For his part, Beauregard spent this day in Tuscumbia, Alabama, engaged in a frustrating effort to glean the plans Hood had for the Army of Tennessee. Ever since he had first met with Hood back on October 9, Beauregard had been trying to work in tandem with the increasingly unpredictable commander of the largest Confederate force in the west. Choosing to believe that Hood was operating with the direct sanction of Jefferson Davis, Beauregard declined to exert any peremptory authority, instead limiting himself to persuasion and suggestions. It seemed, however, that Hood was having none of it.
Beauregard’s particular odyssey with Hood started at their second meeting. It was supposed to be at Blue Pond, northeast of Jacksonville, Alabama, but when Beauregard arrived he learned that Hood’s headquarters were nearly thirty miles farther west. Nettled that Hood hadn’t bothered to inform his immediate superior of the change, Beauregard finally caught up with his principal subordinate on October 21 in Gadsden. It was here that Beauregard learned that Hood was aborting the harassment scheme approved by Jefferson Davis, and was intending instead to invade Tennessee in order to capture Nashville.
Beauregard spent two days closeted with Hood working on the new plan, with special attention to one factor that the army commander seemed predisposed to ignore—logistics. The campaign Hood now proposed to undertake had a remote chance of succeeding, and only if “carried out fearlessly and, above all, judiciously.” In almost the same thought, however, Beauregard also acknowledged that Hood “might not be able to execute it as designed.” Yet despite these serious misgivings, he made no effort to stop the operation from proceeding. It never entered Beauregard’s mind to put his foot down in any manner. Not that Hood made it easy. The next meeting played out like the second, with Beauregard en route to the agreed-upon rendezvous only to discover that Hood and his army were elsewhere. With Sherman keeping his distance, it wasn’t enemy pressure that was causing these abrupt alterations of course, but rather Hood’s own constantly evolving appreciation of the situation.
Their relationship was becoming spiked with petty spites. Deciding to exercise a little authority, Beauregard ordered one of Hood’s corps to assemble in formation on November 12 for what he considered an “informal review.” Hood, after promptly canceling the event, moved his headquarters to the north bank of the Tennessee River, again without informing his superior. Beauregard fumed while his assistant adjutant general combed the army camps, searching for Hood. He persisted in his belief that Hood was operating with the continued approval of Jefferson Davis.
Unknown to the commander of the Division of the West, Davis had just taken Hood to task for not striking at any scattered portion of Sherman’s force or, in military parlance, beating them in detail. Hood answered (directly to Davis) that Sherman had not begun dividing his force (some of it heading north, some south) until after the gap between them had widened so that a sudden blow was not possible. While promising Davis to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself to hurt Sherman, Hood pushed ahead with his developing scheme to invade Tennessee.
In far-off Richmond the topic of the day was the confirmation received that Abraham Lincoln had been reelected for a second term, along with speculation on what impact it would have on the war. The editors of the Richmond Examiner had been poring over the New York papers, which were reporting Sherman’s plans that Federal authorities in Virginia had tried to suppress. The prospect of a march through Georgia, the Examiner decided, was a “big Yankee lie.” It didn’t take a military genius to see that Sherman’s only purpose in burning his Atlanta base was to concentrate against Hood. Even if the New York reports were true, the Examiner continued, a movement across Georgia without a supply base waiting would only “lead him to the Paradise of Fools.”
Sherman, who reached Atlanta during the afternoon, was pleased by all the reports he received—food and forage were well in hand, and Captain Poe was hard at work wrecking legitimate military targets. The engineer’s principal objectives this day were the railroad lines that in better times had pumped commerce into the city like arteries bringing blood. “We burn all stations, towns &c along the line of the R.R. leaving the country desolate,” scribbled an Ohio diarist.
Another diary keeper, one of Captain Poe’s men, wrote, “Today we are at work tearing up track and committing all kinds of destruction, for to[day] we have burnt up 2 large depots and a round house which was large enough to hold 50 or more engines. We also blowed up a stone depot with 700 lbs of powder.” The ingenuity displayed by Captain Poe’s men was impressive. The railroad depot “was a fine building some 80 ft. wide & 200 long with an arched roof with no supports resting on brick side walls in which smaller arched doorways were placed closely together,” remembered a Massachusetts infantryman. “A Battering Ram was improvised out of a heavy iron rail slung by the middle from a high horse. With this a half-a-dozen men knocked away pier after pier while the roof came down a part at a time.” “I saw that magnificent structure the depot fall this morning,” recorded an Indiana soldier, “and the crash was terrible indeed.”
As daylight yielded to evening, much of the official work paused, and the unofficial activities began. A soldier in the ranks of a late-arriving regiment, some eight miles out from the city, could plainly “see the smoke of her burning as from afar.” An Illinois soldier noted, “Tremendous fires in Atlanta to-day.” A Michigan surgeon stood in awe as “the flames mount up to heaven, hissing, crashing & rushing on from one [building] over to another.” To a New Jersey officer the “vast waves and sheets of flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty billows” was a “grand but awful sight.”
A precocious ten-year-old named Carrie Berry, whose father had been allowed to remain in town because he was doing Union Army work, wrote in her diary: “They came burning Atlanta to day. We all dread it because they say that they will burn the last house before they stop. We will dread it.”
The experience of one Fourteenth Corps brigade marching into Atlanta represented William Tecumseh Sherman’s worst nightmare. Led by a guide unfamiliar with the roads, the unit was sent in the wrong direction at an intersection. “We already had marched twenty miles when we reached the river and after marching two miles down the river an aid[e] from division headquarters came up and ordered our brigade back,” remembered one footsore Minnesota soldier. “Wagons crossing delayed us so that it was eight o’clock before we reached our stopping place. The colonel was mad and the boys were mad…. When one thing goes wrong everything seems perverse, and we were delayed by numberless little circumstances.” Were this brigade’s experiences to become the norm in the days ahead, the danger to the integrity of the columns would be great. Other than lots of weary men, no damage was done in this case, save to the ego of the guide who erred. “I think that had the officer who led us astray heard all the remarks made about him, he would not have felt highly flattered,” said the soldier. Added an Ohio man in the same brigade, “there was swearing enough to make the air blue.”
In the hundreds of camps around Atlanta, Union soldiers completed their own preparations, mental and otherwise. This meant a thorough housecleaning in the bivouac of the 1st Battery, Minnesota Light Artillery, whose members had just learned that no personal baggage would be allowed on the cannon limbers. One gunner and his pal “overhauled our knapsacks & destroyed several shirts, pair of pantaloons & other clothing, besides both our journals.” The infantry had less to discard and more time to ponder. Thinking how cut off they now were from the North, an Illinois soldier recorded “a feeling of loneliness beyond anything we have yet experienced.” Another Illinois man, on guard duty this evening, marveled at the power represented by all the bivouac fires. He thought that “the earth seems like another firmament decorated with twinkling stars but it is only a Yankee camp.”
Sherman set up his headquarters in the house owned by John Neal,* where he got a taste of Captain Poe’s work when some fragments “came uncomfortably near” from a secret ammunition cache
that exploded in a nearby burning building. All of his forces save the Fourteenth Corps were scheduled to start out tomorrow. That meant there were timetables to check, wagon loads to secure, a cattle herd to organize, and orders to confirm. Already the vast machine that was Sherman’s operation was in motion as scouting parties slipped out of town to reconnoiter the first day’s routes. No one expected any serious opposition on day one, but a prudent commander took no chances. Flurries of orders issued from the various Union headquarters as final operational decisions were announced.
The Twentieth Corps, representing half of the Left Wing, would march eastward from Atlanta following the Decatur Road. Major General Henry W. Slocum, in charge of the wing, would ride with this corps. The Left Wing’s other component, the late-arriving Fourteenth Corps, would spend November 15 in Atlanta, completing its resupply. The commander of the Twentieth Corps, Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams, was especially concerned about maintaining the pace, telling his family in his last letter to them that “the prospect of bad roads is not amusing.” Williams’s instructions to his pioneer detachments were especially detailed. He worried too about discipline on the march. “Straggling and pillaging must be stopped by the most prompt measures,” read his orders, “the safety of the corps depends upon this.”
Both Right Wing corps would be marching on November 15—the Fifteenth Corps under Major General Peter J. Osterhaus† and the Seventeenth led by Major General Frank P. Blair Jr. Major General Oliver O. Howard, commanding the wing, fretted about the ammunition supply, which could not be replenished en route. His told his corps commanders that “the greatest possible economy must be observed in its use.” Major General Osterhaus did not want his corps to thin out while marching and reminded the leading division not to move too fast. Frank Blair warned that “the flanks of the army will be infested to a greater or less extent with bands of guerrillas, whose principal object will be to pick up stragglers.” His remedy was to institute the “most rigid measures” to keep the men in ranks.
To Kilpatrick’s cavalry Sherman gave the job of clearing the way and screening Howard’s right flank. For all his bravado and bluster, Kilpatrick was nervous about the upcoming operation. “Was there no enemy to oppose us?” he asked. “Yes, yes! sufficient, if concentrated in our front, to have disputed the passage of every river and delayed us days and days, which of itself would have been fatal.” To a soldier-correspondent who wrote from the ranks of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry, the fires and destruction he witnessed on the ride into Atlanta represented the “signal that a great and hazardous move was about to be made.” A trooper in the 9th Ohio Cavalry expected no easy time, since he understood that the “position of the cavalry…was to be at all times between the infantry and the enemy.”
Throughout the “selling” of this campaign to Grant, Halleck (and through him to Lincoln), and even Thomas, Sherman had held out the prospect of his launching damaging strikes at Macon and Augusta, places containing significant strategic targets. Now, as he finalized his orders for the first phase of the operation, Sherman removed Macon from the list. His orders to General Howard, whose line of march would bring him within range of the munitions and war manufacturing center, specified a route “via McDonough and Monticello, to Gordon,” bypassing Macon.
Sherman gave his reasons well after the fact. Posing a threat to Macon was more advantageous than actually assaulting its fortifications, since the enemy would have to assign scant resources to its defense, leaving the pathways north of it uncontested. This was critical, since Sherman’s biggest concern was any potential “opposition at these great rivers which crossed our path, where a few thousand men well handled could have delayed us for weeks and swelled the dangers and difficulties.” Also, capturing Macon could take days, and Sherman knew that he “could not then afford to lie in siege…even for a week, because the necessity for food compelled us to move through new fields daily.” So Macon was to be spared, though Sherman planned to give every indication of intending otherwise.
Six days earlier he had issued a statement to his men, telling them just about all he wanted them to know regarding the upcoming operation. It circulated through the various regimental camps where some heard it read for the first time today:
The general commanding deems it proper at this time to inform the officers and men of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Twentieth Corps, that he has organized them into an army for a special purpose, well known to the War Department and to General Grant. It is sufficient for you to know that it involves a departure from our present base, and a long and difficult march to a new one. All the chances of war have been considered and provided for, as far as human sagacity can. All he asks of you is to maintain that discipline, patience, and courage, which have characterized you in the past; and he hopes, through you, to strike a blow at our enemy that will have a material effect in producing what we all so much desire, his complete overthrow. Of all things, the most important is, that the men, during marches and in camp, keep their places and do not scatter about as stragglers or foragers, to be picked up by a hostile people in detail. It is also of the utmost importance that our wagons should not be loaded with any thing but provisions and ammunition. All surplus servants, non-combatants, and refugees, should now go to the rear, and none should be encouraged to encumber us on the march. At some future time we will be able to provide for the poor whites and blacks who seek to escape the bondage under which they are now suffering. With these few simple cautions, he hopes to lead you to achievements equal in importance to those of the past.
PART TWO
Atlanta to Milledgeville
NOVEMBER 15–24
CHAPTER 6
“Dies Irae Filled the Air”
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1864
Midnight–Noon
Left Wing
The camps of the Twentieth Corps began stirring well before sunrise, some as early as 3:00 A.M. Starting around 5:00 A.M., corps officers began the complicated task of herding their roughly 13,700 men into marching order along the Decatur Road. A New Jersey quartermaster marveled at the process of “waiting and working to get order out of chaos, organizing and arranging the confused array of troops, trains, artillery, ambulances and other impedimenta that had there massed.”
A gunner in one of the four batteries accompanying the corps encountered a group of happy soldiers. “They had just been paid off and were playing chuckaluck,” he remembered. The cannoneers were grumpy, for some had just learned that they could not store their knapsacks on the artillery wagons but would have to carry them. The “boys make up faces about it,” commented the gunner. The mood was more solemn in the ranks of the First Brigade, Second Division. A soldier in the 5th Ohio, injured on November 14, died this morning. There was only time for an abbreviated graveside service and a hasty burial on the divisional campgrounds.
Tuesday, November 15, 1864
The First Division began marching around 7:00 A.M. The order for today’s movement was the First followed by the Second and Third. Their route took them through an area that had been the scene of intense fighting in July. “Here we saw low breastworks that were made while the battle was raging, broken trees, empty ammunition boxes, parts of soldiers’ equipment, canteens, and haversacks scattered in all directions,” recalled a New York soldier.
The old battlefield also represented a good vantage point for viewing Atlanta. A New York infantryman was one of many this day who paused here and turned his gaze toward the Gate City. “I beheld a column of black smoke ascending to the sky,” he wrote. “Then another column of smoke arose, and another, and another, until it seemed that they all merged together and the whole city was in flames.” For the New Jersey quartermaster it was a “fearful sight.” The heavy smoke hid most of what was happening from view, “but the crackling of the flames and crack of falling walls and buildings told the worst was going on.” Recollected an Indiana boy, “as we left I had to think about Sodom and Gomorrah.”
The news
paperman present for the New York Herald noted that the three divisions of the Twentieth Corps, “with a [supply] train of more than six hundred wagons,” occupied “when stretched out on the march, nearly eight miles of road.” While the advance started out at about 7:00 A.M., the trailing division and the wagons would not begin their march until nearly noon.
Atlanta
With the logistical tails of the two wings still in the process of leaving town and an entire army corps arriving, Atlanta was heavily congested this morning. A Fourteenth Corps staff officer who rode in at 9:00 A.M. “found every street so crowded with troops and wagons that it was almost impossible to get along on horseback.” Somehow Captain Poe and his detachments continued their work amidst the bustle and hurry. The first part of today’s program involved finishing the job already begun “battering down the walls, throwing down smokestacks, breaking up furnace arches, knocking steam machinery to pieces and punching all boilers full of holes.” It was the second part of the program that most worried Poe, when fire would be set to the heaps of debris left after the wrecking was completed. The chief engineer knew from experience that once the soldiers saw his men setting controlled blazes, there would be little to stop them from undertaking their own uncontrolled retribution.
Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea Page 9