Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  There was an unintended indignity when the time came for Beauregard to depart Savannah that evening. He had entered town on a Charleston train, but the latest reports indicated that during the day the enemy had cut that rail line near the South Carolina border. Used by now to having his travel plans complicated by Sherman’s designs, Beauregard commandeered a launch to carry him up the Savannah River as far as the railroad bridge, where he changed over to a train to carry him to Charleston. As one of his aides later summed up the situation: “The outlook for the immediate future of the Confederacy had become very alarming.”

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1864

  Left Wing

  The Rebel roadblock that had cost the impetuous Lieutenant Coe his life and held up the Fourteenth Corps was very silent this morning as Federal skirmishers brought it under fire, then edged closer. “The battery that annoyed our march last night fell back during the night toward Savannah,” noted a relieved Illinois soldier. “They had earthworks thrown up across the road and embrasures for four guns.” The idling columns began shuffling southward, following the Augusta Road, toward a link-up with the Twentieth Corps near Monteith.

  The Yankees were now passing through a rice-producing region where the residences were few and far between. Supply parties prowling close to the Savannah River found one, described by an Ohioan as “a splendid plantation well stocked with forage.” Continued an Illinois comrade, “The proprietor had fled to an island in the river, which is a part of his plantation, taking with him most of his effects, but the boys succeeded in capturing a large flatboat loaded with rice, meat, &c, which was duly appropriated without a trial by jury.” All the men knew their business, for, as the Ohio man explained, “if we did not clean it out on short notice it was our own fault.”

  For one successful forager, today was a lesson learned about the prerogatives of command. William Bircher’s division had stopped near a stretch of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, where some detachments got busy prying up the rails, while the others were warned to remain close because of reports of Rebel cavalry in the neighborhood. Bircher, in the 2nd Minnesota, cheerfully ignoring the restrictions, wandered about a mile and a half before he came upon an abandoned farmstead not yet visited by other Federals. A few helpful blacks loaded the boy with potatoes and eggs, and as he departed, he gazed longingly at a pair of plump cows destined for some regiment’s commissary.

  Returning to where his comrades were working the road, Bircher tried to sneak in with his stash, but instead ran right into his colonel, who was sitting on a pile of track ties, supervising the line’s destruction. The officer eyed the youngster lugging a rubber poncho filled with something.

  “What have you got in your blanket?” he asked evenly.

  “Potatoes,” answered Bircher, knowing that it would do him no good to lie about something that could be easily checked.

  “What have you got in your handkerchief?” continued the colonel.

  “Eggs.” They had arrived at the moment of truth. If Bircher was to keep his plunder, he had to convince the colonel that no rules had been broken. He was mentally ready when the officer popped the next question.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Oh,” said Bircher in his most casual tone, “about two hundred yards from here.”

  The colonel smiled. “Is that so?” he said.

  “That’s so.”

  “About two hundred yards from here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hoping to close the sale, Bircher began to describe the stout bovines he’d seen, but the colonel cut him off, saying that they’d talk about cows later. For the moment he instructed the young man to place his goods on the ground, then join the regiment tearing up the tracks. “I never got humpbacked from the amount of work I did,” Bircher recollected in later years. “I principally kept one eye on the colonel and the other on the potatoes and eggs.” The colonel’s cook made an appearance, gathered in his takings, then headed toward camp. Bircher intercepted the man, but his protestations of ownership carried no weight with him. “Well,” reflected the young soldier, now imbued with a veteran’s philosophical skepticism, “that was the last I saw of the eggs and yams.”

  Some of the units assigned to the railroad job were told to follow the line to the river in order to destroy the bridge. “We tore up the track to the bridge and a detail was sent to fire it and the bridge but the Rebs had a Gun Boat laying in the river and they shelled us so we abandoned it,” reported an Indiana soldier. Actually, corrected an Ohio comrade, it was so dark when the arsonists reached the span that no one was “certain what was firing on them.” It could have been a gunboat; equally, it could have been a battery on the South Carolina side. Whichever it was, the Hoosier avowed that the Rebels “made it ‘red hot’ for us.”

  Having cleared the Rebel outpost blocking the way at Monteith Swamp, the Twentieth Corps bypassed the station to press toward Savannah’s principal line of defense. The trick now was to recognize the difference between the lightly held outer works and the firmly held main position, then knowing when to stop. A soldier in the 129th Illinois who was part of this process recollected slogging “through thick underbrush and thorns in the pines, without a single shot being fired at us by rebel infantry. We could not explain this any other way than that the enemy’s intention was to get us within easy range, and then pepper away at us to kill as many as possible…. We advanced until a swamp prevented all further progress, from the other side of which the enemy stationed there now opened on us. The enemy, being secure behind the swamps, answered three or four times to our shots, but all balls went overhead.” The officer commanding a Connecticut regiment in the same predicament sent for something to eat once the line had stopped advancing, “for he ‘knows it will be a week before we will get out of this d——d swamp.’”

  The encounter of the day was turned in by a detail from the 150th New York, which was ordered toward the Savannah River by its brigade commander, who was hoping for a good haul to replenish depleted supplies. What happened instead was a land-river action, whose only eyewitness account was the brief unpublished report filed by the officer in charge, Captain Henry A. Gildersleeve:

  Camp 150th NYV

  Dec 11th 1864

  Colonel

  I have the honor to report that while foraging yesterday with my company, which numbers forty-two muskets, we discovered a steamboat, making her way up the Savannah river, and captured her with her officers and crew, eleven in number. Col. Clinch (said to be a bearer of dispatches to General Beauregard) and orderly were also taken from the vessel.

  She proved to be the Rebel dispatch boat “Ida”—a sidewheel steamer about one hundred and twenty feet in length.

  As soon as the “Ida” came in sight we opened fire on her with our muskets and were assisted some by a detachment of the 9th IIIs. Cavalry. The bullets were so effective they caused her to turn around and endeavor to make her way back. In this attempt she struck ground and being still in range, considered her case hopeless, and pulled up the white flag.

  Colonel Clinch then came ashore in a small boat and surrendered himself and the vessel.

  As soon as the tide came up she was brought along side the wharf. By a very careful search nothing of any value was found on board but a small amount of rations for the crew.

  Considering it unsafe to hold my company there until support could be obtained I fired the boat and returned to my regiment.

  The prisoners were all turned over to the Provost Marshal of the Corps and I hold his receipt for the same.

  I remain Very Respectfully,

  Your Obd’t Serv’t

  H.A. Gildersleeve

  Capt. 150th NYV

  Comd’g Co. C

  Afterward, one of the captured Southern officers passed through the camp of the 86th Illinois, where he struck up a conversation with a Yankee after learning they both had connections to the town of Buffalo, New York. The Rebel had little good to say about C.S. currency (t
erming it “Confederate trash”), and confessed that he was “d——d glad to be captured,” because he “was tired fighting for a country that was already gone to h——l.”

  Right Wing

  The four constituent parts of the Fifteenth Corps, which had been operating on independent tracks for the past few days, began to merge across the face of Savannah’s southwestern defensive sector. The men of Major General Peter J. Osterhaus’s corps would occupy the extreme right flank of the investment Sherman planned for Savannah.

  Those of the command operating this morning along the Canoochee River awoke to a heavy fog. “The weather is cold and a chilly mist is above and around us,” recorded a Minnesota man, “which, rising from the flow water of the swamp and canal, gives a spectral appearance to the long lines of blue-coats.” At numerous points the probing screen ahead of the main columns encountered the city’s hard defensive shell. In a pattern repeated all up and down the line, Rebel cannon let loose at the first sight of the Federal voltigeurs. “We then commenced firing and skirmishing with the enemy,” related a member of the 63rd Illinois. “The balls flew pretty thick but none of our boys were hurt.” One slight exception was a private clipped by a tree branch severed by a cannonball, though the man “was not hurt bad, merely scared.”

  This was the sloppy phase of the process of grappling the enemy’s main line of resistance. Units advanced by rough maps and compasses, with scant knowledge of what lay ahead. The men of the 100th Indiana found themselves having to entrench in the middle of a rice field. “Every thing is a black muck,” griped a Hoosier. “We had just got settled when the Captain of a couple of guns which were in the embrasures close at our right told us to lay low. He was going to wake up the Johnnys. He fired both of his guns at a Battery perhaps half a mile away. He woke them up all right. They replied, knocked the muzzle off the gun next to us, the wheel of the other, blew up the caisson standing in the rear of the guns, and threw one shell into the muck in front of us which exploded and covered us with about 20 tons of black mud.”

  Even though the main part of the Fifteenth Corps was concentrating in an area bounded on its right by the Little Ogeechee River, several detached units extended Union control as far south as the ruined remains of King’s Bridge. Already Sherman was looking at his maps and realizing that the Ogeechee River represented his best chance for establishing an accessible supply link with the Federal fleet at the stream’s mouth. All that stood in the way was Fort McAllister. The first step toward eliminating that strong point was to restore King’s Bridge to allow troops to cross. So an advance party from Major General Howard’s headquarters, headed by his chief of engineers, Captain Chauncey B. Reese, now stared thoughtfully at the wrecked crossing.

  It was a daunting prospect. The stringers and supporting timber were gone; all that remained were the log pilings, stretching like parallel dotted lines to the opposite shore. The distance to be bridged was about 700 feet; with approaches, nearly 1,000. The river here was really an estuary of the Atlantic, with a daily tidal rise of six to eight feet. At low tide the water was fourteen feet deep. While the tools needed were part of the kits carried by the engineers, all the timber would have to be manufactured on site. The final product had to be sturdy enough to carry a full division plus wagons and artillery.

  The group with Captain Reese broke up, each member hurrying off to begin the process of measuring, surveying, mapping, and planning. When the bridge was first constructed the schedule had been measured in weeks. Now it would be counted in hours and days.

  For their part, each of the three divisions in the Seventeenth Corps pressed hard today against Savannah’s defenses. Likely the first in contact was the Fourth Division, which learned firsthand that many of the city’s seaward-facing heavy-caliber guns had been shifted over to the land side. “The rebels shelled us quite lively, their large 32 and 64 lb shells tearing through the tops of the tall pine trees hurling branches and splinters in all directions,” attested an Iowa soldier. “It was demoralizing but the damage was slight.” Next into the line of fire was the Third Division, one of whose soldiers had a less than fond memory of plowing “pell mell through a big swamp up to my crotch in water.” The typical situation facing the men was described by a Third Division soldier when he wrote: “In our front was a large ricefield partly covered with water, on the opposite side of which was a slight elevation, on which the enemy were entrenched.” Substitute “swamp” for “ricefield,” and the model fits nearly all.

  Major General Sherman was still tagging along with the Seventeenth Corps; now that they were encountering the enemy’s main line of resistance, his curiosity drew him into the combat zone. “He had dismounted,” recalled an Illinois soldier, “and was walking nervously up and down the side of the road, his head bent over on his breast, his hands crossed behind him. He seemed intent upon his own thoughts, and oblivious to the volleys of shell and shot which tore down the road.” “The boys thought that he was exposing himself unnecessarily and wished for the sake of all concerned that ‘the Old Man’ would look a leedle out and seek a safer place,” seconded an Iowan.

  All of which would have found no argument with Major Hitchcock, shadowing his restless boss this eventful day. Things had started out without any problems. Headquarters was on the move with Major General Blair’s corps at 8:00 A.M., but once it became clear that the head of the column was fighting and not marching, Sherman brought everyone to a halt at a frame farmhouse. The women inside appeared more curious than anxious about what was happening around them, even when a field aide station began treating wounded men in their front yard. Hitchcock was taking in the scene, which he would later record in his journal, when he suddenly noticed that the General had gone off on foot to where there was shooting.

  The frantic aide ran forward, searched for a while, then retraced his steps to discover that Sherman had returned ahead of him. However, it wasn’t more than thirty minutes before he was again on the move, again heading toward the front. This time, Hitchcock walked alongside. They had covered maybe one hundred yards when there was the boom-thud of a cannon firing nearby. Sherman stopped, looked toward the source of the sound, and quickly stepped to one side. Hitchcock, hearing a “loud rush and whizzing in air over and in front of us,” hit the deck. The solid shot struck elsewhere before bounding toward the rear. Hitchcock rose, dusted himself off, and joined his boss. “This place is not safe,” Sherman said, “they are firing down the road—we had better go back.”

  The pair returned to the frame house, which abutted the Central of Georgia Railroad in its backyard. There they found the rest of Sherman’s staff, spooked by the same skipping iron ball, clustered nervously behind the psychological cover represented by the flimsy structure. Just as a column of soldiers began cutting diagonally across the tracks, Sherman sighted down the right-of-way toward Savannah. The road ran straight and true, making it a perfect targeting guide for any alert Rebel gunner.

  “I could see the cannoneers preparing to fire, and cautioned the officers near me to scatter, as we would likely attract a shot,” remembered Sherman. “Very soon I saw the white puff of smoke, and, watching close, caught sight of the ball as it rose in its flight, and, finding it coming pretty straight, I stepped a short distance to one side, but noticed a negro very near me in the act of crossing the track at right angles.” Major Hitchcock watched, frozen in horrific anticipation, as the cannon round hit the ground some distance off, but continued ricocheting along the right-of-way. A bounce carried it past the huddled staff and their boss; it hissed close to the infantry file, and with what seemed an eerily precise aim, struck the black man in the head, killing him instantly. Remarked Sherman: “A soldier close by spread an overcoat over the body, and we all concluded to get out of that railroad cut.”

  The incident of the near misses was not the only noteworthy moment for Major Hitchcock this day. Ever conscious of his self-appointed role as chronicler/historian of the enterprise, he realized that December 10 marked a miles
tone. Now that Sherman’s forces were coming into contact with Savannah’s fixed line of defenses, this day “may be considered as ending our march on this campaign.” As reports came in through the evening citing the strong resistance being met by all corps, Hitchcock also wondered: “How long will it take us to get over the last five of our ‘300 mile march’?”

  There were those in the Savannah garrison who were content to carry out their job assignment without much reference to what was happening around them. Edwin Ledyard was one. He worked in the Savannah Arsenal, where his duties included delivering ordnance to the main line of defense. “I was driving out…in a light wagon belonging to the arsenal and was near our intrenchments when a cannon [shell] suddenly exploded some distance in front,” he recollected.

  “What is that?” Ledyard asked a passing soldier.

  “That’s Sherman,” was the answer.

  The stranger suggested that he drive his wagon elsewhere. “I took his advice,” said a suddenly frightened Ledyard.

  Now that Sherman was closely investing Savannah, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee’s options had much simplified. There were only five narrow corridors along which to approach western Savannah—the two railways, as well as the Augusta, the Louisville, and the Ogeechee roads—so Hardee blocked them all. Taking full advantage of the low-lying land and irrigated rice fields in between those access points, his engineers had flooded the intervening ground, making it hugely difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate the defensive perimeter through those regions. In addition, recognizing that there was little chance that Federal naval elements would attack the city, the Confederate commander had reoriented a great deal of his most powerful ordnance to point inland.