A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  The news about Savannah was not long in coming. The men awoke to the strident notes of a bugler one evening, after which they received orders to “fall in without arms” and snap to attention. Edward Meyer relieved their suspense by announcing that Fort McAllister had yielded to Sherman’s men. With the fall of the stubborn Confederate garrison, the road to Savannah was open. Men in the ranks released lusty cheers, while the 127th New York took up the sprightly measures of “Yankee Doodle.” Then, John Brunny and his fellow regimental band members joined in, finishing the cheering anthem their fifes had refused to whistle since that fateful afternoon along the Orange Turnpike at Chancellorsville. Within days, the rebels would abandon the Charleston & Savannah Railroad, leaving the Ohioans to inspect the damage they had wrought on the rails.27

  In late December, Sherman and his men settled into Savannah—the general took as his headquarters a handsome, Gothic Revival mansion trimmed in black walnut—though they had no plans to linger. The troops struck north from Savannah in January, determined that the Palmetto State would at last know something of the war it began four years earlier. Brushing aside a token rebel force at the Salkehatchie River, Sherman’s columns, marching at breakneck pace, converged on Columbia, the state’s capital, in mid-February. On February 17, vengeful soldiers and stalwart winds fanned burning cotton bales into a hideous blaze that engulfed nearly a third of the city, adding Columbia to the lengthy inventory of destruction Sherman’s armies visited on South Carolina. The next day, as embers crackled and columns of smoke choked Columbia, the city of Charleston finally surrendered—bringing the war’s longest siege to an anticlimactic end.28

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Charleston was the regiment’s next destination. Wading “detestable swamps,” flooded rice fields, and no fewer than nine rivers, the men struck for the coast, hastily hollowing out rifle pits as they felt their way toward the city. At Combahee Ferry they constructed a new bridge across the river, harvesting the lumber from abandoned slave dwellings nearby. Beyond the river, their route carried them over the old Monck’s Corner battlefield, where Sir Henry Clinton’s strapping British army scored a decisive victory over the besieged patriots in the spring of 1780.

  Sherman’s columns, meanwhile, drove toward Goldsboro and the North Carolina line. Though few enemy soldiers stood in the way—after the loss of Columbia and Charleston, the rebels concentrated their strength in North Carolina—plenty of obstacles hindered their progress. Swollen streams, creeks, and rivers impeded the march, as did treacherous roads that required corduroying and bridges that demanded replanking. Even so, in a reprise of their performance in Georgia, Sherman’s troops laid waste to “railroad tracks, stockpiles of ammunition, factories, mills, cotton” and to “an incalculable number of private homes, barns, and stores.”29

  To be sure, as Sherman’s armies inched closer to their rendezvous with rebels in North Carolina, the general had little to chagrin him; his men had made short order of the enemy’s supplies and knotted the rails between Columbia and Kingsville into “Sherman neckties.” But there remained a “vast amount of rolling-stock” on the rails between Sumterville and Florence. In early March, two brigades of rebel cavalry and a small collection of infantry had turned back an understaffed federal expedition to Florence; the blue-coated column, dispatched by Oliver Otis Howard, “had not been sufficiently vigorous in its reconnaissance.” On March 15, then, as his men continued their drive toward Goldsboro, Sherman scribbled a dispatch to General Gillmore. Deeming the destruction of those trains to be “all important,” the general directed Gillmore to ready twenty-five hundred men from the forces garrisoning Savannah and Charleston for an expedition into the heart of South Carolina. “I want it done at once,” he demanded, recommending that the men unsling their knapsacks and live off the land. “All real good soldiers must now be marching . . . keep them going all the time, even if for no other purpose than to exhaust the enemy’s country.”30

  IT WAS forty-one-year-old Brigadier General Edward Elmer Potter who was selected to spearhead the expedition. Along with nearly three hundred thousand Americans, the New York City native and Columbia College graduate had rushed to California in 1849 to pan for riches in the South Fork American River. Although commissioned as a captain in the Union army early in the war, Potter’s only real command experience had been threading a brigade into the battle at Honey Hill the previous November. His orderly charge that day, however, stood out among the other jumbled federal attacks; in March, he earned a brevet promotion that saluted his “bravery, discretion, and energy.”

  Potter did not tarry in assembling his force: two columns of infantry, a regiment of engineers, and the troopers of the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry. The six twelve-pounder Napoleons of Battery B, 3rd New York Artillery, would trundle behind. In late March, after steaming up the coast and navigating the shoals of the exquisite Winyah Bay—a journey of “ten or twelve hours”—ships conveyed the soldiers to Georgetown, one of South Carolina’s oldest cities. Once the throne of the rice kingdom and a host to presidents, Georgetown’s shabby streets and “decayed wharves” now told the story of the long-grained crop’s collapse. Only the handsome headquarters of the Winyah Indigo Society, established in 1740 to debate “agricultural questions” and “discuss the latest news from London” each month, endured as a reminder of the social, cultural, and political capital once concentrated in cypress-shaded Georgetown.31

  On April 2, General Gillmore reviewed the troops in “a large ploughed field.” With the 25th Ohio and a pair of New York infantry regiments, the 107th Ohio packed into the first column, commanded by cerebral, forty-one-year-old Colonel Philip Perry Brown Jr. The second column, led by the handsomely mustached Colonel Edward Needles Hallowell, was composed exclusively of African-American soldiers: the 32nd United States Colored Troops, five companies of the 102nd United States Colored Troops, and Hallowell’s own 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, the celebrated unit that had stormed Battery Wagner.32

  Three mornings later the columns struck west, trudging through the marshy and meagre soil drained by the Black River. The march twisted through dense, “heavily timbered country,” which Samuel Wildman of the 25th Ohio likened to the “chaparral of Mexico.” Knots of vines laced through the “gloomy, frowning” pines as if to scorn and mock their efforts; still, Potter’s men logged nineteen miles on the expedition’s first day, bivouacking for the night near Johnson’s Swamp. Just after dawn, with Hallowell’s column taking the lead, they resumed the march. It was a “close, warm day,” and more than a few wearied men, their stomachs empty and feet blistered, fell out of the ranks. There was “little,” one soldier carped, to “relieve the dull monotony of the march.” All rejoiced, however, when foraging parties delivered their bounty of ham, bacon, and sweet potatoes to camp that evening. “The colored troops foraged nobly,” one New York soldier applauded.33

  General Edward Potter’s Raid, April 1865.

  AS THEY PRESSED into the interior of South Carolina, the men entered country that had scarcely been touched by the war. “Improvements could be observed,” one soldier noted, “in private residences, outhouses and fences.” The irony that the first state to pull itself out of the Union had known virtually nothing of the conflict was not lost on them, prompting many to indulge their darker side. The troops not only torched every gin mill and cotton bale in their path, but likewise resorted to pillage and “plunder” on a scale that Colonel Cooper deemed “absolutely sickening.” With wry understatement, one soldier boasted the men were “living upon the fat of the land.” Understandably, anxiety and dread consumed local civilians, who hastily stowed heirlooms and valuables in cellars and garrets. “We live in a whirl of excitement,” acknowledged one young woman from nearby Camden, “and all things are unsettled and uncertain.”34

  Sated by their liberal foraging, the men broke camp at six thirty on the morning of April 8. A determined march of twenty miles delivered them to Manning, a handsome, well-manicured village of several hundred, by dusk.
The route was onerous—requiring men to splash across muddy fords and wade through mucky, snake-choked swamps—but that hardly deterred the region’s enslaved peoples from voting with their feet and joining the blue-coated columns. Hundreds of men and women and many young children, some cradled in their mothers’ arms, seized this moment to flee their bondage. From the earliest days of the war, when enslaved persons wound their way to Benjamin Butler’s lines at Fortress Monroe, geographic proximity to a Union army had opened windows of opportunity for freedom-seeking slaves. Now, after a long and impatient wait, the war had finally arrived in the South Carolina interior. “Such a sight for an artist it is to see these poor people just liberated,” one enlisted man exclaimed, “going on happy, under such burdens as they bear, keeping up with veterans Soldiers in the long wearisome marching.” Still, even as this soldier marveled at the social revolution unleashed by the war, he could not silence his doubts. “What is to become of this Race of uneducated, hopeful, anxious people?” he asked. His was a question that many more of his countrymen would pose in the months and years ahead.35

  IF GENERAL POTTER’S columns hoped for a warm welcome in Manning that evening, they were bound to be disappointed. As the men pressed into the city along a “fine, wide street,” they learned that a stray round had picked off a soldier from the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry. “Deliberate murder,” one soldier seethed. Until this point, the men had scarcely seen a rebel soldier. Hallowell’s column easily punched through a thin Confederate cavalry screen on the way to Manning, but otherwise failed to encounter any serious opposition from the enemy.

  That was about to change. A few miles up the road in Sumter, the Confederates were collecting frenziedly whatever men they could find to turn back the raiders. Among them was William Garland, a South Carolina infantryman who was recovering from the loss of his hand in a battle near Richmond the previous year. Rallying behind Lieutenant William Alexander McQueen, whose artillery pieces had rolled into action during Pickett’s Charge, Garland and his fellow patients at the Confederate hospital in Sumter formed gun crews to man a pair of “brass howitzers.” The convalescing soldiers joined a motley troop, which included Colonel George Washington Lee’s 20th South Carolina Militia and the men of Colonel John W. Caldwell’s 9th Kentucky Mounted Regiment. Mustered in at Bowling Green, Kentucky, that first autumn of the war, Caldwell’s men had seen some hard service. They fought at Shiloh, defended Vicksburg, and were bloodied at Stone’s River before mounting up to contest Sherman’s March to the Sea. In March 1865 they occupied Augusta, supposing—mistakenly, as it turned out—that its manufacturing houses and gunpowder works would make a tempting target for the Yankees. From Augusta, the Kentuckians set out for Sumter, ordered to defend the “rolling stock” the federals had set out to destroy.36

  As the rebels prepared to make their stand before Sumter, Potter’s men fanned through the streets of Manning. The 25th Ohio, along with a few mischievous boys from the 107th Ohio, seized the offices of W. J. N. Hammet’s Clarendon Banner, the rebel rag which earlier in the week “recommended the assassination of General Potter.” Perhaps moved by the sights of that day’s march, they went to work on a “special edition” of the paper for the next morning, April 9, 1865. Throughout the night, they typeset original editorials in columns capped by a new masthead: The Clarendon Banner—Of Freedom. “We understand that our General does not intend to burn the town,” the quick-witted soldiers wrote, “but if we have our way, this office shall no more poison the political atmosphere of the country with its foul odors.”37

  WHEN THE TROOPS broke camp and set out on the road to Sumter in the morning, a light drizzle dampening their march, they had no way to know that three hundred miles to the north, John Brown Gordon had just nodded forward the last charge of the Army of Northern Virginia. Just one week before, on April 2, Grant’s troops broke through the threadbare Confederate works coiled around Petersburg, Virginia—prompting the rebels to evacuate both the supply hub and the city of Richmond. Hungry and bedraggled, Lee’s men scurried west into the leafy tobacco fields drained by the Appomattox River, hoping to resupply before banking south to link hands with Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in North Carolina. With Grant and Sheridan in pounding pursuit, one of the most intense weeks of the war in Virginia ensued. At Saylor’s Creek, in a merciless rain on April 6, Lee lost a quarter of his army; defiant until the end, however, he rejected an initial invitation from Grant to discuss terms of surrender. Clinging to the faint hope that Gordon’s men might punch through the federal cavalrymen straddling the Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road just west of the village of Appomattox Court House, on this Palm Sunday morning, Lee held his breath.38

  No more than three miles from Sumter, General Potter discovered that there were rebels ensconced in some fresh breastworks behind the cypress-shaded Turkey Creek. What was more, he learned that the enemy had pried up much of the wooden planking on the bridge that spanned the stream. Unable to dislodge some of the “stronger pieces” wedged in the banks, Sumter’s defenders decided to set them ablaze. Still not satisfied, the rebels then torched the nearby millhouse, lest the federals seize it for a sharpshooter’s nest. While these developments persuaded Potter that the enemy was in full retreat, his regimental commanders were more circumspect. As the 107th Ohio felt its way toward the creek, Colonel Cooper called for several soldiers to tear across the smoldering bridge and scout the enemy’s position. Much to his surprise, Cooper found three eager volunteers in Henry Finkenbiner, Jacob Brobst, and Jacob James. None of these enlisted men had done very much to distinguish themselves as soldiers to this point in the war, though the thirty-two-year-old Finkenbiner, a blacksmith with a shock of reddish hair, had suffered a wound at Gettysburg.39

  Without delay, as Sumter’s church bells announced the three o’clock service, the trio crept across the burning bridge. When they reached the opposite bank, the rebels saluted them with a crackle of muskets. To make matters worse, the Ohioans were also “within the direct range and close fire” of the artillery pieces that Garland and his comrades had parked atop a “little knoll.” Finkenbiner and his comrades managed to squeeze off a round of their own before another enemy volley erupted from the “dense thickets” choking the banks of the creek. The men dashed for the bridge, hoping to withdraw, but at least one Confederate round was accurate. Brobst crumpled to the ground, seriously wounded.

  “Don’t for God’s sake let the rebels get me,” he wailed. “Don’t for God’s sake let the rebels get me!”

  Ducking and dodging shot and shell, Finkenbiner and James turned back to retrieve their injured comrade. “We picked Brobst up and placed him on my rifle between us,” the blacksmith recalled, “thus carrying him in safety over the burning bridge to an ambulance corps in the woods.” At enormous personal risk to their own safety, Finkenbiner, Brobst, and James had established the enemy’s position at Dingle’s Mill. General Potter would have to give battle after all.40

  THE FRUSTRATED GENERAL determined to flank the rebels. While the 107th Ohio shook out into a skirmish line and laid down a “covering fire” along the creek, Hallowell’s column would coil down an old “plantation road” and gain the enemy’s left. For their part, the 56th New York and 157th New York would loop to the left and trudge through a “waist deep” swamp, negotiating “broken timber, tangled vines, and drooping limbs” in an effort to turn the enemy’s right.41

  Henry Finkenbiner was awarded the Medal of Honor for his daring actions at Dingle’s Mill on April 9, 1865. Walter F. Beyer and Oscar F. Keydel, Deeds of Valor: How America’s Heroes Won the Medal of Honor (Detroit: The Perrien Keydel Company, 1901), 495

  Hallowell’s men set out on their march, but reversed course after their guide became disoriented in the impossible thickets. Piloted through the woods by a local African-American scout, however, the New Yorkers had better luck. Scaling a post-and-rail fence, they formed into a line of battle and prepared to make an attempt on the enemy’s flank. From his commanding perc
h behind one of the Confederate howitzers, William Garland spied the New Yorkers readying their assault. “I happened to look down the swamp to our right and rear,” he recalled, “and saw the Yankees jumping over the fence into the field a little over a quarter of a mile from us.” By the time Garland and his frazzled gunners turned to meet the flanking column, it was already too late. The New Yorkers hoisted their muskets and squeezed out a devastating volley, killing one of the rebels’ artillery commanders. For a time, the air “whistled” with “lively” shot and deadly canister. “Boys . . . take that battery!” the colonel of the 157th New York bellowed. Another federal shell severed the right shoulder of Lieutenant McQueen, killing the rebel officer instantly—no more than three miles from the place of his youth. “We were now flanked, vastly outnumbered, and both of our officers were killed,” Garland sighed. “It was useless for us to attempt to continue the fight.”

  As the rebels scampered toward the rear “in great confusion,” the New Yorkers seized one of their battle flags and hauled off both of their artillery pieces. At the cost of twenty-six men, the federals had brushed aside the first “opposition of consequence” on their raid into the South Carolina interior. “Had our Brigade been sent to the Rebel left earlier so as to have got on their flank,” one soldier in the 54th Massachusetts contended, “we would have bagged them all.” Confederate losses in the engagement were much larger, their killed and wounded left to litter the field where they fell. Before nightfall, they would be buried in hastily made graves. What was more, the 107th Ohio had turned in a most creditable performance, and at the cost of just one man—Brobst—wounded. But as luck would have it, their heroic deeds at Dingle’s Mill would be immediately eclipsed by the news out of Virginia. John Brown Gordon’s men had fought to a “frazzle,” but could not cut through that Union cavalry screen at Appomattox. At the very moment the Ohioans laid down their covering fire, Robert E. Lee accepted his fate and waited for Ulysses S. Grant to meet him in Wilmer McLean’s front parlor.42