Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Captain Poe’s men had done their jobs to his exacting satisfaction, enabling him to report that for “military purposes the city of Atlanta has ceased to exist.” Poe also derided those “lawless persons, who, by sneaking around in blind alleys, succeeded in firing many houses which it was not intended to touch.” In his diary, Poe branded these unauthorized actions a “great scandal of our army.” The result was what one Ohio soldier called “smoke, dust, bustle and confusion.” “This has b[e] en a dreadful day,” scribbled the young diarist Carrie Berry. “Things have b[e]en burning all around us.” When darkness fell, the Berrys were relieved to see a provost guard assigned to their house, yet the whole family still sat up all night, fearfully watching for flying embers and other flaring debris.

  Punctuating the crackling inferno was the uneven staccato of exploding munitions. Some Union soldiers thought this was dud U.S. ordnance from the brief siege and bombardment back in August, while others put the blame on hidden caches of Confederate stores. “Every instant there was the sharp report, or the smothered burning sound of exploding shells and powder concealed in the buildings, and then the sparks and flames shooting away up in the black and red roof, scattering the cinders far and wide,” observed an Illinois soldier.

  Which buildings survived and which were lost was sometimes a matter of luck and sometimes the result of courageous personal initiative. Thanks to the vigorous protests of Father Thomas O’Reilly, pastor of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, soldier squads were detailed to protect it and several other houses of worship as well as at least one public building. It took an inspired ruse by Dr. Peter Paul Noel D’Alvigny to preserve the Atlanta Medical College from the flames. When a Federal work party arrived to begin torching the structure, D’Alvigny showed them a ward full of patients not yet evacuated. The surprised officer in charge agreed to postpone the job until morning. D’Alvigny gambled (rightly) that his hospital would be overlooked in the hurry to leave town the next day. Only after the kindling had been extinguished and the Yankees gone did the doctor dismiss the hospital attendants he had pressed into service for his charade.

  In his later years, when he had a lot to say about the incidents of his military career, William Tecumseh Sherman was tight-lipped about the burning of Atlanta. Neither his campaign report (written on New Year’s Day 1865) nor his Memoirs (published in 1875) justifies it. His recently added staff officer, Major Henry Hitchcock, captured a fleeting vignette of Sherman watching the flames this night with the comment that the glare would be “probably…visible at Griffin, fifty miles off.” An Ohio officer in the Fourteenth Corps added this recollection: “I saw Gen. Sherman walking about the streets of the blazing city paying no heed to the flames seemingly nothing.” Concluded this officer, “I don’t believe he has any mercy in his composition.”

  A round of especially fiery spasms erupted between 8:00 and 10:00 P.M. “The [blazing] waves rolled from house to house and from block to block like the waves of the sea,” wrote a New York soldier. One of Captain Poe’s detachment, watching from a good observation point, thought the scene before him “was truly superb with a touch of the terrific. Nearly the whole business part of town, where all the large buildings were, was in flames…. Great tongues of flame shot up fifty ft. above the roofs & constantly the walls would fall in with a crash which sent a cloud of cinders up among the stars.” A Massachusetts soldier long remembered the “strange light, and the roaring of the flames that licked up everything habitable, the intermittent explosions of powder,…the crashing of falling buildings, and the change, as by a turn of the kaleidoscope[,] of strong walls and proud structures into heaps of desolation.”

  To this spectacle was added the dramatic underscore of music. The 33rd Massachusetts was one of the few regiments that still maintained a band at this late stage of the war. It came by Sherman’s headquarters early in the evening for a concert that included the “Miserere” from Verdi’s opera II Trovatore. In future years Major Hitchcock avowed that hearing it “always will…carry me back to this night’s scenes and sounds.” A requested favorite was “John Brown’s Body.” Listening to the melody played by the band illuminated by the burning buildings, another member of Sherman’s staff declared, “I have never heard that noble anthem when it was so grand, so solemn, so inspiring.” The 33rd’s band wasn’t the only one in town this night. The First Brigade of the Third Division in the Fourteenth Corps boasted a group also, this led by a S. V. W. Post. As the ensemble set up for its performance, its leader joked to the audience: “Nero made music while Rome burned, why not Post make a little while Atlanta burns.”

  Looking at the city from the window of his small room in the Neal house, Sherman’s aide Hitchcock dreaded the next day. Noticing that the fires seemed to be dying down by 11:30 P.M., he worried that the “only danger yet is from stragglers and teamsters, after the guards are withdrawn, which they must tomorrow. I see plainly how true it is [as Sherman said] that ‘there are the men who do these things.’” Hitchcock’s sentiments were echoed by young Miss Berry, who wrote in her diary that at times “it looked like the whole town was on fire.” Marauding Union soldiers, wrote the little girl, “behaved very badly…. Nobody knows what we have suffered!”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Lurid Flames Lit Up the Heavens”

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1864

  Midnight–Noon

  Left Wing

  The Fourteenth Corps—some 14,000 strong—began marching east from Atlanta along the Decatur Road at sunrise. Behind the soldiers, the Gate City still shuddered from the last paroxysms of ruination. “The air was resonant with explosions,” recalled an Illinois officer, “while flames were mounting to the sky from burning depots and factories all over the city.” “The roaring of the shells when they burst sounded like a fight,” recorded another Illinoisan. Sentiments of pity were in a decided minority. “Who set it afire?” wondered an Ohio man. “We knew not, and some cared less.” “A last look at the city, or what once was the city of Atlanta, tells the lovers of our country that the doom of the traitor is sealed,” was the grim assessment of a Wisconsin boy.

  “Country sandy and water scarce,” remembered an Ohio soldier of the morning’s march. An Illinois officer in the Second Division observed how the “men were cheering and singing patriotic songs, and fairly revelling in the excitement and novelty of the situation.” Another exuberant soldier long recalled the images of this morning: “The Corps, marching to the music of the bands, with swinging, regular step, arms glistening in the sunlight, and colors unfurled to the balmy breezes, was as fine a picture as eyes ever saw.”

  Wednesday, November 16, 1864

  While the outward mood was festive, an undercurrent of anxiety was present as well. “All believed we would meet resistance; that supplies would be destroyed, and bridges burned, and roads obstructed,” an Illinois officer reflected. Even the sight of so many wagons carried a double edge. “What doubts, what hopes and fears filled our minds as we took up our line of march, to see those mighty trains as they moved along conveying all that our vast army depended upon for subsistence,” added an Ohio soldier.

  According to Sherman’s watch—and therefore by everyone else’s timepiece—the headquarters party departed Atlanta at 7:00 A.M. The General intended to accompany the Fourteenth Corps for a while. He issued no orders this day; since the campaign’s opening phase was preset, his intention was to intervene only in the case of some unforeseen circumstance. Nevertheless, Sherman was reviewing all the variables he had considered to assure himself that every reasonable contingency had been anticipated. To the amazement of one of his aides, Major Hitchcock, the distracted commander blithely trotted past a drunken soldier who was volubly cursing him. “General rode quietly by him, not ten ft. off—heard all—no notice,” Hitchcock wrote.

  Their passage across the old battlefield momentarily shook Sherman out of his meditation. It was here that he had lost Major General James B. McPherson, a friend and protege, who had comma
nded one of his armies in the recent Atlanta Campaign. In Sherman’s mind, McPherson symbolized all young men of character and promise struck down by the unaccountable fates of war. “Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city,” Sherman remembered in later years. Looking southward, he could see the Fourth Division of the Fifteenth Corps marching south to catch up with the rest of the Right Wing, “the gun-barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south.” A nearby band launched into its umpteenth rendition of “John Brown’s Body,” and some of the passing soldiers took up the melody. “Never before or since have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place,” wrote Sherman.

  In the Twentieth Corps, bivouacked near Stone Mountain, the various camps were bustling well before dawn. “Felt a little sore this morning,” reported a Wisconsin soldier. A Connecticut man reported that he and his comrades were “tired and sleepy as men need to be[,] for the first day or two is always much worse for the men than it is after they become accustomed to marching.” Even as the soldiers milled about their morning campfires, their awareness of the danger around them took on a new urgency. When they called the rolls in the 105th Illinois, it was discovered that two were gone from its ranks. “We know not whether they Deserted or otherwise,” a member of the regiment noted in his journal. A quartermaster in the First Division heard that a pair from his brigade were also missing. It was supposed they were “picked up by the enemy’s cavalry while they were out foraging, one of those [is] reported killed.”

  The process of uncoiling from the encampments was sluggishly executed. “The marching to-day was necessarily slow, owing to the bad character of the roads and bad condition of our animals,” recorded the commander of the Second Division, the first to depart. This set the tone as the other two divisions queued up to follow. “We marched in a regular funeral style,” opined a Wisconsin soldier, “slowly and having to halt every little while.” A Massachusetts man likened the tramp to a “train of freight cars hitching along.” He also noted that “the profanity indulged in by the men…was something alarming.”

  Once it became evident that the First Division, scheduled last in today’s rotation, would not be moving for quite a while, someone had the bright idea to keep the men busy tearing up the track near Stone Mountain. Most of the labor fell to the division’s Third Brigade, whose members now began to repair the road, as some of them termed it. “The modus operandi is as follows,” explained a Wisconsin farmer in those ranks. “We first picked up one side of a section of the road & turned it bottom side up, much after the manner of turning over a furrow of green sward. We then pry off the ties from the rails, pile them in a heap, and fire them. Across those heaps of burning ties we lay the rails, and as soon as they are heated sufficiently in the center we take them by the ends & bend them double, so as to lay a double track the boys say.”

  The First Division commander later reported that the Third Brigade “destroyed two miles of track.” However, a Georgian who passed by Stone Mountain right after the Federals cleared out recorded that the ties were burned “only partially,” and the track iron was injured “slightly.” He also related that an “open car that contained [a] few heavy pieces of machinery belonging to the Atlanta [Iron] Rolling Mill is standing on a track five miles below Decatur. The water tank near the same spot is standing.”

  A small detachment consisting of the 2nd and 33rd Massachusetts regiments, the 111th Pennsylvania, and a portion of the 1st Michigan Engineers and Mechanics represented the last organized units to leave Atlanta today. “Piled all surplus property to be burned,” noted one of the engineers. A Massachusetts soldier in the 33rd, frustrated over the wanton destruction that had taken place despite efforts to control the demolitions, proclaimed Atlanta a “perfect ruin.” One of the Michigan engineers assigned to torch a structure was stopped in his tracks by a ten-year-old girl, who walked up to him and said, “Mr. Soldier, you would not burn our house would you, if you do where are we going to live?” The engineer paused, wondering if destroying one more dwelling would make any difference in the war. The girl, he later wrote, “looked into my face with such a pleading look that I could not have the heart to fire the place, so I dropped the torch and walked away.”

  Right Wing

  By late morning Confederate Major General Joseph Wheeler had received sufficient information from his scouting parties to enable him to send off reports to the eight officers and officials on his distribution list. He was still charting just three of the Federal infantry corps—the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Twentieth—but had discerned that the Yankees were moving in two large columns. “Enemy advancing this morning,” Wheeler grimly announced.

  Even as the Union camps were rising for another day of marching, a few units were arriving after having spent their first day shepherding the wagons. Hardly had they settled in before Sergeant William S. Fultz of the 11th Iowa and his buddy, Jerry J. Miller, went hunting for cooking water. On their return trip they passed through the bivouac area for their division’s First Brigade, where they found everyone asleep and a cooking pot steaming with fresh sweet potatoes. “The temptation was too great for hungry boys that had been up all night assisting teams to move along the…road,” recalled Fultz. “So reaching down we got hold of the camp kettle and carried it to the company and had sweet potatoes for supper as we called the meal.”

  A slight scrap was waiting for the first Federal units that reached the South Fork of the Cotton River on their way to Stockbridge. A small rear guard from the Orphan Brigade was covering the only bridge and shots were exchanged as the mounted Union advance trotted into view. The Rebels had no intention of holding their ground, so while the Yankees paused to regroup, the Kentucky riders scrambled across the bridge, setting it afire as they did so. The fast-moving Federals extinguished the flames and established a security perimeter on the opposite bank, while a detachment from the 1st Missouri Engineers replaced the charred planking. Portions of the Second Division of the Fifteenth Corps idly watched the labor while the bulk of the command “enjoyed a good rest.” Some forty minutes after the skirmish began, the first infantry regiments were filing across the restored bridge.

  Kilpatrick’s cavalrymen jangled out early from their camps about Jonesboro and pressed along the Macon and Western Railroad. The enemy was waiting for them a short distance north of Lovejoy’s Station. “The shells whistled over our heads in the rear,” wrote a diarist in the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry. The Federal troops had encountered portions of Brigade General Thomas H. Harrison’s brigade, whose Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas riders were disposed to be a little stubborn this morning. Instead of breaking contact and falling back to the next prepared position as they should have done, the Rebels stuck to their trenches.

  An effort to flank them by the 8th Indiana Cavalry was blunted when the troopers discovered their “route was blocked by fallen trees and other obstructions.” Kilpatrick arrived on the scene. Once he detected what he thought was smoke from burning stores, he concluded the enemy was pulling out and ordered the nearest available unit to attack. The effort by the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry (supported by portions of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry and 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry) was successful. “We were so completely run over that we were scattered in every direction,” bemoaned a defender, “those of us who were not killed or captured.” In addition to some prisoners taken, two cannon were reclaimed. The guns, lost by a Union raiding party during the Atlanta Campaign, were wholeheartedly welcomed back into the fold by the Yankee horse artillery. A battery officer later bragged how the captures upgraded his unit into “a six-gun battery of steel Rodman guns.”*

  The Union riders regrouped and continued southward. No one supposed that the fighting was over for this day.

  Noon–Midnight

  Armchair strategists in Richmond were convinced they had cracked the secret of S
herman’s whereabouts. Reports in the Yankee papers of a grand movement to the coast were simply “nonsensical,” reasoned the editorial writers for the Richmond Dispatch. More likely and logical, they argued, was a march toward Tennessee to intercept Hood. “At last advices Sherman had reached the neighborhood of Bridgeport, which is on the Tennessee River, between thirty and forty miles below Chattanooga,” the paper reported with smug confidence. The crystal ball seemed equally clear for the editorialists writing in the Augusta Daily Constitutionalist. Sherman’s target, the paper declared, was Macon. Doing some quick calculations, its editor determined that Sherman’s movement had to be so encumbered by his supply trains “that a [Confederate] force of 10,000 determined men can make [the Yankee army]…a retreating and disorganized one.”

  In Milledgeville, most of today’s legislative activity took place in sundry committees, so there was little for the correspondent of the Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel to report. He did mention a session in the state’s Supreme Court where Georgia’s right to determine eligibility for Confederate service was being argued. The state’s case was handled by a former U.S. Congressman and current militia officer, Robert A. Toombs. Toombs, who had served under Robert E. Lee at Antietam, denounced Richmond’s claim of suzerainty “with unsparing vehemence.” Almost as an afterthought, the capital reporter added, “Considerable excitement exists here on account of the movements of the enemy.”

  There was considerable excitement as well in newspaper offices throughout the North. In the Queen City, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial proclaimed Sherman’s movement “one of the boldest undertakings recorded in the annals of war.” Off in Philadelphia, editorial space was filled with a consideration of all Sherman’s potential targets, with no preference expressed by the writers. Readers in Chicago were the beneficiaries of some astute rumor gathering. Sifting through various sources, the Chicago Tribune offered a correct organization of Sherman’s forces along with a very accurate strength estimate. From Saint Louis, the Chicago paper reprinted this tidbit: “An officer of Sherman’s staff is here, who says he had orders when his leave expires to join Sherman by way of the Atlantic coast, at Savannah. He expects Sherman to march entirely across Georgia to that place.”