The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta

by Gary Ecelbarger

  Only two Northern regiments remained from Martin’s brigade to oppose the attackers, the 57th Ohio near the railroad, and the 55th Illinois off the left flank of the Buckeyes. Six cannons from Battery A, 1st Illinois Light Artillery also were positioned to repel the assault. The defense watched the Alabamans’ approach, “with the usual ear-piercing yell.” According to one of the Illinois men, “We held our fire until the rebs were within 60 yards of us, when we gave them a volley of musketry and artillery which staggered them considerably.” A few more volleys from the Illinoisans froze up Benton’s men, while sending hundreds reeling and fleeing, much like Manigault’s men north of that position. Those remaining hugged the ground a mere 50 yards from the works. The Mississippians were further demoralized when their commander, Colonel Benton, went down with two wounds, a bullet through the foot and a shell fragment in his upper chest (the foot required amputation; both wounds would prove fatal six days after the battle). Colonel William F. Brantley took over the brigade at the worst possible time to learn the mechanics of a command several times larger than his expertise and experience. Brantley sent orders for his prone men in front of the works and behind trees and stumps to extricate themselves and withdraw to a safe position a quarter of a mile to the rear.23

  The repulse of Brantley’s brigade infused their enemies with confidence. A member of the 55th Illinois claimed they were “proudly exultant, and intoxicated with the wine of victory—a victory with almost no loss.” But it was much too early to celebrate. Coltart’s Alabamans—including 50 men of the 39th Alabama who pried themselves from the Mississippians—had already begun to shift another 300 yards to the right at the same time the Mississippians were advancing straight on. That redeployment placed the new front of the Alabamans nearly one-third of a mile south of the railroad. Here they advanced with no artillery opposing them and only two isolated regiments of Colonel Reuben Williams’s brigade from William Harrow’s division in the earthworks with no reserves in the Union rear.24

  At 4:15 P.M. Colonel Coltart launched the assault with his Alabama brigade from his new position, not knowing that he was blessed with the good fortune of opposing the weakest part of the Union line south of the Georgia Railroad. Even as his troops closed the quarter-mile gap between the opposing lines, a rejuvenated assault at and north of the railroad bed had begun to turn the tide of the contest. Manigault had met with a shower of lead and iron from Colonel Wells S. Jones’s brigade and 6 cannons from two Illinois batteries, aided by additional Union artillery pieces half a mile north of the Troup Hurt house. Stalled in his tracks, Manigault’s predicament ended with the arrival of Colonel Jacob H. Sharp’s Mississippi brigade. Next to General Manigault, Sharp was the most experienced of Brown’s four brigade commanders, although he had held the helm of the brigade for only ten weeks prior to the battle. Sharp had kept his Mississippians 100 yards behind Manigault’s men and had even sent messages to the frontline troops to offer assistance during the first minutes of action. The offers were refused, but became necessary.

  As it turned out, merely the presence of Sharp’s regiments sparked a resurgence in Manigault’s brigade. “The men saw them, and gathered confidence,” insisted Manigault. The Alabamans and Carolinians were then determined to complete their mission. Surging forward between deadly discharges from Union artillery aimed in their direction, the frontline Confederates stormed the breastworks. The 10th South Carolina Regiment near the right of Manigault’s line, considerably weaker in numbers from rearward bound soldiers in their ranks, charged along the north side of the railroad until they reached the cut running through the fortifications. The second attempt proved easier as thick battle smoke and a ravine screened their approach to the Union line. Colonel James F. Pressley led the 10th Regiment forward, some rushing through the cut while others scaled the low works between the cut and the wagon road 20 yards north of it. Several Gamecocks fell dead and wounded, including Pressley, who was shot through the shoulder on top of the works and was borne from the field, but he had done his job well, for his men reached a portion of the line poorly defended by XV Corps infantry. The infantry near the position melted away, leaving an open path to the first cherished prize for the Southerners—the cannons of Battery A, 1st Illinois Light Artillery.25

  Battery A was a Chicago artillery regiment, formerly known as the Dearborne Artillery Militia Company. On July 22 it was actually a consolidated unit, formed from the remnant of Battery A and B with the expiration of service of the 1861 recruits only days before the battle. One section stood between the railroad and the road to Decatur; another section occupied ground south of the railroad and a third section stood north of the dirt road. Even before the Rebels broke through the works, a series of mishaps portended doom when two artillerists in the battery had their forearms blown off because the guns each manned discharged prematurely.26

  The South Carolina infantry prepared to inflict a great deal more pain on the battery, swarming upon it before the next rounds of double canister could be rammed down the barrels. Lieutenant Samuel S. Smyth commanded the battery and stood next to the northernmost section. Major John R. Hotaling, a XV Corps staff officer and one of six brothers fighting for the Union, had also ridden up to the battery to oversee that position. “I stood by the right section, talking to Lieut. [Samuel] Smyth, and thought we had repulsed the massed assault,” admitted Hotaling. “We had, but it was only the first line; the powder smoke was so dense and I was stooping to look under the cloud when the second line of [Confederates] poured over our works and through the cut, gaining our rear.”27

  The Southerners lit upon the battery so swiftly that few escaped unscathed. The Carolina troops shot man and horse alike in an effort to prevent the guns from being rolled to safety. Ten artillerists were killed, several wounded, and twenty-one others forced to surrender, including the battery commander, Lieutenant Smyth; fifty-six battery horses were also killed or wounded. All 6 cannons fell into the hands of the 10th South Carolina. One of the artillerists “played possum” by feigning death the moment Lieutenant Theodore Raub was struck down at his side. He was able to continue the ruse even after the Gamecocks flocked over the captured cannons, kicking him and stomping on him in the process.28

  The 24th Alabama charged in on the heels of the victorious Carolinians. Captain Starke H. Oliver passed the captured guns of Battery A and came upon Lieutenant Raub leaning against a tree, staring in stunned silence with his sword in his right hand while his left arm draped over his stomach, just a few feet behind the guns. Oliver ordered Raub to surrender and head toward the Confederate rear west of them but the Illinoisan insisted that he was too wounded to walk. At that moment Oliver could see that Raub had been holding his arm over his slit abdomen to prevent his protruding bowels from dropping out from the long, deep, and obviously mortal cut. With the help of another Confederate soldier, Oliver carried the dying officer to a ditch behind the earthworks where they gently placed him. Lieutenant Raub died within an hour in that secluded spot.29

  Major Hotaling escaped the maelstrom. He had survived close calls in the past, bearing a reminder of that across his face in the form of a sabre scar received during the Mexican War. Disregarding repeated calls to surrender, Hotaling discovered a ravine east of the battery near where the caissons stood. There he stayed, rallying soldiers from different commands to coalesce around him. He was essentially using the ravine as a recruiting station to form a new hodgepodge regiment, one that would counterstrike as soon as Hotaling was satisfied he had enough men to make a difference.30

  The successful exploits of the 10th South Carolina opened the door for the 19th South Carolina behind it and the Alabamans north of them. All had rushed forward through the cut or over the works. That proved all too much for the 47th Ohio Infantry of Jones’s brigade, one of only three regiments north of the railroad cut positioned to protect Battery A off its left flank and De Gress’s cannons off its right flank. Low-hanging battle smoke concealed what had quickly become an overwhelming
presence of the Confederates deploying from the cut they then owned. Herculean efforts by Lieutenant Colonel John Wallace of the 47th Ohio to form a new line on each side of the flags of the regiment could not stem the gray tide. As Private William Bakhaus revealed, “Lt. Col. Wallace ordered us to rally around him, but in this instance I must admit that I did not obey orders, but commanded myself to rally to the rear, and did so in double quick time.” Too many Ohioans followed Bakhaus’s cue, leaving Wallace and members of the color guard essentially alone to be captured in short order. New 2nd Division commander Brig. Gen. Joseph Lightburn rode to the rear to prepare a secondary defensive line while his new brigadier, Colonel Wells Jones, moved to the right to try to get a battle line formed from the remainder of his troops just north of the Troup Hurt house.31

  Captain De Gress and his subordinates, manning the 4 twenty-pounder Parrotts, stood north of the brick house with portions of two other Ohio regiments surrounding the house in front of them and immediately to their left. Those regiments—the 30th and 37th Ohio—buckled under the overwhelming presence of Manigault’s men in front of the breastworks and then flanking them from the left (south) where the Carolina men had penetrated the railroad. Confederate numbers here doubled at that time when Sharp’s Mississippians entered the fray on the heels of Manigault’s brigade. With more than 2,500 Confederates at or inside the XV Corps works, the outcome around the Troup Hurt house appeared decided. Unable to form a resisting line of regiments of his brigade north of the railroad, Colonel Jones ran to Captain De Gress and urged him to retire from the field and save his guns.32

  It was way too late for that. De Gress managed to turn his left 2 guns toward the left (south). Loading one with canister, De Gress fired it himself at Confederates closing within 20 yards of him. He ordered the guns spiked to prevent them from being fired upon his own troops after their inevitable capture. De Gress was forced to abandon his artillery pieces and escaped with the few artillerists willing to protect them. Although De Gress escaped, 9 of his men could not get out in time. A mixture of Manigault’s men and Mississippians from Sharp’s brigade lit upon the battery and captured all 4 cannons. Those guns plus Battery A of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery made 10 in all for the Southern breach into the XV Corps lines.

  The two penetrating Southern brigades threatened the entire XV Corps position. Immediately affected were the three regiments of Martin’s brigade south of the railroad. After successfully repulsing Benton’s Mississippi brigade in their front, the Illinois and Ohio regiments lost sight of the Confederate penetration along the Georgia Railroad to their right. Officers barked out orders to oblique to the right to face the new danger north of them. “It was too late,” admitted one of the foot soldiers in the line, observing the entire region north of the railway “swarming with Confederate soldiers, the battery captured, and hundreds of the enemy coming up in serried ranks from out the railroad cut behind our right companies.” Like a chain of falling dominoes the regiments south of the line dropped back into the woods and eventually to their original line of works half a mile east of the attacked line. Twenty minutes after the first exchange of infantry fire, Lightburn’s entire division was gone. Perhaps as many as 1,800 infantry soldiers had evaded the casualty list and had fallen back to the interior line of works. But nearly a third of their comrades would not be joining them. Close to 700 officers and men had been killed, wounded, or captured; all of Lightburn’s cannons were then in the possession of Cheatham’s corps.33

  The absolute disappearance of a Union division in the center of a corps line with its replacement by two butternut brigades began to unravel the rest of the XV Corps. William Harrow’s division south of Lightburn’s position suffered the soonest. Regiments from two brigades of Harrow’s force had already been active two hours earlier when they put an end to the northward penetration of Cleburne’s attack. Harrow was also forced to contest the weak eastward thrust of Stevenson’s division during the three o’clock hour. At 4:00 P.M., Harrow’s northernmost brigade, commanded by Colonel Reuben Williams, parried another eastward Confederate assault, that one by Coltart’s Alabama brigade, which had stabbed directly at his position just as the attack by Benton’s Mississippians had begun to wane off to his right. Ironically, Alabamans faced off against each other, for Colonel Williams had recruited Union-loving Alabamans into the ranks of the 12th Indiana Infantry (his former regiment) when the XV Corps was encamped near Scottsboro, Alabama, the previous winter and early spring. Included in the Indiana ranks was an Alabama soldier firing at Coltart’s men while one of his family’s slaves sat next to him biting off the tops of the paper cartridges and handing up the gunpowder and bullet wrapped in paper to him. “It was not often, surely,” noted Williams, “that a Southern-born man fought on the Union side during the ‘War for the Union’ with his own slave to assist him.”34

  Colonel Williams and his men were doubly pleased and relieved at the success of their stand, for the brigade was down to two regiments, the 90th Illinois and Williams’s own 12th Indiana to its right (one regiment was detached in Marietta and another, the 26th Illinois, had been sent southward to reinforce Colonel Walcutt’s position). Although they covered nearly 500 yards of works with only 600 men and no reserve, the volleys from the Yankees broke Coltart’s brigade twice, each repulse sparking more confidence in the defenders. Williams recalled how ecstatic he and his command felt at that moment, “None of the troops or myself even thought of disaster, and ‘the boys’ were already making jests out of the various matters witnessed by them during the fight and repulse, when all at once came a volley from perhaps a thousand men fired straight into the backs of both of my regiments, at fairly close range.”35

  Perhaps Williams exaggerated the strength of the blow to the back of his brigade, but not by much. Indeed, several hundred members of Sharp’s Mississippi brigade had penetrated deep into the Union fortifications and veered to the right, facing south, while Manigault’s brigade with the 41st Mississippi of Sharp’s brigade (and perhaps another Mississippi regiment) had forced their way northward from the railroad. Colonel Williams was shocked at the sudden turn of events that then jeopardized his two regiments. He ordered his command rearward to re-form behind an old stone building a quarter of a mile directly behind his line. He did that without approval from his division commander, General Harrow, who was nowhere near the harassed portion of his line, and apparently without warning the next brigade to his left, commanded by Colonel John Oliver. Also surprised on his right and rear, Oliver ordered his three regiments in the works to fall back as well. Then with uncontested works in front of them, the Alabama troops in Coltart’s brigade moved eastward again and occupied them with minimal loss.36

  That left Walcutt’s brigade from Harrow’s division as the only XV Corps troops south of the railroad and north of Bald Hill. Positioned to cover the wooded gap and to protect Leggett’s position at Bald Hill, Walcutt’s soldiers would easily become a major attraction for Confederate fire from north of them. General Harrow recognized that and sent an order for Colonel Walcutt to fall back with the brigades of Williams and Oliver. The order would preserve his division and reinforce a strong second line, but Harrow’s order jeopardized Leggett’s defense of Bald Hill. Once Walcutt received the order and abandoned his line, Leggett would most certainly be surrounded on the north, east, and west by enemy soldiers. By saving Walcutt, Harrow’s order risked killing off Leggett. If Bald Hill fell to Hood, the entire position of the XVI and XVII Corps would be untenable and the battle would most certainly end in Confederate victory. Atop Bald Hill, General Leggett recognized the importance of Walcutt’s position more than anyone. Without possibly knowing that an order was on its way to Walcutt to fall back, Leggett galloped northward to meet with Walcutt and to apprise him as to how vital the flank protection was to the defense of Bald Hill.37

  At 4:30 P.M., as the Union defenders from the XV Corps fled back to half a mile eastward of their original line of works they had constructed on July 20, t
he Confederates established a tenuous toehold in the new section of real estate they acquired. Confederate reinforcements began to arrive in the form of corps commander Benjamin Cheatham’s remaining division, led by Major General Henry D. Clayton, whose four brigades were advancing directly behind General Brown’s engaged brigades and north of them. Opposing those approaching 4,500 fresh Confederates were about half as many Federal soldiers from two of the three remaining infantry brigades of the XV Corps on the field, the two brigades of the 1st Division several hundred yards north of the Troup Hurt house. Walcutt’s brigade of Harrow’s division was also in its position, but they were mostly oriented southward to aid the XV Corps. Between those two Union positions was three quarters of a mile of earthworks then owned by Brown’s division of Cheatham’s corps. That fact was not realized by General Hood because it had yet to be reported to him. Nor did General Hood realize that a rejuvenation of Hardee’s corps was about to commence at the southern end of the battlefield. Major General Cleburne and Brigadier General Maney were in the process of massing troops for a grand assault against the weakened XVII Corps position.

  Only 18,000 Union soldiers remained on the line as an organized body to face off against Confederate attacks. Two brigades (2,000 soldiers) of the XV Corps anchored the right of the Army of the Tennessee and were separated by nearly a mile from the remainder of the army by a line of earthworks possessed by Cheatham’s Confederate corps. The rest of the organized XV Corps stood just north of Bald Hill, represented by Walcutt’s brigade, Wangelin’s brigade, and the reserves of two other brigades, a total of 4,000 men. These men buttressed the right flank of what remained of the XVII Corps on Bald Hill and angled southeast of that position. The two divisions of Blair’s XVII Corps, still commanded by Giles Smith and Mortimer Leggett, were considerably weakened by two hours of assaults, which bled their strength down to 7,000 officers and men by 4:30 P.M. The inevitability of another grand assault coming from the south within the next hour did not help their morale.