Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Matters were already out of hand in places. Near the camp of the 58th Indiana, a regiment specializing in bridge building, pontoon drills were interrupted by the torching of a nearby cluster of wood-frame hospitals. According to the regimental chaplain, “First, there was a hammering and banging within, as the kindling was being prepared; and soon flames began to rise from the numerous small buildings. The lumber used in the construction of the houses was pine, hence the flames spread rapidly.” Instead of indignation or anger, the good chaplain felt only detached resignation. “A notion has possessed the army that Atlanta is to be burned, but I suppose the wish is father to the thought.”

  Destruction was also on William Tecumseh Sherman’s mind this morning, though he was contemplating the kinds justified by the rules of war. His orders to Poe had been explicit; the only structures in Atlanta liable for destruction were those “which could be converted to hostile uses.” Poring over his maps this morning, Sherman realized that the route planned for the Left Wing bypassed a pair of important bridges at the Oconee River. That would not do. Off to Major General Henry Slocum went instructions to detach a sufficient force to wreck them once he reached the town of Madison.

  Perhaps responding to the dour mask Major Hitchcock had sported since they had departed from Marietta, Sherman took pains at breakfast to explain why Atlanta was paying such a terrible price. By his reckoning, the great amount of munitions and material that was either produced in the city or shipped from it made Atlanta second only to Richmond as a strategic target. “We have been fighting Atlanta all the time, in the past: have been capturing guns, wagons, etc., etc., marked ‘Atlanta’ and made here, all the time: and now since they have been doing so much to destroy us and our Government we have to destroy them, at least enough to prevent any more of that,” Sherman said.

  Right Wing

  The powerful Right Wing—consisting of the approximately 15,900-man Fifteenth Corps, the 11,700-strong Seventeenth Corps, and some 5,100 cavalry—roused early to begin moving at daylight. The Fifteenth Corps marched in sequential order; the First Division followed by the Second and the Third.* The Seventeenth Corps advanced Third, Fourth, First.† Since the Confederates had been always most concerned about a quick Yankee thrust toward Macon, they had posted much of their available cavalry and militia to meet just such a contingency. So, unlike the Left Wing, which passed without incident through a widely dispersed line of enemy scouts this day, the soldiers and troopers of the Right Wing had people shooting at them almost immediately.

  Pressing rapidly southward in conjunction with the right flank of the Fifteenth Corps, Kilpatrick’s cavalry overran a Confederate outpost at East Point even before the enemy realized what was happening. A young rider in the 10th Ohio Cavalry recorded it as an “Exciting time,” boasting that they “ran into the Rebel Pickets, drove them into their camp, took their camp, Equipage, several prisoners and part of their wagon train.” The officer commanding the brigade later counted eight POWs captured.

  Spirits were generally high among the foot soldiers. “We were cheery and marching quite rapidly,” said an Ohio infantryman in the Fifteenth Corps, “and the boys struck up the anthem, John Brown’s soul goes marching on, and other National airs.” “Started early this morning for the Southern coast, somewhere, and we don’t care, so long as Sherman is leading us,” exulted an Iowan in the Seventeenth Corps. Rather than Sherman, a Missouri man put his reliance “on our strength and the Providence of God.”

  There were problems small and large. In the ranks of the 31st Iowa the worry was over soldier James Martin, who had broken out with a fever soon after the movement got under way and who was clearly showing signs of the measles. The regiment’s options were to leave him to the tender mercies of the Southerners or carry him along. The ailing soldier was put into a wagon as the column tramped southward.* In the Seventeenth Corps Brigadier General Manning F. Force was fuming. Yesterday his division commander had insisted on issuing whiskey to the soldiers. Today there were several so inebriated in one company that they could not stay in ranks. Force, determined to make an example of the unit commander, hastily composed an order reprimanding him to be read at evening camp.

  Bigger problems confronted the commanders of the trailing divisions. Although the head of each corps was marching well, delays farther back along the line were considerably slowing down the supply vehicles. “It took some time for this large body of troops to move out with its great wagon train,” declared a brigadier in the Fifteenth Corps. “We…made slow progress,” added a Minnesota soldier, “ten minutes’ march and twenty minutes’ standstill, weight on left leg and head under wing.” In an effort to get things moving, a company of the 1st Missouri Engineers was taken off road repair duties and assigned to assist the wagon teams.

  It was late in the morning when the leading Fifteenth Corps elements encountered and dispersed a Confederate outpost near an unapologetically named station stop on the Macon and Western Railroad. “We found some Rebel pickets at Rough and Ready, who fled precipitately on the approach of our advance,” crowed a soldier in the 100th Indiana. Frantic outriders carried word of the Yankee progress to one of the most experienced Confederate units posted in the area.

  Organized throughout Kentucky in the first flush of Southern nationhood in 1861, the Rebel brigade from the Bluegrass State had seen action in some of the west’s fiercest battles, including those of the Atlanta Campaign. Once it became clear that the unbreakable Federal grip on their home state meant they could not go home, men took to calling these Kentucky soldiers the “Orphan” Brigade. In September the Kentucky infantrymen were pulled out of the Army of Tennessee, put on horses largely confiscated from captured Federal raiders, and appended as “mounted infantry” to the defensive area south of Atlanta.

  For acting major John Weller, the reassignment had provided a welcome interlude after numbingly endless periods of marching and fighting. As an added benefit, Weller had gotten to know the Stubbs family, whose house fell within his defensive zone. The young lady of the house was such a special attraction that each day Weller tried to time his inspection tours to arrive at the Stubbses’ place around 10:00 A.M. Then, “if she was in good voice,” Miss Stubbs “would sing the sweet songs of the day and chat so entertainingly, that, somehow, dinner would be announced before I was aware of the flight of time.” Today, Weller had just assured the young lady’s worried father that there would be plenty of warning should the Yankees move out of Atlanta when he was called to the front gate, where one of his troopers was waiting. “Cap.,” the courier said excitedly, “they are fighting at headquarters!” With a hasty good-bye to the Stubbs family, Weller rode off toward Atlanta.

  Noon–Midnight

  If word of Sherman’s march reached the Georgia capital of Milledgeville this day, there was nothing on the state legislative docket to show it. A reporter present for the Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel filed this report:

  The session is drawing its slow length along.

  There is a tiresome amount of debate in the House. Petty issues often consume hours in running discussion, and it is a little notable that some of the poorest speakers are those who are oftenest on the floor.

  The most predominant feature of the session is the introduction of bills to change the lines between certain counties. These bills are so numerous and so apparently trifling, as to be generally regarded a nuisance and encumbrance to the calendar. A man becomes dissatisfied with some action of his county, or with the rate of local tax, and runs to the Legislature to be cut off into another county. The practice consumes much time. Several bills for changing lines were passed to day, none of which would interest your readers.

  The authorities in charge of the Confederate prison compound Camp Lawton, outside Millen, began the process of thinning out its population. According to an Illinois POW, “Nearly one thousand sick and wounded leave here to-day for Savannah to be exchanged.” For those left behind, conditions remained grim. An Ohio prisoner drafted a
s a butcher recalled that he and his comrades “slaughtered thirty-five head of cattle per day; the animals were small and very lean, averaging about 350 pounds each; this, after deducting rations for the officers and guards, left about one-fourth of a pound per man, per diem, including the bone.”

  Left Wing

  The region through which the Twentieth Corps marched had already been well scoured during Atlanta’s two-month occupation, so prospects for grub were slim. “We have found but little forage today as the country has been foraged over before,” grumbled a Wisconsin soldier. The village of Decatur barely registered with most of the Yankee boys, though it lay square in their path. A Connecticut soldier thought it “a small and insignificant place.” A New Jersey quartermaster who paused there for dinner had time for a more complete survey. Decatur, he noted in his journal, had “its Court House, a dilapidated enclosure in the square where the marketing is done, with the usual amount of stores and taverns around the square, and also a church and some 40 or 50 other buildings.”*

  The stop-and-go slogging pace meant idleness for portions of the Twentieth Corps column, which in turn meant time for mischief. “As our advances was slow and the night very damp, several deserted houses along our route were burned,” wrote an Illinois soldier. The officer commanding the 33rd Indiana noted that after his unit passed through Decatur at dusk, “many of the buildings were wrapped in flames.” The Illinoisan, who put the number at “several,” opined that the incendiarism ended when “guards were stationed through the town.” Further down the road, some unoccupied outbuildings of a small farm fell victim to vandals. Recalled a Connecticut soldier, “I remember one very pretty girl weeping with her family over the ruins of their stable, expressing a wish ‘that you’uns were millions of miles away.’”

  The head of the Twentieth Corps column went into camp late in the afternoon near an impressive natural landmark known as Stone Mountain. A very awed Ohio boy described it as “a vast body of granite rock devoid of vegetation which rises abruptly & majestically from a large plain to a towering height.”† “Standing thus isolated and rising to such a height, it forms a very striking feature in the landscape,” seconded a New Yorker. Another from the Empire State added that the sight excited the “surprise and wonder of our boys whose homes were in the shadows of the Adirondacks; when home, they looked at mountains every day but they never saw a mountain like this.”

  The Left Wing covered some thirteen to fifteen miles today. Orders for the next day projected the advance even deeper into Georgia, but as the soldiers bedded down for the night, most eyes were oriented toward Atlanta. An Illinoisan observed that “the western sky was lighted up with a more brilliant glow than that imparted by the sun’s declining rays; it was the light of burning buildings.” “I suppose ‘Atlanta’ is one of the things that were but is not,” quipped an Ohio soldier. The thoughts of an Indiana officer were apocalyptic. “Dies irae, Dies irae filled the air,” he reflected, “and fell upon the hearts of the inhabitants of doomed Georgia.”

  Right Wing

  The sots who had so infuriated Brigadier General Force were still out cold when the trailing division marched past them. “I saw 4 or 5 drunk men lying beside the road,” an Iowan noted in his diary. Few in the tail end of the two columns were enjoying the day. “The wagons, being rather heavily loaded our progress as rear guard is very slow,” griped one of them. His regiment, the 64th Illinois, was the end of the end, the last in line in the last brigade of the last division in today’s rotation. This meant they had to drive forward all the stragglers they encountered. Another in the ranks found their job “a disagreeable task, for, in the case of a large army like ours, it must be that some, from accident, sickness or otherwise will be found far in the rear of their respective commands; in consequence, our duty necessitates us to urge them on farther than their physical strength will oftimes permit them.” The fate of the drunks is unrecorded.

  Sweeping south just to the west of the Fifteenth Corps, Kilpatrick’s cavalry encountered enemy positions on full alert near Jonesboro. The Confederate commander, Wheeler, had been in the town as late as 2:30 P.M., when he sent off his only summary of today’s movements, reporting that the Federals (units unidentified) “advanced with infantry, cavalry, artillery and wagons early this morning. Have driven our cavalry back to this place. Enemy have burned many houses in Rome, Marietta and Atlanta; they also destroyed railroad and burned railroad bridges over Chattahoochee [River].” Right after sending this, Wheeler moved his headquarters to the next line of resistance, near Griffin, leaving a rear guard covering Jonesboro.*

  This force was engaged late in the afternoon by Kilpatrick’s vanguard, consisting of the 8th Indiana Cavalry and the 5th Kentucky Cavalry. The Confederates, fighting from behind earthworks backed with some artillery, were holding the Indiana troopers at bay until the Kentucky regiment rushed in from a side road. At this point, recorded a proud Hoosier cavalryman, “We charged them and drove them back in confusion.” The Rebels retreated to another prepared position just south of the town, formidable enough to deter further pursuit. “I deemed it best to retire,” reported the careful Union Kentucky commander.

  There was more combat to the east as first the Seventeenth and then the Fifteenth Corps pressed against the long line held by some 1,000 members of the Orphan Brigade. When the riders screening the Union infantry struck the Orphan position, the Yankees found themselves under fire and out of carbine range, as the recently mounted Confederate infantrymen had retained their rifles. The resulting fight was more noisy than deadly, though acting major Weller, up from his visit to the Stubbs farm, was certain that his boys “were hitting some one every now and then.”

  The two Right Wing infantry columns, which departed Atlanta by separate routes, were converging now, and even as the badly outnumbered Kentucky rebels were gamely preparing to resist the whole Seventeenth Corps, leading elements of the Fifteenth appeared suddenly on their left flank. Like the Orphans, this was another body of infantry mounted on horses. The 29th Missouri numbered about 115 men, but unlike the Orphans, they were armed with shorter-range cavalry carbines. “We made lots of noise, but didn’t hurt the ‘rebs’ much; neither did they hurt us much,” recalled a member of the unit. With the Yankees in large numbers flooding in from front and flank, discretion triumphed over valor as the Confederate combat veterans retreated toward Stockbridge.

  The Orphan Brigade’s withdrawal was part of a general pullback of Confederate forces south of Atlanta. Most of the Georgia militia gathered around Lovejoy’s Station on the Macon and Western line. Altogether, some 2,400 soldiers made a weary night tramp toward Macon, stopping at Griffin. “We had a very hard march…,” one militiaman wrote his wife. “We rather skeddadled, I think.”

  From Griffin, Georgia major general Howell Cobb promptly forgot anything Jefferson Davis had said about not counting on outside help. Cobb shot off a brief report of affairs to Richmond, indicating that all local forces were in the process of concentrating at Macon. It was there, Cobb informed the distant Confederate officials, “where re-enforcements should be sent at once.”

  Also today, Major General Joseph Wheeler made it official regarding a matter that would become a controversial aspect of the coming campaign—the treatment of Georgia civilians by his men. When he had left Hood’s army, Wheeler’s instructions were to “destroy everything from which the enemy might derive sustenance.” The cavalry commander now significantly scaled back these orders, limiting his men to wrecking factory machinery and driving off stock, but only if they were in the enemy’s path. No foraging of civilian supplies or burning of buildings was authorized. However, Wheeler’s directives ignored the fact that his command lacked a supply system, so his men would have to live off the land. Additionally, it was Confederate policy that cavalrymen were individually responsible for replacing animals lost in action. All this, coupled with the loose control Wheeler exerted over his far-flung units, would seriously limit his enforcement of these new guid
elines.

  The Right Wing columns marched through the briefly held Rebel defenses before finding sufficient water and camping space for the night; the Fifteenth Corps near the South Fork of the Cotton River, the Seventeenth on Upton Creek. As the tired men moved about their bivouacs, their gaze was drawn irresistibly northward. “The whole region for miles was lighted up with a strange and indescribable glare,” recollected an Ohio soldier. “Atlanta on fire—Ah! cruel war,” echoed another Buckeye, “and cruel it has become.”

  Atlanta

  One major miscalculation this day was the assumption that the Fourteenth Corps and the Fourth Division of the Fifteenth Corps—both still in Atlanta—could be effectively resupplied. Thanks to the empty shelves reflecting the goods already shipped north or snagged by the columns now under way, plus the constantly expanding blazes, it was proving difficult for those still in town to restock. A staff officer in the Fourteenth Corps recalled that things went relatively smoothly until after 3:00 P.M., when the spreading fires prompted frustrated supply clerks to tell the “soldiers to go in and take what they wanted before it burned up.” “As we left the town the Quartermasters were throwing clothing into the streets for the boys rather than have them burned up as the flames rapidly approached,” seconded an Illinois man in the Fifteenth Corps.

  The members of a regiment who replaced their worn outfits with new had to perform a maneuver that wasn’t in the drill book. “It must have been a weird sight to see this horde of excited men frantically trying to change clothing while on the march, the officers at the same time attempting to maintain a semblance of discipline,” remembered one soldier in the ranks. “Guns at all angles, bundles under arms, one foot shod, the other with sock only, pants on backward, everything askew but all good natured.”