Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Not long after he returned to Richmond, Davis reported to the Confederate Congress on the progress of the war. He predicted a new phase of the conflict during which Confederate armies would no longer be tied down defending fixed places like cities, which would free them to maneuver to advantage as Hood’s plan allowed. “There are no vital points on the preservation of which the continued existence of the Confederacy depends,” he told the lawmakers. “There is no military success of the enemy which can accomplish its destruction. Not the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington [, North Carolina;] nor Charleston, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor all combined, can save the enemy from the constant and exhaustive drain of blood and treasure which must continue until he shall discover that no peace is attainable unless based on the recognition of our indefeasible rights.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Captive Audiences

  A web of iron links bound Atlanta to the Atlantic coast. In prewar times these connections brought prosperity and convenience to those fortunate enough to be located along the right-of-way. Since the war began, those railroad routes marked those same fortunate ones as targets, and what was once a source of pride had become cause for much anxiety. The northern leg of this route to the sea consisted of a track belonging to the Georgia Railroad. It linked Atlanta to Augusta, from which point waterways or other rail connections completed the journey. The southern leg represented two operations: the Macon and Western Railroad hooked Atlanta to Macon, from there the Central of Georgia Railroad completed the circuit through to Savannah.

  One of the first stops moving east from Atlanta on the Georgia Railroad was Covington, a gracious village that serviced several nearby plantations. Young Tillie Travis loved her town but despaired over the effect the war was having on it. Because of its proximity to Atlanta, Covington had already endured visits by Union cavalrymen who burned its railroad depot and associated buildings. A number of Covington’s residents had fled since Atlanta’s fall, so many that Travis observed, “Our town looked deserted, indeed.” As September passed through October into November, Travis and the other holdouts had grown used to the almost daily rumors that “the Yankees are coming!” Many of those still in town were in a state of denial because of the constant false alarms. Thinking about those enemy soldiers, Travis noted that “we had almost concluded that they would vex us with their presence no more.”

  A mile and a half from Covington was Oxford, home of one Zora M. Fair, a South Carolina refugee of considerable pluck. Determined to do more for the Confederacy than stoically enduring privations, the young lady stained her skin with walnut juice, frazzled her hair, and went into Atlanta to spy disguised as a Negro girl. Her friends were aghast when they found out about her escapade, but the determined girl returned to set down what she saw and heard in a letter that she sent off to Georgia’s governor.

  Some nine miles east of Covington was the sprawling plantation managed by the widow Burge. Born in Maine as Dolly Sumner Lunt (and a relative of the abolitionist U.S. senator Charles Sumner), Mrs. Burge had followed her sister from Maine to Georgia, taught school, and married a certified Southern gentleman named Thomas Burge. Mr. Burge died in the late 1850s, leaving Dolly with a daughter (Sarah, called “Sadai”) and the responsibility of running the plantation on her own. She proved adept, both in adjusting her New England morality to embrace slavery and in her careful management of the busy enterprise. Already she had witnessed the sad procession of refugees from Atlanta, as well as suffering visits from Yankee raiders who rustled some of her livestock.

  Dolly Burge offered no apologies for keeping slaves. “I can see nothing in the scriptures which forbids it,” she said. Like many thoughtful owners, she eased any pangs of conscience through benevolent stewardship of her charges. “I have never bought or sold slaves and I have tried to make life easy and pleasant to those that have been bequeathed me,” she explained. Her biggest worry was the outcome of this terrible war. “Shall we be a nation or shall we be annihilated?” she wondered.

  Pushing east from Covington, the Georgia Railroad passed through the well-appointed town of Madison, where Emma High lived. The natural beauty of the town was a continuing marvel to her. “The winter was a mild one and there were roses in bloom,” she recalled, “rich and beautiful and in great profusion in many of the flower gardens.” Madison was, by general consensus, one of the most attractive towns in the state, an appearance that offset its more eccentric residents, such as Edmund B. Walker. Walker believed in being prepared, so he purchased a coffin built exactly to his measure, which he stored in his attic. As the years passed and his waistline expanded, Walker was known to make periodic visits to his final resting place to assure himself that he still fit.

  South of the town, in Jasper County, was the Aiken Plantation, run by the owner’s wife while he was away in the army. Frances B. Aiken was the youngest of the twelve children, all of whom helped their mother manage the operation and watch over the slaves. Later in her long life, Frances never forgot how her mother prepared to deal with any invaders. Her plan was not to spite them but to welcome and charm them, pitting Southern hospitality against Northern aggression. Anyone who knew her mother knew that this was no contest at all.

  The Georgia Railroad terminated on the Savannah River at Augusta, one of the Confederacy’s busiest arsenals. The city leaders had been slow to assess potential Yankee threats, so it wasn’t until mid-August that serious work began to erect fortifications around the city. A force of some 500 slaves labored in the summer heat to dig the defensive strong points. The feeling that Georgia’s fate was not being sufficiently considered in far-off Richmond was shared by many. One Augusta newspaper editorial rhetorically asked the Confederate government “whether the State of Georgia is necessary to the achievement of our independence?” By mid-September every available slave had been pressed into the job of protecting Augusta, so many in fact that when the post’s military commander requested a detail to dig some soldier graves, he was told that no extra hands were available.

  The course of the Macon and Western Railroad ran south and then east of Atlanta. The population of Macon, another important location for manufactures and munitions, had swelled with workers and refugees. Among the latter was a family from north Georgia. Rebeca Felton’s husband had moved his dependents here early in 1864 to escape the ravages of the Union army’s campaign against Atlanta, but then the capture of the Gate City had put Macon’s future in doubt. “It was very astounding to remember all these reverses and yet we were constantly told we would certainly succeed,” she recalled in later years, “and we clutched at every item of news that indicated a success.”

  North from Macon about twenty-three miles was Hillsboro, which had already felt the hard hand of war. A column of Union cavalry had paused briefly in the town on a late July raid aimed at freeing Union POWs caged near Macon. Mrs. Tabitha Reese endured the presence of Yankee officers in her parlor, even as their men freely pillaged outside. The whole affair left Mrs. Reese’s nerves frayed with what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” Her daughter, Louise, dreaded the next visitation, which seemed inevitable. “We know what terrible means,” she declared. “‘Terrible as an army with banners.’”

  From Macon, the Central of Georgia Railroad looped eastward toward Savannah. A spur at Gordon connected the state’s capital, Milledgeville, with the circuit. Legislators from around Georgia began trouping toward Milledgeville in late October for the state assembly’s annual session, scheduled to convene on November 3. The elected officials faced a wide range of issues, from finance to state defense. Included on the agenda was a bill to amend the state’s ban on grain-based liquors to allow for the manufacture and consumption of lager beer. Smart money was betting that the bill would pass.

  The legislative session opened with a strident message from Governor Joseph E. Brown, who excoriated the Davis administration for failing to prevent Atlanta’s capture. “But the misfortunes following the misguided judgment of our rulers must not have the eff
ect of relaxing our zeal or chilling our love for the cause,” Brown proclaimed. He dropped something of a bombshell by proposing a convention of states—Southern and Northern—to consider continuing the war. “States can terminate wars by negotiation,” Brown insisted.*

  Behind all the bold words of the governor and the state legislators was the knowledge that if the Yankee army should target Milledgeville, they would all flee. There were others in the town whose sense of duty chained them to this post. One was Dr. R. J. Massey, responsible for “six different wards, something like two hundred sick, wounded and convalescents.” Another was Dr. Thomas F. Green, superintendent of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. His daughter, Anna Maria, was an honor student and a dedicated diarist. Also determined to remain was the Georgia secretary of state, Nathan C. Barnett. Among his responsibilities was the Great Seal of Georgia and all records pertaining to the current legislative session.

  Milledgeville boasted more than its share of impressive houses. One was the Orme house, with its distinctive Doric-columned portico. The mansion’s mistress, Mrs. Richard McAllister Orme, had strong northern roots. Her father, John Adams, was president of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, whose graduates included at least one Union officer in Atlanta. Not far away was the Governor’s Mansion, patterned after a fourteenth-century Italian villa. Its front door opened into a great hall and a rotunda topped with a gilded dome, all illuminated by crystal chandeliers. One of the state’s first families preceding Governor Brown included a cat lover in its ranks, who had a pet entrance cut into one of the house’s fine carved doors.

  The Milledgeville spur threaded northward to terminate at Eatonton, where the war’s demands had put women into the working force at the Eatonton Manufacturing Company, which produced a durable heavy cloth called osnaburg as well as pants for soldiers. Other women had formed a Ladies Aid Society whose squads of knitters were urged on with the battle cry, “a sock a day.” Patriotic pride centered on the 102-foot-high flagpole, whose mastlike look was credited to the retired sea captain who had directed its construction. The captain also raised and lowered the standard each day, carefully handling the emblem that had been hand-sewn by a female resident who had attended the first Confederate Congress just to get the proper specifications.

  The Central of Georgia continued its eastward wandering, passing through the town of Millen, where another spur shunted off the main trunk line, this one making possible one of the Confederacy’s newest and largest prisoner enclosures. Camp Lawton, as it was called, came into being as a way of relieving the overcrowding and suffering at Camp Sumter (also known as Andersonville), south of Atlanta, which had been in operation since late February. With losses reaching toward one hundred a day from disease, starvation, and violence, a decision was made in July to build another prison. A site was found five miles north of Millen blessed with a good supply of fresh water, high ground for guard stations, and easy access to the railroad spur. Construction on Camp Lawton began in late July, and the first Union prisoners reached the stockade in mid-October as Hood’s planned move forced Camp Sumter’s temporary closure.

  Reaction by the POWs to the new, still incomplete facility was mixed. An Ohio artilleryman swore that there was little improvement over Andersonville, while an infantryman from Illinois found the new location to be “much more pleasant” than Camp Sumter. “Disease and starvation together are decimating us daily,” recorded another Federal captive, “and the average deaths are twenty to thirty-five per day.” There were regular visits from Confederate officials anxious to recruit disaffected Yankees into their ranks. These “galvanized Rebels,”* as they were called, were promised better fare and treatment, benefits that a few found irresistible. “Let us not judge them too harshly,” noted a captive who did not sign up, “remembering how sorely they were tempted.” Confederate officials hoped that Camp Lawton was secluded enough to be secure from enemy raiders, even though the nearby railroad marked it clearly on Union maps.

  Farther north along the Millen spur was Waynesboro, near which a visitor would find the Carswell house, known as Bellevue. Mrs. Carswell, the former Sarah Ann Devine, was a New Englander who loved to tend her garden. Her special pride was the rosebush that ran along the side of the house. There is no evidence that Mr. Carswell, a lawyer and judge, ever gave much thought to his wife’s horticultural passion, but in the not very distant future that rosebush would come to mean life itself.

  Seventeen miles outside Savannah, young Jennie Ihly was boarding with her grandparents, who lived near one of the main roads leading into the port city. Writing years later, Jennie described herself then as “a merry hearted girl, little dreaming of the realities of war, for to me it sounded like a fairy tale as I heard it discussed by the people of matured years.” Lying between this household and Savannah was a belt of tidal marshes that had been cultivated for rice and sea island cotton. Working the rice fields was difficult, dangerous labor, and slave mortality was high.

  The Central of Georgia Railroad terminated at Savannah, a town renowned for the public greens that checkerboarded its central district, crowned by the twenty-acre Forsyth Park. Shortly before the war Savannah played host to the English writer William Thackeray, who described it as a “tranquil old city, wide streeted, tree shrouded.” Although the heaviest ground fighting in Georgia was well off to the west, Savannah’s residents had constant reminders of the turbulence just over the horizon. Refugees were a common sight, as were the temporary holding pens that sprang up to accommodate transiting enemy prisoners. To one observer the Yankees, many from Andersonville, were “altogether the most squalid gathering of humanity it has ever been my lot to look upon.”

  Savannah was a once-bustling seaport whose business had been dramatically curtailed by a Federal naval cordon to the occasional bold blockade runner.* Among those hurt by the loss of trade was Octavus Cohen, a merchant and cotton exporter. His twenty-four-year-old daughter, Fanny, would soon be moved by events to step from the shadows of anonymity by keeping a journal of the happenings in her city. Another daughter who would leave a record of this time was Frances Thomas Howard, whose father helped man Savannah’s defenses. A resident who feared the changes that were coming was Caro Lamar, who managed her household in the absence of her husband. She was especially suspicious of one of the family’s slaves, William, who she worried would betray them at the first opportunity.

  William became one of the few named members of a largely invisible community within the territory defined by the three railroads. Something around 150,000 African-Americans lived and labored on the plantations and in the households of the region. Theirs was a society kept in place by coercion and bound together by a diverse range of personal responses to their plight. Some slaves were docile—broken in spirit and resigned to their fate—while others actively fought their status with force and guile. In between these extremes was the majority—bound to the land because of extended family, or force of habit, or anxiety over dramatic change, or even a sense of obligation to their owners.

  Some lived lives of punishment and fear. The slaves working on the Farrar farm, six miles outside Eatonton, endured a hellish existence punctuated with floggings and tortures designed to increase the pain. They reserved a special hatred for the big red hound owned by Farrar’s neighbor that was used to hunt down escaped blacks. A sentiment shared but never spoken out loud was one of vengeance against the damned dog.

  The touchstone for all Georgia slaves was freedom. This desperate longing was something they could never admit or show to the whites who controlled their lives, but which they would not deny among themselves. The social observer and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through Georgia in the years before the Civil War. Talking to a slave, Olmsted related that he had been given to understand from the whites he had met that blacks did not want to be free. “His only answer,” noted Olmsted, “was a short, contemptuous laugh.” According to George Womble, a slave on a plantation near Clinton, a common saying among
the blacks was, “I know that some day we’ll be free and if we die before that time our children will live to see it.”

  The outbreak of the Civil War had greatly weakened the forces controlling slave life in Georgia. While whites often thought of their slaves as childlike, they also feared them. Many of the white men who had managed the black labor force and policed the coercive laws that kept them in their places had been called up for military service, leaving wives, mothers, and elders to maintain the social order. Propaganda replaced brute force as the slaves were told tales of the ill treatment they could expect in Yankee hands. In some cases the stories were embellished to a degree that verged on absurdity. A widow living near Lithonia told her slaves that the Federals “shot, burned and drowned negroes, old and young, drove men into houses and burned them.” Most blacks saw through the subterfuge. Said one, as recorded in dialect by a white Union officer, “Massa hates de Yankees, and he’s no fren’ter we; so we am de Yankee bi’s fren’s.”

  This was the double edge of the slave system. On the one hand it provided a vast pool of unpaid labor to handle the crops or construct fortifications. On the other it represented an elemental force that threatened to burst free at the first provocation. A young boy living near Eatonton had experienced enough about life to recognize the fear. “The whites who were left at home knew it was in the power of the negroes to rise and in one night sweep the strength and substance of the Confederacy from the face of the earth,” remembered future writer Joel Chandler Harris. “Some of the more ignorant whites lived in constant terror.”

  Many slaves were ready for liberation and awaited only the opportunity to manifest itself. By most measures, thirty-five-year-old Willis Bennefield was a privileged servant. He belonged to a doctor with a plantation just outside Waynesboro who used Willis to chauffeur for him on his calls. As a boy Willis had accompanied the doctor’s sons to school and waited for them on the outside steps. “I got way up de alphabet by listening,” he recollected many years later. Among his happier memories of those times was going to church. “We had dances, and prayers, and singing, too,” he stated. “We sang a song, ‘On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand, and cast a wishful eye.’”