The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta

by Gary Ecelbarger

  General Lowrey witnessed their efforts in what was growing more apparent as a forlorn hope. “I never saw a greater display of gallantry,” he stated with pride, but with the collapse of his left flank and the tenacious defense of Leggett’s men on and surrounding the treeless knoll, Lowrey realized he could not capture and hold the ground without more men entering the fray. As the time passed 3:00 P.M., Lowrey’s attack, including his flank supports from the Texans on his right and Tennesseans on his left, dipped below 1,500 officers and men. He was then appreciably outnumbered by at least 400 Union soldiers and 8 perilous artillery pieces. Rubbing salt in the Confederates’ wound was the fact that they attacked with no artillery support behind them—their guns could not deploy in the woods—and were forced to absorb friendly-fire casualties from Confederate batteries firing from the west. Minutes after 3:00 P.M. Lowrey sent orders for his mauled brigade to disengage, cross back over the creek, and return to the shelter of the woods east of Bald Hill.

  Lowrey had no idea at that time that over 3,000 Confederate troops stood within supporting distance of his brigade in and near the wooded gap separating the two Union corps. At least 500 Texans mingled behind Lowrey’s right with no inclination to help the 200 or so members of the engaged portion of their brigade after the loss of their commander and the luckless bout with Harrow’s division of the XV Corps just an hour before. The same could be said for the 700 members of Govan’s brigade off to Lowrey’s left. Those Arkansans were spent after the grand success they achieved ninety minutes earlier. Together, the Arkansans and Texans had apparently spilled too much blood and dripped too much sweat to be expected to effectively attack again so soon.

  More puzzling was the absence of support of the Tennesseans from Carter’s brigade of Maney’s division. With the exception of the 38th Tennessee, which engaged side by side with the 45th Alabama on Lowrey’s left, the regiments of that brigade provided minimal reinforcements for Lowrey. (Captain Key, the artillery commander, complained that he urged that brigade to charge “but it was impossible to get them forward.”)40 Farther back was Walker’s brigade of Tennesseans, up to 1,500 soldiers marching to and fro but not entering the fray. Had either of those two Tennessee brigades been fully committed to the attack, Lowrey’s assault would have approached 3,500 men, a force 70 percent larger than what was actually deployed. Those brigades fought in different divisions and it would take considerable time for General Maney, General Cleburne, and General Hardee to organize them for another assault upon Bald Hill.

  Unlike the horrors suffered by the Orphan Brigade during their retreat from the XVI Corps, Lowrey’s regiments were able to return to cross the open twenty-acre field and return to the woods with relative ease. The Confederate cannon fire from the Atlanta side of Bald Hill made that possible, for it commanded the universal attention of Leggett’s division. It also provided an opening for wounded Confederates to escape capture. A. G. Anderson of the 7th Texas of General James A. Smith’s brigade was shot in the shoulder in front of the breastworks on Bald Hill just when the retreat was ordered. “I crawled as fast as I could, but began to get blind from the loss of blood,” he recalled. He reached the edge of the woods and plunged into a pond—right near his wounded brigadier, General J. A. Smith. It was a fortuitous moment for Anderson, who was hoisted upon Smith’s horse and carried rearward to a field hospital.41

  Rather than harass Cleburne’s retreating soldiers, Leggett’s brigades and batteries reacted to the western threat by reversing their front. For the third time in an hour, they crossed over their works to face westward in the direction of Atlanta. More specifically, the 4 Napoleons of Captain Ruel W. Anderson’s Georgia Battery had been launching its twelve-pound rounds from the smoothbore barrels of its bronze cannons 400 yards from Leggett’s batteries. The Union guns responded swiftly and effectively. According to Captain Elliott of the Black Horse Artillery “it took only about fifteen minutes to clear them out.” Perhaps so, but surrounding and supporting the Georgia guns was an entire division of Georgia militia, twelve regiments organized into four brigades and commanded by Major General Gustavus W. Smith.

  General G. W. Smith took his orders directly from General Hood, but on that afternoon he decided to advance without waiting for orders from Hood or either of the corps commanders. G. W. Smith reported his belief that Anderson’s guns had silenced Leggett’s batteries in ten minutes. Regardless of who neutralized who, the fact was the artillery had ceased and G. W. Smith advanced close enough to see Leggett’s men on and around Bald Hill who showed themselves by lifting their heads above the breastworks. Smith could see how eager his men were to attack the hill, but he also knew how raw those troops were and had been in enough battles over the past three years to appreciate the strong position.42

  Between 3:00 and 3:15 P.M. on July 22 marked the first point in three hours where there was a distinct lull that had overtaken the battlefield. At the cost of 3,000 Confederate casualties, General Hardee’s attack, after a fruitless start on the left rear of the Union army, had pushed in the Federal left, captured 9 cannons, beheaded the enemy army, and captured, killed, and wounded over 2,000 Yankees, still, the core of the Union left had held firm. Five thousand American soldiers were out of the contest in three hours—an average of a Yankee or Rebel casualty every other second of the fight.

  No one believed the three-hour battle was over; but at the same time, no one ever revealed their belief in the sobering fact that the halfway point of that contest had yet to be reached.

  8

  BLOODY DIVERSION

  As General Cleburne’s assault of Bald Hill waned to near silence, the ambulance wagon bearing the body of General McPherson rolled 2 miles north of Bald Hill to General Sherman’s headquarters at the Howard house, the home of Augustus Hurt. Sherman ordered the escorts to carry the body inside as aides yanked a door free from its hinges and set it down to serve as a temporary bier for the dead general. “He was dressed just as he left me,” noted Sherman, who studied the path of the fatal bullet with the help of an army doctor. Sherman was crushed by the death of his protégé, but he took no time to reflect upon what could have been. Logan had commanded the army for about an hour and by the dissipating battle sounds south of him, Sherman must have been relieved that Hood’s three-hour offensive had failed to turn the flank of the Army of the Tennessee. Still, as 3:00 P.M. came and went, Sherman’s experience—and the warnings of Hood’s tenacity that were previously supplied by Schofield and McPherson—would have told him that the battle was not yet over.1

  At his headquarters near the city cemetery a mile east of Atlanta, General Hood had stewed for hours over the lack of progress of Hardee’s corps against the Union left. Notwithstanding his decision to change Hardee’s intended march to Decatur and shorten it to an attack upon the rear of the southern flank of the enemy, Hood never appeared comfortable with that very necessary adjustment. He had spent an entire restless morning listening for the sound of battle that was supposed to commence at daybreak.

  The long anticipated rolling sound of battle hit Hood’s ears close to noon. He listened to the attacks from south to north against the XVII Corps and soon learned that Maney’s division was not in the rear of an unsuspecting opponent as his plan suggested, but apparently attacking the entrenched flank. (He either personally observed or received an aide’s report of Strahl’s brigade pressing northeastward toward Bald Hill.) Hood was disgusted at that discovery, for in his eyes it completely upended his battle plan to throw Sherman into chaos and send him reeling toward Peachtree Creek. Still, Hood had no way of knowing at that time that the XVI Corps posed an incredible roadblock in the rear or that Cleburne’s division had actually struck the enemy from the rear as he had intended it to. The fact that a portion of Maney’s division was attacking northeastward actually increased the chaos and stress upon the Union left flank, another point that Hood had yet to appreciate.

  So, at 3:00 P.M. Hood had to accept the stark reality that McPherson’s army (he had yet
to learn of that general’s demise) had been struck hard but had refused to leave the field. Making matters worse was the inevitability that Union reinforcements would head toward the contested flank to buttress the Yankee defense. That not only guaranteed more casualties in Hardee’s corps, it could separate Hardee from the rest of Hood’s army, and it also risked the continuation of apparent Union plans to extend southward from the eastern locale and take over the Macon Railroad, the iron lifeline running into Atlanta from the south. Hood never admitted that his grandest of wishes—the roll-up and retreat of all Union forces threatening Atlanta—had all but completely disintegrated. Nevertheless, Hood still hoped for the destruction of the Army of the Tennessee. It was still possible, but a new plan had to be devised.

  Hood issued orders to be delivered to General Cheatham, commander of Hood’s old corps, orders that stopped Cheatham from “take up the movement” and fueling a rout that was supposed to be created by Hardee and Wheeler. There was no rout to fuel. Instead, Hood then saw Cheatham’s corps as a diversionary force to hold the XV Corps in place to prevent them, and perhaps Schofield’s Army of the Ohio north of them, from reinforcing the XVII Corps on the Union left. Hood ordered Cheatham to move forward with his corps, and attack the position in his front.2

  Benjamin Franklin Cheatham was not a brilliant general, but his history as a division commander in the Army of Tennessee was virtually unparalleled. Although not a West Pointer, he earned command of Hood’s corps not only because he was the senior division commander in the Army of Tennessee, but also because he was the most experienced one, even more so than General Cleburne. Cheatham’s reputation as a hard fighter was nearly matched by rumors that he was just as hard a drinker, although he appears to have abstained from the habit during the course of battles. Nashville born and raised, that forty-three-year-old former farmer and Mexican War veteran was synonymous with Tennessee and was the idol of his all-Tennessee division throughout 1862, 1863, and the Atlanta campaign of 1864. The only oddity of elevating Cheatham to lead a corps three days before the battle of Atlanta was that only one Tennessee brigade existed in the three divisions he took over.

  By the midafternoon of Friday, Cheatham had the freshest and largest Confederate corps at Atlanta. Fourteen thousand officers and men occupied his twelve brigades—troops not engaged two days earlier at Peachtree Creek, not fatigued by an overnight march, and not consumed as casualties in a monstrous battle entering its fourth hour. Hood apparently liked them where they were. They were in position to fuel a rout expected by the surge of Hardee’s and Wheeler’s men against the flank and rear of the Army of the Tennessee, but at the same time they were available at a moment’s notice to shift westward and link up with the right flank of General Alexander P. Stewart’s corps and thus double the defensive manpower in Atlanta’s northern environs should General Thomas threaten that sector with his Army of the Cumberland. Hood had attacked Thomas’s army with two corps two days earlier; he must have believed he could defend with two corps should the reverse occur.

  Should Cheatham’s entire corps attack if the intention was to create a diversion? Perhaps Hood left that to Cheatham’s discretion. With less than five hours of daylight remaining on July 22, Hood must have been less concerned about Thomas attacking Stewart’s corps that day. Yet that possibility still existed. Most important was the outcome of the battle east of Atlanta. Hood might not achieve the rout he had planned for, but the successes reported to him would have convinced him that he was on the verge of a victory nonetheless.

  The most puzzling aspect of Hood’s generalship was keeping Cheatham’s corps out of the primary action for two consecutive battles, particularly since those were the men that Hood had led for four months. Hood later attributed the decision to Cheatham’s inexperience as a corps commander, but given Cheatham’s experience and solid reputation as a division chief, there appears to be a more satisfying reason for holding his former corps from action that long. That corps had not succeeded in offensive action two distinct times during the campaign when Hood had led them. At Resaca on May 14–15 and six weeks later at the Battle of Kolb’s Farm, the corps had failed to carry an enemy line when it attacked under Hood’s leadership. Their failure rested with Hood, whose reputation for punishing attacks had been gained with a brigade, a division, and a corps (the latter at Chickamauga), consisting of troops he had led from the Army of Northern Virginia—Lee’s army. Hood’s success as a corps commander during the Atlanta campaign had only been achieved on the defensive, most notably at the Battle of New Hope Church on May 25. Perhaps Hood’s lack of faith in the ability of the divisions and brigades of that corps to attack and carry a position convinced him to use Cheatham in a more passive role, first to “take up the movement,” and then to “create a diversion.”3

  Cheatham received his orders and issued directives for each of his divisions. Cheatham was not hampered by the clamp that a diversionary attack would normally place on the assaulting force. Cheatham planned to engage all of his divisions and nearly every brigade of each division. Cheatham was going to treat his mission as a full-scale assault to destroy the opponent in front of him, not as a diversionary attack with the primary goal to hold them in place. To maximize the killing potential of the attack, Cheatham prepared an en echelon assault from south to north, each division advancing fifteen minutes after the one to its right. As it turns out, that tactic would have been the preferred one if Cheatham was following Hood’s initial plan to push the Union army northward as it was routed by Hardee’s rear and flank strike.

  Cheatham’s southernmost division would battle first. That force was the four brigades of Tennesseans, Georgians, Alabamans, North Carolinians, and Virginians commanded by Major General Carter L. Stevenson. They were the only one of Cheatham’s three divisions deployed and prepared to advance and attack at 3:30 P.M. Stevenson had 4,500 Confederates at his disposal. His division occupied ground near the midpoint between Atlanta and the Union works. Facing east with his right flank in line with Bald Hill and his left extending across a front to face off against the right of General William Harrow’s division of the XV Corps, Stevenson appears to have begun his advance with two brigades in the frontlines and the other two in reserve behind them. At 3:30 P.M. he began to engage the bluecoats in rifle fire.

  The first recipients of Stevenson’s bullets were the most harried soldiers on the field. Manning Force’s brigade had been led by Colonel Bryant of the 12th Wisconsin after General Force was escorted northward with the ugly facial wound received earlier that afternoon. Bryant’s brigade should have been warned about a western threat to their position twenty minutes earlier when the Black Horse Battery 100 yards down the line had engaged and silenced the Georgia battery commanded by Captain Anderson. The Buckeyes and Badgers on and north of Bald Hill would relish in postwar claims of reversing directions several times during the battle to fend off simultaneous attacks from the east and west. A member of the 20th Ohio likened the position-changing infantry to “a long line of these toy monkeys you see which jump over the end of a stick.” Jump over the other side of the works they certainly did, but at that point in the battle it was completed after an eerie lull lasting nearly twenty minutes and at a time when Cleburne was no longer posing a serious threat from the woods draping east and southeast of Bald Hill.4

  The threat to the Union position then emanated west of Bald Hill in the form of Brigadier General Alexander W. Reynolds’s brigade of four regiments (two from Virginia and two from North Carolina), the only brigade carrying regiments from those two states in Hood’s entire army. That appeared to be the only distinction those men would carry that day. Reynolds’s men, about 1,200 strong, halfheartedly fought Bryant’s defenders, giving up the contest after taking fewer than thirty members killed or wounded. Surprisingly, the brigade abandoned more men behind as healthy prisoners in Union hands than those who had suffered battle wounds in that short-lived bout.5

  Support for the Confederates stood in position to the ri
ght and rear of Reynolds’s brigade. That was the Georgia militia, four brigades commanded by Major General Gustavus W. Smith. The militia had been called out a few weeks earlier by Governor Joseph Brown—earning them the nickname “Joe Brown’s Pets.” G. W. Smith claimed a force of “2,000 muskets” (about 2,200 officers and men). Protecting Anderson’s Battery in its 3:00 P.M. exchange with the Union guns south of Bald Hill, Smith’s militia was antsy to attack the Yankees 400 yards east of them. G. W. Smith—who was under orders from General Hood directly—considered what his eager men wanted, especially with the protection of Stevenson’s division guiding him on his left (northern) flank. Reynolds’s retreat, followed by Stevenson’s shift farther northward, left the Georgians in a dangerous spot without protection on either flank. “I considered it useless to make an isolated attack,” Smith wisely concluded, as he continued to hold his position on fairly open ground. Over the next two hours he would lose 50 militiamen as casualties in that exposed position, neither charging nor retreating the entire time.6

  The hasty abandonment by Reynolds’s brigade and the stagnant position of Smith’s militia removed any threat to the XVII Corps from the west for the rest of the afternoon (although those soldiers did not know that at the time). Stevenson’s division was still in the fight; however, his left flank represented his new battle front. The second brigade of attackers, Brigadier General Alfred Cumming’s five Georgia regiments, surged forward nearly simultaneously with Reynolds’s brigade. Those Southerners struck north of Bald Hill against a line of breastworks defended by Harrow’s division of the XV Corps. General Harrow described the assault as “vigorous,” but it wasn’t nearly enough. Twelve hundred Confederates attempted to take the earthworks supposed to be manned by Walcutt’s and Oliver’s brigades, but Walcutt’s men were not there; they were still in the rear of the line oriented southward. Only three regiments from Oliver’s brigade covered a line of entrenchments designed for treble their numbers. The 70th Ohio met the approach head on, Major William Brown reporting “the firing was very heavy along the entire line.” Another Ohioan witnessed one of the Georgia color bearers plant the flag just a few feet from the Union line, “but it required only one well-directed volley from our guns to move them back with greater speed than when they came forward.” After absorbing 40 casualties in his ranks while inflicting very few as he probed the Union position, General Cumming retired his brigade from the contest.7