Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Sherman reached King’s Bridge with his party at midday, just in time to prevent a major disruption to the all-important supply system. It required approximately 1,600 men to handle the security as well as manage the unloading and transfer of goods from boats to wagons sent by the various commands. Since December 16 these duties had been performed by Colonel Benjamin F. Potts’s brigade (Seventeenth Corps), but when Sherman arrived at King’s Bridge he was told by the acting provost marshal that Major General Blair had recalled Potts’s troops, sending only two regiments (600 men) to replace them. Sherman was very annoyed. After ordering the two regiments back whence they came, he told Potts not to go anywhere. He fired off notes to Howard and Slocum, apprising them of the problem and directing them to detail one regiment (approximately 350 men) with 50 black pioneers from each corps to handle the workload at King’s Bridge. Only when this body of men was fully assembled could Potts be released.

  (Sherman’s actions and orders ignited a tempest in a teapot, as it took time for the instructions to make their way through the wing commanders to their subordinate corps commanders. Before matters were straightened out, Major General Blair had ordered Colonel Potts arrested for failing to obey orders to join him, and the commissary of subsistence had figuratively crossed swords with Blair by refusing to release Potts’s men from their duties.)

  Sherman boarded an army tug at King’s Bridge, then headed down the Ogeechee. He was anxious to contact Rear Admiral Dahlgren, who was scouting the Vernon River, planning the joint operation against its defensive batteries that he had discussed with Sherman during their meeting. When Sherman’s tug finally located the Harvest Moon toward evening, the General came aboard. Dahlgren now learned that the combined army-navy push (Howard was to supply some troops) was canceled (a “great disappointment” to the rear admiral); but more importantly, he was informed of Grant’s intention to transfer most of Sherman’s army to Virginia. Dahlgren agreed to transport Sherman to Hilton Head for his personal meeting with Foster, a journey that the rear admiral estimated would take until dawn.

  The destruction of the Savannah and Gulf Railroad remained on the daily agenda. “Still taring up the rode,” scribbled a diarist in the 83rd Indiana, while others in the division set down their tools and “loaded the [wagon] train with corn & potatoes.” Southward, Mower’s division of the Seventeenth Corps finally arrived at its designated zone. “Moved out on the rail road and tore up track all day,” recorded a member of the 64th Illinois. Liberty County’s ordeal continued, as the soldier added: “Got lots of flour and meal.” The Fourteenth Corps brigade that had been scouring the county as well made the turn for home today, “our teams all loaded,” according to a Minnesota man. Their only complaint was that they had to “drink the water along the side of the road, which is nearly black as tar.”

  Now that supply vessels were arriving at King’s Bridge, someone had the idea to fill them with contrabands for the return trip to Hilton Head, where Northern abolitionists had set up a model African-American community. For several days the blacks had been shunted into staging camps near King’s Bridge. A soldier assigned to watch over one encampment never forgot how the escaped slaves “would sing hymns, pray and preach and hold out till nearly midnight, unless we ordered them to stop.” Others enjoyed “plantation dances and frolics.” The white soldiers found their “amusements…quite interesting.”

  The Fourteenth Corps staff officer, Major John A. Connolly (still drafting a note for newspaper publication regarding the incident he’d heard about Ebenezer Creek), watched with interest as the first contingent of blacks slated for transport were marched down to the departure wharf. “It was a strange spectacle to see those negroes of all ages, sizes, and both sexes, with their bundles on their heads and in their hands trudging along, they knew not whither, but willing to blindly follow the direction given to them by our officers.” Once the procession reached King’s Bridge, other Federal officers went among them, observed an Ohio guard, “and the men and boys, able bodied, are taken out to work for the government.”

  Up and down the siege lines preparations went ahead for the upcoming Savannah assault. In the Second Division, Twentieth Corps, there was a staff conference today “with view to the adoption of a plan for storming the enemy’s works.” Orders were issued to other commands to “make thorough reconnaissances of the grounds in their front; [and to] examine the approaches of the enemy’s works which give the greatest promise of successful assault.” In one such expedition, a detachment from the 7th Iowa used a small boat to ease up to the Rebel lines along Salt Creek. They found that “the opposite shore was low and marshy in many places, waist deep in mud,” ruling out this avenue of approach. In returning to their supports, the reconnaissance party was spotted by Rebel artillerymen who “threw their shells among us, pretty lively for a while, but without doing us any injury,” wrote a relieved Iowan.

  Along with all this focused activity, typical siege operations continued as if nothing else were happening. An Iowa soldier noted that there was “some heavy cannonading and brisk skirmishing all along the lines.” “We lay within 100 yds of their forts under constant fire and they don’t hurt anybody,” boasted a Michigan man this day, “only chop off trees with their shots. Our pursuits go on the same as if no enemy within 50 miles except when shells come down too close, everybody is out of sight into their holes like so many gophers.”

  Fate yet played an unpredictable hand. In the sector held by the First Brigade, Third Division, Seventeenth Corps, Major John M. Price of the 12th Wisconsin had just been promoted from captain, relieving him of all duties on the picket line. Nevertheless, he insisted on one final tour of duty, partly in order to examine an area being considered for a possible attack. According to Brigadier General Manning F. Force, who looked into the matter, Price, returning from his scout, approached a two-man picket post “upon one of the thread-like narrow dikes, [when] they took him for a rebel and challenged. He answered ‘a friend’ and kept advancing taking them for our men. As he came near they said something which he did not hear. He then observed one going around as if to get behind him, supposed he had come upon rebels, turned to run off and was shot.” Price died the next day. “He was a fine officer in both appearance and soldierly qualities,” mourned a comrade, “and was much beloved by all the men of the regiment.”

  The stakes were being dramatically raised this day on Argyle Island. At dawn and pursuant to orders, Colonel Ezra Carmen landed the 3rd Wisconsin followed by the 2nd Massachusetts onto the South Carolina shore at Izard’s Plantation, near where a Rebel horse battery had been driven off by Captain Winegar on December 18. Incredibly, the Confederates had not picketed the place, so the Wisconsin boys splashed ashore “without opposition,” as one of them stated. Behind them the 2nd Massachusetts piled onto the riverbank, also without trouble. “If they had had their guns where they were yesterday they could have knocked Hail Columbia out of us,” observed a Bay State officer.

  Skirmishers took up the advance, followed by the rest of the two regiments. “The rebs made but little opposition,” said a Wisconsin officer. Colonel Carmen was about to stick his neck way out. Soon after the two regiments cleared the landing area, he signaled for the 13th New Jersey to come across as well, an action that he fully realized “exceeded…[my] instructions.” The New Jersey soldiers began changing banks at 7:00 A.M. “It was known that the only avenue of escape left to Hardee, was across the river in our front,” said one, “and it was intended, if possible, to cut them off.” Confederate reaction may have been slow to develop, but develop it did. Beginning around 11:00 A.M., “the contest became severe and stubborn,” reported Carmen, as his men began meeting more and more of Major General Wheeler’s troopers supported by local militia. Nevertheless, by noon Carmen had advanced his line nearly two miles inland.

  This despite a difficult terrain. “We came right across rice fields all cut up with ditches from 1 to 10 ft. wide,” related a Massachusetts soldier, “which we had to
get over as best we could; part of the way was through rice as high as our heads & all wet with dew.” By 1:00 P.M. Carmen’s progress was halted by an increasing enemy force backed with artillery. Seeing his bluff called and his bet raised, Carmen upped the ante. Orders went to Argyle Island for the rest of the brigade—the 107th and 150th New York regiments—to join their compatriots. As fast as the 107th landed, Carmen parceled it out; four companies to assist the 2nd Massachusetts, two to aid the 3rd Wisconsin, and five to extend the line. The men, said a member of the 107th, “had some severe work skirmishing.”

  By 4:00 P.M. Colonel Carmen had pushed his command to its limits. His four regiments (the 150th New York stood in reserve) held a “line nearly two and a half miles long, front and flanks well covered, and securely resisting Wheeler’s persistent attempts to dislodge it.” The officer dispatched a situation report to his division commander, admitting what he had done and requesting entrenching tools. With an entire brigade now fully committed to an enterprise authorized only for two regiments, Carmen’s superior had little choice but to back him up by sending the tools along. Night found the colonel’s men well posted, but isolated on the South Carolina shore. There was plenty of activity in the darkness as two cannon were hauled across the river to be positioned before more combat the next day. “I had not reached the [Union] causeway,” Carmen later wrote, “but had given the enemy a good scare.”

  His evacuation plan finished and nearly ready for implementation, General Beauregard departed Savannah this morning for Charleston. The all-important floating bridge was almost completed. The first and longest leg (about 1,000 feet) began at the bottom of West Broad Street to connect with Hutchinson Island. On Hutchinson, a newly raised causeway snaked across the island to a second section of bridge carrying traffic to Pennyworth Island. A short causeway plugged into the third bridge between Pennyworth and the South Carolina shore. From there yet another temporary roadway linked up with the planked road known as Union Causeway—the Savannah garrison’s only escape route.

  The engineering detail under Captain Robert M. Stiles was still hustling to finish the last bridge section when Beauregard left. Lieutenant General Hardee accompanied his superior as far as the head of the elevated passageway, where they encountered Major General Wheeler, with a report on his battle at Izard’s—Colonel Carmen’s filibustering affair—now several hours old. Beauregard’s sole focus was successfully abandoning Savannah. “Gentlemen,” he said, indicating the smoke and musketry sounds coming from the river, “this is not a demonstration; it is a real attack on our communications. You must get out of Savannah as soon as possible.”

  The floating bridge upon which so much depended was not exactly built to standard specs. Normal construction would have deployed relatively small pontoon boats oriented perpendicular to the roadway, but here the seventy-five-to eighty-foot-long barges (all that was available) were lined up end-to-end, moored in place with railroad car wheels as anchors. Existing city wharves and associated buildings were stripped for planking to be laid as flooring, which was then covered with rice straw to muffle the sounds of wheels, feet, and hooves on wood. There was a near tragedy when a number of the precious flats intended for the crossing were destroyed by some of Wheeler’s overzealous cavalrymen, who believed they were keeping them out of the enemy’s hands. The time it took to locate replacements, coupled with unexpectedly heavy morning fogs along the river, further slowed completion of the bridge sections.

  Hardee desperately wanted to evacuate this very night, but Captain Stiles still wasn’t finished at sundown. The experienced lieutenant general, who had a good idea how long it would take for the entire 10,000-man garrison to make it over to the South Carolina shore, did not want there to be anyone caught in the city at daylight. When the engineers couldn’t promise having the bridging task accomplished until after 8:00 P.M., Hardee reluctantly rescheduled the military movement to sunset December 20. That is, unless the enemy had something to say about it.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1864

  Midnight–Sunset

  The Harvest Moon, carrying Major General Sherman, arrived at Port Royal about 8:00 A.M. A reporter present noted that there was “a general rush…to the dock to get a sight of the illustrious visitor…. The General was looking peculiarly well, and seems fresh for another march more extensive than the one he had just finished.” Following a breakfast at Foster’s headquarters, and a “casual inspection of the Post,” the two officers retired for a serious discussion.

  Exactly what transpired between them is not recorded. Sherman in his Memoirs wrote that he “represented the matter to General Foster,” who “promptly agreed to give his personal attention to it.” Major Hitchcock was a tad more specific, noting that Sherman agreed to provide Foster with extra men to cut “off the only remaining avenue open from Savannah—the ‘Union Causeway,’ an old plank road running N.E. from the city to Hardeeville.” These and other discussions kept Sherman occupied throughout the day.

  Savannah’s evacuation began at daylight. A Georgian serving with the provost guard remembered observing the long “lines of army wagons” that trundled onto the floating bridge “to seek the safety of the river on Carolina soil. Here and there could be seen a carriage whose owner had been fortunate to secure a passport.” According to a South Carolinian who escaped: “Very few of the citizens [of Savannah] left the city…. All was uncertainty and doubt. Hope was mingled with fear, and it was difficult for any one to decide which preponderated in his own mind…. There was a pretty general hope that the city would be spared, but no one could give any substantial reason for this hope, having no certain grounds upon which to base it, and ignorant of the real condition kept them from arriving at a different conclusion and preparing for the worst.”

  Munitions were being shipped across with a haste that resulted in several boxes breaking open to spill their contents on the dock. When Lieutenant General Hardee observed this, he “became quite incensed, thinking the guns had been insecurely packed or piled up loose on the wagons,” said an ordnance official. This individual realized the end was near when he received orders several days earlier to issue rattail files to the army. To anyone experienced with weapons, this could only mean “the spiking of artillery.”*

  Included in the evacuation scheme was all the light, easily portable artillery. Excluded were the much harder to move large-caliber guns, whose crews operated today free of previous restrictions on ammunition expenditure. “Our batteries were awake early this morning, even before I got up,” wrote a member of the 50th Illinois. “Our skirmishers kept up their part of the tune.” Another diarist, in the 9th Iowa, recorded that the opposing batteries “have kept up a regular war all day.” “On account of getting so many shells into our camp they thought best to build breastworks in front…although we lay back in reserve in the woods,” commented a soldier in the 29th Ohio. “Heavy cannonading all around the lines,” added yet another soldier, this one in the 93rd Illinois, “so much it makes me nervous so that I can hardly write.”

  Cornelius R. Hanleiter, serving a battery along Savannah’s southern river defenses, received orders at noon to destroy all government property that could not be quickly moved, then to prepare the light artillery for rapid movement. “This intimation of the intention of the Confederate authorities to evacuate Savannah, though suspected for a day or two, was anything but pleasant,” he remembered. The orders caught the battery without sufficient horses to transport everything, so Hanleiter had the unenviable task of deciding what would be left behind. One easy decision was to ship provisions and bedding kept at the post to the part of town where many of the batterymen lived with their families. The officer consoled himself that at least the women and children would enjoy some comfort after the gunners were obliged to abandon them “to the tender mercies of the invaders.”

  It proved a nerve-racking day for Colonel Ezra Carmen, whose brigade was fighting hard to maintain its toehold on the South Carolina shore opposite Argyle Island. The
Rebels in front were in greater strength and acting more aggressively than at any time since the Yankees had come ashore. Adding to his problems, a Rebel gunboat reached extreme range at high tide to begin pumping its monster shells into Carmen’s cramped perimeter. The enemy gunners, noted the officer, “opened on our positions, and in fact on any object they could see, firing in nearly every direction of the compass.” Only the falling tide forced the enemy ironclad to pull out of range.

  What had begun as a grand adventure was being turned into a grim holding action. An increasingly frantic Carmen fired off three or four dispatches to his division commander requesting reinforcements, “yet I have not even an answer,” he lamented in the afternoon. The once bold officer was now thinking the unthinkable. “If my command is sacrificed it will be because I have been left in an exposed position unsupported,” he said.

  At the same time, reports were reaching Carmen suggesting that something was stirring in Savannah. According to an officer from the 3rd Wisconsin, “From one portion of our line wagon trains can be seen leaving the City.” Eager to view it for himself, Carmen climbed into the loft of a barn on his line. Scanning toward the Union Causeway he “could see wagons, family carriages, men and women on foot, singly and in groups, moving north along the road.”

  There were signs throughout Savannah that all was not well. A “crowd of women” gathered around the city’s main arsenal, “supplied with pails and buckets,” in response to a rumor that the building “contained provisions.” Until the officials in charge managed to convince the women otherwise, it looked as if they intended “carrying it by storm,” said an arsenal employee. No formal announcement had been made, yet the indications were plain enough. The daughters of one artillery commander helped their father distribute hoarded stores of clothes and blankets to his men. Late this morning the ladies called on acquaintances with the signal corps, only to find the men “busy burning dispatches.”