Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Left Wing

  The Twentieth Corps, constituting the extreme northern flank of Sherman’s grand movement, passed through Madison today. First in line was Brigadier General John W. Geary’s division (the Second), which followed the railroad tracks eastward, on course for the Oconee River. “The weather is wet and disagreeable,” attested a Pennsylvania diarist. “Colored people are pleased to see the Yanks,” added an Ohio soldier. “Whites look sour & sad.” When the 111th Pennsylvania marched through Madison, their procession was subjected to a dour inspection by a group of old-timers. “A wag in Company A, at a moment when no sound was heard except the route step of marching feet, seeing the manifest distress of these white-bearded patriarchs, swung his cap and, looking at the group, shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Hurrah for Lincoln!’” chuckled a member of the regiment. “The old fellows nearly rolled off their chairs.”

  Behind Geary’s men marched the Third Division, followed by the First, both of which turned south. Groups of soldiers operating ahead of the main column ran loose in the town for a while, leading an Illinois man to mutter that “our men ransacked it badly,” but order was quickly established so that the Yankees who followed almost all complimented what they saw. “It is the finest village this side of Nashville,” declared an Illinois man. “Yards full of the most beautiful roses and other plants.” A correspondent working for the New York Herald thought “the town looked too pretty to think of in connection with the march of an army.”

  When the 102nd Illinois halted in the courthouse square, they were entertained by a band playing patriotic airs. “The men have obtained files of old papers, and are scattering them by hundreds through the different regiments,” wrote a member of the regiment. As a railroad depot, Madison had its share of legitimate targets. A deputation of town notables had tried to negotiate an exemption, but Slocum was not prepared to amend Sherman’s rules of war. “Cotton stored near the railroad station was fired, and the jail near the public square gave up its whips and paddles to increase the big bonfire in the public square,” noted an Ohioan. “The Calaboos[e] was burnt while the Bands plaid,” recorded a Wisconsin diarist. Private houses in the village were subject to soldier searches, but were otherwise left alone.

  The railroad agent’s wife (he was off in Savannah) pleaded with the Union boys not to burn her husband’s office. “But it was of no use whatever,” said a Connecticut soldier. “The windows were opened, fire thrown in and it was soon wrapped in flames. I almost always have sympathy for the women. But I did not much pity her. She was a regular secesh and spit out her spite and venom against the dirty Yanks and mudsills of the north.” Missed or ignored in the random searches was Edmund B. Walker’s coffin, which survived the Federal visit; many years later, young descendants would sneak into the attic to gawk at the space outlined in the dust indicating where it once rested.

  Emma High’s resourceful mother produced her husband’s Masonic apron to back her request for help from any society member in the group of soldiers outside her home. An officer stepped forward, took charge, and posted a guard. Meanwhile, Emma watched, wide-eyed, as the young men in blue descended on her next-door neighbor’s flower garden. The plants, she recalled, were “stripped of all [their]…bright hued roses and the soldiers wove them into garlands and decorated their arms—crossed and tied them with the garlands, singing and making great sport of the occasion.”

  Perhaps it was the beauty of the town that inspired Major General Slocum to indulge in a rare display of command prerogative by having a number of brigades pass before him in review. A soldier in the Third Brigade of the First Division remembered going through Madison in “fine style, colors flying[,] music playing[,] marching in column by platoon, and [being]…reviewed by Gen. Slocum as we passed the public square.” Another infantryman (Second Brigade, Third Division) recalled marching under Slocum’s gaze “with handsomely aligned ranks, precise movement and arms at right-shouldershift, the feet keeping step to the soul-stirring air of ‘Dixie.’”

  The Second and Third brigades of the Third Division drew most of the railroad-wrecking assignment. “We spent the whole forenoon in tearing up the track,” recorded a soldier in the 85th Indiana. “It is rather interesting to see an army stack arms, step forward and take hold of the end of the ties and upset five miles of track at one lift.”

  A few miles south and west of Madison, the Fourteenth Corps finished passing through Covington, then turned southeast, toward a spot on the map called Shady Dale. The Second Division led the way, followed by the Third and the First. A New York Herald correspondent wrote that “the roads were found almost impassable from the rain that had fallen in torrents during the night.” An Ohio soldier never forgot moving “ahead in a heavy rain, the troops straggling much on account of a bad road.” The weather was making everyone grumpy. “You awake in the morning only to find yourself as lame & sore as ever,” grumbled an Ohioan. “Every step gives pain.”

  The sound of rain drumming on his canvas tent fly greeted Major Hitchcock this morning. The commander of the Fourteenth Corps, Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis, stopped by to report that all his transportation and supplies were over the Alcovy River, and his rear guard was just getting across. This was more good news for Sherman, who outwardly remained a picture of confidence, though his mind never ceased mulling over probabilities and possibilities. Recorded Hitchcock, who treasured his close relationship with his boss, “the General explained today to me of his plans in any one of several contingencies.”

  A few of the younger members of the headquarters entourage decided to improve their personal transportation by riding ahead of the column to find some horses and mules. Just before reaching the town of Newborn, the group was fired on from ambush, but their attackers fled almost as quickly as they had appeared. None in the party was hit, so they continued on their mission as if nothing had happened.

  Confederate Lieutenant General William J. Hardee reached Macon this morning, endowed with Beauregard’s authority to take charge of the forces in the region. The intelligence that greeted his arrival was grim. As he promptly reported to Richmond: “The enemy [is] on both sides [of the] Ocmulgee River, about thirty miles from Macon. A column is reported near Social Circle marching on Augusta.” High on his to-do list was the urgent need to accumulate sufficient weapons to arm the militia forces gathering in Georgia and South Carolina. In a separate message Hardee telegraphed Richmond requesting that all “spare arms [be] sent to Charleston, S.C., subject to my orders.”

  There was more bad news. Hardee had alerted Savannah to prepare its land side defenses, only to learn that the earthworks were incomplete and that much labor was needed to finish them. The officer in charge, Major General Lafayette McLaws, wanted to use his troops for the task, but Hardee told him “to press negroes if you need them.” On the plus side, during his train ride from Augusta to Macon, Hardee had passed over the long railroad bridge at the Oconee River and saw its strong defensive possibilities. He was now able to use his temporary authority to make certain that troops were directed to that potential choke point.

  For his part, General Beauregard’s biggest struggle today was with his transportation. He departed Corinth, Mississippi, heading toward Mobile, Alabama, from where he hoped to find a train that would take him to Macon. He was frustrated that General Hood, headquartered in Florence, Alabama, still had not moved his army. Beauregard had reduced Hood’s options to two; he could either “divide [his force] and re-enforce Cobb [at Macon], or take the offensive [into Tennessee] immediately to relieve him.” Beauregard had no clue what Hood intended to do.

  Despite these travails of the high command, Southern newspapers remained upbeat. According to the Augusta Constitutionalist, “After a careful survey of the topography of the country lying before SHERMAN, the distance he must travel before he can strike any vital point, and the difficulties that naturally environ an incursive army of that kind, we apprehend no serious result from the movement.” Editors were equ
ally sanguine in the Confederate capital, where the writers for the Richmond Dispatch assured readers about Sherman that the “country cannot support him, and it is impossible he should carry more than ten or fifteen days’ supplies.” Looking to the illustrious leadership that was directing affairs in Georgia, the paper was positively bullish. “With such men at the head of such a force as we are informed Georgia can still furnish, it will be a very difficult job to march to Savannah, we should think.”

  At Camp Lawton, outside Millen, Union prisoners crawled out from under whatever shelters they had managed to erect to protect themselves from the overnight rain. A half-ration of meal received yesterday evening was supplemented today with a load of beef heads, whose stink, related one captive, “would have turned our stomachs under ordinary circumstances.” Those clever enough to have hidden money from spot searches did better. “Rice, bean soup, biscuits, pies and corn dodgers were made and sold on Market Street at exorbitant prices,” noted the POW.

  Noon–Midnight

  Left Wing

  Pushing eastward along the Georgia Railroad, Brigadier General John Geary’s division (Twentieth Corps) reached Buckhead, where a small party of Rebel scouts was dispersed before the infantry set to wrecking things. “Burned many cotton mills and presses,” noted an Ohio diarist, “took dinner at Buckhead station[,] burned the station.” Geary later supplied a bit more detail when he reported destroying “the water-tank, [a] stationary engine, and all the railroad buildings.” A Pennsylvania soldier recalled burning “several thousand bushels of corn,” while a New Yorker reported having “a first rate time killing hogs and getting potatoes.”

  Most attention was given to the tracks. A New Jersey infantryman recollected “tearing up and burning all the wood work of the road,” while a brigadier reported destroying “a considerable distance of the railroad…by burning the ties and bending and twisting the rails.” Some units were satisfied with a process that produced quantity over quality. “Our Division started out from Madison alone and proceeded to tear up the railroad for a long distance without severing the rails from the ties, like a plow turns the sod over,” attested a Pennsylvania farm boy.

  John Geary marched his main column as far as Blue Springs, where most of the command bivouacked on the plantation of Colonel Lee Jordan of the Rebel army. Geary sent a detachment forward from there to carry out his principal objective, the destruction of the railroad bridge across the Oconee River. It was a fine piece of engineering, some 400 yards long and rising 60 feet above the water. The strike group, Geary later reported, “thoroughly destroyed” the structure. Another detail was sent north several miles to wreck a large mill and to destroy all the ferryboats along the Apalachee River.

  For all the rest of the Twentieth Corps today was a sloppy tramp southeasterly from Madison. “The roads are rather muddy and hard walking,” said a New York soldier. The lousy weather and poor roads did not dissuade many slaves from liberating themselves. An Illinois soldier remembered how they joined the Federal columns “loaded down with bundles and babies.” “There were old Pomps, young Pomps, She Pomps and pickannies,” reflected a New York man, “and as they trudge along they form a grotesque procession and one that should be seen to be appreciated.” When a squad from the 102nd Illinois reached one plantation, they found a large stash of cotton burning, watched over by an elderly black man. When someone wondered aloud who started the blaze, he answered: “You Yankees did it, and I’m glad of it—it would never have done me no good.”

  Between the population of Madison and the surrounding homesteads, a number of encounters took place between the invaders and residents. The officer in charge of the town’s provost guard recorded dining invitations for lunch and supper, a visit from a former U.S. senator (Joshua Hill), and the gift of a flower bouquet. The meetings were less social for more isolated homeowners. “I don’t know what in the world the people through here are going to live upon,” worried one woman to a soldier, “for your army is taking everything.” Another infantryman joined a group that was filling canteens from a house well. They were surprised when the house mistress came to the porch with an appeal for them not to waste the water. “Why ma’am, what’s the difference to you?” asked one of the soldiers. “There’s a whole corps on this road and by night there won’t be any left.”

  For Dolly Burge, waiting apprehensively at her plantation nine miles east of Covington, this was the day she had been dreading. After a restless night and breakfast without incident, she decided to visit her nearest neighbor. Hardly had she reached him before she heard that the dreaded Yankees were close at hand. Dolly raced back to her home, yelled to her slaves to hide themselves, and in the next instant the vandals were all around her. “Like demons they run in!” she exclaimed. “My yards are full. To my smoke-house, my dairy, pantry, kitchen, and cellar, like famished wolves they come, breaking locks and whatever is in their way.”

  Amazingly, a guard appeared, but his authority extended only to the house itself; everything else was fair game. When Dolly protested, the young soldier shrugged. “I cannot help you, Madam; it is orders,” he said. Mrs. Burge watched in silent, incendiary anger as she witnessed her livestock taken and the cabins used by her slaves plundered. When a sympathetic Union officer, who was also a distant relation, tried to console her, she burst into tears. “I saw nothing before me but starvation,” she later wrote. The officer so calmed her that by the time he departed, Dolly was calling him a friend. Two guards later replaced the single one, and together with Dolly, her family and slaves spent what would be a second night without sleep for the plantation mistress from New England. “I…kept walking to and fro,” Dolly remembered, “watching the fires in the distance and dreading the approaching day, which, I feared, as they had not all passed, would be but a continuation of horrors.”

  As they got through the swampy lowlands of the Alcovy River, the Fourteenth Corps made better time in its march toward Shady Dale. Once more the Yankee boys traveled through a bountiful land. “Troops have plenty to eat,” wrote an Illinois man in his journal. “Plenty of corn and potatoes,” said a fellow soldier. When the 21st Wisconsin reached its camp for the night, the men found a nearby hog pen filled to capacity. “There was sport for the boys,” laughed a member of the regiment, “and ere long their hogships [were] given a passport for eternity.”

  One unexpected problem that emerged was the large number of soldier casualties resulting from undisciplined melees over poultry and fowls. “Several…men wounded by shooting at chickens,” recorded a diarist in the 34th Illinois. Another in the 113th Ohio noted that two men in a foraging detail “were accidentally shot, or rather carelessly by their comrades, while shooting chickens.” Trying to make light of the matter, an Illinoisan spoke of a soldier “accidentally wounded in the leg while a vigorous assault was being made on a flock of turkeys by the foragers.” In response, wrote another member of the 34th Illinois, “Provost guards are taking up many of the boys for shooting near the column.”

  “Negroes by the hundred are coming into our line and we are keeping them with us[,] using them to get forage for us and we find them not bad fellows to have along,” reported an Indiana man. Major James A. Connolly, who had earlier browbeaten a plantation owner into surrendering a captured U.S. flag, had to chuckle this afternoon. Most of the citizens in the area, he noticed, had tried to hide their livestock and valuables in swampy places. They had used their slaves to help them; however, “the negroes told the soldiers of these hiding places and most of these hidden valuables find their way into our camp to-night.”

  Sherman’s headquarters party spent two hours in Newborn, mostly because the General was hugely enjoying himself conversing with a “queer old cock” (Hitchcock’s words) named John W. Pitts. A soldier marching past caught sight of “Gen. Sherman sitting with his hat off[,] tracing his map and questioning an old citizen standing near.” Mr. Pitts, who had founded the little village, was given the full Sherman lecture: the Southern cause was hopeless,
its leaders were on the wrong course, its people deserved whatever happened to them. To all this Pitts agreed, even volunteering that the “Confederates were a great deal worse than our men, that they pillaged and plundered everybody, and the inhabitants dreaded their coming.”

  Finally the command group moved along, cantering another seven miles before settling in for the night. Along the route they could hear occasional shots as foragers plied their trade. It was reported that several soldiers had been killed or injured in the activity. Hitchcock thought that something needed to be done about it, but Sherman was unconcerned. “I have been three years fighting stragglers,” he explained, “and they are harder to conquer than the enemy.” Also, from where he sat, Sherman saw nothing wrong with taking supplies in this manner. “The country was sparsely settled, with no magistrates or civil authorities who could respond to requisitions, as is done in all the wars of Europe,” he later wrote in justification, “so that this system of foraging was simply indispensable to our success.”

  Like many thoughtful people guided by grand theoretical abstractions, Sherman had problems when he saw the human face of people affected by his policies. Earlier this day he had been confronted by an older lady whose foodstuffs and livestock were, according to Major Hitchcock, “rapidly disappearing” at the hands of Sherman’s men. Sherman refused her request for a guard, proffered some lame excuses, and foisted her onto Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis, who was even less likely to be conciliatory. Now Hitchcock could overhear Sherman thinking aloud. “I’ll have to harden my heart to these things,” he said. “That poor woman today—how could I help her? There’s no help for it. The soldiers will take all she has. Jeff Davis is responsible for this.”