Hearts Touched by Fire

by Harold Holzer

  The sailors in the Union attack were armed only with cutlasses and pistols. They had to make a long charge down an open beach. At the first Confederate volley, one sailor wrote, “the whole mass of men went down like a row of falling bricks.” A newspaper correspondent declared: “I never saw men fall so fast in my life.”

  In a wild retreat the seamen left three hundred of their comrades dead or wounded on the beach. Lieutenant Commander Thomas Oliver Selfridge, Jr., commanded part of the attacking force. Two decades later, when the Century Company began producing Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, the leading reconciliation compilation of the immediate postwar years, Selfridge wrote an article defending his men and their conduct. The essay is an attorney’s brief more than a soldier’s memoir.

  The South was still reeling from the loss of Wilmington when Sherman and his hardened Union soldiers left Savannah and marched toward South Carolina, the “seedbed of secession.” Stern, red-haired “Cump” Sherman openly declared his intention to destroy everything in his path, spread demoralization afar, and then join Grant in Virginia in a final showdown with Lee.

  Sherman feinted one wing of his army toward the industrial city of Augusta, Georgia, and the other wing toward the port of Charleston. The Confederates rushed all available troops to both cities. The Federal army pushed straight northward in between the two, cutting railroad and communication lines. Augusta and Charleston, isolated and helpless, surrendered to delegations sent by Sherman.

  Commanding one of the Union wings was General Henry Warner Slocum. A quiet, dependable soldier, Slocum did his duty without fanfare or ambition. His only published military accounts are the narratives of the Carolina campaign reprinted here. Written with the twenty-twenty perspective of hindsight and without the heated emotions of wartime, the Slocum narratives are calm and measured. Indeed, the first essay understates both the vigor of Sherman’s soldiers on the northward march and the vengeance they unleashed on South Carolinians.

  Opposition was all but nonexistent. Joseph E. Johnston had come out of retirement to take command of a hodgepodge force of second-class Confederate soldiers barely equal in number to Sherman’s cavalry. “I can do no more than annoy him,” Johnston wrote of Sherman, but he hoped that weather and swampy lowlands would impede the Union advance.

  It did not. Most of Sherman’s men were Midwestern frontiersmen accustomed to the challenges of nature. With ax and spade, they corduroyed roads, built bridges, forded icy rivers, and sometimes roosted in trees to escape the flooded ground. Johnston later remarked that no such army had existed since the legions of Julius Caesar.

  A personal fury permeated the ranks as Union soldiers entered South Carolina. One Billy Yank put it succinctly: “Here is where treason began, and, by God, here is where it shall end!”

  Marking the army’s forty-five-mile-wide path were pillars of smoke by day and pillars of fire by night. Commercial buildings were leveled; homes were sacked and set afire; livestock were butchered; slaves were sent running, partly for freedom and partly from fear. One soldier wrote of the Savannah–Columbia march: “The country behind us is left a howling wilderness, in utter desolation.”

  Columbia, the state capital, caught the worst of the Union storm. Sherman’s forces marched into the city on February 17, and by the next morning a third of Columbia was in ashes. Although the burning may have been accidental— a point still in dispute today—soldiers in the ranks asserted that if the accident had not taken place, they themselves would have burned the place.

  Slocum attributed the destruction to Union soldiers provided too much whiskey by local citizenry. Why Carolinians would give alcohol to the human beings they most hated is a point Slocum did not explain.

  The Union army entered North Carolina the first week of March. The Federals reverted back to good behavior. Whereas South Carolina has led the fight for secession, its northern neighbor had been among the last to leave the Union. It did not deserve a similar fate. In point of fact, there was no military need for another policy of destruction. The war was reaching its final stages.

  When Sherman reached Fayetteville, he burned only an arsenal and machine shop. There he also established contact on the Cape Fear River with Union coastal forces. There, too, Sherman was finally able to rid himself of thousands of contrabands following in his wake. Ex-slaves were shuttled to Wilmington with promises of freedom. Now Sherman was ready for the final push toward Virginia.

  Sixty miles northeast of Fayetteville, as the Union columns approached Goldsboro, Confederate resistance for the first time stiffened. A sharp fight ensued on March 16–17 at Averysboro. Then Johnston struck the exposed Union left wing (Slocum’s) at Bentonville. But the Confederates were simply not strong enough to win a victory over half of Sherman’s army. When Sherman dispatched reinforcements to the danger spot, the Southern offensive melted away. On March 23, Sherman reached Goldsboro. A Union corps under General John M. Schofield awaited his arrival. Sherman now had 80,000 veteran soldiers deep in the Carolinas behind Lee. The Federals could go anywhere they wanted to go without a thought of being stopped. “The Confederacy was being torn up by the roots,” one observer noted, “including the ones that went deepest.”

  Lee’s dwindling army, locked in earthworks at Petersburg and Richmond, was the one fixed point in the dissolving Southern nation. Yet it had suffered horribly during the war’s coldest winter. Meanwhile, Grant had slowly stretched his massive forces in a semicircle that snaked thirty-five miles. This compelled Lee to extend his own thin numbers to vulnerable and dangerous lengths.

  Lee made one effort to stop Grant’s encirclement and possibly break the siege. In the predawn hours of March 25, a third of the Confederate army attacked Fort Stedman in the center of the Union line. Lee’s gamble failed.

  In command of that Union sector was General John Frederick Hartranft, an engineer and attorney who had won his general’s star in the 1864 battle of Spotsylvania and would later in 1865 oversee the imprisonment and execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Hartranft’s brigade of Pennsylvania recruits was seeing its first action. It weathered a momentary breakthrough by the Confederates, then regrouped and slowly beat back the attackers. The battle was over by noon.

  Hartranft’s account of the action is pure military history. He delighted in showing the various regiments maneuvering in battle. Interestingly, the general mentioned a phenomenon known as an “acoustic shadow.” This is a situation in which sound from nearby locations is not heard because of wind direction, terrain, and wetness of forests. Acoustic shadows affected other battles such as Shiloh, Perryville, and Chancellorsville.

  Fort Stedman was Lee’s last offensive action. It cost him 4,800 new casualties (most of them men taken prisoner). The next move was up to Grant, and it came quickly. Less than a week after Fort Stedman, Federal forces swept around Lee’s extreme right flank and seized the vital road junction of Five Forks. The mismanagement of the Confederate commander, George E. Pickett, dulled the glamour of his reputation for boldness at Gettysburg.

  Grant’s all-out assaults on April 2 were expected and unstoppable. Federals poured over the Confederate lines like floodwaters engulfing a levee. The story of the breakthrough and of the pursuit of Lee’s fragmenting brigades has been told many times. No observer on the Union side produced a more incisive account than Colonel Horace Porter, the most intellectual of Grant’s aides. Porter’s highly revealing articles for Battles and Leaders appeared a decade later in book form, under the title Campaigning with Grant (1897). The volume has been reprinted five times since.

  As Grant started his pursuit of Lee’s army in the darkness of April 2, a great glow filled the air. Confederate officials in Richmond had ordered warehouses loaded with tobacco and government property put to the torch. Strong winds turned the flames into a raging inferno. More than eight hundred buildings in the capital were gutted. Ironically, black soldiers in Union general Godfrey Weitzel’s Twenty-fifth Corps finally brought the fires under con
trol. The cremation of Richmond was a symbolic tragedy.

  Two eyewitness accounts from opposite sides provide dramatic pictures of the abandonment of the city. A young Maryland captain, Clement Sulivane, commanded a company of local defense troops. His instructions were to assist in the city’s evacuation and then to set fire to the major bridge spanning the James River. Sulivane’s perspectives from the Southern side are unusually good for the utter chaos of April 2–3 in the capital.

  One of Weitzel’s aides, Thomas Graves, also penned his recollections while memories were still fresh. His narrative, which described President Abraham Lincoln arriving in Richmond while the city was still smoking, is even-tempered and conciliatory. Graves does stretch truth (and chronology) with his account of General Weitzel—who was removed from command on April 13—sending his wallet stuffed with greenbacks to help an old friend, Confederate general Fitzhugh Lee.

  Like a wolf pack pursuing its wounded prey, Grant’s overwhelming numbers slowly encircled the stumbling remnants of Lee’s army. The end came on April 9 at Appomattox Court House. It was not grim old “Unconditional Surrender” Grant with whom Lee met to discuss terms. Instead, Lee found a sympathetic man who himself had known personal humiliation earlier in life. Grant’s surrender proposals were generous. The Federal general set the tone for the future when he admonished Union soldiers for shouting joyfully. “Stop that cheering!” Grant ordered. “The Rebels are our countrymen again.”

  Colonel Charles Marshall was the only aide Lee took to the meeting with Grant. The next day the Virginia-born attorney had the heavy task of drafting Lee’s farewell address to the fewer than 10,000 Confederate soldiers who remained. Marshall incorporated all of the correct phrases: “arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage … the consciousness of duty faithfully performed … a grateful remembrance.…”

  When Lee read the document, a staff member noted, “the tears ran down the old hero’s cheeks, and he gave way—for the first time that I ever knew him to do so since my connection with him.”

  The events after Lee’s surrender were anticlimactic. In North Carolina, Johnston knew better than to try to continue the fight. Sherman had always been an advocate of hard war, but he was quick to offer a soft peace. On April 26, Johnston surrendered what was left of the Army of Tennessee.

  Basil Wilson Duke was the brother-in-law of two Confederate generals, John Hunt Morgan and Ambrose Powell Hill. His account of final operations in southwestern Virginia and of President Jefferson Davis’s “flight into oblivion” captured well the last breaths of the Southern Confederacy.

  In the twilight of life, George Gibbs of the 18th Mississippi pondered: “I look back now … on those turbulent times, and wonder where I found the fortitude, patience and endurance to pass through so many trying experiences suffered during the four years of the war. In most cases I believe we gather strength, courage and fortitude when circumstances are such as to require them.”

  Those men of blue and gray performed with enough courage and honor to give rise to legends that warmed the hearts of the old and embedded inspiration into the hearts of the young.

  CHAPTER 1

  SHERMAN’S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE.

  Henry W. Slocum, Major-General, U.S.V.

  General Sherman’s army commenced its march from “Atlanta to the Sea” on the morning of November 15th, and arrived in front of the defenses of Savannah on the 10th of December, 1864. No news had been received from the North during this interval except such as could be gleaned from Southern papers picked up by the soldiers on the line of our march. Our fleet was in Ossabaw Sound with supplies of food and clothing, and an immense mail, containing letters from home for nearly every one in the army, from the commanding general down to the private soldier. All that blocked our communication with the fleet was Fort McAllister on the Ogeechee River. This fort was captured by Hazen’s division of the Fifteenth Corps on December 13th, and the 15th brought us our mails and an abundant supply of food and ammunition, making this one of the happiest days experienced by the men of Sherman’s army. Preparations were at once commenced for assaulting the Confederate works, and were nearly completed when the Confederates evacuated Savannah. Our troops entered the city before daybreak on the 21st of December. The fall of Fort McAllister placed General Sherman in communication with General Grant and the authorities at Washington. Prior to the capture of Savannah, the plan contemplated by General Grant involved the removal of the infantry of Sherman’s army to City Point by sea. On December 6th General Grant wrote to Sherman:

  ADVANCING UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

  “My idea now is that you establish a base on the sea-coast, fortify, and leave all your artillery and cavalry and enough infantry to protect them, and at the same time so threaten the interior that the militia of the South will have to be kept home. With the balance of your command come here with all dispatch.”

  In reply, under date of December 13th, Sherman said:

  “I had expected, after reducing Savannah, instantly to march to Columbia, South Carolina, thence to Raleigh, and then to report to you.”

  The fall of Savannah resulted in the adoption of the plan which Sherman had contemplated. In a letter dated December 24th Sherman says:

  “Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why I did not go to South Carolina, and when I answered that we were en route for that State, the invariable reply was, ‘Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.’ ”

  About one month was spent in Savannah in clothing the men and filling the trains with ammunition and rations. Then commenced the movement which was to make South Carolina feel the severities of war.1 The right wing, with the exception of Corse’s division of the Seventeenth Corps, moved via Hilton Head to Beaufort. The left wing with Corse’s division and the cavalry moved up the west bank of the Savannah River to Sister’s Ferry, distant about forty miles from Savannah. Sherman’s plan was similar to that adopted on leaving Atlanta. When the army had started from Atlanta, the right wing had moved direct toward Macon and the left toward Augusta. Both cities were occupied by Confederate troops. The movements of our army had caused the Confederate authorities at each of these important cities to demand not only the retention of the troops at each place, but had induced them to demand help from every quarter. Sherman had had no thought of attacking either place, and at the proper time the movements of both wings of the army were so directed as to unite them and leave both cities in our rear, with little or no force in our front. On leaving Savannah our right wing threatened Charleston and the left again threatened Augusta, the two wings being again united in the interior of South Carolina, leaving the Confederate troops at Augusta with almost a certainty that Charleston must fall without a blow from Sherman. On the arrival of the left wing at Sister’s Ferry on the Savannah, instead of finding, as was anticipated, a river a few yards in width which could be easily crossed, they found a broad expanse of water which was utterly impassable. The continuous rain-fall had caused the river to overflow, so that the lowland on the South Carolina side was covered with water, extending nearly half a mile from the river. We were delayed several days in vain efforts to effect a crossing, and were finally compelled to await the falling of the waters. Our pontoon-bridge was finally constructed and the crossing commenced. Each regiment as it entered South Carolina gave three cheers. The men seemed to realize that at last they had set foot on the State which had done more than all others to bring upon the country the horrors of civil war. In the narrow road leading from the ferry on the South Carolina side torpedoes had been planted, so that several of our men were killed or wounded by treading upon them. This was unfortunate for that section of the State. Planting torpedoes for the defense of a position is legitimate warfare, but our soldiers regarded the act of placing them in a highway where no contest was anticipated as something akin to poisoning a stream of water; it is not recognized as fair or legitimate warfare. If that secti
on of South Carolina suffered more severely than any other, it was due in part to the blundering of people who were more zealous than wise.

  RAILWAY DESTRUCTION AS A MILITARY ART.

  About February 19th the two wings of the army were reunited in the vicinity of Branchville, a small village on the South Carolina Railroad at the point where the railroad from Charleston to Columbia branches off to Augusta. Here we resumed the work which had occupied so much of our time in Georgia, viz., the destruction of railroads.2

  SKIRMISHERS CROSSING THE NORTH EDISTO, S.C., ON A FLOATING FOOT-BRIDGE. FROM A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.

  Having effectually destroyed over sixty miles of railroads in this section, the army started for Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, each corps taking a separate road. The left wing (Slocum) arrived at a point about three miles from Columbia on the 16th, and there received orders to cross the Saluda River, at Mount Zion’s Church. The Fourteenth Corps moved to the crossing, built a bridge during the night, crossed the river next day, and was followed by the Twentieth Corps and Kilpatrick’s cavalry. The right wing (Howard) moved direct to Columbia, the Fifteenth Corps moving through the city and camping outside on the Camden road. The Seventeenth Corps did not enter Columbia. During the night of February 17th the greater portion of the city of Columbia was burned. The lurid flames could easily be seen from my camp, many miles distant. Nearly all the public buildings, several churches, an orphan asylum, and many of the residences were destroyed. The city was filled with helpless women and children and invalids, many of whom were rendered houseless and homeless in a single night. No sadder scene was presented during the war. The suffering of so many helpless and innocent persons could not but move the hardest heart. The question as to who was immediately responsible for this disaster has given rise to some controversy. I do not believe that General Sherman countenanced or was in any degree responsible for it. I believe the immediate cause of the disaster was a free use of whisky (which was supplied to the soldiers by citizens with great liberality). A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night, particularly when for a series of years you have urged him to come, so that you might have an opportunity of performing a surgical operation on him.