Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Sherman’s headquarters were established on the plantation of a Mr. Vaun,* located some four miles south of the Murder Creek crossing. Unlike most of his peers, Vaun chose to remain with his property, so this night he had General Sherman as his guest. His personal story was a tired variation on one that the General had heard before: Vaun was a Union man at heart who had been swept up in events beyond his control. Sherman pulled no punches in his reply (Hitchcock thought his boss “not heartless, however terribly straightforward”), but he relented enough to proffer some judicious advice. According to Hitchcock, Sherman advised Vaun “to bring all he could, of corn, wheat, etc., into his house, for safety from the soldiers; gave him to understand they would take all that lay around loose; gave him sacks to put his wheat in, etc.”

  Right Wing

  Many of the tragic events soon to unfold stemmed from failings on the part of both the Confederate and Union cavalry commanders. Each had been in the saddle and constantly on the move since November 15. Each was tasked with operating on his own hook, almost always in a zone of constant contact with the opposition. Thus far each had handled his assignment with the requisite dash and determination, but this afternoon each would botch critical assignments.

  Kilpatrick’s main job was to block the road systems coming out of Macon leading to the northeast, where the slow-moving wagons of the Right Wing offered tempting targets. It had been Major General Howard’s earnest hope that Kilpatrick would maintain his outposts tight to East Macon, but the cavalry officer opted instead to fall back to the Griswoldville area. There, while some of his men continued the destructive work begun by the 9th Michigan, others struggled to maintain a security perimeter against persistent Confederate probing. At noon Kilpatrick reported repulsing several attacks but promised to hold the line of the railroad. Not long after dispatching this to Howard, he decided to pull back farther east, maintaining his hold on the useless railroad and uncovering Griswoldville, thus allowing Wheeler’s men to reoccupy it. The first layer of protection Howard had counted upon to shield his lumbering wagons was not in place anymore.

  The ruined village itself was no longer a prize of value, but what was important was the access it provided to the local road network. Once in control of the portal, Confederate Major General Wheeler was well positioned to throw scouts forward to clarify Union dispositions and to concentrate his command to strike a hard blow. He did neither. Thanks to this failure to undertake a thorough reconnaissance, his superior in Macon had to operate with assumptions and educated guesses, setting the stage for a disastrous clash of arms not twenty-four hours in the future. Rather than making a fist to smite the enemy, Wheeler snapped fingers individually, dissipating his strength into small raiding parties that filled the byways, making life miserable for the Union wagon guards; but at no point did the Rebels do more than menace the Federals.

  Isolated in Macon, with his telegraphic connections north and east broken, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee came to several critical conclusions. First, he reckoned that the city was no longer under a direct threat from Sherman’s forces. Second, if not Macon, then he reasoned that Augusta must be the true object of the Yankee operation. With each city containing irreplaceable military and manufacturing assets, it was inconceivable that a campaign on the scale that Sherman was waging would not target one or both places. With Macon now off the endangered list, the defensive-oriented Hardee could think only of repositioning his military pieces to protect Augusta.

  Third, in the absence of any contrary information from Wheeler, Hardee assumed that the Federal line of march was to the northeast, leaving the Central Railroad clear from Gordon to the coast.* Since time was of the essence, it would be quicker for Macon’s now superfluous infantry forces to march the twenty or so miles to Gordon. Once there, Hardee believed they could catch trains to carry them to Augusta.

  Orders were issued to the various militia units around the city to pack up in preparation for a move east the next day. One unit of state troops, Brigadier General Reuben W. Carswell’s First Brigade of the Georgia Militia, was told to march right away. The citizen-soldiers grumbled as they tramped out of town, but this early departure would save their lives. Hardee then packed his own bags, wanting to return to Savannah as soon as possible, but taking a more prudent course south via rail, then overland by horse to a connecting railroad line that would carry him into the coastal city. Before departing, the lieutenant general sent off a dispatch to General Beauregard: “Satisfied that there will be no attack upon this place, I leave tonight for Savannah by way of Albany and Thomasville. Main body of the enemy moving on Augusta, the movement in this direction evidently for the purpose of destroying Central Rail Road which has been partially accomplished, stopping for the present all communication with the east.”

  The mounted raiders dispatched by Wheeler made contact with numerous elements of the Right Wing throughout the afternoon and into the evening. An Indiana soldier in the Third Division, Fifteenth Corps (moving on the direct Gordon road out of Clinton), scribbled in his diary: “Rebs attacked our [ammunition] train & the 48th [Indiana] & 59th [Indiana] had to go back, found Co. K deployed as skirmishers. Rebels left at dark.”* Trouble was also brewing for the First Division, en route from Clinton to a bivouac at a crossroads northeast of Griswoldville. “This evening the rebel cavalry made an attack on our train but did not accomplish anything,” noted a journal keeper in the 97th Indiana. The Confederate troopers, elaborated a man from the 9th Iowa, “tried to cut off and capture our train but we drove them off without any loss.” The Johnnies, bragged an officer in the 25th Iowa, “went off in a bigger hurry than they came.”

  Following behind the First Division was the Second, which would camp tonight north of Griswoldville, near a small church called Pitts Chapel. These bluecoats encountered some more of Wheeler’s men. “The rebels attacked our train while going through town [of Clinton],” wrote one of the 30th Ohio. “We drive them back in less than no time.” A few Confederates even struck at the very tail end of the Right Wing, the main wagon train guarded by Corse’s Fourth Division. “Met the rebel cavalry,” recorded a diarist in the 66th Illinois. “We drove the Johnnie rebs.” Howard’s orders called for the Second Division to make a demonstration toward Griswoldville on November 22, in the hope of further diverting attention from the wagon trains.

  The potential danger posed by these pinpricks was felt as far off as Gordon, where, as a soldier in the 11th Iowa recollected, the men “corralled the wagons four miles in the rear, where the First Division of the Seventeenth Corps went into bivouac, to safeguard the train, since the rebels’ cavalry have appeared both in front and in the rear.” However, instead of the recon operations representing a prelude to a more serious attack, the probes were the entire effort.

  The head of the Seventeenth Corps column reached Gordon late in the afternoon. The senior Confederate officer at that post, Major General Henry C. Wayne of the Georgia Militia, had been shifting men and supplies east all day, sending everything to the Oconee River bridge, where he planned to make a stand. The last militiamen were clambering onboard the last train when a volunteer aide rode in with word that the enemy was just three miles distant. The scout was a local veteran named Rufus Kelly, disabled by the loss of a leg earlier in the war, though the injury had not quenched in the slightest his resolve to combat the hated Yankees. Having delivered his message, Kelly stared hard at the soldiers climbing onto the train.

  “General, what does this mean?” he asked. “Don’t we make a stand?”

  Wayne tried to explain his plan to defend the Oconee River bridge, but Kelly wasn’t hearing a word of it. He launched into a tirade of impressive proportions. “Well, you damned band of tuck-tails, if you have no manhood left in you,” he finished, “I will defend the women and children of Gordon.”

  Kelly wheeled his horse about to ride toward the enemy, most decidedly looking for trouble. Wayne watched him go, waited until everyone had boarded, then signaled the engineer to
get moving. As the train pulled away from the platform, Wayne observed a “few scattering shots [from the enemy]…dropping harmlessly around it.” He and his men would live to fight another day.*

  This night Major General Howard sent a positive report to Major General Sherman. He passed along news from his scouts that Milledgeville appeared to be undefended. Howard reported his belief that the Macon garrison numbered between ten and fifteen thousand men; and that generals Beauregard, Hardee, and Joseph E. Johnston were all present directing the defense.*

  Howard’s troop movements, along with the estimates of enemy strength circulating around the various Right Wing headquarters, led some officers to credit Sherman with a decision he never made. “General Sherman did not deem it advisable to enter Macon, as it was very heavily garrisoned by Cobb’s militia and Hardee’s old troops,” declared a Fifteenth Corps officer. “It would have cost us many lives to take the city, and of course the wounded would have been left behind. I think it was very wise in General Sherman in avoiding a conflict at that city.”

  It was Howard’s hope that November 22 would see most, if not all, of his vulnerable wagons safely under cover at Gordon. No one was anticipating any significant combat, but the components were in place, and a chain of events already set in motion that would lead directly to a senseless bloody battle.

  CHAPTER 13

  “We ‘Shot Low and to Kill’”

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1864

  Milledgeville

  Left Wing

  The residents of Georgia’s capital awoke to the coldest morning in recent memory. The penetrating chill put an edge to the unease everyone felt. Those who had spent the previous days hiding their valuables began to second-guess themselves and wonder if they were so clever after all. Others who had waited to take such drastic steps now feared it was too late. For every voice of calm reason there was another reciting a litany of horrors ascribed to the Yankee horde that was about to descend on the city. It was the anticipation that was hardest.

  The nearest to Milledgeville that the Fourteenth Corps would come today was about twelve miles to the northwest, in the area around Cedar Creek. Sherman had decided to let the Twentieth Corps have the honor of “taking” the town, so this day Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis’s men made abbreviated marches, using the opportunity to tighten their columns, which the lousy weather and bad roads had spread out.

  The Union boys greeted a raw day after a bitter night in the open. “Very cold last night,” shivered an Ohio soldier, “…so cold that sleep did but little good.” The silver lining, as seen by a positive thinker in the 2nd Minnesota, was that “the cold wind last night dried the mud.” Nevertheless, recorded another Ohio soldier, the “men really suffered with the cold though we marched rapidly.”

  Tuesday, November 22, 1864

  The relatively short distances covered by most units, coupled with the general concentration that was taking place and the relative absence of any Rebel cavalry, meant that many wandered from the line of march. “Nearly every man went out foraging and nearly all sorts of delicacies were brought into camp,” gloated an Illinoisan. A party from the 75th Indiana “foraged sweet potatoes, sorghum, fodder and salt.” A Wisconsin man could not “help feeling pity for these citizens whose every particle of provisions is mercilessly consumed by our troops.”

  East from the Fourteenth Corps, the Twentieth was tramping on a course set for Milledgeville. Weather conditions were no better for this portion of the Left Wing. “Miserable, cloudy, windy, dreary start of a morning,” complained a Garden State quartermaster, “and never I think experienced a colder one at this time of year in N.J.” When a New Yorker in the 149th regiment went to sleep last night his “blankets were wet,” and when he awoke this morning he “found them froze.” The crusty mud road surface proved a mixed blessing, at least according to a Wisconsin soldier. “It told heavily on the shoes and on the half-shod feet; for many of the men had started out poorly shod, or had thrown away their new shoes rather than ‘break them in.’” As a result the Federals “hobbled along at a brisk pace.”

  John Geary’s division, which had been on detached service, rejoined the main body near Dennis Station, so the entire Twentieth Corps closed on Milledgeville. The route they followed took them past a tidy plantation owned by a Reverend Jordan. A New Jersey soldier was quite taken with the “extensive gardens…well cared for and the house [was] surrounded by some of the most elegant shrubbery and evergreens I ever saw.” An Ohioan looked past the elegant facade and did not like what he saw. The Reverend Jordan, he declared, “lives like a prince amongst serfs.” Added another from Wisconsin, “the good people had left &[,] save in the house which was g[u]arded[,] the boys helped themselves to all they wanted.” By the time the trailing division reached Jordan’s place, Sherman’s men had cleaned “him out of everything available.”

  The Left Wing pontoniers were on the job at the Little River, near a ruined railroad bridge. The stream here was 250 feet wide, so it took ten pontoons to finish the job. The ground on the bridge’s south side was low and swampy, which caused a few problems for the wagons, but nothing as severe as the mud wallow of recent days.

  Once the head of the column drew near to Milledgeville, Major General Slocum detailed Colonel William Hawley to forge ahead to secure the town with his regiment (the 3rd Wisconsin) accompanied by the 107th New York. As Hawley later reported, “I immediately proceeded to establish patrols in the streets, and detailed suitable guards for public buildings, including the State House, two arsenals, one depot, one magazine for powder and ammunition, and other buildings containing cotton, salt, and other contraband property.”

  The occupation plan called for the First and Second divisions to pass through the town, crossing the Oconee River on the wagon bridge (not destroyed) to camp along the river’s east bank; while the Third Division would bivouac on the west side near the span. The east side campers settled on Beulah Plantation, owned by a Georgia legislator and lawyer named William McKinley. Major General Slocum set up his headquarters in town at the Milledgeville Hotel. The passage of the troops would extend throughout the afternoon and night and well into the next day, long after Milledgeville’s residents went to bed, leading many to date the first day of occupation as November 23.

  According to a New Yorker in the first brigade to enter, “we were escorted through the town by the regimental band, which played Yankee Doodle for the edification of the remaining inhabitants.” An Illinois comrade thought the white residents “a blank-looking set of people, never dreaming that the hated Yankees would ever invade their noble domain.” Another Illinoisan, who trudged through a few hours later, recalled white flags everywhere plus an impromptu review by General Slocum, standing on the hotel’s steps. The smell of smoke was in the air from the burning State Penitentiary, which had been torched by the inmates left behind who had decided not to volunteer for the Confederate cause.

  Then there were the blacks, described by a New Jerseyman as “old negroes and young negroes, males and females, house servants generally, blessing us—cheering us—laughing—crying—praying—dancing and raising a glorious old time generally, even trying to hug the men as they go along.” An Indiana officer jotted down some of the different cries of joy he heard: “God bless you! You’ve come at last. We’ve been waitin’ for you-all more’n four years!” “Lawsee, Massas! I can’t larf nuff; I’se so glad to see you!” A few Hoosiers were still chuckling over one of the first sights to greet them, a slave cabin flying a white flag. When one of the soldiers asked a black woman the reason for the signal, she replied: “Why-why, that’s to let you’uns know that we’uns have surrendered!”

  Not all encounters were so lighthearted. Some African-Americans attempting to connect with Sherman’s columns were intercepted by Rebel cavalry, eager to inflict object lessons. One such incident, overstated for effect, is found in the diary of an 8th Texas cavalryman, whose November 22 entry reads: “To-day we followed on [after the Federal
columns] and only whipped about 1,000 negroes, who were on their way to the enemy.”

  For William Tecumseh Sherman the capture of Milledgeville represented the end of the first phase of his grand movement into Georgia. Once he reached the state capital and was debriefed by his principal lieutenants, he would have to make some critical decisions to answer the question: What next? Thus far he had been blessedly detached from day-to-day matters for the most part, free to drift with the great current of events he had set in motion; observing and reacting, but unencumbered by the burdens of command. All that would change when he entered Milledgeville, so uncharacteristically though perhaps understandably, Sherman stole another indolent day. His headquarters moved just a short distance this day, even though, as a bored staff member pointed out, “We had time to get into Milledgeville.”

  The headquarters party rode slowly, hunched up against the wind’s cold bite. “Not so much shooting on the flanks today,” noticed Major Hitchcock, “but soldiers all the time out ‘foraging’ and straggling.” As if still trying to convince himself of the rightness of Sherman’s philosophy, Hitchcock added: “To a novice there seems much more of this than consistent with good discipline.”