The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  The rest of Polk’s Corps flooded into Resaca, holding the rail line. Johnston soon learned about the movement to his rear and realized the potentially lethal threat he faced. “The Yankees,” remarked Pvt. Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee, “had got breeches hold on us.” He and the rest of Johnston’s men started disengaging from Dalton to reinforce Resaca and defend along the northern banks of the Oostanaula River. Realizing the enemy was slipping away, Sherman ordered nearly his entire army on a parallel march south to follow McPherson into the Snake Creek Gap. But it was too late. “He could have walked into Resaca,” spat Sherman, livid with frustration. If McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee had taken the town and the rail line there, Sherman was certain Johnston’s pinched-off and hard-pressed army would have been forced to scatter into the mountains. Not a week into the most significant western campaign of the entire war, he would very likely have bagged half of the opposing force and demolished any significant further resistance to his advance on Atlanta. The war in Virginia and elsewhere would have continued, but with no chance of reinforcements or further food and supplies reaching other fronts from Georgia, the Civil War would effectively have been won.

  Instead, the reinforced Army of Tennessee now had nearly 70,000 well-positioned men in and around Resaca ready to defend their lines against a charge from a force not much larger than itself. The first attempt at flanking Johnston had driven him to retreat, but the retreat had left him stronger than before. A set-piece battle was in the offing along the Oostanaula with the odds no longer in the Union army’s favor.

  “A little timid,” Sherman later called McPherson’s actions on that day outside Resaca. Though Sherman himself had told McPherson to advance cautiously into Sugar Valley and retreat to the safety of the gap, he ruefully said when the two met a couple days later while the forces gathered for battle, “Well, Mac, you have missed the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  THOUGH HE MAY HAVE preferred to avoid such a fight, Sherman would have to battle. He hoped to pin the Army of Tennessee against the river banks and destroy it there. Starting with skirmishing and probing by the Union forces on May 13, the first major battle of the campaign began. “We have been in hot and heavy ever since,” A. J. Neal wrote home two days later. The battle moved across the valley as the two sides charged breastworks, only to be driven back. The Yankees pushed forward a strong skirmish line near Neal’s trench on the third day of the fight, May 15, and had sharpshooters “behind every tree and shelter.” Shells fell all around Neal. “To expose your head one second,” he found, “is to draw a dozen bullets.” But rebel bullets and shells tolled too. When, the night before, the Union men charged his position, Neal’s comrades set a large building on fire to light up the field, putting the approaching Yankees into ghostly visibility, “and opened on them with a dozen pieces of artillery repulsing the attack.”

  The day before, Gen. John Bell Hood’s Corps had nearly broken through the Union lines until reinforcements arrived to force the attackers back. The Yankees regained the lines, but their dead littered the field. That night, the infantry from behind their chest-high fortifications around Neal’s Confederate cannons taunted the Yankee line across the field with the news of Hood’s bloody work. Neal heard a Yankee shout back, “What is Confederate money worth?” What Neal called “a rich scene” quickly ensued as the two lines hurled insults back and forth. A rebel shouted, “What niggers command your brigade?” ignoring the fact that General Sherman shared many of the same racist views as his foes. Although he was fighting to impose Union authority, including the abolition of slavery, on the slave states, the Union commander refused to admit black soldiers into his army. He despised as a dangerous weight upon his army the cloud of former slaves who, having fled their Southern masters, now gathered around the camp of their liberators as it moved into Georgia.

  While Neal recorded his impressions, somewhere in the fields and woods nearby William Lowndes Calhoun lay moaning in pain, his hip shattered. During the fighting that afternoon, the Forty-second Georgia as part of the Georgia Brigade had charged against the Union lines. Moving through what their commander called “a thicket almost impenetrable” to sight or sound, they met a fierce hail of bullets and were almost immediately driven back, leaving more than one hundred men dead and wounded behind. Calhoun fell when a minié ball ripped into him. His comrades carried him back. Not long after, he lay in a boxcar with the other wounded bound for Atlanta. He would never walk again without pain. For the mayor of Atlanta’s son, the Civil War fighting was over.

  ON THE NIGHT OF MAY 13, an ashen Johnston gathered his generals. He had learned that an entire Union division had crossed the Oostanaula at Lay’s Ferry several miles to the south of Resaca. That deeper flanking move, steadily reinforced by Sherman, threatened to cut off the Western & Atlantic Railroad again. This time the entire army would have to withdraw from its lines and fall back across the river. Working through the night, the rebels evacuated their positions and, after crossing the river, burned the railroad bridge behind them.

  That began a series of running encounters south of the river through the gently rolling hills beyond. Johnston kept hoping to find a position that would give him the advantages he wanted, and Sherman marched his men around. “It was fighting, fighting, every day,” Tennessee rebel Private Watkins recalled. “When we awoke in the morning, the firing of guns was our reveille, and when the sun went down it was our ‘retreat and our lights out.’” By day the men fought, and by night they built breastworks. “I am well nigh worn out,” admitted A. J. Neal, “fighting all day and running or working all night.” He was sure, though, if the Yankees would “only give us a fair fight we could sweep them from the face of the earth.”

  Sherman, though, had no intention of giving such a fight for now. For his part, General Johnston could not find a position where he felt it safe to turn around and attack his pursuers. He decided to fall back across the next great regional barrier, the southwest-running Etowah River, crossing what Sherman called “the Rubicon of Georgia.” Sherman expected to follow close behind through the heavy wilderness ahead and, at the final river-rampart, “to swarm along the Chattahoochee in a few days.” At some point, he believed “a terrific battle” near that river was inevitable.

  Bone-weary, the soldiers of both armies fought and marched without let up, through summerlike dust and heat. They scratched at poison ivy rashes and cuts from brambles and sharp rocks, swatted at swarms of flies, slapped at biting mosquitoes, and wriggled and danced about incessantly like marionettes tugged on razor-wire strings held by the cruel lice crawling over their raw skin. The misery of the campaign equaled the dangers of flying lead and exploding iron. The Yankee army, though, was deep in Georgia. In two weeks of hard fighting, Sherman had covered half the distance to Atlanta. A little more than fifty miles separated his soldiers from the citadel of the Confederacy itself.

  On May 22, an enthusiastic Col. Charles Morse, of the Second Massachusetts Infantry, wrote that the next day began the drive over the Etowah. “In the words of Sherman’s general order, we start on another ‘grand forward movement,’ with rations and forage for twenty days.” Sherman did not need to tell his men, but, reflected Morse, “Atlanta is evidently our destination; whether we shall reach it or not remains to be seen. One thing we are certain of—Johnston cannot stop us with his army; we can whip that wherever we can get at it.”

  CHAPTER 19

  ROMAN RUNAGEES

  THE YANKEES’ FEARSOMELY SWIFT advance shocked thousands of regional residents and drove them in terror to abandon their towns, homes, and farms. In the predawn hours of May 17, a neighbor roused Charles H. Smith and his family in Rome, Georgia. He shouted that Gen. Joseph Johnston’s army was evacuating the town, despite his assurance that Rome, with its numerous hospitals and important ironworks, “was to be held at every hazard.” The soldiers were pulling out of their lines along the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers, which join at Rome to form the Coosa. “Then,” wrote Smith finding h
imself on the bitter road towards Atlanta, “came the tug of war” dragging the people out of their homes and forcing them to become refugees.

  Smith was famous to readers of the Intelligencer and other newspapers around the South for his comic commentaries, written under the pen name Bill Arp, which usually made light of even the direst aspects of life in the Confederacy. Now he was himself, ironically, a “Roman runagee,” using a slang variation on a word more often applied to runaway slaves. He found dark humor even as his own family was driven from the “eternal sitty” in search of “a log in some vast wilderness . . . where the foul invaders cannot travel nor their pontoon bridges float.” His flight from Rome began as “a dignified retreat,” but he was soon “constrained to leave the dignity behind.” Those who could find an open corner and had the stomach to travel in boxcars alongside litters filled with groaning soldiers with gaping gunshot and artillery wounds, their blood and viscera slopping over the car floor and spilling onto the track bed below, clambered aboard trains bound for Atlanta. Most tossed whatever household possessions they could into wagons and fled down the dusty country highways, “flying in every direction in ruinous confusion.” No “past favors shown . . . Confederate currency, new issues, bank bills, black bottles” or any other form of payment proffered could secure Smith and his family even space to stand in a car. They joined the dawn race by civilians across the Etowah River bridge, which went up in flames behind them. That temporarily halted the chasing Yankee army. William Tecumseh Sherman’s men moved into the town, where Confederate stragglers had already begun the work of pillaging, which the invaders completed. General Sherman knew well what was going on. He had watched during the January campaign into Mississippi and described the similarly wanton destruction to his brother: “Farms disappear, houses are burned and plundered, and every living animal killed and eaten.” There was little he or anyone else could do to stop it. “General officers,” he admitted, “make feeble efforts to stay the disorder, but it is idle.” Once war was unleashed, he preached, it had a life of its own. Until the rebellious people of the South accepted their defeat, “you might as well reason with a thunderstorm.”

  With the raging storm pressing down on them, the exiled North Georgians now formed “a grand caravan” rolling and shuffling down “a highway crowded with wagons and teams, cattle and hogs, niggers and dogs, women and children, all moving in disheveled haste to parts unknown.” Charles Smith noted with “regret, however, that some of our households of African scent [sic] have fallen back into the arms of the foul invaders.” The supposedly faithful black people were voting with their feet for freedom.

  SMITH AND THE OTHER countryside refugees arrived in an already crowded Atlanta swelling with disoriented, frightened, and destitute people. The car shed echoed with the shouts of pushing and shoving people holding their bags and trying not to lose their children’s grips as they continued their refugee journey beyond the city. The crush grew so heavy at times that engineers stopped their trains short of the station to avoid running over people attempting to jump aboard the rolling cars. In the last days of May, Samuel Richards noted the passing of a week “of great excitement in our city.” Refugees were now “constantly arriving.” With boardinghouses and extra rooms in private homes already full with the elite of Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga, and other long-occupied cities, with church pews staked out and dilapidated boxcars long-established homes to extended families, the Smiths and others took to tents or slept under wagons, on porches or in the open. Affording food or other necessities was a challenge. Even before the army began falling back, prices had spiked by as much as 30 percent in less than two weeks. Paper money bought gold at the rate of $20 for $1 in gold coin, but rumors of Sherman’s movements drove exchange rates higher at the fastest pace in American history. For those with money, stores still had goods to sell, but even the well off felt the pinch. Feed became too expensive for residents to purchase for livestock, so townspeople like Richards who still possessed milk cows and other animals butchered them.

  In the last days of May, many people walked out to the edges of town. The sharp-eared ones, recorded Richards, could now hear “the report of the artillery at the front,” now twenty-five miles to the north and west of Atlanta. The booming echoes of cannon daily seemed to draw closer, like some monstrous, fire-breathing beast slouching toward the city, destroying all it encountered. On the march, even General Sherman was stunned by what he saw. “All the people retire before us, and desolation is behind,” he confessed to his wife. “To realize what war is one should follow in our tracks.”

  THE WARRING ARMIES COLLIDED, or stumbled into each other, several times in the junglelike tangles, small railroad towns, and rolling wooded hills below the Etowah River. The fighting continued almost incessantly; men fell by the hundreds day after day. Sherman sent heavily reinforced skirmish lines forward, hoping to pin Johnston’s men down and then bring the weight of Union forces to bear on Confederate breastworks. The Union commander expected Johnston to continue his retreat until the Army of Tennessee had reached the enormous fortifications built along the Chattahoochee River by Lemuel Grant’s hordes of impressed slaves or even to pull back into Atlanta itself. But Johnston was not planning to freeze and starve out an overextended Northern army in the hell of Georgia; instead, he wanted to draw Sherman’s armies far enough apart to destroy a portion and turn the weight of numbers more in his favor. Johnston’s strategy, his chief of staff explained, was “to keep close up to the enemy,” to probe for an opening where his forces could break through. But Johnston’s was much the smaller army, and with the two sides grappling, the Confederates needed to cover their own flanks even as they probed the enemy lines for weakness. Johnston took up position within a seventeen-mile stretch of fortifications northwest of Atlanta. The two armies collided in a series of interconnected battles at the “slaughter-pen” of Pickett ’s Mill and the “hell hole” of New Hope Church and Dallas.

  In the thickets and forests, both sides stumbled into the opposing lines and suffered terribly—though the Union army lost many more men. At Pickett’s Mill 1,500 Northerners fell when “the rebel fire . . . swept the ground like a hailstorm,” wrote one Union soldier. While he fired shells into the enemy, A. J. Neal watched the “fun” the rebel infantry had “to stand in the trenches and mow down their lines as they advance[d].” The dead littered the ground. An Alabama fighter looked over a nearby field: “Such piles of dead men were seldom or never seen before on such a small space of ground.” Another counted fifty Union dead within thirty feet of him. Entire regiments disappeared, every man shot down, in their advance on the Confederates. Soldiers observed they could walk the field, body to body, afterwards and not touch ground for hundreds of yards. A Yankee stated, “This is surely not war; it is butchery.”

  But once again, the manic Sherman zigged or zagged to try to cut Johnston’s railroad line. Johnston, unable to prevent the Northerners’ sally against his rear and again made vulnerable, was forced to fall back further. While Sherman believed Johnston would not come out to fight him, a frustrated Johnston accused his opposing number of being “so cautious that I can find no opportunity to attack him except behind entrenchments.”

  In the densely wooded country through which they carried on their dance, the Confederates quickly threw up works and refused to be dislodged from their dug-out positions—until pried loose by Sherman’s flanking moves. Tennessee private Sam Watkins marked off the days of the Hundred Days’ Battle, with “the boom of cannon and the rattle of musketry . . . our reveille and retreat.” Of one thing he was sure: “Sherman knew that it was no child’s play.”

  Sherman was losing men at a fast clip, with nearly 2,000 dead and another 7,000 wounded or missing after four weeks. He was deep in enemy territory, where a single line of vulnerable railroad kept his army in the battle. He was running low on food, though his army was picking the countryside clean. All around him “sharpshooters, spies & scouts in the guise of peaceable farmers
” were shooting down wagon drivers and couriers and reporting his ponderous army’s movements to the enemy. He had been in such fights before, going back to his first war out of West Point. He understood, perhaps better than any general, how to defeat such an enemy, such a warring people. “It is,” Sherman wrote his brother, “a Big Indian War.”

  Every step backwards, often after a day’s hard, bloody fighting, demoralized Johnston’s men. Nearly 8,000 of them were now dead, wounded, or missing, and scores of deserters slipped away from his camps into Union lines each night. By the end of the first week of June, the entire Confederate Army of Tennessee formed a defensive wedge that covered a range of three ridges and the connecting fields above Marietta. Kennesaw Mountain was the dominant feature in the landscape. Sherman did not expect Johnston to remain there long and observed with apparent indifference, he “is still at my front and can fight or fall back as he pleases.” The hardened men of Johnston’s army were building up their latest fortifications on the heights, together with slave labor impressed from the countryside. When the pouring rain of the past week let up, the troops and slaves could look behind them to see the spires of Atlanta’s churches twenty miles away.