CHAPTER 23

March Across Georgia

THE time beat of the war went on, bluecoat streams pouring south and south, miles of men and boots, leather, hardtack, tents, steel, lead, powder, guns. And as miles of wagon supplies, mountains of hardtack, were used up, more and more poured south. And moving north, flung back out of the muddy and bloody recoils, came stragglers, deserters, bounty-jumpers, the furloughed, the sick and wounded—while beyond the battle fronts toward the south, living skeletons in prison offered prayers that the time beat of the war would end, that the sad music of rifle volleys and cannonading guns would close over in some sweet silence.

In the silence of the night was despair—and hope. Though tom with intestinal violence, the Government of the United States was still a vast going concern, having immense, transactions in land, money, shipbuilding, immigrants thronging United States consulates in Europe with anxiety to go to “the free country” overseas, the first tentative projections of the Union Pacific Railway under way, an around-the-earth international telegraph system being wrought toward reality, mails being carried, pensions paid to widows and orphans, river and harbor works in process—the question running over the world: Would the Union Government be able to hammer out an indissoluble unity of its States?

Now in the close of ’64 it was taken in the North and in Europe as full of portent that President Davis recommended to his Congress that slaves be drafted for the Confederate armies. This plan would throw 400,000 able-bodied and armed black men against the Northern armies. Slavery would not be abolished, but the enlisted Negroes would be given freedom. To Europe went an emissary from Davis hoping to win foreign recognition of the Confederacy by this concession to world opinion. On this partial emancipation, however, planters and slaveholders of influence squarely opposed Davis. Factions in the Confederate Congress with polite contempt offered other plans to fill the thinning armies.

A movement to impeach Davis gained headway. Vice-President Stephens, the Rhett following in South Carolina, Governor Brown of Georgia, Governor Vance of North Carolina, moved slowly and guardedly, backed by a considerable public opinion in the South which held President Davis too arbitrary, too lacking in a spirit of co-operation, empty of the genius of leadership required for the terrible and immediate problems. A congressional committee sent a member to General Robert E. Lee to ask him if he would take charge of the sinking and chaotic affairs of the Confederacy—as sole dictator. Lee couldn’t see that he was the man for such a post, and the old order was resumed.

Southward in Georgia were good rations for Lee and his army—grain and meat lacking transport. The railroads in the South, with no replacements during the war, were rusting and shattered. Forges, mills, machine shops, what few the South had, were almost out of commission. The blockade was letting few new materials in. The extortions of salt speculators had forced the Richmond Government to take over saltworks and issue rations. Meat, sugar, drugs, medicines, wool, coffee, of these in many homes they learned how to do with little, to do without entirely, or to use substitutes. On every doorsill of the South were shadows and imprints of a war going on, with none of the flare and gaiety that marked its beginning.

Unfailing and undying devotion to the cause there was, perhaps most notable among women. A proposal that all Southern women cut off their hair for sale in Europe, to bring $40,000,000 for the cause, would have been carried out if practical. In plenty of instances they denied themselves meat, coffee, wines, blankets, sending these to the army and to hospitals.

As with each year of the war the South had dwindled in man power, in money and economic resources, in commerce and industry, in the comforts or necessities of life, the North had gained in each of these points. In steel, oil, railroads, munitions, textiles, and other industries, scores of large fortunes were already made, many others on their way.

Such were backgrounds in late ’64 for the dramatic military performances of Sherman and Thomas and their armies in the Central and Deep South. For the first time during the war, observers in America and Europe hung breathless and wondering over the audacity and fate of a general and an army who vanished. To his wife the head of this adventure wrote that he would come out of it reputed a great general or just plain crazy. Sherman had not seen the newborn baby who had arrived to them in June. The baby would die while he was gone, while millions were wondering where he was, and he would accept this as war.

“If you can whip Lee,” Sherman wrote to Grant as between family men, in September, “and I can march to the Atlantic, I think Uncle Abe will give us twenty days’ leave of absence to see the young folks.” This he was writing in Georgia, where he had taken Atlanta. Near by was Hood’s army, which Jefferson Davis was saying had every advantage of being on home ground, so that it would yet cut Sherman’s communications and destroy Sherman. To Grant, Sherman offered his plan. He would divide his army, give Thomas 60,000 with which to take care of Hood’s 41,000, and then himself start on a thousand-mile march which was to end by joining Grant in Virginia, pausing at Savannah-by-the-Sea. “I can make the march and make Georgia howl!”

Hood was maneuvering to draw Sherman out of Georgia, Sherman saying, “If Hood will only go North, I will furnish him with rations for the trip.” Long ago everyone in authority knew Sherman’s theory was to punish and destroy in the South till its people were sick of war and willing and anxious for peace. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” Down where he was he would not consider defensive warfare. “Instead of guessing what Hood means to do he would have to guess at my plans. The difference in war is full twenty-five per cent.” Thousands of people abroad and in the South would reason, wrote Sherman, “If the North can march an army right through the South it is proof positive that the North can prevail in this contest.”

What Sherman was proposing sounded as peculiar and as touched with fantasy as Grant’s plan a year and a half back for taking Vicksburg. Grant had every faith in Sherman. And by instinct Grant favored this latest hope of Sherman. Grant at this point did what Lincoln so often did. He raised objections almost as though to reassure both himself and Sherman that they were headed right and not moving too fast. He mentioned to Sherman his doubt whether Sherman could get along without a seacoast base prepared for him. He added his doubt about leaving Thomas with too few men to make sure of beating Hood. Sherman replied he was sure he could strike into Georgia without a seacoast base and was also sure that Thomas, his old classmate at West Point, whom he knew well as a slow but safe fighter, would take care of Hood.

On October 11 Grant had not yet told Sherman he could go, and good luck to him. In fact on October 11 Grant sent to Lincoln by wire a statement of reasons for disapproving of Sherman’s plan. Then the next day Grant changed front, wired Sherman, “On reflection, I think better of your proposition. It would be better to go south than to be forced to come north.” He would have Sherman “clean the country of railroad tracks and supplies . . . move every wagon, horse, mule, and hoof of stock,” arming the Negroes and giving them “such organization as you can.”

Meantime came word to Grant from Lincoln. He agreed with Grant’s reasons for not yet letting Sherman head south to the sea. A telegram from Stanton read: “The President feels much solicitude in respect to General Sherman’s proposed movement and hopes that it will be maturely considered. The objections stated in your telegram of last night impressed him with much force, and a misstep by General Sherman might be fatal to his army.”

Then Grant again exchanged telegrams with Sherman about destroying Hood before marching across Georgia. Both their minds seemed to be playing around the idea that Hood wanted to decoy Sherman’s army out of Georgia northward. And the strategy of both Grant and Sherman more often ran to finding the one thing the enemy didn’t want you to do and then doing that very thing. Grant agreed with Sherman. “I say then, go on, as you propose.”

Grant now wired Lincoln: “Sherman’s proposition is the best that can be adopted. . . . Such an army as Sherman has, and with such a commander, is hard to corner or capture.” This seemed to be the day of an acid test for Lincoln on the matter of whether he would get behind his two best proven generals. Within three hours after Grant’s telegram arrived, Stanton telegraphed Sherman complete approval. “Whatever results, you have the confidence and support of the Government.” Halleck added that “the authorities are willing,” serving Sherman notice that at Savannah a fleet would be waiting for him with supplies.

Grant trusted Sherman completely, it seemed, except for a day or two of wavering on the point of Sherman’s faith that Thomas could take care of Hood. In the end Grant decided he would accept Sherman’s judgment of what Thomas could do. And Lincoln had thrown himself into complete trust of Grant and Sherman. This trio of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman now worked in a co-operation as smooth as that which had long existed between Lee and Davis.

Grant’s decision in this was one Sherman had in mind later when he said, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.” Both of them had practiced and wrought out a technic. Their calculations partook of arithmetic and intuitive cunning learned in hard trials. Sherman had found what he could do in enemy territory. Grant trusted Sherman’s faith in his own mobility.

In the advance on Atlanta one backwoods woman spoke to a Union officer of Sherman’s capacity to have his army disappear and reappear. “You-uns don’t fight we-uns fair. When Johnston crossed the High Tower he made a line and wanted you all to come square at him at Atlanta; but instead of that you-uns went away off to Dallas, and we had to leave and make a line for you there. But there again you all wouldn’t fight fair, for when our line was made afront of yours, Captain Hooker, with his big regiment, came round and pitched into we-uns’ eend. No Gineral can fight such unfair ways as that.” This ran counter to Jefferson Davis’s prediction that Atlanta would be to Sherman what Moscow was to Napoleon. As a forecaster Davis was losing reputation. Atlanta was burned, not as much as Moscow, but Sherman ordered the torch put to it.

Sherman had not intended to burn as much of Atlanta as did burn. His chief engineer under orders wrecked all railroads in and about Atlanta, heated the rails red-hot and twisted them around trees. Then smokestacks were pulled down, furnace arches broken, steam machinery smashed, holes punched in all boilers, all devices of industrial production sabotaged out of possible use. Battering crews knocked down walls and then put the torch to wrecks of what had been passenger depots, freight sheds, roundhouses, machine shops, mills, factories, a tannery, a laboratory, an oil refinery, theatres, and all hotels but one. Before this work had begun, firebugs had set in flame a score of buildings, General Slocum offering a reward of $500 for the detection of any soldier involved. Public dwellings and churches were spared, and it was not in Sherman’s plans to burn the business sections of the city. According to his chief engineer, “lawless persons” without authority had crept through back alleys and laid in ashes stores and shops. Eighteen hundred Atlanta buildings went up in smoke.

 

Railroad depot, Atlanta, Georgia, 1864

 

Sherman rode into the city with an aide on November 15 near sunset. Roses still bloomed in a few gardens of fine houses and Atlanta was a quiet city, not soothed but calm with a hint of heavy fate. The somber red-haired Man on Horseback was about to say, and did say later, “Pierce the shell of the Confederacy and it’s all hollow inside.”

The night held little quiet as an engineer corps fired more fallen buildings, as flames spread to a wrecked arsenal and shell explosions rattled the windows of hundreds of homes where no sleepers lay to be awakened. A fire department of soldiers struggled several hours of the night, managing to hold the fire mainly to the downtown and industrial districts, as intended. When Sherman rode out of the city at seven the next morning, a third, perhaps more, of Atlanta lay in ashes.

Toward the east and southward, toward Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean, toward a path that was to twist upward in the Carolinas, Sherman turned his horse. He knew this country. He had crossed many parts of it and lived in it several years of the 1840’s. The ways of its people had been under his eye in part when he was superintendent of the Louisiana State Military Academy. No stranger seeing novelties was he now. So the Macon Telegraph called him Judas Iscariot, a betrayer, a creature of depravity, a demon “of a thousand fiends.”

Toward the east by the Decatur road Sherman paused on a hill and took a last look at smoking Atlanta. On the horizons around him a bright sun slanted down on the shining rifles of 55,000 picked men, veterans of proved capacity for action, for marching, for legwork, for many disease immunities, survivors of hard campaigns. Each man carried forty rounds of cartridges, and in wagons were enough more to make two hundred rounds per man. The sun slanted too on sixty-five cannon, each drawn by four teams of horses. Six-mule wagons, two thousand five hundred of them, hauled supplies and forage. And six hundred ambulances, two horses to each, were prepared for battle service.

Between Sherman and his friend Grant at Richmond lay a thousand miles of cities and towns, lands, swamps, and rivers, alive with a bitterly hostile people hating with a deepening despair. Behind now was smoldering Atlanta and its black smoke and its deathly stillness of ruin. Around him were glistening gun barrels of his 14th Corps, cheery and swinging boys and men, singing and joking about the thousand miles to Richmond. A band struck up the John Brown song. Men sang “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” And to Sherman’s ears as he rode along came from more than one soldier something like “Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.” There at Richmond, as Sherman read their feeling, “there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed, and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.” Among men and officers Sherman saw a “devil-may-care” feeling that made him feel his full responsibility, “for success would be accepted as a matter of course, whereas, should we fail, this ‘march’ would be adjudged the wild adventure of a crazy fool.”

Heading the Army of the Tennessee, forming the right wing, was the one-armed O. O. Howard with two corps, one commanded by General P. J. Osterhaus, the other by General Frank P. Blair. Heading the Army of the Cumberland, forming the left wing, was the cool and tested General H. W. Slocum, with two corps led by General J. C. Davis and General A. S. Williams.

This army had 218 regiments, all but 33 from Western States. They would be heard from—sometime. The word of Sherman to Grant, to the War Department and the President, was that communications were cut off from central Georgia and his next message he hoped to send from somewhere on the Atlantic Coast.

In the Eastern regiments was noticeable more antislavery sentiment than among the Western. The emancipation idea had less motivating force among the Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky troops, for instance. Striding over Georgia they were Unionists, not aliens nor invaders; they held they were fighting enemies who sought to take away their Mississippi River, their uninterrupted transcontinental railways, their interstate commerce and peace.

Starting on this November 15, marching in four columns sweeping a path twenty to forty or more miles wide, this army began a systematic campaign of destruction. “The State of Georgia alone,” Jefferson Davis had said in a recent speech in Augusta, “produces food enough not only for her own people and the army within but feeds too the Army of Virginia.” On this storehouse and granary of the Confederacy worked the destroyers. What the army could not eat or carry away it burned, spoiled, ruined.

Language and imagery failed to tell the terror that smote this region and ran shuddering through all other yet remaining vitals of the Confederate States of America. War! And the desolation and fallen pride and hunger and deathly quiet lacking majesty because of the smoldering foul smoke and the clean air pungent with the rot and stink of conquest.

Now they had their war, was Sherman’s thought, the war they had asked for. Until now the Border States had taken the punishment. Now it had come to the doorsills of the Deep South. Now sometimes you couldn’t see the roses and the magnolia trees for the depot and warehouse smoke, for the dust of marching columns and rumbling wagons. Until now hereabouts the war had been fairly polite and far off. Here was reality.

An argument began. It was to last long. Was Sherman a modern impersonation of Attila the Hun, a manner of sadist, a wanton and a monster who took pleasure in seeing an enemy people suffer? Or was he a soldier doing a necessary job, a kindhearted family man who wanted to end the war and saw no other way of ending it than by the tactics he was using? Both sides made out a case. The word in military lingo for the work of Sherman’s looters and plunderers was “pillage.” When Sherman’s men in Georgia drove off the livestock of a farmer without paying the farmer for it—as McClellan’s men always did in Virginia and as Lee’s men always did (with Confederate money) in Pennsylvania—it was pillage. “In the beginning [of the war],” wrote Sherman, “I, too, had the old West Point notion that pillage was a capital crime, and punished it by shooting, but the Rebels wanted us to detach a division here, a brigade there, to protect their families and property while they were fighting. . . . This was a one-sided game of war, and many of us . . . kind-hearted, fair, just and manly . . . ceased to quarrel with our own men about such minor things, and went in to subdue the enemy, leaving minor depredations to be charged up to the account of the rebels who had forced us into the war, and who deserved all they got and more.”

His conscience worried Sherman less than his sense of timing. He and Grant would join their armies some day, if their timing was right. Then the war would end. From Richmond to the farthest southwest corner of Texas, “all over the grand theater of war,” Sherman wanted “simultaneous action.” This lesson had been learned at cost and must be applied. “We saw the beauty of time at Chattanooga and there is no reason why the same harmony of action should not pervade a continent.” The man spoke in art lingo and was in some ratings a military artist. He traveled light. The saddlebags which his orderly carried held, as he enumerated the articles, “a change of underclothing, my maps, a flask of whiskey, and a bunch of cigars.” He could live as plainly as rank-and-file soldiers; they had seen him sleep in his blanket on cold ground. He watched over details till midnight and past, was out early in the morning, made up lost sleep sometimes with ten- and fifteen-minute naps on the ground during the day. When his troops had orders to do things that at first seemed impossible they said, “Well, he can’t make a mistake.”

Of the railroad-wrecking, wrote Sherman, “I gave it my personal attention.” Bonfires were made of crossties, the iron rails laid on and when red-hot carried to telegraph poles or trees and twisted around to make what were nicknamed “Sherman hairpins.” Also they were called “Lincoln gimlets.” Or again they were “Jeff Davis neckties.” A month of this and 265 miles of railway were unbuilt.

Instead of the fifteen miles a day to which Sherman had accustomed them, the troops on some days saw they were making ten. This gave them extra time to forage, to make trips aside and ahead off the line of march, to collect corn, molasses, meal, bacon, sweet potatoes, and other foodstuffs. Each brigade commander had authority to detail a forage company, usually about 50 men headed by one or two commissioned officers. Before daylight this party would leave, knowing where to rejoin their command on the march later in the day. On foot five or six miles from the brigade route, they visited every plantation and farm within range. On a farm wagon or a family carriage they loaded bacon, cornmeal, turkeys, ducks, chickens, “everything that could be used as food or forage,” to use Sherman’s words. They regained the main road, usually in advance of their wagon train, and delivered to the brigade commissary the day’s supplies gathered.

Kilpatrick’s cavalry did more than any other unit to earn a bad name for Sherman’s army. They did lay hands on old men and choke them by the throat till the secret hiding-places of coin, silver, or jewelry were divulged. They did put their dirty boots on white bed linen, dance on polished floors to the piano music of howling comrades, smash the piano with gun butts. They did drag feather beds outdoors and scatter the feathers like a small snowstorm. But they were veteran troopers, hard fighters, afraid of no danger nor hardship—and the army believed Sherman tolerated them partly because of his own belief that as tough soldiers for loyal active service they were among the best the earth had ever seen, partly because to set up a military police to watch and discipline his own men would delay when delay might be at heavy cost.

One raw, cold night Sherman found himself in a double-hewed log house, saw a box marked “Howell Cobb,” learned from Negroes he was in the home of a Confederate brigadier general, one-time United States Senator from Georgia, Secretary of the United States Treasury under President Buchanan. “Of course, we confiscated his property, and found it rich in corn, beans, peanuts, and sorghum-molasses.” Sherman sent word to a staff general “to spare nothing,” and that night on the Cobb plantation “huge bonfires consumed the fence-rails, kept our soldiers warm, and the teamsters and men, as well as the slaves, carried off an immense quantity of corn and provisions of all sorts.”

Arriving the next day at the State capital, Milledgeville, they found Governor Joseph Brown, the State officials, and the members of the legislature gone, the Governor’s mansion stripped of carpets, curtains, furniture, food, these latter shipped away on railroad tracks soon wrecked by the Union troops. Here Federal troops used stacks of Confederate paper money for a breakfast fire. Here Federal officers held a mock session in the State legislative chamber, repealed the Ordinance of Secession, voted the State back into the Union. Here were late newspapers from over the South, one having an appeal from General Beauregard to the people of Georgia to arise, obstruct, be confident, be resolute, and “Sherman’s army will soon starve in your midst.” And while Sherman in Milledgeville read this and other items, thousands of bales of cotton got the torch, many cotton gins and presses were wrecked, and as Sherman reported, “I burned the railroad buildings and the arsenals; the state-house and Governor’s Mansion I left unharmed.”

The marching army moved on, no pauses, no days of rest, feeding on the fat of the land with a more savory bill of fare than any army during the war thus far. “It was gravy every day.” Juicy steaks, pork chops, fried chicken, ham and eggs, yams rolled in Indian meal, sorghum syrup—at moments the war was a picnic and a frolic. Not so of course when the route shifted from east southward toward Savannah, when ground under the feet of one column heaved in explosion and several men were torn by shells and torpedoes, whereupon Sherman ordered Confederate prisoners to be marched ahead. They accommodated and dug up a line of buried torpedoes.

 

The march from Atlanta to the sea

 

Sherman’s army feinted toward the cities of Augusta and Macon, made no real move at them, slipped smoothly past them. No time now for the taking of cities.

Confederate cavalry detached from Hood’s army skirmished a little with Sherman’s advance but undertook no real clash with the Union horse troops under Kilpatrick. The convicts, on Sherman’s approach let loose from the State prison at Milledgeville for military service, were no help to further good order in Georgia that month. Some of them, joined up with other deserters, drifters, bushwhackers, raided here and there for loot.

As the Union army drove deeper south and east across Georgia, a bewilderment allied to panic took hold of the Richmond Government and its ramifications. They were stunned by the audacity of it, shaken by mystification as to whether the army was heading for Savannah or Charleston, or whether in the commander’s headlong march there was any logical plan.

Grant at City Point, Virginia, was saying: “Sherman’s army is now somewhat in the condition of a ground-mole when he disappears under a lawn. You can here and there trace his track, but you are not quite certain where he will come out till you see his head.”

An army for thirty-two days to the outside world “lost sight of,” as Sherman phrased it, now had behind it three hundred miles of naked smokestacks, burned culverts, shattered trestleworks, wailing humanity. Of the railroads every rail was twisted beyond use, every tie, bridge, tank, woodshed, and depot building burned. Thirty miles ran the devastation on either side of the line from Atlanta, estimated Sherman. Kilpatrick’s 5,000 horsemen had ravaged beyond the reach of foot troops. For the economy of powder they had sabered hogs, knocked horses between the ears with axes, killing more than a hundred horses on one plantation with a fine mansion and shooting every bloodhound, mastiff, or other dog that looked as though it could track runaway Negroes in swamps and forest. Over many square miles of this area now was left not a chicken, not a pig, nor horse nor cow nor sheep, not a smokehouse ham nor side of bacon, not a standing corncrib with a forgotten bushel, not a mule to plow land with, not a piece of railroad track, nor cars nor locomotives nor a bunker of coal. “The destruction could hardly have been worse,” wrote one commentator, “if Atlanta had been a volcano in eruption, and the molten lava had flowed in a stream sixty miles wide and five times as long.” War as a reality, a pervasive stench of conquest, had come to Georgia.

On December 10 General Howard’s right wing stood ten miles from Savannah. To Washington Howard sent a telegram notifying the Government that the march had won through. By scouts overland to Port Royal, South Carolina, and wire relays this good-news message reached Washington the evening of December 14. The next day Halleck passed on to Lincoln Howard’s dispatch: “We have met with perfect success thus far, troops in fine spirit and General Sherman near by.”

Over the North flashed this news. Across streets in town, over roads and fields in the country, went the jubilant cry that Sherman had got to Savannah. From Boston to Council Bluffs and points west there were cheers and prayers of thanks.

On December 13 Sherman with staff officers climbed to the top of a rice mill, looked toward the sea for the fleet, looked toward a forest edge where the 15th Corps was ready to move on Fort McAllister. The fort overlooked a river needed for supply transport between Sherman and the fleet—if the fleet had arrived as planned. For hours Sherman and his aides kept their lookout. Hour on hour slipped away and it was getting near sundown when a smokestack took clearer form, at last could be seen, and later a flag wigwagging the words, “Who are you?”

“General Sherman,” said the rice-mill flag.

“Is Fort McAlister [sic] taken yet?” asked the ship.

“Not yet, but it will be in a minute.”

As though this was a signal, Sherman’s old Shiloh division under General William B. Hazen broke from cover, sharpshooters running out to fling themselves flat on the ground and pick off enemy gunners, the whole line soon charging through a hail of shot, shell, and rifle bullets, rushing the defenses, soon dancing on the parapets of Fort McAllister, waving their regimental flags and shooting their happy muskets up at the sky. “It’s my old division,” cried Sherman. “I knew they’d do it.” To General Slocum he wired: “The fort was carried at 4:30 P.M., the assault lasting but fifteen minutes.”

By the light of a pale moon this December 13 Sherman rode a fast yawl downstream, boarded the Union ship, the Dandelion, and before midnight was writing dispatches to be read five days later by Stanton, Halleck, and Lincoln—and parts of them passed on to a world starving for news and sure fact.

Over two hundred miles of railroad had been “utterly destroyed,” he notified Washington, and now he asked authority to march straight north to Raleigh, North Carolina, giving the intervening country the same operation he had given Georgia, so that Lee must evacuate Richmond. “I regard Savannah as good as gained.” The Georgia damage he estimated at 1100,000,000.

Savannah fell, its garrison of 9,000 under General Hardee moving out and away toward the north on the night of December 20, sensing Sherman’s design for their capture. Union troops moved in. Sherman himself arrived on December 22. Sherman wrote Lincoln a message:

“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.”