlanta, he resumed his task though the cause seemed to be lost. Still, Johnston devoted himself to explaining “all of Lee’s and Stonewall Jackson’s mistakes” to Mrs. Chesnut. The fussy, erect little general was angered by his orders. He felt that Jefferson Davis would sacrifice “wife, children, country and God to satisfy his hate for Joe Johnston.”
“They’re only calling me back so that I will be the one to surrender,” Johnston said. Mrs. Chesnut understood his apprehension: “He might well be in a rage, this on-and-offing is enough to bewilder the coolest head.” But she had little confidence in Johnston: “He always gives me the feeling that all of his sympathies are on the other side.”
While Joe Johnston was traveling toward his new command, Sherman’s columns were closing upon Fayetteville. Confederate cavalry clattered into the town on March 10, another day of chill rain, and Sherman was not far behind. Townspeople, alarmed by the Federal approach, welcomed the gray-clad horsemen almost hysterically, as if this insignificant force could resist the invaders and protect the city and its arsenal. Wade Hampton and his officers were invited to spend the night in private homes. Pickets were posted, somewhat carelessly, and Butler’s troopers camped on the bank of the Cape Fear River, overlooking a bridge that entered the city from the south. The Federals were not long in making an appearance.
In the half-light of dawn on March 11, Captain William Duncan and sixty-seven bluecoat riders from Howard’s headquarters scouted toward the city, found the bridge lightly guarded, brushed aside the few rebel pickets and rode recklessly into Fayetteville. This little band was seen at once by Hugh Scott, a Confederate cavalry scout, who burst in upon Wade Hampton while the general was at breakfast: “General, there’s a hundred Yankees outside! Give me four or five men and I’ll run ’em out of town.” Hampton and the young scout, reinforced by staff officers and a few South Carolina troopers—seven men in all—charged noisily toward Duncan’s party with drawn sabers, firing pistols and gobbling the rebel yell. The startled bluecoats fled, milled in confusion at a street corner a hundred yards distant, and were routed. Twelve Federals were killed. The intrepid Captain Duncan and ten others were captured. The only Confederate casualty was a handsome mare, killed by a pistol shot.
This brief melee provided the merest of respites, for a Federal infantry column entered the town and Mayor Archibald McLean rode out to make a formal surrender. The Federal advance rode past the bodies of Duncan’s casualties sprawled in the street; a U.S. flag soon flew over the market house in the center of the town. Sherman’s troops thus began a five-day occupation of the town, an occupation that was to reflect Sherman’s mild policy toward North Carolina. Fayetteville’s sufferings under the invaders, though they were to live long in local legend, paled in comparison with those of South Carolinians.
One of those who would not forget the coming of the invaders was little Sally Hawthorne, who, with her sister and the young son of the family cook, sent the last of the Confederate cavalrymen on their way with sandwiches. Sally recalled it years later: “A wide street filled with Confederate soldiers on horseback, riding pellmell up the street, on the sidewalk, anywhere, so as to be going uptown. As they passed near enough to reach the sandwiches they would bend for the package, and then go on at breakneck speed.” Sally and her sister and the tiny black boy held the basket as high as they could reach until the sandwiches were gone.
A man yelled from a nearby house, “Go home! The Yankees are here!” Sally had hardly reached home when Federal officers rode up and demanded her father’s keys to vacant houses in the neighborhood for the use of General Howard’s staff.
“They are not my houses,” Mr. Hawthorne said. “They belong to my brother. I don’t know that I have the right to turn them over to you.”
The officers laughed. “The keys, if you please.”
The bluecoats settled in the houses, barns and stables. Several of Howard’s officers made quarters in Sally’s house and forbade the family to leave without permission.
The alarm found Mrs. James Kyle in one of the city’s hospitals, nursing Confederate wounded from the skirmish in Kilpatrick’s camp. A Confederate officer called through the door, “Ladies, if you have a home and children you’d better go to them. Sherman’s coming into town.”
Mrs. Kyle was helped across the crowded street by an officer who was captured by the Yankees a moment later. She hurried toward her home, but was halted in her tracks by a shocking spectacle: “I saw a Yankee soldier make a man take off his clothing in the street. When I reached my room at home I sank into a chair and felt that I must give up.” She revived when a servant thrust her infant son in her arms. At a glimpse of the helpless child, she thought resolutely, “I must be brave.”
Sherman himself reached Fayetteville in midmorning and made temporary headquarters in the old U.S. Arsenal, a group of stuccoed brick buildings, seized by the Confederates in 1861, that had produced arms and ammunition throughout the war. Sherman ordered Colonel Orlando Poe of the engineers to prepare the arsenal for demolition a few days later. “I hope the people at Washington will have the good sense never to trust North Carolina with an arsenal again,” he said. The general soon rode off on an inspection of the town, leaving Major Byers in charge.
Byers was confronted by Edward Monagan, a well-dressed civilian who complained that his house was looted by soldiers.
“General Sherman is an old and dear friend of mine,” Monagan said. “We were at West Point together.” Monagan waited for the general’s return, telling Byers of escapades he had shared with Sherman as a cadet.
“I know he’ll be pleased to see me,” he said. “You just watch Sherman’s face when we meet.”
Byers was so impressed that he hurried a guard to the Monagan home.
Sherman appeared soon afterward, and as he dismounted Monagan went toward him with open arms. Byers saw that “for a moment there was a ray of pleasure illuminating Sherman’s face,” but it disappeared.
“We were friends, weren’t we?” Sherman said.
“Oh, yes.”
“You shared my friendship and my bread too, didn’t you?”
“That I did.”
Sherman’s face became grim, almost stricken.
“You have betrayed it all. Betrayed me, your friend, betrayed the country that educated you for its defense. And here you are—a traitor—asking me to be your friend once more, to protect your property. To risk the lives of brave men who were fired on from houses here today.”
The general paused. “Turn your back to me forever. I won’t punish you. Only go your way. There is room in this world even for traitors.”
Monagan left hurriedly, and Sherman sat on the arsenal steps to eat lunch with his staff. Byers saw that the general could hardly eat: “The corners of his mouth twitched … the hand that held the bread trembled and for a moment tears were in his eyes.”
General Howard came up a few minutes later to report that his troops were still under fire from rebel sharpshooters who hid in houses. He thought the snipers were Texans.
“Then shoot some Texas prisoners,” Sherman said.
“We’ve got no Texans.”
“Then shoot others, any prisoners. I will not have my men murdered.” He turned abruptly into the arsenal. Howard rode away. Byers never learned whether rebel prisoners in Fayetteville were executed in retaliation.
On Sunday, March 12, whooping Federal troops welcomed the army tug Davidson to Fayetteville after she had chugged up the Cape Fear River from Wilmington, opening a supply line from the sea. Sherman expressed the joy of his men, who were so eager for news that they had been paying five to ten dollars for the privilege of reading an old issue of The New York Times: “The effect was electric, and no one can realize the feeling unless, like us, he had been for months cut off from all communications with friends.”
Sherman spent several hours at a desk in the town hotel during the afternoon. He wrote ten dispatches and then wrote Ellen for the first time in almost two months. The general told his wife that the army’s sweep through the Carolinas was more important than the march to the sea: “South Carolina has had her visit from the West that will cure her of pride and boasting.”
He predicted that the Confederate army would make a stand near Raleigh, but he was confident of the outcome: “I can whip Joe Johnston unless his men fight better than they have since I left Savannah.” He shrugged off Confederate threats: “The same brags and boasts are kept up, but when I reach the path where the lion crouched I find him slinking away.”
The Davidson was off at six that afternoon with her decks piled high with sacks of mail. Since no telegraph lines were at hand, the steamer also carried Major Byers, who was sent by Sherman with a confidential message for Grant—news that the army was nearing its goal in fighting trim, with morale high and in no danger from the enemy.
Also aboard the small ship were Theo Davis, the Harper’s Weekly artist who had been traveling with the army from Atlanta, and the alluring Marie Boozer, who was now leaving Judson Kilpatrick forever. As she left the army, Marie was on the threshold of a bizarre and romantic career—she was to marry a wealthy Northerner, and after a sensational divorce case would become the wife of a French count and reign as a queen of international society. (The tragic end of her life is obscure: One legend has it that she became the mistress of a Japanese prime minister, who had her beheaded; another holds that she was a concubine of a Chinese war lord, who had her ankle tendons severed to prevent her escape, and fattened her into a three-hundred-pound beauty.)
The Davidson returned to Fayetteville two days later, laden with coffee, sugar and oats, but without the uniforms Sherman had hoped to issue to his troops.
One day during the brief occupation of the town, young Sally Hawthorne watched Federal soldiers slaughter all the family livestock except the milk cow. Young officers sat on the back porch, making sport of killing poultry, calling on servants to release chickens, ducks or turkeys, and shooting the birds as they ran to forage on the fresh grass.
When Mr. Hawthorne was told by an officer that his textile mills were to be blown up, he persuaded Mayor McLean and the town board to accompany him to Sherman’s headquarters to protest that these mills offered the only employment to men and women of the farm region. Sherman heard them out and said, “Gentlemen, niggers and cotton caused this war, and I wish them both in hell. On Wednesday these mills will be blown up. Good morning.”
Hawthorne went to the homes of his mill hands with a Federal guard at his side, telling them to take all the cotton and cloth they wished, since the buildings were to be destroyed. For the rest of the day Sally’s father watched as mill hands bore away his stock, and the next day the mills went up “with a terrible noise and dense smoke that surrounded us for hours.”
Colonel Poe and his engineers battered the arsenal buildings into piles of rubble, and then burned and blew up the ruins. Tremors shook houses throughout the city, and several nearby homes caught fire from the intense heat. Even so, the Confederates had managed to salvage something from the wreckage, for much of the arsenal’s machinery had been shipped out before Sherman’s arrival to be hidden in a coal mine in a nearby county; ordnance stores had been carried to Greensboro by wagon.
Federal troops burned a few other buildings, including the local bank and the plant of the Fayetteville Observer, whose editor, E. J. Hale, a prewar Whig and opponent of Secession, had become an ardent supporter of the rebel cause. Sherman’s officers whipped up such feeling against Hale that “even a chicken coop was unsafe if it had his name on it.”
The town was defenseless, but some of its pious women battled the invaders with prayer and scripture. Federal officers who took over an old woman’s house for a dinner party invited her to eat with them.
“General,” she said, “aren’t you going to ask a blessing?”
“Well, madam, I don’t know how. Will you do it for me?”
As the hostess remembered it: “So I asked a blessing and prayed a short prayer. I asked the Lord to turn their hearts away from their wickedness and make them go back to their homes and stop fighting us, and everything I was afraid to tell the Yankees, I told the Lord, and they couldn’t say a word!”
The invaders found Fayetteville more rebellious than they had expected—“offensively rebellious,” said Major Nichols of headquarters staff.
In the country near Fayetteville, civilian victims complained that they were terrorized, in much the same pattern visited upon plantations in the army’s path from Atlanta onward. One anonymous woman of the neighborhood reported the murder of two men, one a wounded Confederate soldier, and said that three men and a woman were hung up by soldiers “in order to make them tell where their valuables were concealed.” A few others were stripped naked and whipped for the same purpose.
Mrs. Jane Evans Elliot, the wife of a Confederate officer, whose plantation was called Ellerslie, told a typical tale of the foragers who beset her: “They pillaged and plundered the whole day and quartered themselves upon us that night … took all our blankets and the Colonel’s clothes, all our silver … all our luxuries, leaving nothing but a little meat and corn … Oh, it was terrible beyond description … one night they strung fire all around us.”
Mrs. Elliot turned to her diary when the ordeal ended: “I have been trying to teach my dear children to improve the day as well as I could, but my mind wanders and is so confused that I find it hard to fix my thoughts on any thing.”
All of Sherman’s army was across the Cape Fear River and on the move by March 15, after an unexpected delay to await supplies and to destroy the massive masonry arsenal buildings and the textile mills. The general sent most of his civilian hangers-on to Wilmington, on the coast, via the Cape Fear, in order to eliminate “useless mouths” and speed his movements. A bewildered crowd, largely of blacks, was herded on small river steamers, bound toward an unknown fate in a city where they were not expected. Other thousands of those who had followed the army walked or rode overland toward the coast.
Departing Federal troops also sent loads of stolen furniture and other valuables homeward by steamer. Mrs. Kyle, the volunteer nurse of Fayetteville, was gratified to hear later that the ship bearing this loot to New York burned on its voyage, “and we had the comfort of knowing that none of our handsome furniture and household treasures reached their destination.”
One of the army’s final acts in Fayetteville was to destroy some of its worthless horses and mules. A thousand of these animals, jaded after months of service, were herded into a field beside the Cape Fear, where they plunged about in terror for hours as soldiers shot them. Bodies were left where they fell; hundreds floated down the river. Soldiers crowded another herd into a corral near the center of town, shot all the animals and left the hundreds of carcasses to the townspeople. “They were burned,” Alice Campbell wrote, “and you may try to imagine the odor, if you can.”
One of the last Federal officers to leave Fayetteville was a Michigan captain, Dextor Horton, who had found the local people friendly and kind. Horton had slept in a clean, comfortable feather bed in a private home. He was aroused by a courier at one in the morning as his regiment moved out, and got an affectionate farewell from his hostesses. “They really felt bad to see me go,” he remembered. “The old lady shed tears and said, ‘Let us part as friends,’ and hoped I would reach my family in safety.”
Horton and his companions of the army’s rear guard crossed the river in utter darkness, stumbled down a bank to a pontoon bridge and clambered up a rutted cliff of mud. At two o’clock Horton lay on the sodden ground for a brief sleep: “Quite a change from sleeping undressed in a feather bed.”
Horton rode in the army’s wake in the early morning, shivering with cold and wondering, like most of his companions, what fate lay ahead. He scrawled in his diary that night: “When will Crazy Billy give us a base to clothe us and give us rest?”