Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Beauregard’s earlier public proclamation was given firm stamp of approval by the editorial writers for the Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel. “Let not this stirring appeal go by unheeded!” they exclaimed. “Act in accordance with its burning words! Act promptly. Rally around the banner of your own chosen General, and all will be well.” In distant Richmond, a well-placed War Department clerk, after reviewing all communications received, nodded approvingly at Governor Brown’s call-up of Georgia’s white male citizens. “I think Sherman is in danger,” wrote the official.

  In Camp Lawton the process of transferring the Union prisoners elsewhere was accelerated. By now the infirmary (such as it was) had been entirely evacuated, and those remaining behind the stockade walls endured a seemingly endless wait as the most important lottery in their life plucked lucky individuals from their midst.

  For Sergeant Lucius W. Barber, part of Sherman’s forces in the Atlanta Campaign until he was captured in early October, this was a winning day. Thanks to an acquaintance, Corporal Rollin Mallory, Barber’s name was added to a list of POWs to be exchanged. The two tried without success to have their friend, Private Millen Mackey, tacked on, but there was no room. Besides, the men were told that all remaining prisoners would be transferred within a week. Then, as their names were called, an opportunity presented itself when someone failed to answer. Mackey made a move to step forward but then held back, believing it better to wait until his exchange could be official.*

  Barber passed through the stockade gate on his way to the parole station. “We were free,” he exulted. “The earth, the air, the very ground we trod on, seemed to echo our soul’s deep gratitude.” Within minutes, Barber and his companion had clambered aboard a train heading for Savannah.

  Located some nine miles east of Macon at Station No. 18 on the Central of Georgia Railroad, the “thrifty little village” of Griswoldville was the by-product of Yankee grit, determination, and ingenuity. The town was laid out around a manufacturing complex created by Samuel Griswold, a transplanted Connecticut businessman and entrepreneur. Built before the war to produce cotton gins, the main factory had followed the money when war came, and by 1864 was turning out a Confederate version of the Colt Navy Revolver.

  Griswoldville had been spared any serious damage from a major Union cavalry raid in late July thanks to the presence of a sizable militia force. Not four months later, the overall picture had changed. Gone was the protection afforded by the citizen-soldiers, replaced by a thin screen of outposts and pickets, intended to alert Macon of any threat in time to hustle forward a reaction force to meet the danger.

  The trip wires failed to perform their assigned task thanks to the resourcefulness of Captain Frederick S. Ladd, leading a raiding party drawn from three companies of the 9th Michigan Cavalry, part of the Second Brigade in Kilpatrick’s division. Ordered to scout as far as Griswoldville and damage what he could, Ladd successfully detoured around the Rebel roadblocks to reach the village, undetected, not long after 10:00 A.M. Hoping to make up in boldness what he lacked in numbers (the raiding party numbered between sixty and a hundred troopers), Ladd ordered his command to charge yelling into town with pistols popping.

  While civilians dashed for cover, the Michigan boys burned some of the outbuildings, then went after the pistol factory itself. According to a member of Ladd’s party, “The arsenal was guarded by a body of Confederate soldiers, but they were driven off, and in a few moments the building was in flames.” Then, as Colonel Smith D. Atkins (commanding the Second Brigade) later reported: “After this work was accomplished he [Ladd] captured one of the enemy, and compelled him to lead his little party out of the town on a route to avoid the enemy, who had all the roads in their possession.” Two Michigan troopers left behind were captured, and a third—slightly wounded in the hip—was carried out.

  Noon–Midnight

  Left Wing

  Before the Oconee River ferryboats operating at Parks Mill were destroyed, a small Yankee expedition landed on the east bank, intent on mischief or misinformation, or both. Not quite two months after the fact, Brigadier General Geary took credit for the operation, though the soldiers themselves—members of the 134th New York—declared that the action was the result of a mistaken appreciation of where the division was heading.

  Whether under orders or in search of better pickings, about twenty New Yorkers crossed the Oconee, rounded up some horses, then set off for the nearest town, Greensboro. There they presented themselves as the vanguard of a mighty horde. Greensboro’s mayor was told that the Federals had been “given orders to search, but that public property was all they were ordered or expected to burn.” Things were moving along in a smooth fashion until several of the party liberated some liquor stocks, and soon the plundering got out of hand. “They took from Mrs. Philip Robinson one gold watch; from Mrs. William D. Davis, one watch; from Mr. John A. Miller about two hundred dollars and from Mrs. Mary Colt two hundred dollars,” recorded the mayor.

  Then, as abruptly as they had arrived, the Yankees were gone. They would rejoin Geary’s column in a few more days, though not without losing several members as stragglers. Called to account for themselves, they explained that they had boasted to Greensboro’s mayor that Sherman’s command, “numbering from fifteen to fifty thousand, was…moving on the town.” Geary liked the tale so much that he made it part of his official report, writing that the visiting band “convinced the inhabitants [of Greensboro] that the most of General Sherman’s army was close by with designs upon Augusta.”

  The bulk of Geary’s division moved south from Parks Mill, following the Oconee until Denham’s Tanyard and Leather Factory was reached. The operation there had reaped the bounty of a Confederate States government contract to make footwear for the Rebel army. “The shoes were given to any one that wanted them,” recorded a Pennsylvania soldier. “What leather was wanted was taken, and the remainder destroyed.” Here Geary camped for the night.

  The two other Twentieth Corps divisions, on a similar course approximately fifteen miles to the west, slogged along bad roads but still managed to forage supplies. “Every house along the road was visited by the men,” wrote a Michigan diarist, “and molasses, sweet potatoes, poultry & pigs were confiscated without regard to quantity and quality.” So plentiful were the foodstuffs that an amused Massachusetts man would note that “the reg’t passed 300 bushels of sweet potatoes lying by the road-side, & that after a whole Army Corps had gone by.”

  There was something about this gray-visaged day that brought out sentiments of just retribution in even the least militant of soldiers. “Every cotton shed has to be purified by fire,” observed the surgeon with a Michigan regiment. “The smoke ascends to the skies bearing aloft the prayers of the Yanks for success & the curses of the rebs for our defeat.” Reflecting on the large quantities of food and equipment he saw destroyed today, a New Jersey quartermaster wrote: “I believe every man in the army would walk 5 miles out of his way even to set fire to a hundred fences that had been used merely for camp at night, sometimes they carry to our camps arm fulls to sleep on but they are sure to fire the same when leaving.”

  Union scouts, who were operating well ahead of the heavy columns, actually entered the outskirts of Georgia’s capital late this day. According to Milledgeville residents who encountered them, the enemy riders asked about Confederate troop strength in the town while they cautiously poked around. Then they pulled down telegraph wires, scooped up a few horses, and departed as enigmatically as they had arrived.

  By the time accounts of those sightings spread around town, they were muddled enough to be worthless. “We would hear on the road first one and then another rumor,” recorded Anna Maria Green, daughter of the superintendent of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum, “and all so contradictory we could place little confidence in any.” Green found time to visit with some male friends who were heading off to Gordon to join in Georgia’s defense. One of them seemed positively giddy at the prospect. Even as she was bidding
her acquaintances good-bye, Green could see another member of the household furtively hiding valuables. It was not a good omen.

  Some twenty-seven miles northwest of the Georgia capital, the lead elements of the Fourteenth Corps were camping for the night below Eatonton Factory on one of the main roads leading to Milledgeville. The factory itself was now a ruin, thanks to the personal attention it received from Captain Orlando M. Poe. Sherman’s chief engineer didn’t bother to record the feat in his official report, but his diary entry for November 20 laconically notes that the “factory was burnt by Gen’l Sherman’s order as well as all cotton in sight.” An Ohio soldier on the sidelines wrote that it was “a large cotton factory which employed about 60 girls manufacturing clothes for the Rebel army. We burnt the factory, notwithstanding the girls could not see the use of doing it.”*

  In spite of the rain and mud, the Fourteenth Corps did a thorough job locating food. “Plenty of forage: pork, potatoes and corn meal,” recorded a Wisconsin diarist. “The foragers brought in horses, mules, oxen and sheep, with plenty meal, meat, sweet potatoes and other delicacies,” seconded an Ohio man. Added a Minnesotan: “We have marched through a very level and fertile country and forage is abundant…. If any one fails to live well it may be attributed to his own laziness.”

  It took until sundown for the rear of the Fourteenth Corps column to pass entirely through Shady Dale, but each segment was greeted as if it was the first to arrive. “Here the colored peoples give us our entertainment,” noted an Indiana boy. A new band would appear, begin to play, and in a short time it would be surrounded by a throng of black women and children “dancing and bobbing their heads in ecstasies of delight.”

  When the First Division settled into camp near Shady Dale, the general commanding, William P. Carlin, was witness to a remarkable scene. One of the bands had launched into yet another performance of “John Brown’s Body” when about a dozen young African-American girls came out of nearby houses, “formed into a ring around the band at the head of the column, and with a weird, plaintive wail, danced in a circle in a most solemn, dignified, and impressive manner,” wrote Carlin years afterward. “What their meaning was I did not know then, nor do I now, but I, of course, interpreted it as an expressive of goodwill to our cause.”

  Sherman’s headquarters for the night were about a mile north of the Eatonton Factory, which Major Hitchcock pointedly wrote of in the past tense. Now that the two columns of his Left Wing were converging, Sherman was anxious to avoid gridlocking the limited roads. He sent a note off to Major General Henry Slocum, riding with the Twentieth Corps, confirming that their point of concentration was to be the Georgia capital. “In moving to Milledgeville, keep your force on the east of the railroad, and General Davis will keep his west,” Sherman instructed. Hoping to hear back from Slocum, Sherman decided to hold his headquarters in place until noon, November 21.

  Orders written this night for the Left Wing reflected growing concern over the soldiers using their weapons to gather food. “The discharge of fire-arms by foragers and others has become an evil which must be stopped,” proclaimed a Fourteenth Corps circular. In the Twentieth Corps, the “most stringent measures” were demanded by headquarters “to stop the waste of ammunition occasioned by the indiscriminate firing by foraging parties.” The refugee procession trailing the Fourteenth Corps was greatly irritating its commander, Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis. His published orders fumed that the coffle had grown so much that it “would be suicide to a column which must be constantly stripped for battle and prepared for the utmost celerity of movement.” Blacks were barred from riding in army wagons or atop horses and mules unless they were identified as officer servants.

  Local blacks were telling Major Hitchcock that Southern forces would surely defend Milledgeville and that they would have a battle for the place. “I don’t think the General expects them to fight there,” was the aide’s comment. He also noted, “Artillery was heard this evening, far to the S. and S.W.—probably Kilpatrick near Macon.”

  Right Wing

  A band of heavy rain moved through Jones County, catching the Seventeenth Corps strung out on the road from Hillsboro to Blountsville. “It has commenced to rain again & the roads are almost impassable,” noted an Illinois diarist. A weary Wisconsin soldier recollected the day’s tramp as “awful for man & beast,” while a journal keeper in the 20th Illinois could only manage that the “mud is deep.” The weather was playing havoc with Major General Frank Blair’s tactical arrangements. An Iowan marching with the rear guard observed that “the roads have become so muddy that it is impossible for the artillery to keep up with the infantry.” Matters became ugly for those guarding the herd, one soldier remembering that “during the day a number of cattle mired down in a deep, boggy swamp by the roadside, when a detail was ordered out to shoot them.”

  Major General Blair singled out one of the few mounted regiments in his command for special censure in a message dispatched this night. Colonel George E. Spencer, 1st Alabama Cavalry, was upbraided for the “outrages committed by your command during the march” and told that unless things improved Blair was prepared to “place every officer in it under arrest.” The general’s tirade had the intended effect, as no other transgressions by the 1st Alabama Cavalry are noted in the official record of the campaign.

  Things were somewhat better for the Fifteenth Corps, since these men had a shorter distance to march. “Lots of rain,” wrote a concise Indiana diary keeper. “In the mud men wet and muddy from head to foot,” recorded a Missouri officer with Scripture on his mind. “Jordan are a hard road to travel.” Once the soldiers reached Clinton they found no signs of the earlier skirmish. “All quiet on our arrival,” wrote a grateful Indiana soldier. Rumor, not impeded by the bad weather and roads, darted impishly among the columns. “This evening the cavalry dashed in on the part of Macon that is on the west side of the river,” wrote an Illinois soldier. “They took the town.”

  Shortly after noon, Brigadier General Kilpatrick led his cavalry division out of Clinton, under orders from Major General Howard for “a second demonstration from the left bank [of the Ocmulgee River] against Macon.” A New York Herald correspondent translated these instructions to mean mounting a threat against Macon, “but not sacrifice life in its capture.”

  The flamboyant cavalry commander had a pensive side that grasped the broader strategic implications of the role assigned to his mounted division. “There was a rebel force at Augusta,” he later wrote, “another in Savannah, another at Milledgeville, and still another at Macon, along with the State Militia of Georgia and Wheeler’s Cavalry, ready to strike at the first opportunity. If these forces could have been massed—if Hardee could only have known Sherman’s objective point and ultimate intentions—I doubt if the march would have been a success.”

  Kilpatrick’s troop dispositions reflect his intention to feign attack. He dropped off his First Brigade (save one regiment) to block the main road to Macon, while using his Second Brigade on a sweep to the southeast in order to approach the city from its eastern flank. A single regiment (the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry) covered a road splitting the difference between the pair. For the First Brigade, November 20 was marked by skirmishing and sharp encounters with enemy pickets. (“They made a stubborn resistance to our march,” recalled a Hoosier.) For the Second Brigade, November 20 was marked by something approaching a battle.

  Closing on Macon via the Milledgeville Road, Kilpatrick’s advance (92nd Illinois Mounted Infantry) struck a Rebel roadblock some four miles from the city. The men here were from Wheeler’s command (part of Colonel Charles C. Crew’s all-Georgia brigade) and did not panic. When a battalion of the 92nd acted to flank the barricade, Crews’s troopers countercharged, only to run into a wall of gunfire laid down by two hundred fast-firing Spencer carbines. The Georgians scattered, chased for a short distance by the 10th Ohio Cavalry. Speaking at a postwar reunion, the brigade commander asked, “Do you recollect how that Rebel brigade scattered
in utter confusion in every direction through the woods and fields?”

  As this action was playing out along the Milledgeville Road, Kilpatrick with his headquarters escort rode south to the railroad tracks and telegraph line. Although the connection through Gordon to Augusta had been cut at Griswoldville at about 10:30 A.M., the line to Macon was intact. Kilpatrick watched as the signal corps officer on his staff tapped into the No. 1 wire and, after a few minutes of listening, handed him a message intercept. Addressed to General Beauregard, the note read: “For God’s sake hurry up troops and save the bridge over the Oconee.” It was signed, “Hardee.” When Kilpatrick’s operator tried to learn more, he was unmasked by an alert Macon telegrapher. A brief dialogue ensued:

  Yank: Please inform Gen. Hardee that Gens. Howard and Kilpatrick will take breakfast with him in the morning.

  Reb: All right; we’ve got Stoneman’s old quarters ready for them.

  Kilpatrick was enjoying himself hugely until the line went dead, cut by another Federal party carrying out the orders of destruction. Sighed Kilpatrick, “Our fun was over.”

  Once the roadblock manned by Crews’s troopers had been dispersed, Kilpatrick continued to press toward Macon. Consciously or not, he was following a course that had been used by his unfortunate predecessor, Major General George Stoneman, during his disastrous July raid. Before long, Kilpatrick’s column had reached Walnut Creek, about two miles outside Macon.

  Here the ground favored the defense, with the road west of the creek climbing up a steep hill that was flanked to the north by a second rise. The Confederates had established a strong point on the high ground in an old frontier outpost, Fort Hawkins, while on the lower crest, a farm owned by Samuel S. Dunlap, there was a two-gun battery with infantry support. The defenders (numbering 1,000 to 1,200) were a mix of militia and veterans. As an indication of the South’s strained resources, some of the steadiest troops were artillerymen fighting as infantry because their units lacked sufficient horses to pull the cannon.