There were mini-actions all along the main siege lines, few large enough to warrant mention in official reports unless men died. The soldiers in the 63rd Illinois would puzzle for a while about the mission they executed this afternoon. The regiment was called into line not long after 1:00 P.M., then marched toward Savannah following the railroad tracks. The column halted short of the enemy’s position, where it deployed to the left of the road bed in an open skirmishing order. One more advance was undertaken, bringing the men within extreme rifle range of the Rebels. The order to halt was followed by one to commence firing toward the city. Forty rounds apiece were loosed off before the shooting was halted, the men re-formed in column along the railway line, and then returned to camp “covered with mud up to our forks,” said one. The soldiers guessed they had carried out a diversion for an operation somewhere else. Not until the next morning would they understand the reason for their curious action.
Right Wing December 13, 1864
Fort McAllister
William Tecumseh Sherman stood silent and unseen in the obscuring morning shadows, watching Hazen’s division pass on its way to Fort McAllister. There were other pressing matters awaiting the General’s attention this day, but he would entertain none of them. Opening communication with the fleet was the only item on his personal agenda, and Fort McAllister was all that stood in the way. Sherman’s earlier confidence had waned somewhat. He now acknowledged that McAllister “will be found [to be] a strong work,” so he cut orders for Brigadier General Kilpatrick to try to establish contact with the fleet at the next inlet to the south.
The divisional pioneers and Missouri engineers, who had labored hard through the night to complete the crossing in time, were almost through. The span lacked guardrails, but no one in charge was willing to hold things up the extra couple of hours it would have taken to install them, so the soldiers crossed with no handholds. The finishing work, now undertaken in the breaks and pauses of the movement, would have the protections in place by December 14. No one seems to have been hurt or any material lost in the crossing.
Brigadier General Hazen made the passage at about 5:00 A.M. There is nothing to indicate that he met with either Sherman or Howard this morning, but given the very high level of expectation on the part of the two leaders, some kind of leavetaking would not have been out of the question. Most of the foot soldiers marched in ignorance of their objective; only Hazen and his key officers knew what lay ahead. “There was a general notion [among the ranks] that we were going to assail and capture some obstacle separating the army from its food and raiment,” recollected the brigadier. There were seventeen regiments marching this morning; for eight there would be little to note in journals and diaries save for another stretch of Georgia countryside visited. For the other nine, however, this day would produce the mix of anxiety, determination, fear, adrenaline, and relief that embodied combat.
Once across King’s Bridge, the infantrymen tramped along what Hazen described as “about two miles of causeway with rice fields on either hand.” “While we were going along the causeway,” he continued in a later memoir, “the column was beset by a great crowd of rice plantation people, a simple race, small, ignorant, of all shades of color and speaking a peculiar patois. They were entirely unique and distinct from any other people, and their chatter was…almost unintelligible.”
The officer in command at Fort McAllister, Major George W. Anderson, greeted the new day with foreboding. A sudden increase in Union cavalry patrols to the west had effectively shut down his own scouting efforts, so the major had no idea what was going on beyond his picket outpost about a mile distant. The two enemy cannon at Cheves’ Rice Mill continued to annoy the garrison with an occasional shell. The Federal navy had not made an appearance below the fort, but Anderson wouldn’t put it past them to be cooking up some combined operation. His one grim satisfaction was knowing that the ordnance experts from Charleston had arranged for a deadly surprise along the causeway leading directly to the fort. That, plus the defenses his men had worked so hard to erect, added to the difficulty the enemy would have getting through the swampy areas surrounding the place, gave him some hope that Sherman would find Fort McAllister too costly to capture.
Not long after the tail of Hazen’s column—including six cannon in one and a half batteries—crossed King’s Bridge, Major General Sherman and his staff headed off along the plantation roads, paved with crushed oyster shells, to Cheves’ Rice Mill, from where the General intended to observe operations. Missing from the entourage was Major Hitchcock, who, to his everlasting regret, chose to remain at the main headquarters closer to Savannah. Also with the party were Major General Howard and his staff. Once there, they would be joined throughout the day by a gaggle of officers and aides from the other Fifteenth Corps divisions and the Seventeenth Corps. A crowd of braid and glitter was about to descend on Cheves’ Rice Mill.
With no immediate decisions requiring his attention, Brigadier General Hazen took in the sights as his column trudged south from King’s Bridge. “The day was bright,” he wrote later; “and the march, after leaving the rice-farms, was along a lovely road of shells and white sand, under magnolias and wide-branching live oaks draped in long hanging moss.” Probably around 6:15 A.M. the Yankee boys passed near Strathy Hall, the formidable residence of Joseph L. McAllister, a portion of whose property had been donated to the Southern cause for the eponymous fort. Kilpatrick’s cavalrymen had already paid the mansion a visit, Hazen observed, “and the contents of the house were strewn upon the floors or scattered about the lawn.” Even though the horse was already out of this barn, Hazen (who had enjoyed a slight prewar acquaintance with the McAllisters) posted some guards anyway, perhaps thinking he might need the structure for a headquarters later on and did not want anyone burning it.
There was corresponding activity among the handful of Union vessels watching over Ossabaw Sound, where no less than three rivers—the Vernon, Little Ogeechee, and Ogeechee—terminated. Steam was up and the crew ready on the tug Dandelion, which had just been turned over to Lieutenant George A. Fisher of the army signal corps for his mission to establish contact with Sherman’s forces. Fisher logged the time at 8:00 A.M. when he came aboard. Following a discussion with the boat’s skipper, the party departed the anchorage. Their likely course followed first the Vernon River then the Little Ogeechee River before ducking into a narrow passageway called Harvey’s Creek. It wasn’t long before the eager signal officer was “looking closely in every direction with my glass for some signal or sign of General Sherman’s army.”
Not far south from Strathy Hall was the turnoff for Genesis Point and Fort McAllister, four and a half miles distant. It was near here that Hazen met up with Brigadier General Kilpatrick, whose men had carried out a crucial and largely unheralded assignment by keeping prying enemy eyes away from the approaching infantry column. The cavalrymen, Hazen noted, “had reconnoitered the fort and confirmed what General Howard was able to tell me about the situation.”
If Kilpatrick was unhappy at Sherman’s decision to deny him a role in the upcoming assault, he did not show it. Perhaps he shared his thoughts with Hazen about how the job should be done—use sharpshooters with fast-firing breech-loaders to suppress the enemy cannon, then rush the place. If he did pass anything along, Hazen never saw fit to acknowledge the fact, and Kilpatrick never tried to claim any credit. The best news was that the route was clear to within about a mile of the fort.
Hazen’s column made the turn toward Genesis Point. About a dozen mounted men—signal corps officers, some orderlies, and aides—galloped forward to scout the way.
For the moment, the tug Dandelion had gone as far as its captain was prepared to go. Across the marsh to the north and east, at long cannon range along the Little Ogeechee River, was the enemy’s Rose Dhu Island battery, making further movement foolhardy. Lieutenant Fisher, who could see nothing of Sherman’s army, realized that he needed to get closer to Fort McAllister. The Dandelion’s skipper agree
d to loan him a lifeboat with four sailors to row. Accompanied by two other signal corps men, Fisher pushed off about 10:00 A.M.
After passing along the plantation road through the marshland, Sherman, Howard, plus their staffs reached Cheves’ Rice Mill around 10:30 A.M. The General’s first thought was of the Union navy just a few miles away. “Have you seen anything of the fleet?” he queried the post’s senior officer, Captain James M. McClintock, of Major General Howard’s signal detachment. “Nothing definite, General,” the captain replied; “but, at times have thought I could dimly discern the tops of masts far out upon the sound.” This was not the news Sherman wanted to hear. “I don’t believe they are looking for us,” he complained aloud. Sherman, McClintock observed, “was quite restless and seemingly impatient.”
There was a small shed attached to the rice mill that had a flat roof; without being directed there Sherman and some of those with him clambered onto it to better observe Fort McAllister. Their efforts were punctuated by DeGress’s gunners, who continued with their own program by occasionally blasting a round toward the enemy redoubt. From his perch atop the shed, Sherman noted that McAllister could be “plainly seen over the salt-marsh, about three miles distant.” A soldier with the group attested that with “the use of the glass I could see the fort[,] rebel flag & even the men very distinctly.” Added an officer with Major General Howard’s staff, the “timber in rear of the fort had been cleared off so, not only the fort, but the movements of the troops in rear of it, could be seen from the mill.”
For the moment, however, there was very little to see. Sherman, anxious for some sign that Hazen was on the case, could only mutter that “the place looked as peaceable and quiet as on the Sabbath.”
Perhaps three miles southeast of where Major General Sherman was glaring at Fort McAllister, Lieutenant Fisher’s party was picking its way through the marsh, struggling against the sharp-edged grass and the falling tide. There was nothing recognizable to navigate by at water level, so the boat stopped from time to time to allow the officer or one of his men to stand on some passably firm ground to fix their position. When the time came to write his report of this adventure, Fisher described this process as taking “a careful and close reconnaissance of the forts and the surrounding country.”
It was a testament to the effectiveness of Kilpatrick’s cavalry that the dozen advance riders from Hazen’s column came within a mile or so of Fort McAllister before they encountered any of the enemy—a small mounted picket guarding the entrance to a narrow causeway running parallel to the river bank. Using the cover provided by the trees lining the road, the Federals, led by Lieutenant William H. Sherfy, overran the post before those manning it could react. When the captured Rebels showed a marked disinclination to walk on the causeway itself, the Union officers began to suspect the presence of torpedoes.
One of the captured Confederates, Thomas J. Mills, now confirmed the presence of the deadly devices. They had been laid here to draw first blood when the Union soldiers took to the causeway, as they had to do to reach Fort McAllister. When Brigadier General Hazen was notified of this, he halted the column to consult the helpful POW. Mills not only showed where the torpedoes had been placed, he also assisted in digging them up. “This humane and proper act gained for him, as it deserved, the kind consideration of all,” remarked Hazen.
While a detail gingerly excavated the deadly packages, Hazen directed his column into open fields near a house belonging to the Middleton family. It was apparent that he had more troops in hand than there was room for in the constricted area of dry ground across the causeway, so eight regiments took station at the Middletons’, which became Hazen’s headquarters. Thanks to the helpful Mills, Hazen had also gleaned several helpful details about McAllister’s armament and defensive scheme that would guide him in shaping his mission plan.
The time was approaching 2:00 P.M. when the causeway was declared safe for passage. Hazen ordered forward the nine regiments he had selected to attack the fort, led by three from Colonel Wells S. Jones’s Second Brigade: 47th Ohio, 54th Ohio, and 111th Illinois. There was a slight rubbernecking delay as the men passed by the excavated mines, “and large, black, ugly-looking things they were,” wrote a gunner who saw them later in the day. Immediately upon debouching from the narrow causeway, Jones’s column fanned out to advance as skirmishers, quickly bringing Fort McAllister under direct rifle fire. Hazen had decided against sending out a flag of truce with a surrender demand, “believing that it would merely advertise our intentions, and be met with a boastful refusal.”
As soon as Hazen’s men opened a scattering fire,* Major George W. Anderson understood that it was the beginning of the great trial for his little command. Considering, as he later reported, “the feebleness of the garrison of the fort,…it was evident, cut off from all support, and with no possible hope of reinforcements from any quarter, that holding the fort was simply a question of time.” Anderson reckoned his grim options as “death or captivity.”
Major General Sherman reckoned it as roughly 2:00 P.M. when he “observed signs of commotion in the fort, and noticed one or two guns fired inland, and some musket-skirmishing in the woods close by.” A staff officer under Howard with an eye for the poetic took note of how the skirmish line was marked “by the little round puffs of blue smoke that roll out from the cover of the wood full rifle range away from the Rebel Fort, and which float lazily up towards the tree tops.”
The crescendo of musketry about Fort McAllister, punctuated by the boom of its landside cannon firing, caught Lieutenant Fisher’s full attention. Once he determined that the enemy wasn’t firing at him, he began to swing his binoculars over a wider area. “I…saw, about three miles northwest of where I was lying in the marsh, a flag upon the top of an old rice mill, but there being no air stirring I was unable to make out of what nature it was,” he reported. “I could then indistinctly see persons through a broken part of the roof, one of whom, taking hold of the end of the flag, drew its folds out so I could see our own glorious Stars and Stripes.” Taking a deep breath, the young officer told the sailors to row back to the Dandelion. He had found Sherman’s army!
Two mistakes had been made in designing Fort McAllister’s rear defenses and in preparing the ground adjacent to the earthwork that made matters even worse for the garrison. The landside guns, like most of those along the river and seawalls, were positioned behind an unnotched fort wall; in military terms, they were en barbette. While this allowed the individual cannon to traverse to a greater degree than those constrained by a narrow opening, or embrasure, it was hell on the men who operated the weapons. They were fully exposed while handling the reloads, which might not have been so fatal a miscalculation were it not for the other decision that had been made.
A fort ultimately depends upon the strength of its walls, the effectiveness of its firepower, and the courage of its garrison to survive. Adding to that defensive scheme were the obstructions placed outside the fort, designed to slow up any attackers, increasing the attrition as they came closer. Fort McAllister was not without these layers of defense.
There was a ditch running close to the walls, where the land was firm enough to support it; a dozen feet deep, nine feet wide at bottom, and twice that at top. Studded in a ragged row along the ditch floor were sharpened wooden stakes, four feet long, embedded perhaps two to three inches apart. Out from the ditch (ten yards at some points, up to twenty-five at others) was a ring of abatis—chopped trees left with upper branches intact, laid in parallel with the tops interlaced and pointing toward the enemy. Two more such rows were planned but not even begun by December 13. Just outside this barrier was a narrow field of sub-terra shells—torpedoes—diabolically sited where advancing troops would slow down and congregate to pick their way through the maze.
In the process of preparing the abatis, the fort’s garrison and slave laborers cleared a further field of fire by chopping down trees for several hundred yards more, as well as razing some wooden outbuil
dings. A detached mortar battery located off the fort’s southeast corner was to be dismantled to prevent its use by the enemy. Major Anderson’s men had not gotten around to removing the stumps, dismantling the mortar battery, or finishing the building demolition, an oversight that provided Federal sharpshooters with ample places of cover to shoot at the exposed artillerymen. In some cases, the riflemen were able to set up within 200 yards of the fort. A veteran marksman in the 47th Ohio sized up the situation at once as his company scuttled ahead to bring McAllister under fire. Nestled safely behind one of the tree stumps, he brought his rifle to his shoulder with the comment, “watch me make the Johnnies get off the works.”
In his after-action report Major Anderson cited the worst case of one of his batteries along the landside wall where “out of a detachment of eight men three were killed and three more wounded. The Federal skirmish line was very heavy, and the fire so close and rapid that it was at times impossible to work our guns.”
It was Brigadier General Hazen’s intention to encircle the landside of Fort McAllister using nine regiments; three from each of his three brigades. The first across the causeway, Colonel Wells S. Jones’s Second Brigade, were assigned “position on the left of the road, the left resting on the river.” The next to arrive were the three from Colonel Theodore Jones’s First Brigade—30th Ohio, 6th Missouri, and 116th Illinois. In many ways theirs was the toughest task, for they had to pick their way through the swampy mire south and east of the fort in order to take their place on the extreme right. Last over the causeway were the 70th Ohio, 48th Illinois, and 90th Illinois from Colonel John M. Oliver’s Third Brigade, which were to link the two flanks.
Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea Page 48