by Shelby Foote
That was how Taylor would recall the parting, but here again he misconstrued the method. Far from marching “with the dawn,” Forrest took ten days to get ready before he set out from below Tupelo with everything in order, plans all laid and instructions clearly understood by subordinates charged with carrying them out. Chief among these was Abraham Buford, in command of his own two brigades and one from Chalmers, who would remain behind to patrol the region around Memphis. Eight guns rolled with the column, which left on September 16 with just over 3500 effectives, anticipating a meeting near the Tennessee River with nearly a thousand Alabama troopers under William Johnson, who had shown his mettle at Brice’s Crossroads back in June. At Tuscumbia on the 20th Forrest also met someone he had not expected: Joe Wheeler. The diminutive Georgian was recrossing the river to wind up his long raid through East and Middle Tennessee, begun on August 10. Although the destruction he had wrought was about as extensive as he claimed to Hood, he neglected to add that Sherman’s road gangs had repaired the damage about as fast as it was inflicted, often appearing on the scene before the twisted rails were cool. Moreover, there was something else the young West Pointer did not include in his report, and this was the condition of his command. Grievously diminished (for he tallied only his combat losses, which were barely a twentieth of the total suffered in the course of his six-week ride from Atlanta, up to Strawberry Plains near Knoxville, then back into North Alabama) the survivors were scarecrow examples of what could happen to troopers off on their own behind enemy lines. Originally 4500 strong — the number Forrest would have when Johnson joined tomorrow — they now counted fewer than 2000. A good many of the missing were stragglers whose mounts had broken down, and Forrest wrote Taylor that night, amid preparations for crossing the river next day: “I hope to be instrumental in gathering them up.”
Fording his horsemen and floating his guns and wagons across on flatboats, he camped the following night on the north bank of the river, five miles west of Florence, which he passed through next morning, September 22, on the way to his main objective, the Tennessee & Alabama Railroad, just over forty miles to the east. One of Sherman’s two main supply lines, running from Nashville through Columbia and Pulaski to Decatur, where it joined the Memphis & Charleston to connect with Chattanooga and Atlanta, its nearest point was Athens, and that was where Forrest was headed. He got there after sunset on the 23d to begin his investment of the town and its adjoining fort, a ditched and palisaded work a quarter-mile in circumference, occupied by a force of 600 infantry and considered impregnable to assault: as indeed perhaps it was, although no one would ever know. Soon after daybreak John Morton opened fire with his eight guns, “casting almost every shell inside the works,” according to the garrison commander. Before long, Forrest halted fire to send in a white-flag note demanding “immediate and unconditional surrender.” The Federal declined, but then unwisely consented to a parley, in the course of which Forrest pulled his customary trick of exposing troops and guns in triplicate, thereby convincing his adversary that he was besieged by a host of 15,000 of all arms, with no less than two dozen cannon. Capitulation came in time for the graybacks to give their full attention to a relief column that arrived from Decatur to take part in a brief skirmish before joining the surrender. Reduction of two nearby railway blockhouses raised the day’s bag to 1300 prisoners, two pieces of artillery, 300 horses, and a mountain of supplies and equipment, including two locomotives captured with their cars in Athens. Forrest put the torch to the stores and installations, issued the horses to those of his men who needed them, smashed the rolling stock, and sent the prisoners back through Florence for removal south. Then he took up the march northward along the railroad, wrecking as he went.
Halfway to the Tennessee line next morning, September 25, he came upon the Sulphur Branch railway trestle, 72 feet high and 300 long, guarded by a double-casemated blockhouse at each end and a large fortress-stockade with a garrison of about one thousand men. Surrender declined, Morton opened fire and kept it up for two cruel hours, slamming in 800 rounds that left the fort’s interior “perforated with shell, and the dead lying thick along the works.” So Forrest would report, adding that a repeated demand for surrender was promptly accepted. This time the yield was 973 bluecoats, two more guns, another 300 horses, and a quantity of stores. Again he sent his prisoners rearward, together with the captured guns and four of his own, so greatly had the bombardment reduced his supply of artillery ammunition, and after setting fire to the two blockhouses, the buildings in the fort, and the long trestle they had been designed to shield, rode on north to the Elk River, which he reached next day, about midway between Athens and Pulaski. Here too there was a blockhouse at each end of a bridge even longer than the trestle at Sulphur Branch; but they were unmanned, abandoned by a commander who had heard from below how little protection they afforded, either to the installations they overlooked or to the garrisons they contained. Forrest burned them, along with the Elk River span, and pushed on to Richland Creek, seven miles beyond the Tennessee line and the same distance from Pulaski. Here there was a 200-foot-long truss bridge, stoutly built to take the weight of heavy-laden supply trains. The raiders crossed and sent it up in flames.
Now the character of the expedition changed. “Enemy concentrating heavily against me,” Forrest notified Taylor the following night, September 27, from the vicinity of Pulaski. Touched where he was tender, Sherman had reacted hard and fast, sending George Thomas himself from Atlanta with two divisions to take charge in Middle Tennessee, with instructions for “the whole resources” of the region, including Kentucky and North Alabama, to be “turned against Forrest … until he is disposed of.” Other divisions were on the way by rail and river from Memphis and Chattanooga, and Rosecrans had been urged to return A. J. Smith’s gorillas from Missouri. As a result, fully 30,000 reinforcements were converging by now from all directions upon Pulaski, where Lovell Rousseau, arriving from Nashville to meet the threat, already had more men in its fortifications than were in the gray column on its outskirts. “Press Forrest to the death,” Thomas wired ahead, “keeping your troops well in hand and holding them to the work. I do not think that we shall ever have a better chance than this.”
The chance was not as good as the blue Virginian thought: not yet at any rate. Though he kept his Pulaski defenders “well in hand,” Rousseau found the raiders gone from his front next morning. Forrest had built up his campfires the night before, and leaving them burning had pulled out. Having done what he could, at least for the present, to cripple the Tennessee & Alabama, he now was moving toward that other, more vital supply line, the Nashville & Chattanooga, fifty miles to the east. He was obliged, however, to do it no more than superficial damage, learning from scouts when he got beyond Fayetteville on the 29th that the Chattanooga road was heavily protected by reinforcements hurried up it from Georgia and down it from Kentucky. He contented himself with detaching a fifty-man detail to tear up wires and track around Tullahoma, then confused the regathering Federals still more by splitting his force in two. Buford turned south with his division and Morton’s four remaining guns, under orders to return to the Tennessee River by way of Huntsville, which he was to capture if possible, and tear up track on the Memphis & Charleston, between there and Decatur, before recrossing. Forrest himself, with the other two brigades, turned northwest through Lewisburg, then north across Duck River, passing near his Chapel Hill birthplace on the last day of September to descend once more, at high noon of the following day, on the already hard-hit Tennessee & Alabama near Spring Hill, ten miles north of Columbia and about four times that distance above Pulaski, which he had left four days ago.
He turned south, ripping up track, capturing three more blockhouses — mainly by bluff, since Buford had the guns — firing bridges, and smashing culverts all the way to Columbia, which he bypassed on October 2 to avoid the delay of a gunless fight with the bluecoats in its works. The time had come to get out, and Forrest, as one of his troopers said, was �
�pretty good on a git.” Taking off southwest away from what remained of the Tennessee & Alabama, he moved by country roads through Lawrenceburg, where he camped on the night of the 3d, and crossed the Alabama line the next day to return to Florence on October 5, one day less than two weeks after he left it. Buford was there ahead of him, having found Huntsville too stoutly garrisoned to be taken, and though the Tennessee was swollen past fording he had managed to get his men and guns across in relays on three rickety ferries, swimming the horses alongside. Now it was Forrest’s turn.
A slow and risky business, with the enemy reported close astern, the piecemeal crossing took two full days, and was only accomplished, a veteran would recall, with “considerable disregard of the third commandment.” Fretted and tired, the general was in the last boat to leave. While helping to pole against the swift-running current he noticed a lieutenant standing in the bow and taking no part in the work. “Why don’t you take hold of an oar or pole and help get this boat across?” The lieutenant replied that, as an officer, he did not feel “called on to do that kind of work” while private soldiers were available to perform it. Astounded by this implied reproach — for he himself was as hard at work as anyone aboard — Forrest slapped the young man sprawling into the river, then held out the long pole and hauled him back over the gunwale, saying: “Now, damn you, get hold of the oars and go to work! If I knock you out of the boat again I’ll let you drown.” Another passenger observed that the douched lieutenant “made an excellent hand for the balance of the trip.”
In the two weeks spent south of Nashville, within the great bend of the Tennessee, Forrest had captured 2360 of the enemy and killed or wounded an estimated thousand more, at a cost to himself of 340 casualties, only 47 of whom were killed. He had destroyed eleven blockhouses, together with the extensive trestles and bridges they were meant to guard, and had taken seven U.S. guns, 800 horses, and more than 2000 rifles, all of which he brought out with him, in addition to fifty captured wagons loaded with spoils too valuable for burning. Best of all, he had wrecked the Tennessee & Alabama so thoroughly that even the skilled blue work crews would need six full weeks to put it back in operation. Indeed, Taylor was so encouraged by this Middle Tennessee expedition that he promptly authorized another, to be aimed this time at Johnsonville, terminus of the newly extended Nashville & Northwestern Railroad, by which supplies, unloaded from steamboats and barges on the Tennessee, were sent to Sherman by way of Nashville, seventy-five miles due east. A blow at this riverport depot, whose yards and warehouses were crowded with stores awaiting transfer, would go far toward increasing the Union supply problem down in Georgia, and Forrest spent only a week resting and refitting his weary troopers, summoning Chalmers to join him en route, and adding a pair of long-range Parrotts to Morton’s two batteries, before he took off again for Johnsonville, a hundred miles north of Corinth, to which he had returned on October 9.
Much was expected of this follow-up strike, even though the first — successful as it had been, within its geographic limitations — had failed to achieve its major purpose, which was to make Sherman turn loose of Atlanta for lack of subsistence for his army of occupation. Not only did the red-haired Ohioan by then have ample stockpiles of supplies, he also had the scarcely interrupted use of the Nashville & Chattanooga line, having repaired within twelve hours the limited damage inflicted near Tullahoma by the fifty-man detail Forrest had detached when he turned north beyond Fayetteville. If the raid had been made a month or six weeks earlier, while the Federals were fighting outside Atlanta, opposed by an aggressive foe and with both overworked railroads barely able to meet their daily subsistence needs, the result might have been different. Even so, Forrest with only 4500 troopers had managed to disrupt Sherman’s supply arrangements, as well as the troop dispositions in his rear, and had brought him to the exasperated conclusion, expressed to Grant on October 9, that it would be “a physical impossibility to protect the roads, now that Hood, Forrest, Wheeler, and the whole batch of devils are turned loose without home or habitation.”
5
First there had been the fret of verbal contention. Drawing back from Jonesboro, as he said, “to enjoy a short period of rest and to think well over the next step required in the progress of events,” Sherman announced on September 8 that “the city of Atlanta, being exclusively required for warlike purposes, will at once be evacuated by all except the armies of the United States.” He foresaw charges of inhumanity, perhaps from friends as well as foes, but he was determined neither to feed the citizens nor to “see them starve under our eyes.… If the people raise a howl against my barbarity or cruelty,” he told Halleck, “I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.”
Sure enough, when Mayor Calhoun protested that the suffering of the sick and aged, turned out homeless with winter coming on, would be “appalling and heart-rending,” Sherman replied that while he gave “full credit to your statement of the distress that will be occasioned,” he would not revoke his orders for immediate resettlement. “They were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggle.… You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.… You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war.… Now you must go,” he said in closing, “and take with you your old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the weather until the mad passions of men cool down and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta. Yours in haste.”
Hood attacked as usual, head down and full tilt, in response to a suggestion for a truce to permit the removal southward, through the lines, of the unhappy remnant of the city’s population. He had, he said, no choice except to accede, but he added: “Permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever brought to my attention in the dark history of war. In the name of God and humanity, I protest.”
“In the name of common sense,” Sherman fired back, “I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war — dark and cruel war — who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts.” There followed an arm-long list of Confederate outrages, ending: “Talk thus to the marines, but not to me, who have seen these things.… If we must be enemies, let us be men and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and the families of a brave people at our backs, or to remove them to places of safety among their own friends.”
For two more days, though both agreed that “this discussion by two soldiers is out of place and profitless,” the exchange continued, breathy but bloodless, before a ten-day truce was agreed on and the exodus began. Union troops escorted the refugees, with such clothes and bedding as they could carry, as far as Rough & Ready, where Hood’s men took them in charge and saw them south across the fifteen-mile railroad gap to Lovejoy Station, within the rebel lines. Sherman was glad to see them go, and truth to tell had rather enjoyed the preceding altercation, which he saw as a sort of literary exercise, beneficial to his spleen, and in which he was convinced he had once more gotten the best of his opponent. But in other respects, having little or nothing to do with verbal fencing, he was far less satisfied, and a good deal more perturbed.
On September 8, the day he ordered Calhoun and his people to depart, he also issued a congratulatory order proclaiming to his soldiers that their capture of Atlanta “completed the grand task which has been assigned us by our Government.” This was untrue. Welcome as the fall of the city was at this critical time — he was convinced, for one thing, that it assured Lincoln’s reëlection, and for another he could present it, quite literally, to his troops as a crowning
reward for four solid months of combat — his real objective, agreed on beforehand and identified by Grant in specific instructions, was the Army of Tennessee; he had been told to “break it up,” and Atlanta had been intended merely to serve as the anvil upon which the rebel force was to be fixed and pounded till it shattered. That had been, and was, his true “grand task.” Not only was Hood’s army still in existence, it was relatively intact, containing close to 35,000 effectives, even with Wheeler gone for the past month; whereas Sherman’s own, though twice as strong as Hood’s at the time of occupation, started dwindling from the wholesale loss of veterans whose three-year enlistments ran out about the time the truce began. Subtractions from the top were even heavier in proportion. Schofield had to return for a time to Knoxville to attend to neglected administrative matters in his department, and Dodge, wounded soon after he received a promotion to major general, took off on sick leave, never to return; his corps was broken up to help fill the gaps in Howard’s other two, whose commanders, Logan and Blair — “political soldiers,” Sherman scornfully styled them — had been given leaves of absence to stump for Lincoln in their critical home states. Presently even George Thomas was gone, along with two of his nine infantry divisions, sent back to Tennessee when the news came down that Forrest was on the rampage there, scooping up rear-guard detachments and providing the rail repair gangs with more work than they could handle in a hurry.
Various possibilities obtained, even so, including a march on Macon, Selma, or Mobile; but what the army needed most just now was rest and refitment, a brief period in which to digest its gains and shake its diminished self together, while its leader pondered in tranquillity his next move. Fortified Atlanta seemed an excellent place for this, although the situation afforded little room for error. “I’ve got my wedge pretty deep,” Sherman remarked in this connection, “and must look out I don’t get my fingers pinched.” One drawback was that the interlude surrendered the initiative to Hood, who had shown in the past that he would be quick to grasp it, however stunned his troops might be as a result of their recent failures, including the loss of the city in their charge. Wheeler’s damage to the supply line running back to Chattanooga had long since been repaired, but it seemed likely that his chief would strike there again, this time in heavier force; perhaps, indeed, with all he had.