Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  There was no panic farther east at Camp Lawton, where the processing of the sick for prisoner exchange had reached a lucrative stage. “By paying the doctor a good sum, from twenty to fifty dollars in greenbacks, he will put a person on the sick list, and thus they will get out of prison,” attested a POW. Business was so good, he contended, that “many of the sick are actually crowded out to give place to those who have bought their freedom. The doctors are making quite a speculating game out of it.”

  Right Wing

  The first section of Missouri engineers completed their pontoon across the Ocmulgee River by 1:00 P.M., at which time the passage (measured at 264 feet) was open for business. The second section of boats and bridging elements did not make it through the press of wagons and men until nearly 3:00 P.M., so the additional crossing wasn’t completed until two hours later. This kept things backed up, allowing even more bored soldiers opportunities to rummage around. “Here many of our boys went out foraging, and some got sweet potatoes, others turnips,” recorded an Ohio soldier; “some found whiskey and those were pretty well corned.”

  Idlers from the 100th Indiana came upon a cache of current newspapers at Indian Springs, which, in more peaceful times, enjoyed a brisk business as a health resort. “The Confederate officials promulgated some highly inflammatory addresses to the people of Georgia, exhorting them to rise up in their might and crush out the invaders,” read one bemused Hoosier. Other soldiers “entered into interesting conversation with the inhabitants of the village and those who fled from the cities and towns to this far inland resort, hoping to escape the dread coming of Sherman’s army.”

  Among these unfortunates was a newlywed couple and friends whose celebrations had been cut short. The group (four altogether), arriving from Macon on November 17, had been detained overnight. Given permission today to return to Macon, the wedding party had not gone far before an artillery officer stopped their carriage to swap horses—their sleek pair for his dilapidated set. The exchange completed, the bridegroom tried without success to urge his new team on, his futile efforts drawing forth a chorus of jibes and jeers from passing infantry. “But the tears of the gentle women melted the hearts of the soldiers,” wrote one of them, “who lent a helping hand and the party was soon beyond the lines, and on the road to home and friends.”

  General Howard’s intention was to cross all of the Seventeenth Corps, followed by the remaining divisions of the Fifteenth Corps and Kilpatrick’s cavalry. His original design had the cavalry going over first, but thanks to the diversionary movement against Forsyth, the Yankee horsemen did not reach the Planter’s Factory area until well after sundown. In their stead, a small mounted party led by Captain James M. McClintock of the signal corps crossed the river to scout all the way to the village of Monticello. “Drove in the enemy’s pickets at M[onticello],” McClintock wrote in his diary. “Exchanged a few shots and returned. Arrived in camp at 8 P.M.”

  Back along the river, as the various units were formed up and marched to the Planter’s Factory bridges, they encountered an unexpected wrinkle. Before reaching the pontoons, the columns passed through checkpoints manned by provost guards and quartermasters, who confiscated all unauthorized animals. Too many units needing fresh mounts weren’t getting them, while too many foot soldiers were riding. Even the gunners with artillery batteries were not exempt, and “in this way many of our cannoneers lost the nags they had picked up,” groused one of them.

  Additionally, large piles of foraged goods accumulated at the checkpoints, since most of the soldiers had used the horses and mules as pack animals, leaving them with loads that were more than they cared to carry. “This looked hard to some of them who had a dozen hams and a lot of chickens, or a sack of sweet potatoes, and all sorts of good things to eat,” commented an observer. Slowly, the herd of broken-down animals left in the exchange began to grow.

  The Ocmulgee crossing was becoming the major impediment that General Howard had feared. The lag in bringing up the pontoon train had delayed the schedule until the afternoon, and the process of weeding out all the unauthorized animals had further slowed the pace. Then it began to rain; sprinkles at first, but soon turning into a more steady downfall. “At the eastern end of the bridge the bank rose quite abruptly, making a steep hill,” remembered a member of Howard’s staff. “The falling rain softened the clay ground and made the crossing difficult. The wagons and artillery carriages were helped up the hill by over 1,000 men stationed along the road between the river and crest of the hill.” Seconded a weary Howard, “The crossing of the Ocmulgee, with its steep and muddy banks, was hard enough for the trains.” It was going to be a long night for all concerned.

  Left Wing

  Brigadier General John W. Geary’s division, leading the Twentieth Corps this day, pushed rapidly along the Georgia Railroad until it reached the station stop called Rutledge. There the advance came to a temporary halt while the work of destruction commenced. A soldier in the 28th Pennsylvania recalled his unit burning “a considerable amount of public property among which was several [railroad] cars.” A member of the 29th Ohio never forgot marching “along the R.R. and in many places we would stop and pile fence rails on the track and set fire to them, in other places we pried up the track and turned the road bottom side up.” “Men feel a little jaded,” groaned an Ohioan. “A night’s rest will restore most of them.”

  Behind Geary’s men followed the rest of the corps, some of it wrecking track, some of it foraging. Most of the Yankee boys wondered at the quantities of foodstuffs they found. “Forage abundant,” wrote an amazed Indiana soldier. “Thousands of bushels of sweet potatoes passed by untouched.” The officer commanding the 150th New York was so impressed that he felt he had to itemize today’s gleanings in his official report. “Sent out two companies foraging,” he wrote, “procured 1,530 pounds of fresh pork and 10 sheep, and 6 head of fat cattle—average weight dressed, 300 pounds a head; aggregate, 1,800 pounds—and 42 bushels of sweet potatoes, [plus] about 64 gallons of syrup.”

  Several incidents underscored the narrow margin between an adventure and a disaster. One occurred as the column approached Social Circle. Colonel Ezra A. Carmen, commanding the Second Brigade in the First Division, Twentieth Corps, detailed a number of foraging parties, consisting of two companies from each regiment. His instructions were explicit; the detachments were to “proceed along each side of the road, keeping within half a mile of the column, and collect what subsistence they could find for the use of the brigade.” One party consisted of forty-three men from companies D and K of the 107th New York under the command of Captain George W. Reid. Reid, whose top priority was “whiskey uppermost,” according to a member of the regiment, led his men several miles from the line of march. Even worse, he allowed his command to fall beyond support distance of the rear guard. Reid and his detail did not return to camp that night. It wasn’t until several days later that a few lucky survivors showed up to report that the detail had been ambushed and captured to a man.

  In a way, Reid and his little command were lucky. A group of foragers from the Fourteenth Corps shot it out with a squadron of Rebel cavalry. A trooper from the 8th Texas Cavalry noted in his diary that his men scrapped with about nine foragers near Oxford. “After a run of some two miles, we killed three and wounded four,” he boasted. A member of the 105th Ohio was part of a rescue operation that brought in the dead and wounded. He recorded that one of the corpses had eight bullet wounds, and added that the men “were angry & wanted to burn the town [of Oxford] but the rebels did not belong there so [we] would not.”

  Some ten miles southwest of Social Circle, most of the Fourteenth Corps passed through Covington. A few regiments made quite a production of it. “On the 18th we marched through the beautiful town of Covington, with our ranks closed up, bands playing and colors flying, as if we were on a holiday parade,” recollected a member of the 75th Indiana. Two military hospitals had operated in the village, so the ranks of the onlookers were spotted with c
onvalescent Rebel veterans. An infantryman in the 31st Ohio recalled seeing “a crippled Confederate soldier…among the few bystanders. One of the boys called to him, ‘Hello, pard; what regiment?’—The fellow gave the number, ‘—Jawjay, sah,’ and gave us the military salute.”

  The correspondent for the New York Herald was present when one of the Federal bands struck up “Dixie.” “Every window and door swarmed with blooming war widows, stately matrons and shy virgins in homespun and coarse linen,” he reported. Once it had everyone’s attention, the band segued into “Yankee Doodle.” “Oh, what a retreat,” chuckled the newsman, “windows came down with a slam and doors closed very abruptly, until not a fair face was visible.”

  One fair face that did not disappear belonged to Tillie Travis, who sat quietly knitting as the solid masses of Union soldiery trooped past her porch while groups rummaged around for food. Her stoicism was a pose, for Tillie was not known for holding her tongue when it came to the subject of the Confederacy and her worried mother had put the fear of God into the girl to keep her silent. Tillie held her vow until a Union officer “attempted to reconstruct me by arguments to prove the sin of Secession.” Tillie’s swift response at last drove the Federal away, but not before he commented, “I see it is no use to argue with you.” Tillie had a secret laugh on the plucky Yankee, for snug in the center of the yarn balls she was handling were gold watches, hidden in plain sight for safekeeping.

  Experiences of Covington’s blacks covered a broad spectrum. “Negroes all want to follow us[,] but our limited supplies prevents our taking many,” wrote a diarist in the 34th Illinois. A comrade in the 105th Ohio related that he “saw several darkey women and men who wished to come. I advised the women not to come, they were anxious to come and said that they were abused by their masters shamefully.” Slaves who crowded up to the ranks of the 21st Wisconsin seemed genuinely surprised that the fearsome Yankees did not sport any horns. “Some of the boys told them that, in order not to scare them we had taken them off and put them in the wagons,” quipped a member of the regiment.

  Another side to the story was vouched for by Tillie Travis, one of whose young female slaves came running up to the house shrieking that she was being robbed by Sherman’s men. A nearby Federal wondered aloud what all the fuss was about. “Your soldiers,” Tillie replied, “are carrying off everything she owns, and yet you pretend to be fighting for the negro.” When the slave girl saw an officer’s black servant wearing one of her hats, she went up to him to shake her fist in his face. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “if I had the power like I’ve got the will, I’d tear you to pieces.”

  Passing quickly through Covington was a section of the 58th Indiana, hurrying its pontoon train to the Alcovy River. The first elements of the Fourteenth Corps to reach there found an improvised but usable crossing via a platform built on the ruins of an original bridge. It was good enough for infantry, but wouldn’t take wagons, so orders went back to the Yellow River for one of the sections to hustle forward. The new instructions arrived at 4:00 P.M. Thirty minutes later one of the two pontoons had been dismantled and packed for travel. Less than two hours after that the Indiana engineers were setting to work at the Alcovy River, which one of them described as “a deep, sluggish stream, with almost no banks,” about seventy-five feet wide. The officer in charge decided to run his bridge alongside the platform already in place, so within two hours the new pontoon was handling traffic. Sherman’s secret weapon was performing to expectations.

  The General’s night headquarters were located about a mile and half west of the Alcovy River on the farm of Judge Harris. After asking around, the New York Herald reporter learned that the jurist, who hailed from Massachusetts, was not a kind master. Estimates of his slaveholdings ranged from 60 to 200, housed in what the correspondent called a “village of negro huts.” A crowd of curious and excited blacks was on hand as Sherman’s staff began erecting the night camp. “Glory be to de Lord, de Lincoln’s hab come!” called one, while another shouted “Bress de Lord!” Major Hitchcock asked a younger member of the group (he thought him twenty-five to thirty) why he had left his owner. “I was bound to come, Sah,” he answered, “good trade or bad trade, I’se bound to risk it.” Hitchcock thought that the simple faith these men and women had in the Union presence was striking and touching.

  Sherman had another black elder brought to him to be queried about local roads and conditions. As Sherman recollected the moment, he asked the slave if he understood what the war meant for him and his people. The patriarch “supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom.” Believing that authority in the slave community was vested with the elders, Sherman patiently explained “that we wanted the slaves to remain where they were and not to load us down with useless mouths…, that our success was their assured freedom; but that, if they followed us in swarms…it would simply load us down and cripple us in our great task.”

  To the end of his life, Sherman was convinced that the “old man spread this message to the slaves, which was carried from mouth to mouth, to the very end of our journey, and that it in part saved us from the great danger we incurred of swelling our numbers so that famine would have attended our progress.”

  It was also at this place that Sherman saw firsthand how some of his orders were being implemented by the common soldiers. He encountered one “with a ham on his musket, a jug of sorghum-molasses under his arm, and a big piece of honey in his hand, from which he was eating.” Catching the stern look of his commanding officer, the quick-thinking Yankee stage-whispered to a comrade: “Forage liberally on the country.” Sherman said he “reproved the man, explained that foraging must be limited to the regular parties properly detailed, and that all provisions thus obtained must be delivered to the regular commissaries, to be fairly distributed to the men who kept their ranks.”

  Earlier in this evening, Sherman had another run-in, this witnessed by the colonel of a regiment who related it to the New York Herald reporter. Said the officer, “a number of soldiers…were filling their canteens from a molasses barrel, near Sherman’s headquarters, [and] were quarreling over the division of the syrup, when Sherman passing by cooly crowded in among them, and dipping his finger in it put it to his lips, remarking, ‘Don’t crowd, boys, there is enough for all.’”

  A sack of Rebel mail intercepted in Covington was left at Sherman’s camp for Major Hitchcock to peruse. Among the missives he discovered the letter that Miss Zora M. Fair had composed in Oxford for Governor Brown, recounting her adventures as a spy in Atlanta. From others in the sack Hitchcock gathered that Miss Fair’s friends did not approve of her extracurricular activities. He brought the note to Sherman’s attention and was surprised when the general ordered a detail to knock on doors in Oxford to try to find the girl. “I don’t mean to hurt her,” Sherman explained, “but will give her a scare.” When the search party reported back it was to say that Miss Zora M. Fair was not to be found. Her letter to Governor Brown would remain undelivered.*

  A few miles outside Covington, Mrs. Dolly Sumner Lunt Burge fell asleep fully dressed, expecting Yankees at any moment. During the day she had taken steps to protect her property by sending two of her mules into hiding and secreting food in different places. She also let her black coachman drive the forty fattened hogs she owned into the swamp for safekeeping. Now her only defense was with the Lord. “Oh, how I trust I am safe!” she prayed.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Whites Look Sour & Sad”

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1864

  Midnight–Noon

  Right Wing

  The combination of rain, bad roads, and congestion was turning the Right Wing’s crossing of the Ocmulgee River into a protracted ordeal. “We got up this morning wet & nasty,” groused an Illinoisan in the Fifteenth Corps. The “roads today are very slippery,” seconded an Iowan in the Seventeenth Corps, “which as the country is so hilly, makes difficult marching.” “On both sides of the stream, for many miles, the roads
lay through low, flat ground, sodden with recent rains, and the heavy wagon trains soon converted them into almost bottomless abysses of mud, entailing upon the men severe labor in corduroying, and extricating artillery and wagon trains,” wrote a soldier in the 32nd Illinois. A member of the 4th Minnesota observed that the men’s “blankets are so wet and heavy that some of them could not be dried by fire and had to be left, being too heavy to carry, and so the boys will have to suffer and get along as best they can.”

  In good weather the passage over the Ocmulgee would have been a matter of hours for the Right Wing’s 28,000 soldiers; instead it dragged on throughout the day, into the night, and would extend well into the next morning. Major General Howard opted to keep up the pressure on Macon to divert attention from his increasingly exposed wagon train, which he later described as a “source of anxiety” for him. As the first elements of the Seventeenth Corps reached the small village of Monticello, they turned south and east toward Hillsboro, on the direct road to Macon. Also in motion as part of Howard’s diversionary scheme was Kilpatrick and his cavalry. This force, as Howard later reported, “as soon as over the river, again quickly turned down the first roads toward East Macon.”

  Saturday, November 19, 1864

  The cavalry’s crossing of the Ocmulgee River took place before sunrise and was suitably dramatic. “Great fires were kept blazing on both banks of the river to light up the bridge,” recalled a trooper. “The light was so bright that it reflected the factory, and trees upon the banks, and the crossing columns of troops in the water as clearly and distinctly as if the river had been a mirror.” Getting over the broad stream was no mean feat. “The cavalry cross two by two, each trooper dismounted and leading his horse,” explained one of them. “The artillery, eight horses to a gun, sink the [pontoon] boats to within a few inches of the top, the bridge rising behind the gun as it goes from boat to boat.”