The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  Among those officers who were better informed on current events, mainly through having read such newspapers as were available in camp and on the march, there lately had been growing an anxiety that the good effect of the news from Louisiana and Virginia, which had raised the price of gold on the New York market to 210, would be impaired by the apparently irreversible retreat of the Confederates in North Georgia. Now though, with the word that they were going over to the offensive, their anxiety was relieved and their hope soared, anticipating a still greater drop in the pocketbook barometer that best measured northern greed and fears. As for the men in the ranks, though their faith in Old Joe had never wavered, their spirits took an even higher bounce as they stood and heard the order read to them this morning. “I never saw troops happier or more certain of success,” one private would recall. “A sort of grand halo illuminated every soldier’s face.… We were going to whip and rout the Yankees.”

  Johnston apparently shared this conviction that the Yankees would be whipped and routed: especially as it applied to Schofield, who was reported to be advancing heedlessly into the trap about to be sprung northwest of Cassville. At 10.20, hearing from Hardee that Thomas was moving in strength on Kingston and soon would be too heavily committed to effect a rapid disengagement, he sent his chief of staff, Brigadier General W. W. Mackall — who had served Bragg, his West Point classmate, in the same capacity — to tell Polk and Hood “to make quick work” of their combined lunge at Schofield, so that they would be ready to turn without delay on Thomas, when he came up in Hardee’s wake, for the second phase of the Confederate offensive. With accustomed caution, Johnston added to Hood’s instructions a warning that, in launching his flank attack, he was not to undertake “too wide a movement,” lest he lose contact with Polk on his left, which not only might leave Schofield an escape hatch, but also would delay the consolidation of all three corps for the follow-up strike at Thomas and McPherson.

  Such a warning was altogether superfluous, the staffer found when he encountered Hood near Cassville. Not only had the Kentuckian moved out before Mackall got there; by now he was moving back again, feverishly preparing to take up a defensive position in which to resist attack by a blue column reported to be advancing on a road in his right rear, skirmishers deployed and guns booming.

  Mackall sent word of this surprise development to Johnston, who flatly declined to credit the report. “It can’t be,” he said. He did not believe the Federals were there because none of Polk’s cavalry had encountered them this morning while reconnoitering in that direction. (In point of fact, they had not been there earlier this morning, and it was entirely accidental that they were there at all. A nomadic fragment from Major General Daniel Butterfield’s division, Hooker’s corps, they had missed a turning, lost their way, and wound up deep in Hood’s right rear, some five miles east of their comrades trudging south on the far side of Cassville.) All the same, though Johnston did not believe in their existence — then, any more than he did ten years later, when he declared: “The report upon which General Hood acted was manifestly untrue” — he took no chances. Having rejected the evidence, he proceeded to act upon it. “If that’s so,” he said, examining the situation on a map, “General Hood will have to fall back at once.”

  Accordingly, when Mackall presently returned, he sent him riding again to Polk and Hood with orders canceling their attack. Once more, as had been its custom for the past two weeks, the army would take up a stout defensive position and there await developments: meaning Sherman.

  Johnston quickly found what he was seeking along a wooded ridge immediately southeast of Cassville, overlooking the town and the “broad, open, elevated valley” in which it lay. Hood and Polk fell back to there, followed prudently by Schofield, who by now had notified Sherman of the snare he had so narrowly avoided, and Hardee came up that afternoon to take position on their left, closely pursued by Thomas and McPherson, the latter having closed the gap between him and the Cumberlanders in the course of the daylong skirmish, first north, then east of Kingston. Before sundown the guns of both armies were banging away at each other, arching their shots above the hill-cradled streets and rooftops of the village. Despite the dismay of the townspeople at this harrowing turn of events (“Consternation of citizens,” a staff lieutenant jotted in his diary; “many flee, leaving all; some take away few effects, some remain between hostile fires”) Johnston was greatly pleased with his new position, later referring to it as “the best I saw occupied during the war.”

  Polk and Hood did not agree with this assessment, and they said as much that evening when they came to headquarters for the council of war to which they had been summoned. Protesting that Union batteries enfiladed that portion of the ridge where their lines joined, they liked the position so little, in fact, that both wanted to leave it at the earliest possible moment. The army had no choice, they said, except to schedule a dawn attack, on the chance of beating Sherman to the punch, or else to fall back tonight across the Etowah. Johnston did not want to do either: certainly not attack the reunited Federals with no better promise of success than the tactical situation seemed to him to afford. Hardee, who arrived at this point in the discussion, sided altogether with his chief, hoping like him that Sherman would oblige them tomorrow by exposing his superior numbers to severe and sudden curtailment by advancing them head-on across that broad, open valley to challenge the defenders on the wooded ridge.

  Johnston ended by deciding to retreat. He did so, he explained later, not because he agreed with Hood and Polk that the position had its drawbacks, but “in the belief that the confidence of the commanders of two of the three corps of the army, of their inability to resist the enemy, would inevitably be communicated to their troops, and produce that inability.”

  The fall-back to the Etowah that night, though Sherman made no attempt to interfere, was by far the most disruptive of the campaign. “All hurried off without regard to order,” the young staff diarist recorded. “Reach Cartersville before day, troops come in after day. General Johnston comes up — all hurried over bridges; great confusion caused by mixing trains and by trains which crossed first parking at river’s edge and others winding around wrong roads.”

  Much of the mixup was a manifestation of the army’s chagrin at the two-step disappointment it had suffered, first in the cancellation of the attack, which came hard on the heels of the reading of Old Joe’s “I lead you to battle” address — “I could not restrain my tears when I found we could not strike,” Mackall confessed in a home letter—and then in the directive, which came down that night, for a resumption of the southward march. “Change of line not understood but thought all right,” the diarist put it, “but night retreat after issuing general order impaired confidence; great alarm in country round. Troops think no stand to be made north of Chattahoochee, where supply train is sent.” Civilians north and immediately south of the Etowah reacted to their abandonment much as the people of Cassville had done the day before, milling about like ants in an upset ant hill. Johnston put the blame, or anyhow most of it, on Hood, and so did members of his staff, including the diarist, who wrote: “One lieutenant general talks about attack and not giving ground, publicly, and quietly urges retreat.”

  By way of consolation for its woes, the disgruntled army could see for itself the strength of its new position near Allatoona, four miles down the Western & Atlantic from the river. Here, beginning the day of their arrival, May 20, Johnston had his soldiers throw up breastworks commanding the deep, narrow gorge through which the railroad snaked its way, his flanks protected, left and right, by Pumpkin Vine and Allatoona creeks. Fifteen miles to the south, his new supply base was Marietta, just beyond Kennesaw Mountain, about midway between the Etowah and the Chattahoochee, last of the three main rivers between Chattanooga and Atlanta.

  Allatoona Pass, as the gorge through this spur of the Appalachians was called, was a still more “terrible door of death” than Buzzard Roost had been, some sixty miles to the north. Par
adoxically, though, it was precisely in this abundance of natural strength that the strategic weakness of the position lay. Sherman would be even less apt to call for a main effort here than he had been at Rocky Face Ridge. His solution, now as then, would most likely be to try another sidle — and there was always the danger that, sooner or later, one or another of these complicated flank maneuvers would succeed in accomplishing its purpose of placing the superior blue army squarely between the Confederates and Atlanta; in which case Johnston would have no choice except to attack the Federals where they were, intrenched and waiting, or scatter into the surrounding hills. Either course would mean the loss not only of the campaign (meaning Atlanta) but also of the army, whether by destruction or disintegration, the difference being that one would be somewhat less sudden than the other. All Johnston could do, in the way of attempting to forestall such a calamity, was alert Wheeler to be on the lookout for the first sign of another sidle, up or down the Etowah. He felt sure that one was pending, but he could not move to thwart it until he knew its direction, right or left.

  One other thing he could attempt, however, and that was to protect himself from his detractors, in some measure at least, by putting his performance in the best possible light for his Richmond superiors, with emphasis on his desire for coming to grips with his pursuer. Since this latest retreat had no doubt set his critics’ teeth on edge, he no sooner crossed the Etowah than he got off a wire to the President explaining the cancellation of the “general attack” he had ordered yesterday: “While the officer charged with the lead was advancing he was deceived by a false report that a heavy column of the enemy had turned our right and was close upon him, and took a defensive position. When the mistake was discovered it was too late to resume the movement.” Despite this disappointment, which had obliged him to continue the withdrawal, he pointed out that he had “kept near [Sherman] to prevent his detaching to Virginia, as you directed, and have repulsed every attack he has made.”

  Next day, May 21, the army having spent the night improving its position near Allatoona, still with no sign of what the Federals were up to, he followed through with another message along similar lines. “In the last six days the enemy has pressed us back to this point, thirty-two miles,” he conceded, but he assured Davis that, all this time, “I have earnestly sought an opportunity to strike.” The trouble was that Sherman, by constantly extending his right as he moved down the railroad, had obliged the defenders to give ground no less constantly, and then, “by fortifying the moment he halted,” had also “made an assault upon his superior forces too hazardous.” Without committing himself to anything specific — as, indeed, he could scarcely be expected to do, under the circumstances outlined here — Johnston wanted the Commander in Chief to know that he was in full agreement as to the need for going over to the offensive at the earliest possible moment. Meantime, despite the discouragements generally involved in making a lengthy retrograde movement, he was pleased to report that the slightness of his losses from straggling or desertion showed that the army was in good shape for such exertions as he might presently require.

  The answer came not from Davis — not just yet — but from Bragg, who combined good news with bad and wound up with a flourish that seemed to indicate that the Georgia commander perhaps had oversold his case. Another brigade of infantry from Mobile and a regiment of South Carolina cavalry were on their way to join him, but these were the last the government would be sending.

  “From the high condition in which your army is reported,” the message ended, “we confidently rely on a brilliant success.”

  * * *

  Johnston’s concern, lest the very strength of his Allatoona position deprive him of the quick defensive victory he felt certain he would score if his adversary could only be persuaded to attack him there, was better founded than he knew. Two decades back, as a young artillery lieutenant on detached duty at Marietta with the inspector general, Sherman “rode or walked, exploring creeks, valleys, hills” in the surrounding region, while his less energetic comrades “spent their leisure Sundays reading novels, card-playing, or sleeping.” Now this seemingly useless pastime stood him in good stead. “Twenty years later the thing that helped me to win battles in Georgia was my perfect knowledge of the country. I knew more of Georgia than the rebels did.” In the course of his rambles, sketch pad in hand, he had spent several days investigating some Indian mounds on the south bank of the Etowah, just north of the gorge where Johnston was intrenched, and “I therefore knew that the Allatoona Pass was very strong, would be hard to force, and resolved not even to attempt it, but to turn the position.”

  First, though, he would call a halt, a brief time-out from war; the combat troops would take a welcome three-day rest (“to replenish and fit up,” he explained to Halleck) while Colonel W. W. Wright and his 2000 nimble rail repairmen, having rebuilt the Resaca bridge in jig time, put the Western & Atlantic back in operation down to Kingston. “The dead were buried, the sick and wounded were made more comfortable, and everybody got his mail and wrote letters,” one appreciative officer would recall. Then on May 23, with twenty days’ rations in his wagons, Sherman was ready to cut loose from the railroad and strike out cross-country with everything he had.

  His preliminary objective on this all-out flanking operation was Dallas, a road-hub settlement just under twenty miles west of Marietta and about the same distance southwest of Allatoona, where Johnston would be left holding the bag unless he pulled back in time to meet this massive threat to his new supply base, fifteen miles down the track in his rear. As usual, Thomas would take the direct central route, south from Kingston through Euharlee and Stilesboro, while Schofield marched on his left, by way of Burnt Hickory, and McPherson swung well to the right, through Van Wert, to approach Dallas from the west. The march would be a rigorous one, Sherman knew from previous exploration, “as the country was very obscure, mostly in a state of nature, densely wooded and with few roads.” It might take longer than he planned: in which case, he told Halleck, his twenty-day rations could be stretched to thirty. But he was not inclined to worry much as he set out from Kingston, riding with Thomas across the Etowah; “the Rubicon of Georgia,” he called that river in a dispatch sent just after he gave the jump-off signal. “We are now all in motion like a vast hive of bees,” he declared, fairly buzzing with pleasure at being once more on the go, “and expect to swarm along the Chattahoochee in five days.”

  So he said. But when Schofield captured a lone gray rider at Burnt Hickory next day and found on him a dispatch which showed Johnston already reacting to this latest turning movement, Sherman not only knew that secrecy had gone by the board, along with all hope for a substantial head start in the projected five-day sprint for the Chattahoochee; he also perceived that “it accordingly became necessary to use great caution, lest some of the minor columns should fall into ambush,” as Schofield had so nearly done, four days ago, near Cassville.

  Caution was indeed called for, he found out the following morning, May 25, when Thomas pressed down in advance of the other two armies for a crossing of Pumpkin Vine Creek. Hooker had the lead, driving butternut cavalry pickets over a bridge which they set on fire just as the first of his three divisions came in sight. He doused the flames, double-timed across, and continued his pursuit of the skittery horsemen. Four miles northeast of Dallas, near a Methodist meeting-house called New Hope Church, he came under fire from a mass of rebel infantry whose march he had apparently interrupted. With soldierly instinct, and as if determined to justify his nom de guerre, Fighting Joe shook out a line of skirmishers and attacked with his lead division, commanded by Brigadier General John W. Geary, a six-foot six-inch Pennsylvanian who had been San Francisco’s first mayor and a territorial governor of Kansas. A colonel in the Mexican War before he was thirty, he now was forty-four and had seen much fighting, East and West, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Wauhatchie and Chattanooga, but in none of these had he and his men found harder work than was require
d of them in the next three hours around New Hope Church, which the attackers ever afterwards referred to as the “Hell Hole.”

  What Geary struck, and promptly rebounded from, was Hood. His corps had been last of the three to leave Allatoona the day before, when Johnston, warned by Wheeler that Sherman was off on another sidle, marched southwest up the near bank of Pumpkin Vine Creek to intercept him around Dallas. Hardee was there now, with Polk in position on his right to connect with Hood near New Hope Church; so that what Hooker had encountered was not a mere segment of Johnston’s army on the march, as he first thought, but the entire right wing of that army, already beginning to scratch out intrenchments in expectation of his arrival hard on the heels of the cavalry pickets fading back before him through what Sherman called “the obscurity of the ambushed country.” Undaunted by the truth, which he began to suspect as soon as Geary was flung back, Hooker brought up his other two divisions, led by Butterfield and Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, massed them on a front no wider than Geary had spanned alone, and sent them forward, closely packed, against the rebel center. As a result, Major General Alexander P. Stewart’s division caught the brunt of the all-out blue attack, some 20,000 strong. Known to his soldiers as “Old Straight,” the nickname he had acquired while teaching mathematics at West Point and at Cumberland University in his home state of Tennessee, Stewart was forty-two and a veteran of all the army’s battles, a strict disciplinarian much admired by his men, who gave him today all he asked of them, and more: especially the artillerists, whose guns were advantageously sited to exact a heavy toll from the charging bluecoats. Hooker’s three divisions could make no headway against this one, despite two hours of trying without pause. Hood’s other two divisions, under Major Generals Thomas Hindman and Carter Stevenson, had little to do on the left and right of the sector being assaulted, but when Johnston himself, alarmed by the desperate nature of the struggle, sent to ask Stewart if he needed reinforcements, the Tennessean replied calmly: “My own troops will hold the position.”