“He shall have no rest”
The long blue columns snaked out of Fayetteville over miserable roads, threading toward the northeast. Once more, in the hope of avoiding or postponing battle and dispersing Confederate forces, Sherman separated his wings to obscure his destination. Slocum’s wing feinted in the direction of Raleigh and Howard’s moved toward Goldsboro, the actual goal, where Sherman was to meet General John Schofield and his 30,000 fresh troops, now marching up from the coast.
Sherman rode confidently near the head of a column. His troops were ready to fight. Divisions in the advance of each corps were stripped for action, their heavy equipment following in the wagon trains. He ordered the columns to remain close together: “I will see that this army marches to Goldsboro in compact form.” The commander seemed to be aware, at least, that the threat of a Confederate attack had finally become a reality.
Sherman wrote John Terry, one of Schofield’s corps commanders: “We must not lose time for Joe Johnston to concentrate at Goldsboro. We cannot prevent his concentrating at Raleigh, but he shall have no rest.”
General Johnston had arrived in Sherman’s path on March 15 to take command of his gathering forces. Major Bromfield Ridley of General A. P. Stewart’s staff, who guided him to headquarters, found the old Confederate chief “surprisingly social,” and of rare modesty: “He endeavors to conceal his greatness rather than to impress you with it.” Johnston said he was happy to rejoin his old command as it faced its greatest test, but he added somberly, “I’m afraid it’s too late to make it the same army.”
Johnston soon found himself in conflict with bureaucrats of the expiring Confederate government. Quartermasters in North Carolina were under orders to send food and supplies only to Lee’s army in Virginia; there were none for Johnston’s troops. When he ordered coffee, sugar, tea and brandy from a navy storehouse in Charlotte, Johnston was refused; the Confederate navy had ceased to exist, but there was no precedent for the transfer, and officials would not budge. When he requested money for the troops, many of whom had not been paid in two years, Johnston was stunned by a telegram from John Breckinridge, the new secretary of war—the Confederate treasury was empty.
Johnston must also preside over a bewildering array of general officers, many of them thin-skinned and sensitive, disposed to fight to the last for every prerogative of rank—two full generals, three lieutenant generals, fourteen major generals and brigadiers almost too numerous to count. These commanders all but outnumbered the troops now gathering near the little east Carolina town of Smithfield: Braxton Bragg’s 5,000, who had been driven from Wilmington; Hardee’s worn corps from Savannah, now reduced to 10,000 by loss of its South Carolina brigade, which had been called home by Governor McGrath; Hampton’s 6,000 cavalry; and all that was left of the Army of Tennessee.
The veteran rebel army from the West was now dribbling in after a heroic hegira. P.G.T. Beauregard, sent to Tupelo, Mississippi, to inspect its remnants, had said, “If not, in the strict sense of the word a mob, it was no longer an army.” The Creole found that almost 18,000 men were on the muster rolls, but deserters streamed away nightly, 3,500 were furloughed home, 4,000 were marched off to defend Mobile, and the rest—three skeleton corps—were herded eastward to confront Sherman.
The veterans who had survived John Hood’s bloody battles at Franklin and Nashville could still muster a song. Their favorite was a wry jingle set to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:
So now I’m marching southward;
My heart is full of woe.
I’m going back to Georgia
To see my uncle Joe.
You may talk about your Beauregard
And sing of Ginral Lee
But the gallant Hood of Texas
Sure played hell in Tennessee.
For more than six weeks this ghost of an army had made its way eastward and then northward—on foot, by steamboat and rail, through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas.
The ever present Mrs. James Chesnut had watched General Stephen D. Lee’s corps of this army march through Chester, South Carolina, amazed to hear them singing: “There they go, the gay and gallant few, doomed, the last flowers of southern pride, to be killed, or worse, to a prison. They continue to prance by, light and jaunty … with as airy a tread as if they believed the world was all on their side, and that there were no Yankee bullets for the unwary. What will Johnston do with them now?”
In the end, Johnston reported, only 5,000 troops from the Army of Tennessee reached him, some of those too late to be thrown into battle against Sherman. With the belated addition of these veterans of three years of war, Johnston prepared to fling the last Confederate resources of manpower into combat.
Sherman met serious rebel resistance for the first time since Atlanta in the afternoon of March 15. Judson Kilpatrick, skirmishing with Wheeler’s troopers along the road to Raleigh, ran into Confederate infantry some six miles south of the village of Averasboro on the Cape Fear River. Within a few minutes fighting raged through the swampy woodland, and Kilpatrick’s men hurriedly threw up crude breastworks. They were soon heavily engaged with General William B. Taliaferro’s division.
The Confederates blocked the road to Raleigh by fortifying a narrow peninsula between the Cape Fear and Black rivers, which was flanked by difficult swamps. Sherman must move them or abandon his feint against Raleigh—but the spirited fighting that ensued soon became a more serious matter than the mere testing of a strategic refinement. In fact, Sherman’s advance had collided with General Hardee’s rear guard, and Hardee, who had planned to rest for the day, determined to fight in order to develop Sherman’s strength and intentions on that front. The Federal troops, in any case, were to be tested for the first time since the battle of Atlanta.
The Confederates were not content to wait for the enemy, but launched numerous charges and were beaten back only after hours of desperate fighting. Kilpatrick’s men, on the point of losing their barricades, were reinforced by Colonel William Hawley’s brigade of the XX Corps as darkness fell. By three in the morning of March 16, the Federal newcomers, “encased in an armor of mud,” were struggling through swamps toward an invisible enemy. Soon after daylight the rebels came howling toward Hawley’s line in a charge that shook the command and threatened its flanks. Slocum sent more infantrymen forward, this time the division of General Alpheus Williams, which relieved Hawley’s worn men. The stubborn fight dragged through the day.
The Confederate front line finally sagged and broke, and its men then fled rearward “like so many frightened birds,” under a Federal charge, leaving behind cannon, knapsacks, guns, horses, their dead and wounded, and a few men who waved handkerchiefs overhead, “begging for mercy.” These rebels were artillerymen from Charleston, thrown into their first battle, men whose experience had been limited to firing coastal guns, including those of the captured Fort Sumter. Most of their expert gunners and virtually all the horses were dead, and the heavy guns could not be moved rearward over the boggy ground. This inexperienced command had almost literally been shot to pieces.
Rebel artillery, as if to atone for the setback, began firing rapidly from the rear, under cover of a second line of low breastworks. The Illinois soldier William Grunert joined an attack on this line with his regiments, but quickly flopped to the ground with his companions and hugged the wet earth. The 129th Illinois had already lost twenty men. “Never before had we been exposed to such a fire of shells and grape,” Grunert said.
Federal casualties mounted during the afternoon fighting. After dark, a few men of Grunert’s regiment left their supper fires and floundered into the dark swamps to rescue rebels who called for help from pools of quicksand. Sergeant Henry Morhaus lay awake in the camp of the 123rd New York: “Now and then the Rebel cannon would belch forth … but with no serious results … Above all could be heard the wild wind singing among the pine tops, while now and then the rain would sweep down in passionate, fitful showers upon the unprotected heads of the soldiers.”
Among the rebels captured by Sherman’s men during this day were survivors of the artillery corps from Charleston. Ben Johnson, the accomplished Federal forager from Indiana who helped take prisoners in, was astonished to see one of the rebel enlisted men pounding one of his own officers in the face with his fists. Johnson could halt the irate Confederate only by pricking him with a bayonet point.
“That’s my captain,” the rebel said hotly. “He’s abused me shamefully, and I’ve done told him I’d lick him once I got the chance. Now we’re both prisoners and I’m as big a man as he is. I’m gonna give him what he’s got coming.”
Johnson was forced to interfere several times to prevent the angry gunner from striking the battered and demoralized captain.
Sherman’s extraordinary behavior during the engagement at Averasboro was a mystery to his staff. The general spent the day of March 16 in the rear, listening to the crackling of fire from the front. To the disgust of Henry Hitchcock, Sherman kept his staff “lying around in the woods” during the fighting, out of sight of the action. Only twice did gunfire approach them—a stray grapeshot that fell in the mud nearby and a bullet that sang through the treetops. A later dramatic newspaper account of “Tecumseh directing the battle under a warm fire,” Hitchcock said, was “more poetry than truth.” Neither Hitchcock nor more veteran officers, who had frequently seen Sherman expose himself under fire, could imagine why he remained in the rear at Averasboro.
During this brisk fighting, Sherman encountered a striking prisoner, the commander of the heavy artillerymen from Charleston—an encounter which added to Hitchcock’s irritation with the general.
Captain Theo Northrop, the chief of Kilpatrick’s scouts, accompanied by three of his men, had blundered into Confederate lines by mistake and captured a handsome young rebel colonel who wore a fashionably cut uniform trimmed with gold braid—and the most splendid jackboots in the rebel army.
The young Confederate was confused by the approach of the strange Federals, and seemed to think they were his own men up to some mischief. “Do you realize who you’re talking to, sir?” was his response to a demand for surrender.
“I don’t give a damn,” Northrop said. “I’m taking you back.”
The colonel still imagined that he dealt with Confederates. “You’ll watch your language when you speak to me, Officer. General Hampton will hear of this.”
Not until a pistol was thrust to his head did the rebel colonel realize that these were Federals and give his consent to ride with them into their lines. The haughty colonel was Alfred Rhett, until recently the commander of Fort Sumter’s rebel garrison, the son of the Confederate Congressman Barnwell Rhett, a Charleston editor who had been a candidate for president of the Confederacy.
Colonel Rhett was soon scolding Kilpatrick: “I was taken by my own fool mistake, but you damned Yankees won’t have it your way for long. We’ve got 50,000 fresh men waiting for you in South Carolina.”
“Yes,” Kilpatrick said, “and we’ll have to hunt every swamp to find the damned cowards.”
The two exchanged insults until Kilpatrick sent the Carolinian rearward to Sherman, who had by now sought shelter from the rain under an old shed. Sherman grinned over Rhett’s indignant explanation of his capture, fell to talking with him of mutual friends in Charleston, and invited him to have supper at headquarters. Rhett accepted as a matter of course. Major Hitchcock was offended by the casual intimacy the Confederate assumed with Sherman, and by Sherman’s treatment of Rhett as an honored guest.
Rhett denounced Confederate President Jefferson Davis as “a fool” for allowing the army to march through Georgia without a battle. He told Sherman, “We’d have whipped you if it had cost us 30,000 or 40,000 men.”
“But you can’t afford to lose 30,000,” Sherman said.
“Oh, men! We have men aplenty. I could take a cavalry regiment and raise a hundred thousand troops in a month!”
“Men rounded up like cattle would never fight.”
Rhett persisted: “Conscripts are just as good as any other soldiers. Discipline’s the thing. It’s all discipline. Why, I myself have shot twelve men in the last six weeks. Not long ago I took a pack of dogs into the swamps and caught twenty-eight men in three days.”
Hitchcock was repelled by Rhett’s manner. The rebel, he said, was “a devil in human shape,” a symbol of the arrogant Southern ruling class that had plunged the nation into war: “This class must be blotted out.”
But Sherman, who admired aristocratic Southerners—evidently even South Carolinians—found Rhett entertaining. He ordered a horse for the prisoner and told officers to see that the colonel was treated with respect. Rhett was led away to Kilpatrick’s prison pen for the night, complaining to everyone about him, “making himself offensive by his ill-concealed bitterness and contempt for the Yankees”—as if in demonstration of an epigram coined by one of his female relatives: “The world, you know, is composed of men, women and Rhetts.”
Colonel Rhett got no such considerate treatment from Kilpatrick. Guards yanked the shining Russian boots from his legs and tossed him a pair of rough brogans. Kilpatrick grinned. “They’ll feel better on the march tomorrow, Colonel. You won’t ride horseback. This is one time you’ll be riding shank’s mare.” Kilpatrick’s officers gambled for Rhett’s boots, but lost interest when they saw that they were too small for any of them to wear, and returned the costly boots to the colonel.
As March 16 drew to a close, whispered orders were passed along the Confederate line; the troops built fires as if they were settling for the night, then crawled rearward on all fours. Hardee withdrew his small corps, leaving behind only the inevitable troopers of Wheeler as rear guard. The savage little engagement of Averasboro had come to an end.
Slocum and Kilpatrick reported 682 casualties for the day. Hardee’s losses were slightly fewer. Joseph Johnston, when he was told of Federal losses, commented that Sherman’s men had been demoralized by months of looting Southern plantations, had lost their taste for fighting, and were no longer the crack troops of the Atlanta campaign. Major Nichols of Sherman’s staff saw a different reason for the army’s inability to drive off the rebels: Confederate skirmishers at Averasboro had “shown more pluck than we have seen in them since Atlanta.”
Sergeant Morhaus reported that his division alone had captured 217 prisoners and buried 108 Confederate corpses. “And yet,” the sergeant said, “Averasboro is not put down in history as a battle, but simply a skirmish. We will say, however, it was a very lively skirmish.” Men of New York’s Dutchess County Regiment, who had fought for ten hours without relief during March 15–16, remembered this as the most severe action of the war. Still, a much more formidable challenge lay ahead. Joe Johnston was still gathering his forces, hoping to trap an unwary Federal column.
Casualties from Averasboro overflowed houses and barns in the neighborhood. Fifty wounded Confederates were taken to the home of Farquhar Smith, where Slocum made headquarters, and many of the victims were held down, screaming in pain, while Federal surgeons amputated wounded arms and legs. Seventeen-year-old Janie Smith wrote, “The scene beggars description. The blood lay in puddles in the grove.” The wounded cursed and moaned, one of them a boy whose chest had been torn by a shell. He called incessantly, “Mama … Jesus … Mama. Jesus have mercy on me. I don’t think I’ve been a very bad boy.” The voice faded, the eyes closed, and the boy died.
Sherman went visiting the emergency hospitals, stepping over piles of severed arms and legs to enter, and in one blood-spattered room he met a rebel captain, one McBeth, who recalled that Sherman had visited his family in Charleston years before. Sherman asked to be remembered to the McBeth family, and helped the boy to send a letter to his mother. He then ordered Federal surgeons to remain at the place until they had performed all necessary operations on Confederate wounded.
Such kindnesses failed to impress Janie Smith, who complained that the Yankees “left no living thing but people and one old hen, who played sick, thus saving her neck, but losing her biddies.” The girl wrote to a friend: “If I ever see a Yankee woman I intend to whip her and take the clothes off her very back … When our army invades the North, I want them to carry the torch in one hand and the sword in the other. I want desolation carried to the heart of their country; the widows and orphans left naked and starving, just as ours were left.”
Federal casualties also suffered. There were no ambulances with Slocum’s wing, and as the army moved eastward from Averasboro, the wounded were jolted over wretched roads in springless flatbed wagons. Burial parties trailed the caravan, inspecting the wagons at each halt to remove those who had died. Graves were dug hurriedly at the roadside and marked with names and regiments, in cases where those were known.
Colonel Fahnestock, who commanded the wagon guard, rode all day with a chorus of groans and wails ringing in his ears. He halted several times to see Private Henry Nourse of his regiment, who was in agony from the amputation of a leg. “It’s my toes, Colonel. Oh, God, my toes! I could stand it except for my toes.”