by Marc Wortman
BY THE END OF APRIL, William Tecumseh Sherman had gathered 110,000 troops, 99,000 available for the fight, though every step they might take forward would require leaving more men behind as a rearguard to defend the army’s supply line through hostile territory. Not counting officers’ slaves and the thousands of others impressed to build fortifications, the Army of Tennessee started the defense of its Georgia bastion with almost 55,000 men, most of them hardened and not easily cowed by a charging enemy’s force advantage. They were dug into the rocky palisades and had channeled the approaches through the ravines and mountain passes. A. J. Neal shared the general upsurge in confidence after Johnston’s grand review of the entire army showed the assembled men they were “stronger than [we] had supposed.” He undoubtedly warmed his mother’s heart when he wrote that he and his artillery battalion were “having an easier time than ever” and “getting better and more abundant rations” than at any time since before Bragg took command of the army. He was certain, he wrote his sister, of “brilliant successes this spring and after a few hard fights a glorious peace.”
He also shared in the spiritual preparation for the fight ahead. God, the Confederates increasingly believed by the thousands, stood by them at their posts. The hardened men sang “the sweet songs of Zion” by night; by day, preachers baptized men by the hundreds. Near Neal’s battalion in Dalton, awaiting Sherman’s army, Tom Stokes of the Tenth Texas Infantry exalted over the religious revival sweeping the army. “I have never seen such a spirit as there is now in the army,” he rejoiced in a letter to his sister, Mary Gay, now living with her family and slaves in Decatur. “This revival spirit is not confined to a part only, but pervades the whole army.” The rising religious fervor bolstered the warriors’ courage. The Army of Tennessee was fast becoming “an army of believers.” Stokes felt certain that when the Yankees stormed forward, “God will fight our battles for us, and the boastful foe be scattered and severely rebuked.”
AS THE LAST DAYS OF APRIL ARRIVED, Pvt. Charles E. Benton reached Chattanooga with the 150th New York Infantry, one of the few eastern outfits in Sherman’s army. Despite the western army’s regular soldier’s disdain for the “paper collar” and “white glove” easterners, the added troops knew combat. Benton had fought at Gettysburg and in Virginia. He felt, nonetheless, unnerved as he marched the twenty miles from Chattanooga toward the gathering front. Along the way, his regiment passed through the previous September’s Chickamauga battlefield. More than half a year had passed. The stench of decaying flesh still hung in the air. Whitening skeletal remains lay scattered throughout the miles of battlefield. The hastily dug shallow graves of the dead showed protruding shoes with foot bones visible inside. Here and there, granite-color mummified hands reached from the ground. He noted one with its index finger pointing skywards. He picked up a skull by the roadside. A smooth, round hole peeked through it. “Small it was,” he noted, “but yet large enough to let a life pass out.”
On the night of May 6, orders went out that the advance was to begin the next day. An Indiana soldier looked around his knapsack and tent to eat, use up, or toss away whatever he wouldn’t need. He pulled out his remaining candles. They would be of no further use. In a whimsical mood, he cut them into pieces and placed and lit each piece around his white tent. Others saw him and followed suit. No breeze stirred, and someone climbed a tree where he placed lighted candle ends in the branches. Before long, Sgt. George Puntenney of the Thirty-seventh Indiana looked around at “a most beautiful sight.” Men by the hundreds from the division had placed their last candles up in other trees. Ten thousand candles glowed in the treetops. They cast a warmly flickering white light over the faces of thousands of silent men looking up at the ethereal display from below. That would be the last quiet night any of them would know for the next hundred days until they reached their destiny. Puntenney reflected later, “Hundreds of those poor fellows never saw another candle after that night.”
Soon after dawn the next morning, Union skirmishers encountered Confederate scouts. The first shots of the spring campaign rang out.
CHAPTER 18
FIGHTING, FIGHTING, FIGHTING
THE LAND TO THE SOUTH of Dalton was emptying out. A. J. Neal watched “nearly the entire population . . . moving off taking their Negroes south,” even before the real battle began. Already chaotic and choked with soldiers and supplies heading toward the front, Atlanta was now jammed with refugees moving away from it. Proud Confederate Mary Gay left from the car shed to carry a last basket of food to her brother, Tom Stokes, at the front. She managed to get a seat on a train to Dalton packed with sad-faced young wives, children, and grandmothers going to see their men “for, perhaps, the last time on earth.” Gay, too, thought “another fond embrace . . . would palliate the sting of final separation.” As the train chugged at a crawl through the former Cherokee country where Gay had spent her early childhood, she looked out at an endless line of refugees in wagons heading south that “literally blockaded” the roads. Most made their way into Atlanta.
Increasingly nervous, the city held a rally of sorts for the army—and to fortify its own outlook—in early February. Young socialite Sallie Clayton called it “about the greatest day ever seen in Atlanta” when Gen. John Hunt Morgan came to town. Morgan had won fame for the cavalry raids he led for a thousand miles into Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. While the Great Raid of July 1863 (labeled derisively in the North the Calico Raid for its plundering of dry goods stores) had violated Gen. Braxton Bragg’s express orders not to cross the Ohio River, it caused extensive damage, set off panic in the towns and countryside where Morgan operated, and showed the North’s vulnerability to guerilla operations. Just as importantly, Southerners depressed after Vicksburg’s fall and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg were cheered by the show of bravado. Morgan’s laurels, though, came at a high price. On July 26, 1863, federal troops captured him and nearly all his men—experienced cavalry the Confederacy could ill afford to lose—near New Lisbon, Ohio. In November, Morgan managed to escape. Atlanta was able to enjoy his company, but they had much greater need of his cavalry.
Morgan spent the night of February 6 at Mayor James Calhoun’s house, sharing a grand meal with the town’s fathers and local Confederate leaders. The following morning, he made the few-block ride to deliver a short speech and attend a reception in his honor at the Trout House. His carriage was born along by stout men through a crowd too thick for horses not to trample people. Sallie Clayton joined a throng dense enough for “a boy to walk on the heads and shoulders of men” from one end of the city’s central district to the other. Samuel Richards also stood amid the “large concourse of citizens” to hear the general.
Mayor Calhoun introduced General Morgan to the vast crush of people before him. The mayor invoked the memory of Stonewall Jackson, the greatest Confederate cavalry hero, killed in battle in Virginia. Calhoun intoned,While we mourn the loss of a Jackson, we have great cause to rejoice that we still have many noble leaders left, and amongst them a Morgan, and feel that the spirit of the South can never be subdued while we have such men to lead and encourage our gallant armies. . . . I know our brave soldiers have almost performed miracles; that they have fought as no soldiers have fought before; yet in view of the dangers which threaten us, may I not hope that they will take another step higher upon Fame’s proud temple, and fill the world with the renown of their patriotism and bravery.
It was a wildly hyperbolic introduction for a man who had left most of his troops in a Union prison and who, a few months later, would be hunted down and killed in a farmhouse in Tennessee. But Atlanta enjoyed the rhetoric.
Calhoun sought to encourage the citizens, telling them that those at home, too, should be inspired to feed, clothe, and sustain the army, and should, “if they have an excess” of food, turn it over to the commissary, “and by every kind word and deed, and by a united, persevering and determined effort of the army and the people, we may expect a glorious termination o
f our troubles and sacrifices, and our efforts to be rewarded with independence and a promising future.”
EVENTS HAD FORCED A change in Mayor Calhoun’s sentiments. He had resisted secession and the coming of the war with all his might, he supported peace candidates in Confederate elections even while the war raged, and he seemed to use his authority on behalf of the Confederacy only to the degree necessary for the leader of its second most important city, but the Confederacy was now his nation. His entire family was caught up in the cause. His revered older brother, Ezekiel Calhoun, now nearly seventy years old, had already buried one son and another young man he regarded as a son. The doctor’s oldest son, Edward, was still pulling in the wounded from the Virginia battlefields in his ambulance wagon. Finally, despite Ezekiel’s opposition to a cause that had once led neighbors to threaten his life, he, too, had entered Confederate military service. He now served as a regimental surgeon with the Sixtieth Georgia Regiment on the Island of Skidaway, a heavily bombarded barrier island near the blockaded mouth to the Savannah River.
James Calhoun, too, had a blood investment in the war. His oldest son, Lowndes, now held his rifle in a forward skirmish line north of Dalton. He had reorganized the Forty-second Georgia after its virtual destruction in the Vicksburg siege. Back in the lines, in February, he and his men had already helped to knock down an attempt by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops to push in the Confederate lines in the foothills above Gen. Joseph Johnston’s winter camp. Waiting now for the full force of the Yankee invasion to strike, the Atlanta men behind their breastworks could hear the first gunfire pops echoing through the North Georgia forests and off the ridges. As James Calhoun looked out at the hopeful thousands gathered before him at the Trout House, waiting expectantly to hear cheering words from their Confederate hero, one hundred miles to the north a Yankee storm was building the strength to sweep all of them away.
NEARLY ALL ATLANTANS were at least aware of the preparations for battle being made at Dalton and recognized that their city was at the center of Sherman’s crosshairs. “No event could be more disastrous to the Confederacy” than losing Atlanta to the Yankees, the Intelligencer insisted. Hope remained widespread that Johnston’s forces would hold off the invaders long enough to force a negotiated settlement. The longer the Confederates succeeded in enduring, the more likely the so-called Peace Democrats would be able to defeat Abraham Lincoln in the election due to be held in the fall of 1864. The country was tired of the indecisive war; if the South could forestall Sherman and Grant in their grand designs for the campaign, the Unionist president might be voted out. Besides, the people trusted their army and its new general in Dalton. “Of the capacity of General Johnston none could utter a word of doubt,” the Intelligencer proclaimed. Most in the city seconded that vote of confidence. Mary Mallard, a coastal refugee living in Ezekiel Calhoun’s place, had shared the “perfect ecstasies” people felt when catching a glimpse of the dashing General Morgan during his stay. She trusted that with such leaders, Atlanta would remain unchallenged. “No one seems to apprehend any danger for this place,” she wrote her mother on May 5. However, she also noted that the town’s thousands of hospital beds were being emptied of the sick to make room for the anticipated wounded. “We will be in a dreadful predicament should General Johnston be unsuccessful or be compelled to fall back, but no one seems to contemplate this. All have the utmost confidence in his skill.”
Some were less certain. At the end of the day on May 7, when the first shots of the spring campaign were fired, Samuel Richards sat at his desk in a quiet house. “If we are defeated in these battles,” he reflected, “I fear the bright and cheering hopes of peace that now animate all hearts in the South will be dissipated quickly.” Even so, Richards gave no indication in his diary that he feared his own life might be at risk. The idea that Atlanta might be devastated by a distant force held off by the high ridges and the Confederate defenders within them was still, for most, beyond comprehension.
THE CONFEDERATE LINES Sherman’s men marched into that day started above the 840-foot rise known as Tunnel Hill. Perhaps the Lower South’s greatest antebellum engineering feat, a 1,477-foot Western & Atlantic Railroad tunnel pierced through the pine-covered granite ridge ten miles north of Dalton. Starting in the valley north of there, which Johnston had flooded by damming up Mill Creek, his men stood ready to fight from dug-out emplacements and behind breastworks and boulders along the tops and cliffs of the parallel ridges that raked like scars across the face of North Georgia. Rocky Face Ridge, named for its sheer western palisade wall, was chief among these, stretching from above Dalton south for nearly twenty-three miles to its southern end near a loop in the Oostanaula River. Sherman knew the terrain his men now moved into from his youthful tour through a land “to which I took such a fancy” twenty years earlier. The ridge formed a natural rock barrier, much like Lookout Mountain, which Grant had surmounted outside Chattanooga, but far more impregnable to assault. “The Georgian Gibraltar” fronted the invaders like a bulbous castle wall, every niche in its face bristling with men and their guns. The cliff walls would never yield to even the strongest artillery battering ram, and the valley in front of them left little cover, or hope, for a successful assault.
When the Yankees made their first try, Mayor Calhoun’s neighbors’ son, A. J. Neal, directed his battery, shelling the initial wave of the charge from three miles north of Dalton on the Tunnel Hill Road. Fighting went on all around him; “shell and bullets fell among us,” though in the confusion of the battle, he could judge little about what was going on, except from the crescendo of battle noise. After two days of fighting, though, he was pleased. His battery in Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham’s Corps protected the vital Mill Creek Gap through the Rocky Face Ridge, despite there being at times as many as ten attackers for each defender. The gray coats succeeded in repulsing the initial advances and then “made a sortie and drove the Yankees from the field.” After two days, however, Sherman’s army seemed only to be probing the lines and had not attacked Confederate forward positions in force. Neal hoped the Yankees would be foolhardy enough to undertake a full frontal assault on their lines “for I want a victory here.” Driving back and then crushing the enemy now, as had already happened at Shiloh and Chickamauga before, “would end this war speedily.” The Yankees, he felt certain, could not pierce their lines “except by flanking.”
But flanking was just what Sherman had in mind.
SHERMAN, PERHAPS BETTER THAN Johnston, knew there were three possible doors through the long sweep of the Rocky Face Ridge wall. Closest to the federals’ main force moving down on the rebels and also closest to Dalton was Mill Creek Gap (known to locals as Buzzard’s Roost), about three miles south of Tunnel Hill. The railroad tracks between Chattanooga and Atlanta that served as opposite-running lifelines for the two armies passed through the gap and then ran south. That railroad provided a ready shuttle behind the ridgeline for moving rebels and their supplies in response to Sherman’s attacks. Another three miles south of Mill Creek Gap was Dug Gap, a pass notched into the ridge. Thirteen miles southwest of Dalton, the Snake Creek Gap ran between two mountains and opened beyond them into Sugar Valley, running five miles to the banks of the Oostanaula at the village of Resaca. Sherman thought his breakthrough would come at the southernmost opening. However, he sent three-fourths of his entire force, combining the Army of the Cumberland under Gen. George Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, and the Army of the Ohio led by Gen. John M. Schofield, against the Mill Creek and Dug gaps. He might knock the Confederates back through one or both of the heavily defended northern gaps, though that seemed unlikely. Sherman himself described the Mill Creek Gap, its walls filled with hidden men able to fire down on any heads daring to approach from below, as “the terrible door of death.” At the least, his two armies would pin down the main body of Johnston’s men. Meanwhile Sherman’s own beloved Army of the Tennessee, now commanded by his favored general, the fast rising and brilliant young fellow Ohioan James B
. McPherson, would sidestep the Rocky Face Ridge altogether before marching south and through Snake Creek Gap.
Scouts involved in earlier skirmishes along the ridge had reported finding almost no defenders or obstructions there. Johnston had spent the winter months fortifying Dalton and protecting its northern approaches closest to the enemy’s camp. He had paid scant attention to his southern flank except well south at his supply depot in the railhead town of Rome at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers. He may not have even been aware of the gaping hole he’d left. If McPherson could surge through Snake Creek Gap into the valley, his army could cut the railroad line at Resaca, severing Johnston’s lifeline and forcing him to fall back across the Oostanaula or risk encirclement, logistical strangulation, and the utter destruction of the only army between Sherman and Atlanta.
On May 9, McPherson’s men encountered little opposition as they moved warily through Snake Creek Gap. They entered Sugar Valley and approached within a couple miles of Resaca. McPherson sent Sherman word at his headquarters about their advance. Reading McPherson’s message, the excitable commander pounded on the table, sending dishes and cups flying. “I’ve got Joe Johnston dead!” he exclaimed.