by Bruce Catton
The army went along the Ogeechee River, overwhelmed Confederate Fort McAllister, and met the navy’s gunboats and supply ships, and the days of the rice diet were over. Now the men could have army bacon and hardtack again, for the first time in weeks, and after the rich fare they had been getting in Georgia, army rations seemed good. Sherman missed a bet at Savannah, just as he had done at Atlanta. The Confederates had between ten and fifteen thousand soldiers there, and all of these might have been captured, but while he was investing the place Sherman incautiously left open a line of escape, and the defenders got out and moved up into the Carolinas.
Yet this did not really matter in the least. Prim General Hardee, the Confederate commander, might get his garrison away unscathed, but the war would not be prolonged ten minutes by this fact. For Sherman was not fighting an opposing army now; he was fighting an idea, knocking down the last shredded notion that the southern Confederacy could exist as an independent nation, moving steadily and relentlessly not toward a climactic engagement but simply toward the end of the war.
His soldiers found Savannah unlike any town they had ever been in before. They entered the place on December 21, marching formally for a change, with bands playing and flags flying, Sherman himself taking a salute as they marched past. Savannah had a tropical air; the yards were filled with blooming flowers, palm trees and orange trees were to be seen, the houses looked old and inviting, and war seemed not to have touched the city. The men looked about them, reflecting that they had finished one of the great marches of history, and they suddenly went on their good behavior; Savannah was spared the devastation and pillage so many other places in Georgia had endured.
Sherman sent off a whimsical wire to Abraham Lincoln, offering him the city of Savannah, with much war equipment and twenty-five thousand bales of priceless cotton, as a Christmas gift. To Grant and Halleck he wrote urging that as soon as his army had caught its breath it should be allowed to march straight north across the Carolina country. To Halleck he wrote: “I think our campaign of the last month, as well as every step I take from this point northward, is as much a direct attack upon Lee’s army as though we were operating within the sound of his artillery.”13
Everything was working. Lee’s lines at Petersburg still held, but now his rear was unsafe. Sherman’s army was nearer to Richmond now than it was to Vicksburg, and there was no conceivable way to keep it from coming up. As the year came to an end, the Confederacy had just under four months to live.
4. The Enemy Will Be Attacked
It is possible that the Confederate General Hood made a very serious error in judgment.
When Sherman stopped chasing him in the middle of October and took his men back to Atlanta to prepare to march to the sea, Hood concluded that his own cue was to invade Tennessee from northern Alabama. This invasion might cause the Federal authorities to call Sherman back from his gigantic raid and order him north to meet Hood’s threat. If that failed, Hood could perhaps overwhelm Thomas and regain Tennessee for the Confederacy; he might even be able to drive on north into Kentucky and all the way to the Ohio River in a dazzling counterstroke that would upset the balance and put the Confederacy back into the running again. For reasons that seemed good, then, Hood let Sherman go, pulled his army together below the southernmost loop of the Tennessee River, and at last — late in November, heavy rains and a scarcity of supplies having imposed delay — he took off, crossing the river and moving up toward Nashville.
With hindsight it can be argued that this was a strategic error of the first magnitude. Hood’s offensive was doomed. Thomas had enough strength to stop him, and although the expedition caused uneasy moments in Washington (and proved especially disturbing to no less a person than U. S. Grant) it ended in sheer Confederate disaster. But the simple fact is that Hood had no good choice to make. The Confederate armies were coming to the end of the tether. There was a good deal of killing still to be done — deaths on battlefield and in hospital, men slain in meaningless little crossroads skirmishes, typhoid and dysentery and scurvy doing their stealthy work behind the lines — but the verdict was just about in. Confederate armies now could do little more than play out the string.
In any case, Hood made his march, and for the last time the starred red battle flags of the Confederacy moved north, as if the world were still young and hot gallantry could still go up the road with undaunted hope. Hood himself was morose; he was saying that Johnston’s defensive tactics on the campaign down toward Atlanta had got the men so full of the notion that trenches were invulnerable that they had lost their élan and would no longer attack in the old-time Confederate style. (The furious attacks they had made against odds in his own battles around Atlanta might have shaken him out of this idea but had not done so; it is conceivable that he was excusing his own failure.) Still, his prospects could have been worse. The Federal forces in Tennessee were scattered and needed reorganizing, and there was a chance that he could move in between them and cause much trouble.
Thomas was in Nashville, trying to reassemble his army. Some of his stout Cumberland soldiers had gone off to Savannah with Sherman, and he did not have all of his old command. Reinforcements were on their way, and he would presently have a first-rate cavalry corps — young James H. Wilson, the former staff officer who had fumed so mightily when the sailors failed to get their gunboats down through the Yazoo Delta swamps a year and a half earlier, was putting together a mighty force of mounted men, all of them to be armed with repeating carbines — but Thomas was not quite ready yet and he wanted time. He had sent John Schofield with approximately twenty-two thousand men down near the Tennessee-Alabama border to delay Hood and gain a little of this time for him, and for twenty-four hours it looked as if Hood might eat Schofield’s force at one bite.
Schofield let Hood steal a march on him, and by a fast flank movement Hood brought his troops around to a place called Spring Hill on the Nashville turnpike, squarely in Schofield’s rear. Alerted just in time, Schofield turned back in retreat. Hood’s men were where they could have broken up this retreat and compelled the Federals to fight an uphill battle for their lives, but Hood’s command arrangements got fouled up most atrociously, and in some unaccountable way he let Schofield’s army march straight across his front, wagon trains and all, unmolested.1
It was an eerie march, as the Federals remembered it. The men were gloomy, knowing themselves outnumbered, the weather had been bad, and Schofield was pushing them along so fast that they did not fall out for meals but simply munched raw salt pork and hardtack as they walked. When darkness came they could see long ranks of Rebel campfires twinkling in the fields beside the road; officers warned them to keep quiet — although a moving army was bound to make a good deal of noise, and the Confederate pickets obviously had discovered them — and at intervals the whole column would break into a lumbering run, coming down to a walk only when everybody was winded.2
All night long the march went on, and by daybreak, November 30, the army was out of the trap. Forrest was commanding Hood’s cavalry, and in the morning he came slashing in to attack the moving columns. A few infantry regiments wheeled out with fixed bayonets, and some artillery was unlimbered, and when Forrest’s men came riding in they were butchered. Watching with horrified fascination, one infantryman saw what artillery could do to mounted men at close range. He remembered: “You could see a Rebel’s head falling off his horse on one side and his body on the other, and the horse running and nickering and looking for its rider. Others you could see fall off with their feet caught in the stirrup, and the horse dragging and trampling them, dead or alive. Others, the horse would get shot and the rider tumble head over heels, or maybe get caught by his horse falling on him.”3
Forrest was driven off and the Federals tramped wearily up to the town of Franklin, on the south bank of the Harpeth River. The bridge had been burned, and Schofield could not get his guns or his wagons across the river until his engineers had built a new one; so he put his infantry in line in a
wide semicircle on a rising ground just south of the town and got them solidly entrenched while the engineers went to work.
Hood’s army was moving fast in pursuit — Hood was furious because of the chance that had been missed at Spring Hill, and he was blaming everyone but himself for it, repeating his complaint that his soldiers were unwilling to fight unless they could have the protection of trenches. His army came up into contact with Schofield’s outposts a little after noon, and Hood immediately decided to attack.
The Union position was powerful, and Forrest argued that it would be better to cross the river, off to the right, and try one more flank movement. But Hood would not listen. He would attack, and he would do so at once, without even waiting for his artillery to come up. He shook his army out into a broad line of battle and sent his men straight in on the strongest part of the Federal line.
It was November 30, a pleasant Indian-summer day with a broad open field rolling gently up to the Union trenches. General Schofield, who was on the far side of the river seeing to the bridge-building job, looked across and saw one of the great, tragic sights of the war. Here were eighteen thousand Confederate infantrymen, more men than had charged with Pickett at Gettysburg, coming forward in perfect order, battle flags flying, sunlight glinting on polished rifle barrels. On came the moving ranks, looking irresistible, battalions perfectly aligned; then the Federal infantry and artillery opened, a dense cloud of smoke tumbled down the slope, and the moment of pageantry was over.
No fight in all the war was more desperate than this one at Franklin. Hood’s men charged with a stubborn fury that should have proved to the angry general once and for all that they were not in the least afraid to fight out in the open. They came to close quarters and — incredibly, for the charge was just about as hopeless as Burnside’s assaults on the stone wall at Fredericksburg had been — cracked the center of the Union line and went pouring through, raising the Rebel yell. But the break was quickly mended. Ohio and Wisconsin and Kentucky troops came in with a prompt counterattack. There was terrible hand-to-hand fighting in a farmyard and around a cotton gin; a gunner in one Union battery brained an assailant with an ax, and young Colonel MacArthur of the 24th Wisconsin was crying to his men: “Give ’em hell, boys, give ’em hell, 24th!” The Confederates who had broken the line were killed or driven out, and all along the front the firing reached a fearful intensity; some of the Confederates, utterly beaten out, facing this fire at the closest range, were heard calling: “Don’t shoot, Yanks — for God Almighty’s sake, don’t shoot!”4
The autumn day ended at last, and the battle ended with it, the shattered Confederate brigades drawing back in defeat. Their losses had been six thousand men killed or wounded, five general officers killed — among them the Pat Cleburne who had mentioned the unmentionable in that officers’ meeting the previous winter — and six more generals wounded, one mortally. Nothing whatever had been gained. Late that night Schofield’s bridge was finished and his army marched off to Nashville, eighteen miles away, saving all of its guns and wagons.
Federal losses had been much smaller, but they had not exactly been trifling; there had been more than two thousand casualties, and the survivors — making their second consecutive all-night march, with a wearing battle sandwiched in between — were at the point of complete exhaustion. Whenever the column came to a momentary halt, men would drop in their tracks and sleep; some men even slept while they marched, stumbling along blindly, helpless automatons. Some of these said afterward that in this marching sleep nightmares came to them, with the sights and sounds of the day’s battle moving through their drugged minds.
They revived when they got to Nashville. The Federal army had held this town for the better part of three years and had surrounded it with powerful fortifications. General Thomas was here with the rest of the army, there were hot coffee and food and good camping ground where tired men could sleep, and there would obviously be no more forced marches in retreat. When Hood’s army came up and ranged itself on the hills facing the Union works, the Federals looked out at them and reflected that it was a fine thing to “occupy the favorable side of the fortifications.”6
Hood came to a standstill here before Nashville. He had already shot his bolt, although he did not seem to realize it. He had started his invasion with approximately forty thousand men, of whom something better than thirty thousand were infantry, he had seen his army badly mauled at Franklin, Thomas outnumbered him by a substantial margin, and there was no longer anything of much consequence that he could do. Lacking a better course, he dug trenches facing the strong Yankee line and put up a hollow pretense of besieging the place.
It worried Pap Thomas very little, but it very seriously worried General Grant. Sherman once said admiringly that Grant never cared in the least what the opposing army might be doing off out of his sight, but Grant was worrying now; for once in his life he had the jitters. From his headquarters hut at Petersburg it looked as if Hood might be making a wild, desperate thrust that could wholly upset all of the Federal war plans. Grant had Lee penned, and Sherman was disemboweling the Confederacy with torch and sword — and now, at the eleventh hour, this Confederate army was on the loose; it might get away from Thomas and go rampaging all the way up through Kentucky, and it was important to destroy it at the earliest moment. And Grant, the imperturbable, grew highly nervous and bombarded Thomas with daily messages demanding that he attack at once.
Thomas replied that it would take a few days to get everything ready and that he would attack as soon as possible; Grant retorted that there must be no more delay, and went so far once as to write out an order relieving Thomas of his command and turning the whole army over to Schofield. The order was not sent, finally, but the fact that it was drafted was significant. Between Grant and Thomas there was some strange misunderstanding — a feeling, perhaps, on Grant’s part that dependable old Thomas could never quite make himself move fast. Thomas sensed what was in the wind, and when Halleck wired that Grant was highly unhappy about his delay he calmly replied that he had done his best and that “if General Grant should order me to be relieved, I will submit without a murmur.” Then, just as he was ready to attack, a great sleet storm came down, fields and roads were coated with an inch of slick ice, troop movements became utterly impossible, and a cavalry regiment required to travel to an outpost found that its troopers had to dismount and walk, leading their horses.
The ice lasted for four days, during which time both armies were immobilized. Grant fretted and worried and at last he got hold of Blackjack John Logan, who was north at the time, gave him orders relieving Thomas from command, and sent him west to take over.
Logan never quite made it. On December 14 — at last — the weather turned warm. There was a steady rain, mud took the place of ice, and Thomas sent off a wire to Halleck: “The ice having melted away today, the enemy will be attacked tomorrow morning.” Then he called in his corps commanders, gave them written orders for the next day’s attack, went over the orders with them in detail — and finally went to bed in the Nashville hotel room he was occupying, leaving word at the desk for a five o’clock call next morning.7
Morning came, and Thomas packed his bag, checked out, and rode off to field headquarters. There was a fog on the ground, but it drifted away not long after sunrise and the troops were ready to go. Thomas ordered them forward, sending in two brigades of colored troops to hold Hood’s right and attacking at the other end of the line with a solid corps of infantry and all of Wilson’s cavalry, which trotted forward to attack a prepared infantry position quite as if it had never yet been demonstrated that mounted men could not profitably assault men in trenches.
Everything worked. Hood’s line was stretched thin, and although the works his men occupied at the point of attack looked formidable he did not have enough men to hold them. The infantry smashed through, the cavalry curled around behind his left flank, and Hood was driven back for two miles, to take a new, last-hope position on a little chain of
hills. He had been badly beaten, and there was nothing he could do now but retreat as fast as the muddy roads might permit, but he was still full of fight, and he hung on for another day of it. His men were full of fight too. A Federal cavalryman who helped escort a bag of prisoners to the rear the next morning noticed that the captured Rebels were still confident: “They say Hood will pay us today for yesterday’s reverses. They all assert he is going to capture Nashville before night.”8
It was not in the cards. Thomas renewed the attack the next morning, and although the Confederates put up a stout fight their case was hopeless. Thomas’s IV Corps swarmed up a hill, crumpling the skirmish line and driving on for the trenches. The officer commanding an Indiana regiment spurred forward to be first man through the line, and as he passed his color-bearer he reached out for the flagstaff, to take the flag in with him. The color-bearer refused to let go of it and ran alongside the horse, colonel and private both gripping the same staff; and presently the colonel was pulled bodily out of the saddle and took an undignified tumble in the mud. The color-bearer kept the flag, ran up to the Rebel trench, and drove the base of the staff into the soft earth of the parapet, while the rest of the corps charged through and destroyed the Confederate line. Wilson’s cavalry came up on the right, dismounted and acting like infantry — the men had thrown their sabers by the roadside and were working their repeaters like foot soldiers — and finally the whole defensive position caved in and Hood’s army fled, leaving most of its artillery behind, while the Yankee cavalry scurried back to reclaim its horses and set off in pursuit.9