Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  The volume of fire coming from the Rebel-held gully diminished noticeably after sunset, soon petering out altogether. Federal officers huddled, and at the sound of a bugle, skirmishers from at least four regiments nosed cautiously forward. “The scenes of death, pain, and desolation seen on the field will never be erased from the memory of those who witnessed it,” attested an Iowan. “It was a harvest of death,” wrote a somber soldier in the 100th Indiana. “We moved a few bodies, and there was a boy with a broken arm and leg—just a boy 14 years old; and beside him, cold in death, lay his Father, two Brothers, and an Uncle.” “I was never so affected at the sight of wounded and dead before,” added a man in the ranks of the 103rd Illinois. “Old gray haired and weakly looking men and little boys, not over 15 years old, lay dead or writhing in pain.”

  “I could not help but pity them as they lay on the ground pleading for help but we could not help them as we were scarce of transportation,” explained an Indiana soldier to his wife. “The field was almost covered with dead and wounded,” contributed a member of the 100th Indiana, “some crying for water, some for an end to their misery.” “We took all inside our skirmish line that could bear moving,” said an infantryman in the 103rd Illinois, “and covered the rest with the blankets of the dead.” Other squads broke up captured arms or brought in uninjured prisoners. “They were badly mixed up in age, ranging all the way from 14 to 65 years,” said an Iowan. Among them were several black slave-servants.

  Top priority for the Yankees was taking care of their own, as there were both wounded and killed in Union blue. Among the latter was Corporal Aaron Wolford, an older man in the ranks of the 100th Illinois, whom the younger soldiers had fondly called “Uncle.” Wolford, who had expressed a premonition of his death the night before, fell early in the combat, shot through the head. His comrades fashioned a rude coffin out of a hollow sycamore log to lay him to rest. Another officer present noted that his men buried their dead, placed the wounded in ambulances, and marched that same night. By midnight only Georgians remained alive on the field east of Griswoldville. One of the last Union soldiers to depart remembered the “mournful sighing of the wind among the pines and the pitiable moans of the wounded and dying.”

  When the time came to set down the history of this encounter, both sides put their spin on the story, even though most of those who had been through the ordeal fully understood what had happened. Wrote a Confederate participant: “The Militia has been in a very hard fight and got badly whipped.” Yet Southern writers, beginning with newspaper reports published within days, stressed that Philips withdrew from the enemy without challenge, that the part-time soldiers had acted with “distinguished gallantry,” and that “both sides suffered severely.” Northern historians doubled and tripled the size of Philips’s force, applying a similar multiplier to his casualties, which, in some estimates, approached 2,000. Federal record keeping was fairly thorough, so Walcutt’s losses can be stated with a certain confidence at 13 killed and 86 wounded. Confederate tabulations were much less comprehensive, so here the losses are estimates only: about 50 killed and 500 wounded.

  Over the next few weeks, a number of local newspapers dutifully printed letters from some participants containing lists of the injured and dead. The doleful registers filled column after column, often providing the only notification that families or loved ones would receive. In one such column, readers of the Macon Daily Telegraph and Confederate learned on November 24 of the battle’s impact on the 7th Georgia Militia Regiment, whose commander had been killed. Among the forty-eight individuals listed: T. G. King and J. C. McLeans were dead, William Evans had a slight foot wound, Sergeant D. H. Henly had serious wounds in the thigh and leg, Jack Bussey was hit in the shoulder, William F. Williams in the breast, and M. K. Wilcox was severely wounded “and supposed killed.”

  Brigadier General Philips remained convinced that had his orders to assail both Union flanks been properly executed, “it would have resulted in dislodging and probably routing the enemy.” Although in public Major General Smith praised Brigadier General Philips for his “success in driving before you the enemies of your country,” in his official report he complained that the entire fight happened despite his orders “to avoid an engagement at that place and time,” and that all things considered, “the troops were very fortunate in being withdrawn without disaster.”

  For at least one of the participating militiamen, the results of this engagement were clear. “From all the information I can get,” he wrote his wife, “the Yanks are making their way to Charleston and Savannah, and I can see no way to keep them from going. My darling Camilla, it is a dark day for the Southern Confederacy.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “The First Act Is Well Played”

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1864

  Major General Henry C. Wayne, Georgia’s adjutant and inspector general, was not unfamiliar with quixotic endeavors. In 1855, as a United States Army officer, he was put in charge of a program testing whether or not camels could be adapted for military use in the American West. Now, as one of the top officials in the state’s chain of command, he had reluctantly drawn a line in the sand at the Oconee River Bridge.

  When Wayne first arrived here, after successfully extricating his troops from Gordon, he had every intention of making a stand. However, the large size of the approaching enemy force, coupled with the knowledge that there would be no further help from Savannah, caused him to change his mind. He would have destroyed the bridge and fallen back toward the coast except for the presence of Major Alfred Hartridge, who adamantly refused to even consider taking a backward step with his 186 men. As the major’s rank was C.S. Provisional Army reporting directly to Savannah, Wayne (in the state’s chain of command) had no direct authority over him. Faced with Hartridge’s obstinacy, Wayne reversed himself and prepared to resist the enemy.

  Extending work begun by Hartridge, Wayne finished a line of trenches along the river’s east bank, covering the bridge. In his communications with Savannah he began referring to the Oconee River Bridge as “the now important point in this neighborhood.” He also directed the construction of a fortified outpost about two miles west from the span. This effort, carried out using surplus railroad ties, resulted in a small but sturdy redoubt. Into this exposed post Wayne sent a detachment of cadets from the Georgia Military Institute stiffened with eighty Orphan Brigade veterans belonging to the 4th Kentucky Mounted Infantry. “The cadets were, of course, very young,” recollected acting major John Weller, the senior officer on the scene, “some of them certainly not over fourteen years of age.” Also in the mix was a group of convict volunteers, still in their prison garb and “hardened in appearance,” according to the Kentuckian.

  Wednesday, November 23, 1864;

  Thursday, November 24, 1864

  Wayne had one more trick up his sleeve. The rail line approaching the bridge on the western side passed along a trestle over a mile of marshy swamps, making it difficult if not impossible for the enemy to deploy artillery. Wayne ordered one gun mounted on a platform car to be pushed forward to support the stockade. He was concentrating almost all his available strength here, leaving other nearby crossing places exposed, especially Ball’s Ferry, eight miles south. There the state officer posted a small picket detail, with orders to alert him if the enemy made an appearance.

  All preparations completed, Wayne’s morning situation report to Savannah concluded with the terse assessment: “I am expecting an attack momentarily.”

  It was 8:00 A.M. by Major Hitchcock’s watch when Major General Sherman directed his staff east, toward the Georgia capital. Behind them, plumes of smoke rising in the cold morning air marked the execution of the General’s orders that no building on the Cobb plantation (save slave quarters) be saved. Psychologically, Sherman was feeling the great relief of knowing that the initial phase of his grand movement had been concluded pretty much as he had imagined it would be. As he later put it, “The first stage of the journey was…complete,
and absolutely successful.” Physically, he was in minor distress, suffering a flare-up of neuralgia in his right arm and shoulder that made it difficult for him to hold a pen or pencil.

  After about ninety minutes in the saddle, the headquarters party passed through an outer ring of the earthworks built to defend Milledgeville. Major Hitchcock dismissed Rebel efforts to defend Georgia’s capital with the comment: “not used.” Just outside the town boundary, Brigadier General Kilpatrick—never one to miss a chance to make an impression—was waiting with some of his horsemen drawn up along the road. Hitchcock, caught up in the giddy euphoria of the moment, turned to his boss.

  “First act of drama well played, General!” he exclaimed.

  Answered Sherman: “Yes, sir, the first act is well played.”

  The 1st Alabama Cavalry (U.S.), riding point for the Seventeenth Corps, came upon the Confederate stockade west of the Oconee River Bridge shortly after 10:30 A.M. Acting major John Weller had pushed out his own skirmish line, which was strong enough to send the Federal riders scattering for cover. When after a few minutes of desultory shooting it became evident that these Rebels weren’t taking to their heels, the Yankee cavalry officer called for help.

  Many of the Twentieth Corps units camped east of the Oconee River at Milledgeville occupied William McKinley’s Beulah Plantation. The house itself, used for headquarters by two division commanders, was protected by a guard of 125 soldiers, but the rest of his holdings were fair game. For young Guy McKinley, there were moments of wonder as he gazed over a large field now filled with the Left Wing’s wagon train. To the boy it “looked…like a person could have walked all over the field on canvas covered wagon tops without touching the ground, so many of them were there.”

  Young McKinley witnessed some of the commonplace destruction that occurred. More than a hundred bound and stacked bales of cotton had been plundered for bedding by Union soldiers accustomed to sleeping on the hard ground. An older member of the McKinley clan, a soldier home on sick leave, watched from concealment as the Yankee soldiers carried out well-practiced foraging routines. “Captured wagons, drawn by captured teams, driven by captured teamsters, and laden with captured grain or other stores, rumbled incessantly along toward the camps,” he recollected. “Groups of rollicking cavalrymen, nearly hidden beneath great panniers of hay or fodder strapped on before and behind their saddles, passed every moment, singing and laughing as they went. Others with masses of cackling geese or squealing chickens dangling at their saddle-flaps filled up the intervals or accompanied the wagons by way of needless escort.”

  A heavy infantry skirmish line from the 32nd Ohio, pushing out from Colonel Benjamin F. Potts’s brigade of Brigadier General Giles A. Smith’s division (Seventeenth Corps), wasted little time chasing the Rebel voltigeurs back into the wooden tie redoubt covering the Oconee River Bridge. The Federals wriggled close enough to bring the position under direct rifle fire, causing some casualties among its garrison.

  “The bravery of the school boys was the glory of this fight,” reported acting major Weller. “Several of their number were carried off wounded and dying. I can never forget the looks of one little boy as four convicts carried him on a stretcher to the rear. His handsome face, with the flush of fever on it, and the resolute expression of his eyes, indicated that he fully realized the situation.”

  The appearance of the Union foot soldiers was enough to collapse the screening line of skirmishers, but not enough to force the garrison to abandon the little fort. The Yankee infantry needed more punch, so a request was made for additional firepower.

  On the western outskirts of Milledgeville, units drawn from several Twentieth Corps divisions were set to work wrecking the railroad. The men, beginning shortly after midday, had within an amazingly short time “completely destroyed five miles of the road by burning the ties and heating and twisting the rails.” “It was really amusing to see 2,000 or 5,000 strong men form in one line on one side of the track,” said a New Yorker, “and at the command, see them take hold of the Rails and turn them up, ties and all, as far as you could see, and then pile them up and burn them, forming a continuous line of fire for miles.”

  Within the town limits bands of soldiers gamboled about, some content to see the sights, others determined to damage, as one New York man put it, “all public buildings considered inimical to the United States.” Lieutenant Garrett S. Byrne of the 13th New Jersey was one of the former. “The State House is a rather small building, beautifully located in a square grassy knoll, with its accessory buildings conveniently arrayed around it,” he wrote in his best tourist guide manner. “The Executive Mansion is a square brown building with an air of comfort around it. The State Prison is nothing but a long irregular pile of bricks, not even that now for it was burnt down.”

  Several tourists in blue made note of the state arsenal and magazine (separate buildings) and a few large churches, as well as many well-appointed residences. In some cases the Yankee boys were welcomed as guests in the hope that their presence would deter vandalism. Lieutenant Alfred Trego spent an enjoyable evening in the company of two young women. “All polite and intelligent ladies,” he swore afterward, adding that they entertained him with “music on Piano and Guitar.”

  Mrs. Richard McAllister Orme, of New England stock, answered a knock at the front door of her elegant Doric-columned house to face another Yankee blue blood, Captain Henry Ward Beecher, come to guard the premises. The good captain was given a gracious reception, as were other officers who paid their respects to the daughter of the president of the Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Beecher’s alma mater. Only after they and Sherman’s army had departed did Confederate captain James Alexander, Mrs. Orme’s son-in-law, emerge from his hiding place, an airless attic cubbyhole.

  Other Union soldiers in town had mischief on their agenda. “Stayed in the city all day and lived high,” recorded a Connecticut diarist. A comrade in the ranks was fascinated by the “very curious way” in which some of the men sought loot. “Most of the silver and valuables were buried in the gardens and lawns, the earth and grass being very carefully replaced,” he explained. “You may see the ingenious Yankee probing the earth about every house with his ramrod. He strikes a hard substance and digs.” In this manner, added a member of the 129th Illinois, many “valuable things, dug away in the ground by the owners, were disinterred and taken along or destroyed.” Missed in the probing frenzy were two important artifacts of Georgia’s government—the state’s Great Seal and its legislative records. Both had been hidden by the secretary of state, Nathan C. Barnett; the former under a house, the latter in a pig pen.

  It didn’t take long for several enterprising Yankees to chance upon large stacks of Georgia state currency—piles of bills printed for use but not yet signed for circulation. That fact made little difference. An amused Ohioan on the scene observed that “many a poor soldier became a millionaire for the time being,” while a skeptical New Yorker questioned the wealth, whose “purchasing power…is fast departing.” Nevertheless, several provost soldiers made the day for a number of unpaid women employees of a town cotton mill when they presented them with wads of bills, making “them happy—for a very short time,” commented a Yankee angel.

  An experienced foraging officer took as many of the bills as he could carry so he could “pay” for everything his men confiscated. “Settlement was made on the following basis,” he bragged afterward; “each meal we had was one hundred dollars, poultry taken $10 each, hams $50 each, grain in the husk one dollar a pound. The ordinary horses & mules 10,000 dollars each.” To legitimize all transactions, the officer carefully signed each bill “as Sect’ry of Treasury of the C.S. of America.”

  Another curious find was a room filled with edged arms—pikes and two-foot-long knives—made for mass distribution when the government ran out of guns. An Ohio soldier was unimpressed, declaring them “miserable weapons,” while a Wisconsin man was certain that “if they intended to fight us with those things
they must be crazy.” It was the estimation of an Illinois veteran that the pikes were “formidable looking weapons, indeed, but of little value when pitted against Spencer rifles.” In one regiment the boys hung the long knives at “their sides like officers’ swords, but in a few days cast them aside.”

  Perhaps the most purposeless act of vandalism was that suffered by the state library, located in the capitol building. Lieutenant Byrne of New Jersey reckoned it “a pretty fair sample of libraries generally found at state capitals, but ’tis now in part remembered with things of the past. A great no. of volumes were taken, some for their intrinsic worth and some for their association; some to while away monotony of every day life but [I] should say the most part were taken for mere desecration and despoiling the Confederacy.” “Choice literary and scientific works lay piled upon the ground,” testified an Illinoisan, “and a crowd of soldiers in selecting from the lot, walked over and trampled upon them, and we observed a horseman ride through the crowd purposely to let his horse trample the books.” “Public libraries should be sacredly respected by all belligerents,” declared an angry officer on the scene, “and I am sure General Sherman will, someday, regret that he permitted this library to be destroyed and plundered.” One soldier thought he recognized General Sherman in the crowd. “He looked pretty rough,” the man commented.

  At some point in the afternoon, a cadre of officers (many representing the two provost regiments) organized a mock session of the legislature in the actual governmental chamber. “Motions were made, resolutions offered and speeches made, and though the manual was not strictly followed, it was both comical and interesting,” wrote a Massachusetts soldier. A Wisconsin officer noted that “Gen. Kilpatrick…regaled the convention by an account of his great raid on a [wine] cellar…. The committee on Federal relations soon returned with a set of resolutions to the effect that the ordinance of secession was injudicious…and void.”