Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Dahlgren ordered a list complied of shallow-draft vessels capable of reaching King’s Bridge, then offered to personally oversee the clearing of the waterway. He and Sherman discussed the possibility of a joint action against some of the Rebel river redoubts, with Dahlgren promising to undertake preliminary surveys of the enemy’s defenses. The rear admiral happily agreed to transport Sherman to Fort McAllister, freeing Major General Foster to return to Port Royal to begin opening the floodgates of supplies, ordnance, and mail.

  Sherman spent the night aboard the Harvest Moon, where he was joined in the evening by his dedicated aide and faithful chronicler, Major Henry Hitchcock, who had found his way from headquarters to Cheves’ Rice Mill to Fort McAllister to the flagship. It took but a short time for Hitchcock to conclude “that navy officers are luxurious rascals compared to us dwellers in tents.”

  It was during these visits with Foster and Dahlgren that Sherman was handed a note from Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, addressed from near Petersburg, Virginia, on December 3. The message had been written before any word had been received regarding the fate of Sherman or his forces. “Not liking to rejoice before the victory is assured I abstain from congratulating you and those under your command until the bottom has been struck,” said Grant. There followed a short summary of events in Virginia and elsewhere, along with a troubling assessment of Thomas’s lackluster performance in Tennessee. The man appointed by Sherman to hold the line against Hood had forted up in Nashville after ceding much of the territory to the south without a fight. “Part of the falling back was undoubtedly necessary,” Grant grumbled, “and all of it may have been; it did not look so, however, to me.” Of Sherman’s yet-to-be-revealed accomplishments, Grant expressed a sentiment sure to please its recipient: “I have never had a fear of the result.”

  With the dawn word of McAllister’s fall spread afresh along the Union siege lines outside Savannah. “News came about 10 o’clock of the capture of Fort McAllister,” recorded a Michigan diarist. “Sherman had been on board the fleet…. Our communication is opened with the north again. We gave 3 hearty cheers.” Major James A. Connolly noted in his journal that the soldiers in Brigadier General Absalom Baird’s division (Fourteenth Corps) “have been cheering and yelling like Indians all day. Everybody feeling jolly—bands playing, batteries all firing, flags all flying, and everybody voting everybody else in this army a hero.” “Now we are knocking at the gates of Savannah,” crowed an Iowa boy. “We are going in before long too, for we have the means and Sherman will not be long in putting the same into requisition.”

  At the captured fort, a detail of prisoners headed by McAllister’s engineering chief were clearing the minefield. “They would make a mark around the torpedo with their fingers, then dig it out,” related one of the Yankee guards, “and when they were on the ground they looked like camp kettles.” When General Beauregard later learned of this incident, he applied to Brigadier General John H. Winder, commissary general of prisons, for a like number of Federals “to be employed in retaliation.” According to Beauregard, “Gen. Winder answered, that under his instructions from the Confederate War Department he could not comply; also, that in his belief, prisoners could not rightfully be so employed.”

  Before McAllister was taken, the men may have grumbled about their condition, but it was always with a sense of resigned acceptance. Now that the door to the army warehouses was open, resignation was replaced with impatience. “We will soon have rations again,” proclaimed a New Yorker, “and what we wish for fully is letters from home.” The capture of McAllister, added a hopeful member of the 105th Ohio, “must soon end our season of scarcity of rations which now reigns to such an extent as to make anything welcome that is possibly eatable.” “Our food line should now be open again,” contributed a Wisconsin comrade. “We now have too little to live on…. We have only a small amount of rice and an ounce of meat per day.”

  Still, not everyone was thinking about mail or their stomachs. An Ohio soldier found time today to enjoy his surroundings. “Almost every tree is draped with Spanish Moss,” he wrote in his journal. “It is long & sways to & fro in the breeze. Live oaks look green & splendid.” A few members of the 22nd Wisconsin were celebrating their good fortune this day: “We captured a yawl boat—it had in it 5 chickens, one gobbler and one good blanket.” Another captured boat was the object of a turf war between the infantry and engineers. Acting on orders from Major General Slocum, Colonel George P. Buell with a detail from the 58th Indiana Pontoniers came aboard the captured tender Resolute, intending to tow it to the mainland to repair the engines. Buell’s deputy was met at the gangplank by Colonel William Hawley, who claimed possession for the 3rd Wisconsin. After a bit of verbal tussle, Slocum’s orders trumped Hawley’s claim, so the captured craft was hauled to the mainland.

  Brigadier General Kilpatrick’s headquarters this day were located in historic Midway Church, Liberty County, some fifteen miles southwest of Fort McAllister. He and his riders had arrived here yesterday, having had no problem dispersing the two Confederate militia units assigned to the region, the 29th Battalion Georgia Cavalry (Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hood commanding), and members of the Remount Detachment of the Liberty Independent Troop. Muttered one frustrated Rebel: “If Hood’s Battalion ever fired a shot at a Yankee in Liberty County, I have never been able to find out where it was.”

  One bold detachment from the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry raced nearly thirty miles along the Savannah and Gulf Railroad with orders to destroy the bridge at the Altamaha River. However, this time the militia had managed to concentrate on the opposite bank in sufficient strength, so the 120 or so Union troopers had to content themselves with wrecking the approaches on their side.

  Kilpatrick’s men found themselves in something of a forager’s paradise. Their commander looked across Liberty County and saw many wealthy plantations. The area had been relatively untouched by the war, and even more important, it was far enough distant from Savannah that no Union infantry units had ranged this far, so the troopers had it all to themselves. Add to the mix the absence of Wheeler’s cavalry and the impotency of the local militia, and the result proved to be a catastrophe for Liberty County’s property owners.

  One of the more affluent of them was Mrs. Mary Jones Jones,* recent widow of the influential cleric and planter the Reverend Dr. Charles Colcock Jones. (Dr. Jones made the conversion of slaves to Christianity his life’s work. Through his efforts there was some improvement in their living conditions, even as he taught his converts a Christian obedience to their owners.) The holdings he had passed to his wife consisted of three plantations plus associated slaves: Arcadia in northwestern Liberty County, Montevideo near Riceboro, and Maybank, closer to the coast. Mrs. Jones, a fervent secessionist like her husband, had managed the estates since his passing in March 1863. The abrupt Yankee invasion forced some hard choices. The family decided to remain at Montevideo, which lay along the most likely route for any invader, but to store their goods at the more remote Arcadia. Maybank, presumably, would be left in God’s hands.

  Mrs. Jones had spent the previous day in remote Arcadia, preparing for the goods and valuables she intended to place there. She set off for Montevideo at sunset in a carriage driven by her house slave, Jack. They were about seven miles north of Riceboro when an armed Union officer gestured them to a halt. After enduring a hasty inspection, Mrs. Jones, despite her imperious ways, was advised by the Federal of a roadblock ahead manned by less understanding Yankees. Thus forewarned, she had Jack take her on a roundabout path that led them to a Confederate picket post. Her hopes that a Southern gentleman would see to her needs proved wishful thinking once the officer made clear that he had his orders, which did not include providing her with an armed escort.

  The black servant of a family friend offered to help; with him operating as a scout, Mrs. Jones and Jack were able to get to about four miles west of Riceboro, where they encountered another C.S. picket who said that the town bridge was do
wn. A nearby couple who knew the family urged her to stay with them for the night, but Mrs. Jones was determined to reach Montevideo. She was ready to continue on foot when the picket learned that the bridge had been sufficiently repaired to handle her carriage. The town itself was occupied by Union troopers, necessitating another detour, but by 9:00 P.M. she had reached her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren at the Jones family homestead.

  Her travails were far from over. The wagons carrying the goods intended for Arcadia had found the route closed by enemy checkpoints, so the family members now hustled to secrete what they could on the Montevideo grounds. Other neighbors passed through with ominous tidings of where the Yankees were operating. Then her son-in-law, the Reverend Robert Quarterman Mallard, insisted on leaving to join his militia unit. Left alone, the women prepared to greet the next day with what Mrs. Jones’s daughter later wrote of as a “fearful anxiety.” It was not a misplaced concern.

  Ahead of Liberty County would be six weeks of almost constant exposure to Yankee raiding parties and foraging expeditions. The ordeal, the most extensive suffered by any region during Sherman’s march, was just getting started.

  Once the fall of Fort McAllister had been confirmed, Lieutenant General Hardee feared it presaged an all-out assault. Work on the now-critical floating bridge was not progressing as rapidly as everyone hoped it would; only the first leg (from the city to Hutchinson’s Island) was completed. Worried that he was almost out of time, Hardee ordered a temporary wharf built on the north side of the island to allow him to evacuate troops by boat if need be. (When the dawn of December 15 revealed that the Federals were not mounting a major operation, Hardee canceled the wharf to continue building the bridge.)

  A turf war now erupted over management of the bridge project. Lieutenant Colonel B. W. Frobel, a Confederate States Army engineer on detached service with the Georgia state forces, caught the ear of the militia commander, Major General Gustavus G. W. Smith, to convince him that he could do a better job than Beauregard’s man, Colonel Clarke. Smith pressed Hardee, who passed the buck by foisting Frobel on Clarke. Neither had anything good to say about the other, and not until Clarke concocted some make-work to keep Frobel out of his hair was the chief engineer able to devote his full attention to finishing the job.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1864

  Now that the emotional high of Fort McAllister was behind them, Union soldiers returned to the often tiresome and sometimes deadly business of the siege. “No change from yesterday,” noted a diarist in the 129th Illinois. “Occasional shots from Rebel gun. They do no harm. One man wounded on skirmish line.” “The frogs are peeping at night, the mosquitoes kiss us on our cheeks and leave a smart which is quite uncomfortable at times,” added a Massachusetts comrade. “The birds are leaping from tree to tree and warble forth their sweetest notes of praise.” “This morning I go and see the tide come in,” wrote an Illinois boy.

  Along some sections of the opposing lines the philosophy was live and let live. “We were stationed on the east side of the swamp & Ogeechee canal,” wrote an Ohioan with the Fourteenth Corps. “Lieutenant Heath of Co. A made an agreement with the Rebel picket in our front that either party should give the other warning before firing.” Not so at other points. According to a member of the 68th Ohio (Seventeenth Corps), “a heavy detail from our regiment was assisting to build a line of heavy earthworks, when the saucy enemy threw a number of shells among the working party; but the boys hugged the ground and escaped injury.” On a portion of the Fifteenth Corps line, the heavier-caliber Rebel cannon had their way with a section from the 12th Battery, Wisconsin Light Artillery which “lost three men today all of them being badly wounded.”

  Behind the front lines, the men grumbled about the food and indulged in the general gripe of being located in the midst of a swamp. “Rations getting scarce,” complained a Hoosier. “Living on rice and short on ‘hard tack,’ groused an Ohio man. “We are now living on plain rice, without salt,” contributed a Minnesotan. “We first chopped a trough-like hole in a log, then laid the heads of the rice-sheaves in it, and with a club threshed the grains out; then we rubbed the kernels between our hands to clear it of hulls; after which we used our lungs for a fanning mill, placing the rice, hulls, sand, and all, in a tin plate and blowing until we had it free from hulls; but the sand still remained, and, like the rice, sunk to the bottom and could not be cleaned out; so we had to cook the rice with the sand in it.”

  Many of the Yankees manning the Fourteenth Corps lines were wondering today what to make of some unusual prisoners taken early in the morning. “The story they tell is this,” related a soldier in the 79th Pennsylvania. “Some six hundred Federal prisoners, confined in the ‘Bull Pens’ at Charleston, took the oath of allegiance to the confederacy, and were formed into a battalion…. For a long time they were not allowed arms. On Tuesday last [December 13], however, 250 were taken from the battalion on trial, and ordered to hold the fort in front of our lines. On Wednesday evening [December 14] while the officers were asleep, a guard was placed over them, one of the guns was spiked and filled with mud, and off they started in squads for our lines.” “There is much diversity of opinion as to what should be the judgment in their cases,” continued a Wisconsin soldier in the 21st regiment. “They have undoubtedly done wrong in their enlisting but they claim they have never been disloyal at heart to the U.S. and I believe in this they are honest.”

  When evening settled in along the lines, a number of Union patrols edged ahead to fix the locations of suspected enemy strong points. One such was drawn largely from the 104th Illinois. “The boys waded in [the swamp] for a considerable distance,” recalled a member of the expedition. “In places the water was deep, reaching to the armpits of some. The route taken was found to be impracticable, and the enemy becoming alarmed and opening fire, the command was ordered back to camp, where it arrived wet, cold and disgusted with Georgia swamps.”

  Closer to the Savannah River, Colonel Ezra Carmen was making his way to the headquarters tent of the Twentieth Corps commander, Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams, his head fairly buzzing with glittering prospects. Carmen led the brigade that now had a two-regiment foothold on Argyle Island, thanks to the transfer of the 2nd Massachusetts to join the 3rd Wisconsin. Carmen saw Argyle Island as the perfect launching point to break the enemy’s communication link with Charleston in order to trap the Savannah garrison inside its battlements. He found Brigadier General Williams with Major General Henry Slocum, the Left Wing chief. Both listened eagerly to Carmen talk as he pointed to a rough map he had drawn showing the city, the river, and the thin line representing the planked Union Causeway—Savannah’s only connection to the outside world.

  There were, Carmen explained, “boats enough in the river to cross a brigade every hour.” Despite the firefights ignited each time a Federal touched the South Carolina shore, Carmen had been assured by Colonel William Hawley (commanding the 3rd Wisconsin) that the Union Causeway “could be reached by a brigade.” Even as Carmen was explaining this, a courier arrived with a message from Hawley confirming everything that had been said. Carmen’s enthusiasm was becoming infectious; even cautious Henry Slocum saw the possibilities clear enough. “Damn it!” he exclaimed at last. “Let us take this plank road and shut these fellows in.” Before departing for his headquarters, he alerted Carmen to have the rest of his brigade ready to move on a moment’s notice.

  Back at his camp, Slocum sent a situation report to Sherman, at 9:00 P.M. Summarizing the current situation plus his plans for Carmen’s brigade, the Left Wing commander strongly recommended moving at least a division, and possibly an entire corps, across the Savannah River via Argyle Island into South Carolina. Such an action, he emphasized, would enable the Twentieth Corps to “seal up that side of the city and be in a position to shell every portion of it.” For one of the few times in his professional military career, Slocum was raring to go. He was anxious to know what Sherman thought of the enterprise.

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p; Today’s Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel printed an assessment from Savannah that was both sobering and encouraging. The account, after listing a number of the wounded recently admitted to the principal military hospital (seventeen altogether), reported the death of one of the principals in the Griswoldville fight, Major Ferdinand W. C. Cook, who had directed the Athens Local Defense Battalion. Savannah’s citizens were cautioned against hoarding food, and those with a surplus were asked to share with those in need.

  Still, there was nothing in the present circumstances that gave Savannah’s authorities any cause for alarm. Said the writer: “The citizens of Savannah have only to discharge their duty, and act in concert with the brave and gallant veterans in defending our homes and firesides from the pollution of a hostile foe, the enemy will be driven back in dismay and confusion, and our city rendered secure from future trouble.”

  This cheery outlook was not shared by General P. G. T. Beauregard in Charleston, who put Richmond on the spot today by officially requesting validation for his plan to preserve Lieutenant General Hardee’s forces, even if it meant abandoning Savannah. “I desire being informed if these instructions are approved by the War Department, and are applicable to Charleston as well as Savannah,” Beauregard wired President Davis’s military adviser. Working off the same page, Hardee chimed in a separate message, warning that unless his communication and supply line to Charleston could be held open, “I shall be compelled to evacuate Savannah.”

  In another note sent this day to Major General Samuel Jones, the man principally responsible for keeping the corridor open, Hardee confessed, “I feel uneasy about my communications.” Now that matters were moving inexorably toward an evacuation, Hardee wanted to be sure that there were no misunderstandings, so he asked Beauregard to “come here and give me the benefit of your advice.”