by Shelby Foote
Lincoln knew little or nothing yet of this plan by his friends and associates for a midstream swap, but he saw as clearly as they did that the drift was toward defeat and was likely to remain so unless some way could be found, between now and November, to turn the tide. A military victory would help, even one on a fairly modest scale — the more modest the better, in fact, so far as bloodshed was concerned — just so it encouraged the belief that things were looking up for one or another of the armies. But that was mainly up to Grant, locked in a stalemate below Richmond, and Sherman, apparently no better off in front of Atlanta. The other possibility was politics, Lincoln’s field, and he was prepared to do all he could in that direction. His native Kentucky would be the first state to hold an election since his nomination; August 1 was the balloting date, and though only some county offices and an appellate judgeship were at stake, the contest was certain to be regarded as a bellwether for the rest, which were to follow in September. Consequently, he took off the gloves for this one. Declaring martial law, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus on July 5, continued the suspension through election day, and gave a free rein to Stephen Burbridge, who, having recently disposed of John Morgan at Cynthiana, proposed to move in a similar aggressive manner against all foes of the Administration throughout his Department of Kentucky. As a result, prominent Democrats were arrested wholesale for “disloyalty,” and the name of their candidate for the judgeship was ordered stricken from the ballot on the same vague charge, obliging the survivors to make a last-minute substitute nomination for the post. Lincoln awaited the outcome with much interest, only to find on August 1 that all his pains had gone for nothing. The Democratic candidates swept the state.
There would be other contests; Maine, for instance, was coming up next, to be followed by Vermont. Although the snub just given him in his native state did not augur well for the result, he had no intention of doing anything less than his best to win in all of them, with the help of whatever devices he thought might help and despite the clamor of his critics, left and right, in his own party or the other. “The pilots on our western rivers steer from point to point, as they call it,” he told a caller one of these days, “setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see. And that is all I propose to do in the great problems that are before us.” One such point now was Atlanta; or anyhow it seemed to him it might be. Events that followed hard on the rebel change of commanders there had brought the fighting to a pitch of intensity, throughout the last two weeks in July, that matched the savagery of the struggle here in the East before it subsided into stalemate. The same thing might happen there — for that seemed to be the pattern: alternate fury and exhaustion — but Lincoln kept peering in that direction, seeking a point to steer by in his effort to land the boat in his charge before it split and sank.
2
“The appointment has but one meaning,” the Richmond Examiner declared on July 19, in reference to Johnston’s supersession down in Georgia the day before, “and that is to give battle to the foe.” Because John Bell Hood, in contrast to his predecessor, was “young, dashing, and lucky,” the rival Whig informed its readers that same day, “the army and the people all have confidence in his ability and inclination to fight, and will look to him to drive back Sherman and save Atlanta.” Thus the two papers were in agreement on the matter, not only with each other, but also, for once, with the new western leader’s red-haired adversary, who rarely subscribed to any journalist’s opinion, North or South. “I inferred that the change of commanders meant fight,” Sherman remarked after conferring with subordinates who had known Hood in the days before the war. But he added, in contrast to the inference the two Confederate editors drew, five hundred miles away: “This was just what we wanted, viz., to fight in open ground, on anything like equal terms, instead of being forced to run up against prepared intrenchments.”
He was about to get what he said he wanted. Hood — whose recent association with Johnston, he later explained, had made him “a still more ardent advocate of the Lee and Jackson school” — needed only one full day at his post before he resolved to go over to the offensive. By then, moreover, though he had had to spend a good part of the time discovering where his own troops were, he not only had decided to lash out at the encircling Federal host; he also had determined just when and where and how he would do so, with a minimal adjustment of the lines now held by his three corps. Accordingly, on the evening of July 19, he summoned Hardee and Stewart to headquarters along with Ben Cheatham, his temporary successor as corps commander, and gave them face-to-face instructions for an attack to be launched soon after midday tomorrow in order to take advantage of an opportunity Sherman was affording them, apparently out of overweening contempt or unconcern, to accomplish his piecemeal destruction. In the execution of what he termed “a general right wheel” from the near bank of the Chattahoochee, with Thomas inching the pivot forward across Peachtree Creek to close down on Atlanta from the north, and McPherson and Schofield swinging wide to come in from the east along the Georgia Railroad, the Ohioan had in effect divided his army and developed a better than two-mile gap between the inner edges of its widespread wings. It was Hood’s intention, expressed in detail at his first council of war tonight on the outskirts of the city in his charge, not to plunge into but rather to preserve this gap, and thus keep the two blue wings divided while he crushed them in furious sequence, left and right.
Cheatham, with the help of Wheeler’s troopers and some 5000 Georgia militia, would confront McPherson and Schofield from his present intrenchments east of Atlanta, taking care to mass artillery on his left and thus prevent the bluecoats in front from crossing the gap between them and Thomas, who meantime would be receiving the full attention of the other two corps. The Union-loyal Virginian’s infantry strength was just above 50,000 — about the number Hood had in all — but the intention was to catch him half over Peachtree Creek, which he had begun to bridge today, and hit him before he could intrench or bring up reinforcements. Hardee on the right and Stewart on the left, disposed along a jump-off line roughly four miles north of the city, were to attack in echelon, east to west, each holding a division in reserve for immediate exploitation of any advantage that developed, “the effort to be to drive the enemy back to the creek, and then toward the river, into the narrow space formed by the river and creek.” Once Thomas had been tamped into that watery pocket and ground up, the two gray corps would shift rapidly eastward to assist Cheatham in mangling Schofield and McPherson, with Wheeler’s free-swinging horsemen standing by to carry out the roundup that would follow. Hood explained all this to his chief lieutenants “by direct interrogatory,” having long since learned “that no measure is more important, upon the eve of battle, than to make certain in the presence of commanders that each thoroughly comprehends his orders.”
His concern in this regard was not unfounded. Remembering, as he must have done, the Army of Tennessee’s latest — and indeed, under Johnston, only — contemplated full-scale offensive at Cassville two months ago today, midway down the doleful road from Tunnel Hill to Atlanta, Hood knew only too well the dangers that lurked in tactical iotas. Nothing had come of the Cassville design, largely because of his own reaction to finding a misplaced blue column approaching his flank, and presently on July 20, with all his troops in position and the 1 o’clock jump-off hour at hand, there were signs that a repetition was in the making. Cheatham sent word before noon that he would have to shift his line southward to keep McPherson from overlapping his right, beyond the railroad. Hood could only approve, and issue simultaneous instructions for Hardee and Stewart to conform by sidestepping half a division-front to their right, thus to prevent too wide an interval from developing between them and Cheatham, through which Schofield might plunge when he came up alongside McPherson. Hardee then had a difficult choice to make. Sidestepping as ordered, he found the interval wider than Hood had supposed, which left him with the decision whether to continue the sidling movement, at the cost of de
laying his jump-off, or go forward on schedule — it was 1 o’clock by now — with a mile-wide gap yawning empty on his right. He chose the former course, Stewart conforming on his left, and thus delayed the attack for better than two hours. Shortly after 3 o’clock he sent three of his four divisions plunging northward into the valley of Peachtree Creek.
George Thomas was there, in strength and largely braced. Though the attack achieved the desired surprise, those extra two hours had given him time, not only to get nearly all of his combat elements over the creek, but also to get started on the construction of intrenchments. Hardee struck them and rebounded as if from contact with a red-hot stove, followed by Stewart, who drove harder against the enemy right with no better luck. The Federals either stood firm or hurried reinforcements to shore up threatened portions of their line. Moreover, in the unexpected emergency, Thomas abandoned his accustomed role of Old Slow Trot. Urging his guns forward to “relieve the hitch,” he used the point of his sword on the rumps of laggard battery horses, then crossed the stream to direct in person the close-up defense of the bridgehead. An Indiana officer judged the progress of the fighting by the way Old Tom fiddled with his short, thick, gray-shot whiskers. “When satisfied he smoothes them down; when troubled he works them all out of shape.” They were badly tousled now, and presently, when he saw the attackers falling back from the blast of fire that met them, he moved even further out of character in the opposite direction. “Hurrah!” he shouted, and took off his hat and slammed it on the ground in pure exuberance. “His whiskers were soon in good shape again,” the Hoosier captain noted.
They might have been worse ruffled shortly thereafter; Hardee was about to throw Cleburne’s reserve division into the melee, and in fact had just summoned him forward, when an urgent dispatch from Hood directed that troops be sent at once to the far right, where Cheatham’s flank was under heavy pressure from McPherson. Cleburne arrived after nightfall, in time to confront a piece of high, cleared ground known as Bald Hill, two miles east of Atlanta and a mile south of the Georgia Railroad; Wheeler’s dismounted troopers, after being pushed back all morning, had managed to hang on there through most of the afternoon. Northward, the battle raged along Peachtree Creek, but with decreasing fury, until about 6 o’clock, when it sputtered out. At a cost of 2500 casualties suffered, and 1600 inflicted, Hood’s plan for crushing first Thomas, then the other two Union armies, had failed because the Rock of Chickamauga declined, as usual, to be budged or flustered. The southern commander had only praise for Cheatham and Wheeler, who fought hard all day against long odds, and especially for Stewart, who, though his losses were close to two thirds of the Confederate total, “carried out his instructions to the letter.” He put the blame for his lack of success on Hardee — his former senior, known since Shiloh as Old Reliable — whose corps, “although composed of the best troops in the army, virtually accomplished nothing” and in fact, as a comparison of casualties would show, “did nothing more than skirmish with the enemy.”
So Hood would report afterwards, when he got around to distributing blame for the failure of his first offensive action; the Battle of Peachtree Creek, it was called, or “Hood’s First Sortie.” But that did not keep him from choosing Hardee to deliver the main effort, two days later, in what would be referred to as “Hood’s Second Sortie” or the Battle of Atlanta.
While Cleburne struggled the following day to prevent a blue advance past Bald Hill — the fighting on this third anniversary of First Manassas, he said, was “the bitterest” of his life — Wheeler moved still farther to the right, another mile beyond the railroad, to forestall another Federal flanking effort. What he found instead was an invitation for just such a movement by the Confederate defenders. McPherson, apparently with his full attention drawn to the day-long contest with Cleburne, had his left flank “in the air,” unprotected by cavalry and wide open to assault. Informed of the situation early that morning, Hood grasped eagerly at this chance to turn the tables on the attackers. It was one of the chief regrets of his career that he had missed Chancellorsville, having been on detached service with Longstreet around Suffolk while the Lee-Jackson masterpiece was being forged in the smoky, vine-choked Wilderness a hundred miles away. Now here was a God-given once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stage a Chancellorsville of his own, down in the piny woods of Georgia, within a scant five days of his appointment to command the hard-luck Army of Tennessee.
In preparation for exploiting this advantage — and also because both ends of his present line were gravely threatened, Thomas having begun to build up pressure against the left about as heavy as McPherson had been exerting on the right — Hood directed that all three corps begin a withdrawal at nightfall to the works rimming the city in their rear, already laid out by Johnston the month before. These were to be held by Stewart and Cheatham, on the north and east, while Hardee marched south, then southeast, six miles down the McDonough Road to Cobb’s Mill, where he would turn northeast and continue for the same distance up the Fayetteville Road to the Widow Parker’s farm, south of the railroad about midway between Atlanta and Decatur. This would put his four divisions (including Cleburne’s, which would join him on his way through town) in position for an all-out assault on McPherson’s left rear. Though the route was as circuitous and long as Stonewall’s flanking march had been, fourteen months ago in Virginia, an early start this evening should enable Old Reliable to launch a dawn attack, and a dawn attack would give him a full day in which to accomplish McPherson’s destruction, whereas Jackson had had only the few hours between sunset and dusk to serve Hooker in that fashion. Moreover, by way of increasing the blue confusion and distress, Wheeler’s troopers, after serving as guides and outriders for the infantry column, would continue eastward to Decatur for a strike at McPherson’s wagon train, known to be parked in the town square with all his reserve supplies and munitions. Hood explained further that once the flank attack got rolling he would send Cheatham forward to assail McPherson’s front and keep Schofield from sending reinforcements to the hardpressed Union left, while Stewart, around to the north, engaged Thomas for the same purpose. Now, as before the Peachtree venture, he assembled a council of war to make certain that each of his lieutenants understood exactly what was required of him, and why. This was all the more advisable here, because of the greater complexity of what he was asking them to do. “To transfer after dark our entire line from the immediate presence of the enemy to another line around Atlanta, and to throw Hardee, the same night, entirely to the rear and flank of McPherson — as Jackson was thrown, in a similar movement, at Chancellorsville and Second Manassas — and to initiate the offensive at daylight, required no small effort on the part of the men and officers. I hoped, however, that the assault would result not only in a general battle, but in a signal victory to our arms.”
Such hope was furthered by the secrecy and speed of the nighttime withdrawal to Atlanta’s “inner line,” which Stewart and Cheatham then began improving with picks and shovels while Hardee set out on his march around the Federal south flank. Almost at once the first hitch developed. Two miles to the east, confronting the enemy on Bald Hill, Cleburne had trouble breaking contact without giving away the movement or inviting an attack; it was crowding midnight before Hardee solved the problem by instructing him to leave his skirmishers in position and fall in behind W. H. T. Walker’s men, marking time in rear of the other two divisions under Bate and George Maney, Cheatham’s senior brigadier. Cleburne managed this by 1 a.m. of the projected day of battle — Friday, July 22 — but it was 3 o’clock in the morning before the final elements of the corps filed out of the unoccupied intrenchments south of town.
That was the first delay. Another was caused by the weariness of the marchers, still unrested from Wednesday’s bloody work and Thursday’s fitful skirmishing under the burning summer sun. Strung out on the single, narrow road, which had to be cleared from time to time when Wheeler’s dusty horsemen clattered up or down it, the head of the column did not rea
ch Cobb’s Mill until dawn, the supposed jump-off hour. Disgruntled, Hardee turned northeast for the Widow Parker’s, another half dozen miles up the troop-choked road. It was close to noon by the time he got there, evidently unsuspected by the enemy in the woods across the way, and 12.30 before the corps was formed for assault, Maney and Cleburne on the left, astride the Flat Shoals Road, which ran northwest past Bald Hill, where McPherson’s flank was anchored — Cleburne thus had nearly come full circle — and Walker and Bate on the right, on opposite sides of Sugar Creek, which also led northwest, directly into McPherson’s rear. Old Reliable could take pride in being just where he was meant to be, in position to duplicate Jackson’s famous end-on strike at Hooker, but he was also uncomfortably aware that he was more than six hours behind schedule.
This made him testy: as anyone near him could see in these final minutes before he gave the order to go forward. When Wheeler sent word that a sizeable column of blue troopers had passed this way a while ago, apparently headed southward on a raid, and requested permission to take out after them, Hardee was quick to say no; “We must attack, as we arranged, with all our force.” So Wheeler, disappointed at being denied the chance to cross sabers with the intruders, set out eastward for Decatur and McPherson’s unsuspecting and perhaps unguarded wagon train. Then Walker came to headquarters to report that he had discovered in his immediate front a giant brier patch, which he asked to be allowed to skirt when he advanced, despite the probable derangement of his line and the loss of still more time. Normally courteous, Hardee was emphatic in refusal. “No, sir!” he said roughly, not bothering to disguise his anger. “This movement has been delayed too long already. Go and obey my orders!”