Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Brigadier General John W. Geary’s division (Twentieth Corps) had the railroad duties for the Left Wing, tasked with demolishing the stretch between Tennille and Davisboro. “Here tearing the track, burning ties, twisting iron, &c.,” wrote one of Geary’s Ohio soldiers. It was Brigadier General John M. Corse’s men (Fifteenth Corps) who were handed the same job, but from the Oconee River to Tennille. There was something about this work that prompted three different members of the 50th Illinois to consider it worth mentioning. Frederick Sherwood, a musician in the ranks, thought it “Good work for a Sunday’s job.” Charles F. Hubert, who later wrote a history of the regiment, remembered that the men carried out their task to a rhythmic chant: the line, “Soldier, will you work?” answered by, “No, I’ll sell my shirt first.” All this labor gave Lewis F. Roe cause for ironic reflection. “This is the Sabbath, a day set apart for the worship of God & probably my folks have been to Church to-day, while I have been engaged in a far different occupation, that of tearing & burning the Macon Railroad.”

  Other soldiers were set to work on the South’s reigning cash crop, fondly known as King Cotton. A Massachusetts soldier noted that “a great deal of cotton was destroyed,” while a Minnesota boy marching with a different column recalled passing two “large buildings stored full of bales of cotton [which] were burning.” This may well have been the Hodgson plantation, where a meticulous staff officer counted 580 bales incinerated. “As the dense columns of smoke roll up toward the sky,” related an Illinois soldier, “we mentally exclaim ‘Cotton is not King’!”

  The columns moving slowly, Sherman’s hungry men scattered across the countryside. “Country very level, fertile & well cultivated,” recorded an Ohio soldier. “Great abundance of forage, provisions, mules, horses &c. captured to day.” By now the ever pragmatic infantrymen had adapted to the official and unofficial ways of carrying out the “forage liberally” directive. “There is strict orders for soldiers in the ranks to do no private foraging,” declared an Iowa man, “but there is scarcely a private that does not forage from noon till night if he can get a chance.” “Country good, abounds in sweet potatoes, yams, molasses, fresh pork,” added an Illinoisan. “Desolation we leave behind in their stead.” The tendency toward casual excess was beginning to bother some of the Yankee farmers. “I think we destroy as much or more than we eat,” worried an Ohio soldier. The image was even starker for an Iowan in the Seventeenth Corps, who wrote this day: “I think a katydid, following our rear, would starve.”

  It was another deadly day for the unfit horses and mules rounded up after the river crossing. “These animals were in daily use,” explained a Fifteenth Corps brigadier, “but every regiment had an excess of pack animals beyond the alIowance in orders, and while forage was now easily obtainable for all of them, it would only be a few days when the whole army would be on short rations for both men and animals…. I was informed the orders were that these [extra or unserviceable] animals were to be killed by the rear guard after the balance of the troops had passed. This was not a pleasant duty, but the order was imperative, and was obeyed to the letter.”*

  One small item on Sherman’s personal agenda was a ride into Tennille to investigate a cryptic remark made the previous evening by a local black man. Recounting what he had seen of the various waves of destruction visited upon the railroad station, the slave concluded by exclaiming that not only did the Yankee soldiers burn the depot and wreck the tracks, but they “sot fire to the well!” Checking it out this morning, Sherman found the well was more a pit lined by wooden scaffolding with steps leading down to a “fine copper pump.” Thorough Federals had filled the pit with flammable material and, as the black had accurately described, “sot fire to the well!”

  Sherman’s anecdote in his Memoirs masked a grim awareness throughout the ranks that the black refugee problem was not going away. A “great crowd of miserable squalid negroes, women and children, are following us,” wrote a Wisconsin diarist. “I do pity these poor helpless creatures…. I hope they may gain what they so ardently desire—their freedom—but I fear they will in the thousands of cases, find their freedom in death.” “Women came with large bundles on their heads, children also carried quite large packages on their heads, and some of the larger ones carried the little ones,” contributed another Wisconsin man. “They would not leave us if told to do so,” added a third Midwesterner. “Where they lived from I don’t know, but they managed to live somehow.” Their eagerness to help was exploited by soldiers who took them along as personal servants. “It makes but little difference to the private what wages he’s agreed to pay,” commented one observer; “he won’t do it.”

  Sherman’s overall scheme moved the combined wings in as tight a formation as possible. That meant taking advantage of every available parallel route, far more than were shown on any of the maps in use. The result was that both halves experienced some serious cases of faulty navigation. In the Fifteenth Corps, Brigadier General John E. Smith’s division was a good two miles along the wrong road before anyone noticed. “If ever Old Smith got a cursing he got it today,” growled a limping Illinois soldier.

  Making matters worse for the officers leading the Twentieth Corps was the fact that the person who discovered that an entire brigade had gone astray was their Left Wing commander, Major General Henry W. Slocum. “About noon Slocum came along at full speed and halted our Reg[imen]t and kept on calling for the Brig[ade] to halt until he reached the head of the Brig[ade],” recorded a member of the 102nd Illinois. “Had quite an exhibition of General Slocum’s temper,” added a soldier from the 105th Illinois. Lieutenant Alfred Trego was close at hand when Slocum encountered the errant guide. “Gen. Slocum came up and gave one of his aid[e]s a terrible cussing for leading the column on the wrong road. He was very angry—told him he was unfit to be an aide and sent him to headquarters under arrest.”

  The Right Wing finally completed crossing the Oconee River this day; the Seventeenth Corps was done early, the bigger Fifteenth Corps took until noon. When they had finished, the Missouri engineers pulled up the bridges, packed their gear, and readied themselves to do it all over again at the Ogeechee. As the last Fourteenth Corps units pulled out of Sandersville, they burned several government warehouses that had been used overnight by Federal soldiers for shelter. Most of the town’s citizens were glad to be rid of the men, but Mrs. “L.F.J.” was actually sorry to see them go. The youth assigned to guard her house had shown sympathy toward the young woman and her child, making sure they obtained a generous helping of rations, including flour and real coffee. Special permission was granted allowing the sentry to join “L.F.J.” and her mother for a home-cooked meal. She never forgot how, “asking God’s blessing upon our food, he ate his supper.”*

  William Tecumseh Sherman was among those departing Sandersville, traveling only as far as Tennille, where he set up his headquarters. While short in distance, the journey was greater in symbolism, since he was also shifting his flag from the Left Wing to the Right. For the moment the General and his staff would accompany Blair’s Seventeenth Corps.

  It was a pensive day for Sherman, who was anxiously reviewing his troop dispositions in light of the enemy’s recent combativeness. One of the Confederacy’s more skilled officers, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, had been as close as Tennille on November 26. Residents living near the station claimed to have heard Hardee vow to hold the line of the Ogeechee River at Louisville, a possibility that had to be treated with sober consideration. Sherman rode so lost in thought that, as Major Hitchcock watched with openmouthed astonishment, he ignored a woman standing at her front gate frantically trying to get his attention. “If she spoke, it was not audible,” remembered Hitchcock, “and he rode along looking straight forward and did not see her.”

  Among Sherman’s other frustrations this day was the sketchy nature of the maps he had to use. Another was making certain that his generals were literally burning their bridges behind them to bolster the security of the trai
ling wagon trains. When a casual conversation with one division commander suggested that the Oconee River and Buffalo Creek crossings hadn’t been destroyed, Sherman fired off a petulant dispatch to the wing commander to make certain that they had. His mood wasn’t helped by some of the information contained in recent Rebel newspapers confiscated in Sandersville. Several reprinted accounts taken from Northern dailies accurately gauged the size of his force, how it was organized, and his likely objectives. Speaking with Major Hitchcock, Sherman had complained, “It’s impossible to carry on war with a free press.”

  He was presently moving his forces in three columns, the middle and right ones supporting each other as they tramped to take up a line between Davisboro on the left and Riddleville on the right.* The third, a pair of divisions from the Fourteenth Corps, followed a slightly diverging route north of the others. This column’s aim was to get across the Ogeechee River at a place called Fenn’s Bridge. If Hardee was making a stand at Louisville, they would turn his flank; if Wheeler came pounding down from Augusta hoping to pounce on the wagons, they would block the thrust, so much depended on how well the column carried out its mission, and how lucky it was.

  Major James A. Connolly, a Third Division staff officer riding at the head of that column, was hoping for a little excitement. The morning’s march had been without incident, the men even joking about eating too many of the persimmons that littered the roadsides. Matters became decidedly more serious as they drew near to the Ogeechee River, where scouts pointed out to Connolly how the Rebel cavalry tracks they had been following (easily visible in the sandy road) suddenly split left and right, suggesting an ambush ahead. The column halted while a skirmisher screen nosed forward with Connolly following. “Being as full of curiosity as a woman, and being anxious to get the first sight of the rebels, I rode along with the skirmish line, watching every tree and stump, listening very intently, and moving as quietly as a cat in the sandy road, expecting every moment to hear the crack of a rifle from some concealed rebel.”

  All was quiet. The voltigeurs reached the river, where the major beheld an astonishing sight—Fenn’s Bridge was intact, “not a plank disturbed, and not a rebel in sight.” With Connolly was Colonel George P. Este, commanding the division’s Third Brigade. The pair grinned at each other before putting spurs to their horses’ flanks to see who could race across first. In his account, Connolly diplomatically implies the result was a tie. The infantry humped after the officers to spread out along the east side, protecting the precious gift.

  Connolly afterward encountered a local woman who identified herself as the toll collector. She told him that there had been Confederate cavalry here this very morning, but they had headed west to burn a span toward Sandersville, saying they would return later to wreck Fenn’s Bridge. The swift advance by the Fourteenth Corps’ men cut off the Rebels, allowing the Federals to gain control. “The Lord was ‘on our side’ this time, surely,” sighed a relieved Connolly. “For if that rebel brigade had burned the bridge this morning when they were here, we would have been compelled to build one before we could cross, and we could not have built one at all if there had been a regiment of rebels on the east bank to oppose us.”

  Both flanking divisions utilized Fenn’s Bridge. An Indiana soldier remembered it as “an old wooden bridge none to[o] sound but all crossed safely.” Once over, the pair angled south toward Louisville on parallel roads, camping for the night in a defensive posture. There were smiles at Sherman’s headquarters when news of the successful crossing was confirmed. With the Ogeechee line now breached, all planning aimed toward the next potential trouble spot: Millen. As Major Hitchcock settled down at the end of a long day, his only thought was that “tomorrow the second Act of the Drama will be fully under way.”

  Cavalry

  For all his acumen as an operational planner and strategic visionary, Sherman had a blind spot when it came to handling cavalry. His entire army career never intersected with that branch of arms; consequently it was a weapon he did not know how to employ wisely. He failed to understand the combat strengths and limitations of cavalrymen, never grasped what they did effectively or what they did poorly, and had no practical appreciation of their special problems.

  There was no integration of his cavalry division with his infantry corps. Scouting duties for the foot soldiers were handled, for the most part, by mounted infantry, engineers, detached cavalry companies, or staff officers; flank protection came from the swarms of foragers who effectively cocooned the line of march; while picketing duties were given to foot soldiers or mounted infantry. The jobs Sherman tended to give his troopers were railroad wrecking (which they did poorly), infrastructure demolition (also difficult without adequate tools), and attracting the attention of the enemy’s cavalry (which they did exceedingly well). Kilpatrick’s current mission parameters contained all three, though the one Sherman most emphasized was number four—freeing the prisoners at Camp Lawton.

  After breaking contact with the Yankee infantry around Sandersville on November 26, Confederate Major General Wheeler pushed his riders north and west, toward Ogeechee Shoals. Shortly after midnight his men began scrapping with the two regiments Kilpatrick had posted to watch the back door.

  Trooper Leroy S. Fallis in the 8th Indiana Cavalry (one of the two rearguard regiments; the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry was the other) recalled the Rebel strikes as “unexpected, and in the darkness things became somewhat mixed.” Hoping to realize maximum effect under the cover of night, the few Confederates involved made a substantial ruckus. Confusion reigned on both sides; at one point a section of the 8th Indiana Cavalry bluffed its way out of a tight spot by pretending to be a Rebel detachment; at another, a different Hoosier section was flanked out of its barricaded position and, in the words of a trooper, “fell back in some confusion.” Disruption rather than attack was the objective; once the Federals stabilized a situation, Wheeler’s men sought another weak point, allowing the Yanks to proclaim a successful defense while the Rebs enjoyed a successful harassment. According to Private Fallis, “we could hear the old rebel yell as they attempted some new move which was invariably met and repulsed.”

  At dawn Brigadier General Kilpatrick continued his assigned mission toward Waynesboro and Millen. However, the information Wheeler had gathered convinced him that Kilpatrick’s real objective was to raid Augusta. “Being mindful of the great damage that could be done,” the Confederate general adopted a strategy of “pressing him hard [so that] he might be turned from his purpose.” Here again the absence of any overall coordination squandered a valuable military asset. Wheeler made his own decision to concentrate on defending what was probably the best-prepared potential target along Sherman’s track—this at a time when more and more Confederate leaders on the scene recognized that Savannah was the most likely object of the enemy’s attentions.

  Even more ironic was the fact that the enemy Wheeler was protecting Augusta against was clearly thinking of defensive, not offensive, measures, as his march arrangements made evident. Before breaking camp, Kilpatrick’s Second Brigade formed behind a barricade across the road, and at the word of command, the hard-pressed First passed through the Second. While the First took over the advance, the Second staved off Rebel dashes at the column’s rear. A member of the 92nd Illinois Mounted Infantry described the process:

  A company of fifty men would form at some point in the thick brush, with open fields in rear; in the road a squad of six or eight mounted men would halt, fire at the enemy at long range, then turn and retreat on the column; and on would come their confident pursuers at a gallop. When close up, the fifty concealed horsemen, cool and quiet from much similar practice, would volley them with their repeating rifles. Then the enemy would…deploy his skirmishers, and carefully feel his way…while the fifty mounted men were leisurely closing up on the column.

  “Marched thirty miles and built 9 or ten barricades,” recorded an exhausted Ohio trooper. At one creek the Federals were able to destroy a bridge before
the pursuing Confederates could reach it, forcing them to find an upstream ford, thus buying perhaps an hour of peace until the familiar sounds returned. “The rebels followed close…hooping and yelling terribly,” recollected an Illinois man. “It was evident that the Johnnies in our rear were becoming desperate and wrathy in the highest degree,” agreed a Pennsylvanian.

  It wasn’t just the Rebels who were testy. Even before reaching Waynesboro, Kilpatrick’s men passed the Whitehead plantation, where the Yankee troopers helped themselves with the extreme discourtesy of soldiers pressed for time. When they departed, Catherine Whitehead declared them “certainly the vilest wretches that ever lived & must be overtaken in their wickedness, but if they are not punished in this world, God will certainly punish them in the world to come.”

  For reasons unexplained, Wheeler today limited himself to a stern chase, allowing the head of Kilpatrick’s column to enter Waynesboro in the early afternoon, where some railroad equipment and associated buildings were set ablaze. It was about this time that the Federal general heard from Captain Estes that there were no Union prisoners to be liberated from Camp Lawton. In later reporting this revelation to Sherman, Kilpatrick tried to allay his chief’s anticipated disappointment. “It is needless to say that had this not been the case I should have rescued them,” he said; “the Confederate Government could not have prevented me.”

  With his prisoner-liberation mission scratched, Kilpatrick led his men south from Waynesboro following the railroad. Roughly three miles outside the town he found a good location for a defensive camp; there he established a barricaded line with one flank anchored on the railroad and the other resting on a pond. Rather than allowing his weary troopers time off their feet, Kilpatrick kept every available man busy tearing up the tracks, so that he could claim some accomplishment of his assignment. It was not a decision welcomed by the officers, whose men were “sadly in need of rest and sleep.” They would not get much of either.