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

by Shelby Foote

  First, though, there was the problem of finding a permanent replacement for his fallen star, McPherson. On the face of it, Logan having performed spectacularly under worse than trying conditions, the solution should have been simple. But it turned out to be extremely complicated, involving the exacerbation of some tender feelings and, in the end, nothing less than the reorganization of the command structure of two of the three armies in his charge.

  Thomas came promptly to headquarters to advise against keeping Logan at his temporary post. Although there was bad blood between them, dating back to Chattanooga, basically his objection was that Black Jack, like all the other corps and division leaders in the Army of the Tennessee — not one of them was a West Pointer, whereas two thirds of his own and half of Schofield’s were Academy graduates — was a nonprofessional. “He is brave enough and a good officer,” the Virginian admitted, “but if he had an army I am afraid he would edge over on both sides and annoy Schofield and me. Even as a corps commander he is given to edging out beyond his jurisdiction.” Sherman agreed in principle that volunteers from civilian life, especially politicians, “looked to personal fame and glory as auxiliary and secondary to their political ambition.… I wanted to succeed in taking Atlanta,” he later explained, “and needed commanders who were purely and technically soldiers, men who would obey orders and execute them promptly and on time.” That ruled out Logan, along with Blair. Who then? he asked Thomas, who replied: “You cannot do better than put Howard in command of that army.” Sherman protested that this would make Logan “terribly mad” and might also create “a rumpus among those volunteers,” but then agreed. One-armed and two years younger even than McPherson, O. O. Howard, West Point ’54, a Maine-born recent eastern import to the western theater, was then announced as the new commander of the army that had once been Sherman’s own.

  Returned to his corps, Logan managed to live with the burning aroused in his breast by this disappointment. But the same could not be said for Old Tom’s ranking corps commander, the altogether professional Joe Hooker. Outraged at having been passed over in favor of the man he largely blamed for his defeat at Chancellorsville, Fighting Joe characterized the action as “an insult to my rank and services” and submitted at once a request to be relieved of his present duties. Thomas “approved and heartily recommended” acceptance of this application, which Sherman was quick to grant, remarking incidentally that the former commander of the Army of the Potomac had not even been considered for the post that now was Howard’s, since “we on the spot did not rate his fighting qualities as high as he did.” Hooker departed for an inactive assignment in the Northern Department, where he spent the rest of the war, further embittered by the news that his successor was Major General Henry W. Slocum, another enemy, who had been sent to Vicksburg on the eve of the present campaign to avoid personality clashes between them. Pending Slocum’s arrival from Mississippi, Alpheus Williams would lead the corps as senior division commander, much as Major General David S. Stanley had succeeded to the command of Howard’s corps, though on a permanent basis.

  By July 25, within five days of the Peachtree crossing, when work on it began, the railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee — 760 feet long and 90 high — was completed and track relaid to a forward base immediately in Thomas’s rear. Sherman, his supplies replenished and generals reshuffled, was ready within another two days to begin the counterclockwise western slide designed to bring on the fall of Atlanta by severing its rail connection with the world outside. Already this had been accomplished up to the final step; for of the four lines in and out of the city all but one had been seized or wrecked by now, beginning with the Western & Atlantic, down which the Federals had been moving ever since they chevied Johnston out of Dalton. Then Schofield and McPherson had put the Georgia Railroad out of commission by dismantling it as they moved westward from Stone Mountain and Decatur. Of the remaining two — the Atlanta & West Point and the Macon & Western, which shared the same track until they branched southwest and southeast at East Point, five miles south of the city — the former, connecting with Montgomery and Mobile, had been severely damaged the week before by Major General Lovell Rousseau, who raided southward through Alabama with 2500 troopers, practically unopposed, and tore up close to thirty miles of the line between Montgomery and Opelika, where it branched northeast for West Point and Atlanta. That left only the Macon road, connecting eastward with Savannah, for Hood’s use in supplying his army and for Sherman to destroy. He began his large-scale semicircular maneuver to accomplish this on July 27, ordering Howard to swing north, then west — in rear of Schofield and Thomas, who would follow him in turn — for a southward march down the near bank of the Chattahoochee, which would serve as an artery for supplies, to descend as soon as possible on that one railroad still in operation out of a place that once had boasted of being “the turntable of the Confederacy.”

  Simultaneously, by way of putting two strings to his bow, he turned 10,000 horsemen loose on the same objective in an all-out double strike around both rebel flanks. Brigadier General Edward McCook, his division reinforced to a strength of 3500 by the addition of a brigade from Rousseau — who, it was hoped, had established the model for the current operation, over in Alabama the week before — would ride down the north bank of the Chattahoochee for a crossing at Campbelltown, under orders to proceed eastward and hit the Macon & Western at or below Jonesboro, just under twenty miles on the far side of Atlanta. This was also the goal of the second mounted column, 6500 strong, which would set out from Decatur under Stoneman, who had Garrard’s division attached to his own for a southward lunge around the enemy right. Both columns were to start on July 27, the day the infantry slide began; Sherman expected them back within three days at the most. But when Stoneman asked permission to press on, once the railroad had been wrecked, to Macon and Andersonville for the purpose of freeing the prisoners held in their thousands at both places, he readily agreed to this hundred-mile extension of the raid, on condition that Garrard head back as soon as the Macon road was smashed, to work with McCook in covering the infantry’s left wheel around Atlanta. The redhead’s hopes were high, but not for long: mainly because of Joe Wheeler, who, though outnumbered three-to-two by the blue troopers, did not neglect this opportunity to deal with them in detail.

  Right and left, at Campbelltown and Decatur, both of them closer to Jonesboro than they were to each other at the outset, the two columns took off on schedule, though not altogether in the manner Sherman intended. Stoneman’s mind was fixed so firmly on his ultimate goal — Andersonville and its 30,000 inmates, whose liberation would be nothing less than the top cavalry exploit of the war — that he no longer had any discernible interest in the limited purpose for which the two-pronged strike had been conceived. Accordingly, without notifying anyone above him, he sent Garrard’s 4300 troopers pounding due south to draw off the enemy horsemen while he and his 2200 rode east for Covington, which Garrard had raided five days ago during the Battle of Atlanta. In this he was successful; he reached Covington undetected and turned south, down the east bank of the Ocmulgee River, for Macon, the first of his two prison-camp objectives. Garrard meantime had been no less successful in carrying out his part of the revised design, which was to attract the attention of the rebels in his direction. On Snapfinger Creek that afternoon, barely ten miles out of Decatur, he ran into mounted graybacks whose number increased so rapidly overnight that at Flatrock Bridge next morning, another five miles down the road, he had to turn and ride hard, back to Decatur, to keep from losing everything he had. His nimbleness kept down his losses; yet even so these would have been much heavier if Wheeler, about to give chase with eight brigades — just over 6000 sabers in all — had not received word that McCook had crossed the Chattahoochee, en route for the Macon & Western, and that Stoneman was beyond the Ocmulgee, apparently headed for Macon itself. The Georgia-born Alabamian, two months short of his twenty-eighth birthday, left one brigade to keep up the pressure on Garrard and turned w
ith the other seven to meet these rearward threats, sending three brigades to deal with Stoneman while he himself set out with the rest to intercept McCook.

  As it turned out, the interception came after, not before, McCook struck the railroad at Lovejoy Station, seven miles beyond Jonesboro. He got there four hours ahead of Wheeler, which gave him time to burn the depot, tear up a mile and a half of track, and destroy a sizeable wagon train, along with its 800 mules, before the graybacks arrived to drive him off and pursue him all the way to the Chattahoochee. Overtaken at Newnan, due west on the West Point road, McCook lost 950 troopers killed and captured, along with his pack train and two guns, between there and the river, which he crossed to safety on July 30, reduced in strength by nearly a third and much the worse for wear.

  By that time Stoneman had reached the outskirts of Macon, only to find it defended by local militia. While he engaged in a long-range duel across the Ocmulgee with these part-time soldiers, hoping to cover his search for a downstream ford, the three brigades sent after him by Wheeler came up in his rear. He tried for a getaway, back the way he had come, then found himself involved in a running fight that ended next day near Hillsboro, twenty-five miles to the north, when he was all but surrounded at a place called Sunshine Church. He chose one brigade to make a stand and told the other two to escape as best they could; which they did, while he and his chosen 700 were being overrun and rounded up. One of the two surviving brigades made it back to Decatur two days later, but the other, unable to turn west because of the swarm of rebels on that flank, was wrecked at Jug Tavern on August 3, thirty miles north of Covington. Stoneman and his captured fellow officers were in Macon by then, locked up with the unfortunates they had set out to liberate, and the enlisted men were in much the same position, though considerably worse off so far as the creature comforts were concerned, sixty miles to the southwest at Andersonville.

  “On the whole,” Sherman reported to Washington in one of the prize understatements of the war, “the cavalry raid is not deemed a success.”

  In plain fact, aside from McCook’s fortuitous interception of the 800-mule train — the break in the track at Lovejoy’s, for example, amounted to nothing worse than a two-day inconvenience, after which the Macon & Western was back in use from end to end — the raid not only failed to achieve its purpose, it was also a good deal harder on the raiders than on the raided. Sherman’s true assessment was shown by what he did, on the return of his badly cut up horsemen, rather than by what he wrote in his report. Garrard’s division, which had suffered least, was dismounted and used to occupy the intrenchments Schofield vacated when he began his swing around the city in Howard’s wake, and the other two were reorganized, after a period of sorely needed rest and refitment, into units roughly half their former size. Not that Sherman expected much from them, offensively speaking, in the critical days ahead. “I now became satisfied,” he said later, “that cavalry could not, or would not, make a sufficient lodgment on the railroad below Atlanta, and that nothing would suffice but for us to reach it with the main army.”

  But that turned out to be about as difficult an undertaking as the one assigned to Stoneman and McCook. For one thing — against all his expectations, which were founded on the belief that Hood by now had shot his wad — he had no sooner begun his counterclockwise wheel, shifting Howard around in rear of Schofield and Thomas to a position west of the city so that his right could be extended to reach the vital railway junction at East Point, than he was confronted with still a third sortie by his Confederate opponent, quite as savage as the other two.

  All had gone well on the first day, July 27; Howard pulled out undeterred and took up the march, first north, then west along the near bank of Peachtree Creek. Riding south next morning in rear of Logan, whose corps was in the lead, Sherman and the new army commander came under fire from a masked battery as they approached the Lickskillet Road, which ran due east into Atlanta, three miles off. Howard did not like the look of things, and said so. “General Hood will attack me here,” he told his companion, who scoffed at the notion: “I guess not. He will hardly try it again.” But Howard remained persuaded that he was about to be struck, explaining later that he based his conviction on previous acquaintance with the man who would do the striking; “I said that I had known Hood at West Point, and that he was indomitable.”

  Indomitable. Presented thus with a third chance to destroy an isolated portion of the enemy host, Hood had designed still another combined assault, once more after the manner of Lee and Jackson, to forestall this massive probe around his left. His old corps, now under Stephen D. Lee — the South Carolinian had been promoted to lieutenant general and brought from Alabama to take over from Cheatham — would march out the Lickskillet Road on the morning of July 28 to occupy a position from which it could block Howard’s extension of the Union right and set him up for a flank attack by Stewart, who would bring his corps out the Sandtown Road that evening, a mile in Lee’s rear, to circle the head of the stalled blue column and strike from the southwest at Howard’s unguarded outer flank next morning. Hardee, reduced to three divisions, each of which received a brigade from the fallen Walker’s broken-up division, would hold Atlanta’s inner line against whatever pressure Schofield and Thomas might exert. Lee, who had assumed command only the day before, moved as ordered, determined to prove his mettle in this first test at his new post — two months short of his thirty-first birthday, he was six years younger than anyone else of his rank in the whole Confederacy — but found himself involved by midday, three miles out the Lickskillet Road, near a rural chapel known as Ezra Church, in a furious meeting engagement that left him no time for digging in or even getting set. So instead he took the offensive with all three of his divisions.

  They were not enough: not nearly enough, as the thing developed. Howard, who was only two years older than Lee and no less anxious to prove his mettle, having also assumed command the day before, had foreseen the attack (or anyhow forefelt it, despite Sherman’s scoff) and though there was no time for intrenching, once he had called a halt he had his lead corps throw up a rudimentary breastwork of logs and rails; so that when Lee’s men charged — “with a terrifying yell,” the one-armed commander would recall — they were “met steadily and repulsed.” They fell back, then charged again, with the same result. Busily strengthening their improvised works between attacks, Logan’s four divisions stood their ground, reinforced in the course of the struggle by others from Dodge and Blair, while Sherman rode back and alerted Thomas to be ready to send more. These last were unneeded, even though Hood by then had abandoned his plan for a double envelopment and instead told Stewart to go at once out the Lickskillet Road to Lee’s assistance. Stewart added the weight of one division to the contest before sundown, without appreciable effect. “Each attack was less vigorous and had less chance than the one before it,” a Union veteran was to note.

  Alarmed by reports coming in all afternoon from west of Atlanta, Hood had Hardee turn his corps over to Cheatham, who had returned to his division, and proceed without delay to Ezra Church to take charge of the other two. Old Reliable arrived to find that the battle had sputtered out, and made no effort to revive it. Lee and Stewart between them had lost some 2500 killed and wounded — about the same number that had fallen along Peachtree Creek eight days ago — as compared to Howard’s loss of a scant 700. Nor was that the worst of it, according to Hardee, who afterwards declared: “No action of the campaign probably did so much to demoralize and dishearten the troops engaged in it.”

  Sherman knew now that he had been wrong, these past five days, in thinking that Hood had shot his wad in the Battle of Atlanta. He would have been considerably closer to the truth, however, if he had reverted to this belief on the night that followed the Battle of Ezra Church. Moreover, there were Confederates in the still smoky woods, out beyond Howard’s unbroken lines, who would have agreed with him; almost.

  “Say, Johnny,” one of Logan’s soldiers called across the breastwor
ks, into the outer darkness. “How many of you are there left?”

  “Oh, about enough for another killing,” some butternut replied.

  This attitude on both sides, now that another month drew to a close, was reflected in their respective casualty lists. Including his cavalry subtractions, which were heavy, Sherman had lost in July about 8000 killed, wounded, and missing — roughly the number that fell in June, and better than a thousand fewer than fell in May. The over-all Federal total, from the outset back at Tunnel Hill, came to just under 25,000. Hood, on the other hand, had suffered 13,000 casualties in the course of his three sorties, which brought the Confederate total, including Johnston’s, to 27,500. That was about the number Lee had lost during the same three-month span in Virginia, whereas Sherman had lost considerably fewer than half as many as Meade. Grant could well be proud of his western lieutenant, if and when he got around to comparing the cost, in men per mile, of the campaigns in Georgia and the Old Dominion, West and East.