by Bruce Catton
The Union soldiers themselves had mixed feelings. In early June an officer in the Army of the Tennessee wrote that he never saw soldiers in better spirits; they trusted Sherman implicitly, and “if we get to Atlanta in a week, all right; if it takes two months you won’t hear this army grumbling.” Yet the marches were hard, men were too busy to do much foraging — and as a result had to live on hardtack and bacon, so that some of them began to come down with scurvy and the rear areas were full of “black-mouthed, loose-toothed fellows” hankering for fresh food and a little rest.5 For three weeks there were heavy rains and the roads turned into quagmires; in open country men and vehicles left the highway and plodded through the wet fields, so that after they had passed it was impossible to tell where the road itself had been — everything was plowed up, trodden down, and turned into a general all-inclusive slough.
The armies moved south through places like Adairsville and Cassville and Allatoona, where Sherman again swung wide in a flanking maneuver and had a hard three-day fight at a country hamlet known as New Hope Church. Then Johnston pulled back to a prepared position on Kenesaw Mountain, and Sherman seems to have got wind of the fact that his men were complaining that there was too much marching going on. He decided, after an extended stalemate, that this time they would make a frontal assault.
The assault was made on June 27, with picked divisions driving up the mountainside toward an open plateau and a little peach orchard, and it was a flat failure. Secure in deep trenches, with head logs running along the parapet and defending infantry snug behind impenetrable defenses, the Confederates blew the assault column all to bits, inflicting a loss of three thousand and suffering hardly any loss themselves; and Pap Thomas, whose men had paid for most of this venture, looked the situation over and remarked to Sherman that “one or two more such assaults would use up this army.”
Sherman himself had something to say about this, as it happened. He seems to have felt that Thomas, with his care to save the lives of his men, was being a little too cautious. To Grant, just at this time, he wrote a complaint: “My chief worry is with the Army of the Cumberland, which is dreadfully slow. A fresh furrow in a plowed field will stop the whole column, and all begin to entrench.”6 But if this feeling existed, he would bow to it. There was no way to get over Kenesaw Mountain — not with all of these armed Southerners waiting there in snug rifle pits with loaded rifles in their hands — and after a few days Sherman began the old flanking maneuvers all over again, swinging out in a wide arc, driving his troops in on Johnston’s flank and rear, and ultimately — without another real battle — forcing his antagonist to leave his impregnable lines and come down in the open country to go on with the dance. Nothing at all had been gained at Kenesaw Mountain, except that the Episcopal bishop who served the Confederacy as an army corps commander, General Leonidas Polk, was killed by a cannon ball during the fighting in that area; but by July 9 Joe Johnston had been forced to pull his men back across the Chattahoochee River and put them in the trenches around Atlanta itself.
This did not sit well in Richmond. Jefferson Davis was a man under unendurable pressure. He had to save a country that was dissolving under his eyes, he could not take the long view because the government he headed was dying of steady constriction, and he felt — as he was bound to feel — that his General Johnston should have been able to keep Sherman’s army away from the gates of Atlanta. By telegraph he asked Johnston what he proposed to do next. Johnston not only disliked Davis personally; he distrusted him as well — early in the war, when he was commanding Confederate troops in Virginia, little General Joe had expounded his plans to the President and Cabinet and had seen a faithful résumé of them in the Richmond newspapers next day. Now he answered with icy reserve, saying in substance that he would fight Sherman whenever he saw a chance to do so with advantage.
Mr. Davis had had enough. He had nine more months — no more than that, although the future was hidden from him — in which he could exercise the functions of President of a free nation, and while this time lasted he would live up to his role. He sent Johnston a curt message, telling him that since he had not been able to stop Sherman, and since he expressed no especial confidence that he could ever stop him, he was removed from command of his army, which would now go under the control of General John B. Hood.
Johnston replied with equal acidity. He remarked that after all General Sherman had not come any closer to Atlanta during the spring campaign than Grant had come to Richmond — the distances covered, as he pointed out, were just about equal — and he added a final kicker that did him no good but served to discharge a little venom: “Confident language by a military commander is not usually regarded as evidence of competency.”
This was true enough, but it did not help. On July 17 Johnston went into retirement, and the General Hood who had fought so hard on so many fields, getting a crippled arm at Gettysburg and an amputated leg at Chickamauga, took his place; and Sherman’s officers learned of the change and believed that it might work to their advantage.
Sherman talked to General Schofield, who commanded the Army of the Ohio. Schofield had been a fellow cadet of Hood at West Point, and he remembered the Confederate commander as a man whose intellectual gifts were limited. Schofield recalled that Hood came near flunking out of the Academy because of his difficulty in mathematics; Schofield had coached him, and once, in despair, Hood had blurted out: “Which would you rather be, an officer of the army or a farmer in Kentucky?” — implying unmistakably that he himself would prefer to be a farmer. Schofield managed to get Hood through his difficult mathematics class, and he thought of it now and remarked ruefully that he “came very near thinking once or twice that perhaps I had made a mistake.”
At any rate, Schofield gave Sherman warning. Hood was not too smart, but he was combative as anyone who ever lived: “He’ll hit you like hell, now, before you know it.” It was reported in the Federal army that a Kentucky colonel, hearing of the change in Confederate command, went to Sherman and told him of an old-army poker game he had once witnessed: “I seed Hood bet twenty-five hundred dollars with nary a pair in his hand.” However the news came to him, Sherman had fair warning that if he had had trouble in compelling Joe Johnston to meet him in knockdown combat he would have no such trouble with Hood.7
This was demonstrated before he was very much older. He got his troops across the Chattahoochee, sent them straight in at Atlanta, and immediately ran into the furious pugnacity of General Hood.
Thomas had the direct approach, and he got his Army of the Cumberland across Peachtree Creek, no more than five miles from the center of Atlanta, while McPherson was taking his Army of the Tennessee off to the east on another of those wide flanking movements, planning to come in on the Confederate stronghold from the vicinity of Decatur. While Thomas was crossing the creek and McPherson was moving east, on July 20, Hood struck, and struck hard.
He had not picked the best man to strike. Thomas was as good a defensive fighter as America ever produced, and although the attack caught him at a disadvantage he refused to let the fact bother him. He had sent his leading corps across the creek and had it in position on a hill overlooking Atlanta, when Hood’s men came out and opened a smashing assault, coming around both ends of the advanced line and getting in behind it. But Thomas led two batteries over the creek, prodding the horses to a gallop with the point of his sword — he was not being “Old Slow Trot” today — and his guns broke the Confederate assault waves and drove them back, other troops came up, and at the end of the day Hood’s first massive counterstroke had definitely been a failure. Thomas remarked once that he believed he could whip the Confederates here in front of Atlanta with his own Army of the Cumberland alone, without help from McPherson or Schofield. This battle of Peachtree Creek seems to have confirmed him in this belief.8
But Hood had unlimited energy. If he could not blast Pap Thomas off the ground above Peachtree Creek he would try something else; and as Sherman drew his net in around Atlan
ta, Hood saw an opening and struck again, with concentrated fury.
While Thomas was crossing Peachtree Creek, McPherson had taken his Army of the Tennessee off to the east. He occupied the town of Decatur, five miles east of Atlanta, and then he moved toward the city; and as he moved — somewhat incautiously, perhaps, in the belief that Thomas was giving the Confederates all they could handle — he exposed his southern flank, and Hood hit him there on July 22, slashing vigorously with his shock troops, striking a blow that might crumple the whole Union left and compel the invaders to draw back north of the Chattahoochee.
McPherson was one of the attractive men in the Union army. He was young and brilliant; had been an honor man at West Point, was loved by Sherman as that grim soldier might have loved a gifted younger brother, and he wore a trim curly beard and had dancing lights of laughter in the corners of his eyes. He was thought to be somewhat Puritanical — he had said once that if to be a soldier a man had to forget the claims of humanity, “then I do not want to be a soldier” — yet he was full of life and bounce, and in captured Vicksburg he and brother officers had strolled through the streets in the evening, serenading southern belles with sentimental vocalizing after the camps were still.… What had they sung? “Juanita,” perhaps?
Far o’er the mountain
Breaks the day too soon.…
It does not matter much. McPherson was engaged to Miss Emily Hoffman of Baltimore, and he had planned to take leave in the winter of 1864 and go north and marry her. But the winter became very busy, and after Grant was summoned east and there were promotions all along the line Sherman had called McPherson in and had told him he could not have leave just now; McPherson was an army commander, the army had to be made ready for hard fighting, and his leave would have to wait until fall, or until next winter, or until some other time. McPherson had acquiesced, and he was still a bachelor; and now, late in July, he was bringing his army in on Atlanta from the east while Thomas’s men buried the dead in front of Peachtree Creek, and Hood caught his formations off guard and was threatening to inflict a ruinous defeat.
McPherson was at lunch when the news reached him. He got his horse and galloped off to the scene of action, and along the way advancing Confederate skirmishers had found a gap in the Union lines and were pushing through for the rear. McPherson ran into some of them, wheeled to retreat, and was shot dead from the saddle; and farther on his leading division repulsed a frontal attack just in time to turn around and meet an attack that was coming in from the rear. General John A. Logan succeeded to McPherson’s command and rode down the fighting lines, his felt hat clutched in one hand, his black hair and mustachios streaming in the wind, crying out to his men: “Will you hold this line for me? Will you hold this line?” The men liked Logan, and as they plied ramrods in hot musket barrels they began to chant his nickname — “Black Jack! Black Jack!” They held the line, beating off assaults that seemed to come bewilderingly from all directions; and as the hot day wore away, the Army of the Tennessee at last managed to hold its position, Hood’s counterblow was broken, and by evening the Union army was safe again. 9
Grim General Sherman wept unashamedly when McPherson’s body was brought to headquarters. After the battle he wrote to Emily Hoffman in Baltimore, the girl who by now would have been Mrs. McPherson if Sherman had not intervened; a girl from a strongly southern family which had not approved of her engagement to this Union general. When the telegram that announced McPherson’s death came the girl heard a member of her family say: “I have the most wonderful news — McPherson is dead.” Emily Hoffman went to her bedroom and did not come out of it for a solid year, living there with curtains drawn, trays of food brought to her door three times every day, speaking no word to anyone. To her, Sherman poured out his heart in a long letter:
“I yield to no one on earth but yourself the right to exceed me in lamentations for our dead hero. Rather the bride of McPherson dead than the wife of the richest merchant of Baltimore.… I see him now, so handsome, so smiling, on his fine black horse, booted and spurred, with his easy seat, the impersonation of the gallant knight.”
Lamenting thus, Sherman thought of the fire-eaters who had helped bring on the war, and he lashed out at them: “The loss of a thousand men such as Davis and Yancey and Toombs and Floyd and Beechers and Greeleys and Lovejoys, would not atone for that of McPherson.” Then, looking darkly into the mist of war that still lay ahead of him, this uncontrollable fighter tried to put a personal grief into words:
“Though the cannon booms now, and the angry rattle of musketry tells me that I also will likely pay the same penalty, yet while life lasts I will delight in the memory of that bright particular star which has gone before to prepare the way for us more hardened sinners who must struggle to the end.”10
The bright particular star was gone forever, and something that could never be regained went out of the war when McPherson died, just as had happened with the deaths of thousands of other young men who might have swung a golden light across the dark infinite sky; and meanwhile there was Hood’s army in Atlanta, still defiant and still dangerous, and the war could not stop because something irreplaceable had been lost, even though many women had to retreat to darkened rooms to live in the muted dusk of grief. The war had to be won and a good part of it was up to Sherman, and he had to get on with the job.
He had not managed this battle too well, as a matter of fact. While the Army of the Tennessee had to take the pounding, Sherman had let Thomas’s and Schofield’s men remain out of action. They might have been sent in with an offensive that would have taken Atlanta then and there, for Hood was holding the lines in their front with one corps while he massed everything else against McPherson. A brilliant strategist, Sherman was not always a complete master of battlefield tactics.
But there was no time to waste in mourning lost opportunities. With this battle out of the way Sherman resumed his attempt to outflank the defenders; and he had the Army of the Tennessee, still bearing the grime of battle, set out on another of its long marches, pulling it behind the rest of the army in a wide arc so that instead of facing Atlanta from the east it was, a few days later, approaching the town from the west. Hood shifted strength to meet it, detected an opening once more, and on July 28 came out with another savage attack at Ezra Church, west of Atlanta. Again the Army of the Tennessee beat off the attack, and when it ended, Hood’s army was very nearly fought out. It had struck three times to drive the Yankees away from Atlanta, and each blow had failed. After Ezra Church a Yankee picket called out to a weary Confederate: “How many of you are there left, Johnny?” The Confederate’s reply was brief and eloquent: “Oh, about enough for another killing.”11
Sherman shifted his command arrangements just before Ezra Church. He refused to retain Logan as commander of the Army of the Tennessee; there was a coolness between Logan and Thomas, and cordial co-operation between the two seemed unlikely. McPherson’s old job went to Oliver Otis Howard, a prim sobersides of a New Englander who seemed excessively pious and strait-laced for this army of free-thinking Westerners but who, for some inexplicable reason, was doing a much better job with them than he had been able to do when he led troops in the more sedate Army of the Potomac. Howard had lost his right arm fighting under McClellan at Fair Oaks in front of Richmond; he never drank and never swore, and on Sundays he liked to visit hospitals and distribute religious tracts and baskets of fruit. He was never brilliant but he was reliable, and Sherman — his exact opposite, in most respects — had come to trust him.
Now Sherman settled down to put Atlanta under siege. He brought guns up and kept the town and its defenses under heavy bombardment, he refused to assault the strong Confederate trenches and he kept shifting his troops farther and farther around toward his right, trying to cut the railroads that linked Atlanta with the rest of the South so that he might capture both the city and the Confederate army that defended it.
And the month of August slowly wore away, while Sherman played what looked
like a waiting game and people in the North began to feel that neither his army nor Grant’s would ever win a clear-cut, decisive victory that would bring peace nearer.
2. Wind across the Sky
The people of the North were about to decide whether they would carry the load any longer. They would decide by means of a presidential election, which would finally be interpreted either as a decision for war to a finish or as a vote to give up and let things slide. In midsummer it looked very much as if the Lincoln administration would be beaten.
The war had gone on for more than three years. It had touched every family circle in America. Every isolated farm, every peaceful village, and every great city knew perfectly well what names like Stone’s River and Chickamauga and Cold Harbor meant; and by now many folk were wondering if the terrible price they were paying was really going to buy what they wanted. The Confederates still held Richmond, Atlanta, and the heart of the South. Lee’s army was secure and defiant behind the Petersburg trenches. Hood’s army hung on in Atlanta. Early’s men continued to hold the Shenandoah Valley; and although the United States flag waved within eyesight of the two great citadels, the North had spent very close to one hundred thousand casualties to put it there, and nothing to speak of had come of it all. If people were beginning to question whether all of this was worth going on with any longer, it is not especially surprising.