Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  “Countermarched at 4 A.M.,” scrawled a weary Seventeenth Corps soldier. “Long and tedious march.” Per Major General Howard’s orders, Major General Blair’s men were disengaging from the railroad bridge and looping around toward Ball’s Ferry. This brought them onto the routes already being used by the Fifteenth Corps, which had gotten there first. As a consequence, recorded a brigadier under Blair, his men “had to cut two roads [through the woods], one for wheels, one for men, much of the way had to be corduroyed in swamp.” The snaky route followed by the Seventeenth Corps brought it alongside a stretch of Central of Georgia Railroad tracks which hadn’t yet been touched. That wouldn’t do, so, reported one infantryman, they “had to tare up Rail road in the evening.” About four miles of track were wrecked in this manner.

  Getting his troops across the Oconee at Ball’s Ferry looked impossible to Major General Peter J. Osterhaus. The terrain was so unforgiving that he could only squeeze forward two regiments—the 57th Ohio and 116th Illinois—and those in a widely dispersed skirmishing formation. They at once engaged the enemy forces dug in on the opposite bank, who replied with an impressive volume of musket and cannon fire. It would cost a lot of lives, and even then Osterhaus wasn’t certain he could force his way across in the face of such determined opposition.

  The worried officer made his way back toward Major General Howard’s headquarters to deliver the bad news. Spotting the Right Wing commander dismounted by the side of the road, writing dispatches, Osterhaus rode over. Without getting off his horse, he blurted out: “General Howard, how can we get any further?” Snapping back that this “was no way to talk,” Howard motioned him down. Listening to his subordinate’s assessment, the Right Wing commander realized that Osterhaus had a case of tunnel vision. Everything was focused on crossing at Ball’s Ferry, forgetting that there were other uses for all the men lined up behind those skirmishing along the river. The trick was to utilize that strength to locate the enemy’s weak points, not to try to bull through a strong point.

  Howard explained that he wanted Osterhaus to use his numerical superiority to “extend his skirmish line north and south, pressing them in, till they could get sight of the other bank or clearing beyond the river.” It was really very simple. “Deploy your skirmishers more and more till there is no reply,” said Howard, certain that somewhere they would run out of Confederates. The Prussian officer hurried off to carry out the task. Howard would later state, without equivocation, that the “Oconee crossing was the most difficult that we had to encounter.”*

  A few miles west of Howard’s headquarters, the villagers of Irwinton were finding out what it meant to be in the path of Sherman’s storm. A member of the 81st Ohio recalled their “burning the Court House and other public buildings, and also a lot of cotton.” A soldier in the 12th Illinois described the town as “mostly burned,” while one in the 50th Illinois proclaimed it “now in ruins.” However, what the Federals could take they could also give back. Early in the evening a shanty fire spread to an adjoining two-story residence, prompting nearby Union soldiers to save it. “We…carried out the goods and then knocked the siding off the porch and got the fire out,” recorded an Illinoisan. “We then carried back the goods. There was an old man and young lady and child living in the house.”

  It was late in the afternoon when Osterhaus reported to Howard that his constantly extending skirmish line had finally outstretched the Confederate defensive zone at a point two miles north of the ferry. Said Howard: “I then instructed him to send in a brigade with the canvas [pontoon] boats, already put together, and push over the men rapidly into the clearings beyond, then come down the river and take the enemy in the flank.” It turned out that the critical site was closer to the camps of the just arriving Seventeenth Corps, so Major General Blair’s men got the assignment.

  Pontoniers from the 1st Missouri Engineers with about thirty infantrymen led by Lieutenant Colonel Kirby of Blair’s staff made their way to the river’s edge, where they learned why the Rebels had not bothered to post a guard. The Oconee narrowed noticeably here into a stretch of rapid-flowing white water, making a pontoon bridge difficult, if not impossible. Finally, one of the Missouri engineers plunged into the swift rapids with a rope tied to his waist. He managed to secure his end to a stout tree on the other bank.

  Using this as a guideline, a “flying ferry” was set up to hand-haul across an officer with thirty men. They established a security perimeter that provided cover while the engineers transported an additional 170 soldiers. This armed party then began picking its way through the swamp in the gathering darkness toward the Ball’s Ferry road, hoping to trap the stubborn Confederates against the river.

  Although unopposed, the Federal crossing of the Oconee was not unnoticed. Even as he was considering a request from the officer commanding at Ball’s Ferry for ammunition and reinforcements, Major General Henry C. Wayne learned that the enemy had secured a lodgment on the east bank. He reported this to Lieutenant General Hardee at Tennille, who was also mulling over reports from Wheeler’s scouts that placed an enemy column near Sandersville. It was clear that the defensive scheme holding the Federals back along the Oconee had been compromised, leaving nothing to do but preserve the fighting forces. Hardee allowed Major General Wayne to withdraw the Ball’s Ferry defenders while instructing Major General Wheeler to reinforce his advance party at Sandersville to buy time for Wayne’s men to clear the area. He then ordered his headquarters relocated eastward to Millen. “I think,” Hardee concluded by late afternoon, “that the enemy is moving on Savannah.”

  Before nightfall the scouts Brigadier General Ferguson had sent off from Milledgeville returned with information about the Yankee movements as well as a straggler they had captured. The officer was unimpressed with the specimen of Yankeehood, who had been caught with “a ladies handsome opera cloak, opera glass and other plunder in his possession.” The cavalry officer made his disgust known and turned the prisoner over to a trooper, who promised to take care of the matter. Ferguson had rafts to build, and paid no attention when he heard a shot not long after dismissing the guard and his prisoner. The next morning, seeing a crowd standing at the riverside, he asked the reason and was told they were staring at a dead enemy soldier. With a sudden chill, Ferguson knew whose body it was.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Poor Foolish Simpletons”

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1864

  About an hour after midnight, the Confederates holding the line at Ball’s Ferry and the Oconee River Bridge began pulling back toward Station No. 13 (Tennille) on the Central of Georgia Railroad. When the first elements arrived there at 5:30 A.M., they received new orders to continue westward as far as Station No. 10 (Sebastopol). It would take several more hours for all the troops that had been holding the Oconee River line to complete their withdrawal through Tennille, which was itself under threat from a Yankee force descending on it from the north.

  Before departing for Millen, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, now fully in his Savannah-defense mode, sent Wheeler’s cavalry to delay the enemy outside Sandersville. Once again, in the absence of any comprehensive strategic plan, senior Confederate officers were acting to protect their own areas of specific responsibilities. Hardee’s overriding concern at this moment was to preserve military assets to augment Savannah’s pitifully small garrison, then estimated at “less than 1,000 men of all arms.” He was virtually certain that Sherman was going to bypass Augusta in favor of Savannah, but he still released Wheeler’s mobile force to assist in defending the northeastern city and arsenal, based on a strategic analysis several days old. General Beauregard, whose job it was to choreograph the military pieces to maximize their impact, was isolated in Macon and unfamiliar with affairs west of the Oconee River. His principal activity this day was to harangue General Hood (via telegraph) to help him identify someone to better manage Wheeler’s cavalry.

  Saturday, November 26, 1864

  The cavalry leader, who warned Sandersville’s
residents on November 25 “to send off all movable property of value,” now reached the threatened place. A little girl who saw him remembered the officer as “a very small, very erect man, dressed in grey, wearing a crimson sash and a large black plumed hat.” “There was not an adult male citizen to be seen,” recorded a trooper in the general’s escort, “but the terror-stricken women swarmed in the street around Wheeler, crying and begging him to leave the town and not bring on a fight there. One woman swung to his horse’s neck, begging him not to fight.” Orders to buy time overrode any humanitarian concerns, so Wheeler ignored the protestations and prepared to resist the enemy’s advance.

  Left Wing

  Afterward, when the fighting was over, a Yankee wit cracked that Sandersville “was well named, for it was the only place thus far that gave indications of having any ‘grit.’” The jaws of the Left Wing closed on the Georgia town with conviction. From the west the Twentieth Corps pressed in, while the Fourteenth closed from the north. Both were expecting trouble. Mounted Infantry of the 9th Illinois screened the Twentieth Corps, making first contact with Wheeler’s troopers. The Rebels, who had blocked the road with felled trees, were fighting dismounted from behind cover along a creek bed. At least one Illinoisan was killed in this initial encounter. Hustling up behind the mounted infantry was the 13th New Jersey, leading the way for Colonel Ezra A. Carmen’s brigade. Three companies fanned out in skirmishing formation, “and with shouts and yells,” swarmed forward. “Presently, the pop-pop-pop of carbines was heard,” reported an anxious soldier in the column. “Then a volley of musketry told that the cavalry were not doing all the shooting.” Men weren’t the only creatures keyed up by the action; as the New Jerseymen pressed back the dismounted Confederates, “the sound of horses neighing was perfectly audible.” An impromptu Yankee squadron formed of “all the mounted officers of the corps” swooped in to assist the foot soldiers.

  To the north, Colonel Robert F. Smith, commanding the First Brigade, Second Division, Fourteenth Corps, had the good sense to lead the way with foraging parties drawn from two regiments—the 16th Illinois and 17th New York—closely succored by their reserves. Once these detachments tripped the enemy’s outpost line, they fell back a short distance to their supports before the combined force then surged ahead. More men were fed into the advance from the 113th Ohio; it was, according to a Buckeye, “warm work.”

  Major General Sherman kept position just behind the Twentieth Corps skirmishers. “I myself saw the rebel cavalry apply fire to stacks of fodder standing in the fields at Sandersville,” he later attested. Major Hitchcock, riding at Sherman’s side, termed this morning’s affair “not a battle,—only skirmish firing, but that pretty rapid and constant for twenty or thirty minutes.” Pure serendipity coordinated the converging attacks of the two Left Wing corps, forcefully shoving the thin Rebel line back on its heels.

  The crescendo of firing brought some Sandersville residents to windows or onto porches in curiosity and consternation. Two white women and several female slaves huddled in a town building. One of the whites, who for a long time was known only as “L.F.J.,” was spotted at her window by a passing Confederate cavalryman who rushed into the house. “For God’s sake, ladies, go into your cellar!” he cried. “Don’t you know those bullets will kill you?” The curious young lady, a recent war widow and mother, suddenly realized her danger. “We have no cellar,” she told the trooper.

  “Then take that poor baby, and put him on a pillow in some of the back room chimneys, and you ladies stay there,” he responded. “We are fighting Sherman’s whole army, and we’ve got to run, and that fast. We thought we were fighting a skirmishing party, but its the whole army.”

  As he turned to go, the young widow begged him to stay with them. “I would gladly do so if I could help you, but I’d only be captured,” he answered. “Lock your doors; stay in the house; if the soldiers try to come in speak politely to them, and ask for a guard. I don’t think the Yankees will harm you. Good-bye.” He paused at the door. “God bless you ladies!” he called out. “To run is the hardest thing I ever did.”

  Run he did, as files of Northern infantry entered Sandersville. “There was a wild chase through the town, our skirmishers broke down the fences & rushed through the back yards & streets in line of battle,” wrote a New Jersey soldier. “The Reb. Cavalry galloped ahead for dear life. Of course the women & children were frightened entirely out of their wits & increased the confusion by their screams.” According to a Massachusetts soldier the “women were in great trepidation, wringing their hands saying, ‘The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming.’” Giving way to temptation, “L.F.J.” peeked through a window. “Looking out, I screamed in terror,” she related. “It seemed as if the whole world was coming down upon us.”*

  Elements of the Twentieth and Fourteenth corps passed the town limits at about the same time, with a slight edge to Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams’s troops. Hardly had the last shot died out before Sherman, followed by his staff, entered Sandersville. “Saw the 20th [Corps] coming in on a road to our right,” recollected an Ohio soldier in the Fourteenth Corps, “and pretty soon Old Billy Sherman came riding down the street with a whole cigar stuck in his mouth, supposed to be the same one he took Atlanta with, as he never lights one.” The General’s party rode through the town square “and went to [a] large brick house set back in [a] yard, with [a] large garden in front and on both sides,” reported Major Hitchcock.

  The aide received an instant lesson in Yankee resourcefulness as he helplessly rattled the locked front door, only to have it opened a moment later from the inside by a Union soldier who had broken in through the rear. The owner, a Southern matron, appeared in the hall demanding that Sherman protect the house because he was a Catholic like her.* “Madam, it’s a pity the Catholics in the South have not acted so as to protect themselves,” Major Hitchcock huffed. Sherman’s orders directed the Twentieth Corps to pass around Sandersville toward Tennille, while the Fourteenth was to camp in the town itself.

  Some of those taking the bypass marched as far as the Central of Georgia Railroad tracks, which only a short time earlier had carried Confederate fighters west to safety. “We immediately commenced repairing the RR,” commented a Wisconsin soldier with what now passed for standard humor. This stretch of the line also employed the cheaper strap iron with the metal pads spiked to long pine stringers. The tracks were pried, piled, burned, and bent, “and that in very quick time too,” the soldier reported, “for it didn’t take quite as long for an army to spoil a road as it does to build one.” Even this noncombat activity was not without risks. A soldier in the 31st Wisconsin was reported fatally injured when a pile of railroad ties fell on him, breaking his back.

  Other Federals who missed their chance to pick through Sandersville did quite well in its environs. “This evening we got chickens, pork, yams & molasses,” recorded a satisfied Minnesotan in the ranks. While a few groups of foragers did scrap with bands of Confederate cavalry roving the periphery of the Federal occupation, others had social rather than military quandaries. A New York soldier, who had just decapitated a chicken with his hatchet, knocked on the back door of the farmhouse in search of some water to wash his hands without thinking about the implications of his act.

  When the door was opened, he found himself facing a group of women “transfixed with terror at the sight of my blood-smeared face and hatchet.” Remembering his upbringing, the Federal politely asked for a basin of water, which was brought out to him by one of the younger women in the group. Now suffering from acute embarrassment for intruding into their lives, the Yankee boy mumbled thanks, and as he hurriedly cleaned up he lamely explained that the lack of army rations forced the soldiers to live off the land. That broke the ice somewhat, so for the next few minutes the Northern boy and the Southern girl engaged in empty small talk, as if they were chatting at a garden party. Then the soldier, finishing his ablutions, turned to go. He briefly considered leaving the bird for the
women to eat but then thought “it would probably be my last opportunity for the day to get food, and—hunger got the upper hand of sentiment, and the fowl went with me.”

  Wheeler’s holding action outside Sandersville, which successfully helped facilitate the escape of Confederate forces to the south, was misread by Sherman as being without purpose. This offense was compounded when the fast-moving combat spilled into the town itself, where several civilian buildings were used for cover by the withdrawing Confederates. Also annoying to him was the destruction of useful supplies by the retreating Rebel cavalry. Several of Sherman’s rules of war had been broken, a fact that made the General, in Major Hitchcock’s words, “very angry.”

  It was fortunate that his staff set up headquarters in an occupied house, since its female owner put a human face on the town’s civilian population, taking them off the retributive table as far as Sherman was concerned. Anything else even remotely “official,” however, was fair game. “The co[u]rt house & jail is on fire,” scribbled an Ohio diarist. “Bands are playing[.] The church bell’s tolling.”

  A stone monument in the town to native son and former state governor Jared Irwin was not touched, save some chipping it suffered from random shots fired during the engagement. Not so lucky were businesses located near the government center, and all cotton stocks. One Federal “went into a large drug store after the boys had cleaned it out and I never saw such a mixture of medicines and glassware. I would hate to take some prescriptions which were compounded.” The only resident who benefited from the Yankee occupation was a prisoner released from the jail before it was torched. “He was a happy man I assure you when we let him loose,” declared a Union soldier.