Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  The effort Wheeler was making to keep up the pressure on Sherman’s Left Wing stretched Confederate logistics well past their breaking points. Keeping his troopers in constant contact with the slowly moving Federal columns was all that mattered; consequently, Wheeler never questioned how his men kept themselves supplied. After this campaign had ended, one exasperated citizen wrote the C.S. secretary of war to protest “against the destructive lawlessness of members of General Wheeler’s command.” He continued: “Beeves have been shot down in the fields, one quarter taken off, and the balance left for buzzards. Horses are stolen out of wagons on the road, and by wholesale out of stables at night…. It is no unusual sight to see these men ride late into camp with all sorts of plunder.”

  Still, it was results that mattered, and this day Wheeler delivered something. A Union rider bearing a communication from Major General Slocum to Brevet Major General Davis ran afoul of one of Wheeler’s detachments, which sent the captured missive all the way up the chain of command to Lieutenant General Hardee in Savannah. The note sketched the proposed alignment of Federal forces once contact had been made with Savannah’s principal defensive ring. The dispatch contained accurate intelligence, but it presented only a slight advantage to Hardee, who now had a better idea where to best concentrate his scant resources. All his efforts were aimed at buying time—time for somebody somewhere else to do something that might upset Sherman’s schemes. That someone else was General Beauregard, who attempted a strategy conference in Charleston that Hardee declined to attend, pleading “injury to the service” if he left his post. Beauregard realized that he would have to travel to the threatened city.

  One key question was answered this day: Savannah would not be held to the last ditch. General Beauregard made that clear in a message he sent Hardee from Charleston: “Having no army of relief to look to, and your forces being essential to the defense of Georgia and South Carolina, whenever you shall have to select between their safety and that of Savannah, sacrifice the latter.”

  Hardee had allowed one exception to Beauregard’s directive. Located on Genesis Point near the mouth of the Ogeechee River, Fort McAllister had successfully blunted seven different Union naval efforts in 1862 and 1863 to penetrate the river system it protected. The earthen fort lay some four miles outside Savannah’s intermediate defensive ring and could expect no help if attacked on its land side. Abandoning the position would open the Ogeechee River for Federal craft, which could easily range inland as far as King’s Bridge, where it would be possible to establish a depot for Sherman’s army. Once Sherman tapped into a source of fresh supplies and—even more important—large-caliber siege guns, Savannah was doomed.

  Friday, December 9, 1864

  Hardee never explicitly ordered the Fort McAllister commandant (Major George W. Anderson) to hold until the last, but his actions left no other interpretation. This day Hardee dispatched to the fort rations of bacon, bread, whiskey, molasses, salt, and sundries amounting to what one Southern officer calculated was “thirty-two days’ rations for two hundred men.” The implication was clear: Fort McAllister was to be held to the bitter end.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1864

  Savannah’s defensive scheme was laid out in four zones. Outermost was a fringe region where the primary components were passive: roadway obstructions and bridge demolitions. Closer to the city came a more active exterior “outpost” line about twelve miles out from Savannah’s western boundary. “Detached field works had been hastily prepared at important points, and some light artillery and infantry put in position,” recorded an officer with Hardee’s garrison. No one expected this exterior line to stop the Federals, only delay or deflect them. Arcing about five miles west from town (and up to twice that to the south) was the intermediate or “overflow” line. The latter name acknowledged that large sections of it had been rendered impassable by the simple expedient of flooding heavily irrigated rice fields or cutting dikes to inundate low-lying areas. According to the garrison officer, the defenses here “consisted of detached works, located at prominent points, commanding the established avenues of approach to the city, crowning causeways and private crossings over these lowlands and offering resistance wherever the swamps were practicable.” The final line, tight to the city itself, was best considered a rallying point in case of a breakthrough or a rearguard position covering an evacuation into South Carolina.

  Left Wing

  Monteith Swamp

  Brigadier General Nathaniel J. Jackson’s First Division had the lead today in the general movement of the Twentieth Corps from around Springfield toward Monteith Station on the Savannah and Charleston Railroad. No one needed a compass to recognize that their general course was changing from south to east. Taking the point for Jackson’s command was the 123rd New York, a veteran unit nearly five hundred strong. “The boys were marching along, joking, laughing and singing as usual, when all at once a shell exploded directly over their heads,” related a member of the unit. “If ever soldiers were surprised it was the boys of the 123d Regiment, about noon on the 9th of December, 1864.”

  Ahead of them the thoroughfare was pinched on its left by a wide swamp and on its right by a mixture of swamps, woods, and rice fields, a region known locally as Turkey Roost Swamp. The passage directly ahead was clogged with heavy slashings—chopped trees and brush promiscuously piled together. Behind this was a piece of high ground on which the Confederates had constructed two redoubts, with one field piece manned by veteran North Carolina artillerists, part of the reinforcements that General Braxton Bragg had brought with him from the Wilmington area.

  The cannon fire brought Brigadier General Jackson to the front to assess the situation. The Rebel position was well sited; its gun commanded the road, while the heavy slashings discouraged any effort to tackle the position straightway. Tactical doctrine called for getting the enemy’s attention head-on, then working another force around the side to take it from the flank. Jackson saw no reason not to go by the book. His leading unit—the First Brigade under Colonel James L. Selfridge—was told to “occupy the attention of the enemy in front,” while the next in order—Colonel Ezra A. Carmen’s Second Brigade—was sent into the swampy mess on the right side of the road “with instructions to advance well around the enemy’s left flank and endeavor to get in his rear.”

  Both assignments were easier said than done. A member of one of Selfridge’s regiments recollected the men wading through the “swamp just at the left of the road, [and] jumping from bog to bog, sometimes miring in the black, inky mud and water to their waists.” Officers with the flanking brigade had troubles of their own. “After plunging around a while on horse back, we concluded to dismount & send our horses to the rear,” wrote one of them. A short New Yorker found the swamp deep enough that he was “obliged at one time to swim or sink.”

  Growing impatient at the slow pace of Colonel Carmen’s maneuver, Brigadier General Jackson decided to hedge his bet. Three regiments from Colonel James S. Robinson’s Third Brigade (two advancing, one in support) were peeled off the column to be sent into the mire on the enemy’s right. “We waded through a swamp,” related a soldier in the 31st Wisconsin, who also noted that he and his comrades “had quite a lively time of it.”

  The Confederates blocking the roadway were getting jumpy. Their instructions were “not…to fight the enemy, but merely to hold them in check for a few hours.” How long this meant was a function of their commander’s nerves. It was apparent that the Yankees were flanking them; however, the trick was to hold until the artillerymen could get in their last lick in time to withdraw their piece before it became impossible to do so.

  Along the road, Colonel Selfridge’s men were doing their best to keep the enemy’s focus on them. “Advanced as skirmishers, crawling on our hands & knees through brush & water, through the swamp,” recalled one. On the right, Colonel Carmen reached the enemy’s rear, where he spent some time aligning his five regiments for the charge. On the left, the two regiments—61
st Ohio and 31st Wisconsin—had wormed their way through the morass to confront a stretch of open ground leading to the Rebel right flank.

  Luck played its part in this little action. The time it took Colonel Carmen to move his brigade across the swamp, then line it up to attack, allowed the later-starting pair from Colonel Robinson’s brigade to wriggle close enough to the enemy redoubt to open fire. A few minutes of taking hits from the front and right was enough for the Tarheels in the forward redoubt. A soldier in the 31st Wisconsin long remembered the “most magnificent view of their coat tails standing out at right angles to a pair of legs that were doing their best to take their owner to a place of safety.”

  Even as the two regiments raced forward to claim the forward redoubt, Colonel Carmen’s battle line closed on the second. Had the first still been manned with Confederates, his job would have been more bloody; but with no force firing into their flank, Carmen’s men surged ahead. “The enemy kept blazing away with his gun from the fort, as valorous in his effort as he was poor in his shooting,” scoffed a soldier in the 3rd Wisconsin. By now some details from the First Brigade had scrambled into the emptied first redoubt to open fire on the other position. They only managed to hit Captain Wilson S. Buck of the 3rd Wisconsin. Enough was enough. A soldier in the 2nd Massachusetts remembered seeing “the Johnnies break over the parapet & make for the rear.”

  Hoping to slow the pace of the Yankee advance, a thin line of Tarheels from the 10th North Carolina Battalion briefly barred the way. Playing it by the book, Captain C. M. T. McCauley took station eighty paces to the rear of his skirmishers, directing things from behind a large tree stump. Once the Federals got into range, the captain’s position was fully exposed. A bullet chipped the bark on one side of the stump, then the other. McCauley carefully peered over the top when, as he recollected, there came “three or four baskets full of bullets all around and over him.” He also noticed that his men were expeditiously retrograding, “and not desiring to go contrary to the tactics, maintained his distance pretty well.”

  Racing ahead of Colonel Carmen’s brigade were skirmishers from the 3rd Wisconsin led by Sergeant Wilbur F. Haughawut. “As I came splashing out of the water under [a] full head of steam,” he recollected, “I beheld several heads exposed above the works, and though they were prepared to riddle me with bullets, my comrades’ cheers so elated me that I slackened not till I had cleared the 15-foot ditch filled with water to protect the fort. I scaled the ditch and works and secured the three prisoners with my empty musket.” This trio, plus one more, would prove the only prisoners taken, for, as the sergeant’s regimental commander reported, “the swamp was so deep, and the enemy had a good road at his command, it was impossible for us to overtake him.”

  At a cost of one man killed and seven wounded, the Twentieth Corps had cracked through its sector of the outpost line. Ahead of them lay the intermediate line, a much tougher proposition.

  Ebenezer/Lockner Creeks

  Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis was feeling the pressure. The Kentucky-born commander of the Fourteenth Corps had problems galore this December day. His columns were still struggling to bull through the melange of limited roadways, pervasive swamps, and tricky stream crossings in the area where the Augusta Road crossed the Ebenezer and Lockner creeks. As a direct consequence, his corps—and his corps alone—was running behind Sherman’s schedule, a failing that Davis felt personally.

  He was an officer who needed friends with friends in Washington, where the decision rested whether or not to confirm him in the rank of major general or leave him in an “acting” or brevet capacity. While Davis’s combat record was solid, his career would forever bear the mark of his actions on September 29, 1862, when he shot his former commander dead after a quarrel. His connections were strong enough to sweep the matter under the rug; Davis was not punished, but it was a blemish that would always be there. Having Sherman in his corner was important, but he wasn’t scoring any points as long as his corps was slowing up the entire enterprise.

  It didn’t help that Wheeler’s cavalry appeared to have singled out his command for special attention. His rear guard had been skirmishing constantly over the past few days, further slowing down the pace of his progress. Then there were the slave refugees, more and more of them every day, increasingly retarding the movements of his men and wagons. While in Eatonton, on November 20, Davis had issued a special order on the subject that read in part: “Useless negroes are being accumulated to an extent which would be suicide to a column which must be constantly stripped for battle and prepared for the utmost celerity of movement…. Our wagons are too much overladen to allow of their being filled with negro women and children or their baggage, and every additional mouth consumes food, which it requires risk to obtain. No negroes, therefore, or their baggage, will be allowed in wagons and none but the servants of mounted officers on horses or mules.”

  His directive had been but indifferently enforced, and now Davis found his column handicapped by a crowd of fugitives numbering in the hundreds, if not a thousand or more. Like his commander as well as many of his soldiers, Davis believed that the blacks would be better off returning to their home plantations. There would be time once the war was over for the government to sort out what would happen to this abruptly freed race, but the middle of an active military campaign was not it.

  Six days earlier, at Buckhead Creek, his officers had tried to halt the trailing refugees by preventing them from using the military bridge before it was dismantled. Buckhead Creek had not been enough of a barrier to discourage many, and since then the problem, as Davis saw it, had only worsened. Any sympathetic consideration of their plight was lost on a man imbued with an urgent sense of military necessity and raised in a society that dehumanized its African-American members.

  The bridging of the Ebenezer and Lockner creeks offered Davis a better opportunity than had Buckhead Creek to free his infantry columns from the freed slaves’ clinging embrace. Even as the trestle bridge over Ebenezer Creek was being finished on December 8, Davis positioned provost units at the entryway with orders to turn back any unauthorized blacks. When Brigadier General Absalom Baird’s aide, Major James Connolly, learned of this he was livid. “I…knew [this] must result in all these negroes being recaptured or perhaps brutally shot down by the rebel cavalry to-morrow morning,” he fumed. “The idea of five or six hundred black women, children and old men being thus returned to slavery by such an infernal copperhead as Jeff. C. Davis was entirely too much for my Democracy;…and I told his staff officers what I thought of such an inhuman, barbarous proceeding in language which may possibly result in a reprimand from his serene Highness,…but I don’t care a fig.” Connolly stormed off, his conscience assuaged, but Davis’s orders remained unchanged.

  Human nature being what it is, orders to prevent the blacks crossing at Ebenezer Creek were not entirely effective. “Some hid in the wagons and passed by the officers,” noted an Indiana teamster, but a majority were halted. “As soon as the army was across, the planks were taken up,” reported a member of the 2nd Minnesota. To keep anyone from clambering over the bridge skeleton, what was left was burned. “It was really pitiful to see them and they are afraid of the Rebels and begged hard to get over,” related a Hoosier. “Some of them swam the river but the women and children could not get over.”

  Just as at Buckhead Creek, resourceful individuals began to organize their own crossing. “The Negro men constructed a raft by tying ropes to each end, [and] would pull it back & forth loaded with families of negro women & children,” scrawled a Minnesota diarist. “They would ‘bress the lord’ as soon as they was over.” “The raft would carry only half a dozen and sunk a foot under water then,” added another Minnesotan. “One young fellow slightly deformed crossing with his wife, she stumbled and fell off the raft going to her neck in the water, her husband caught her and dragged her on board again…. They came on shore, she dripping and smiling, and he remarking that he would rather lose his ow
n life than that sweet darling should be drowned.” Tragically, if those who did get over Ebenezer Creek thought that the worst was behind them, they hadn’t reckoned with the cold determination of Davis’s officers.

  A short way down the Augusta Road was Lockner Creek, where Federal engineers had laid a pontoon bridge. Here mounted infantry from the 16th Illinois constituted the rear guard, under the command of Captain Charles D. Kerr. “As soon as we were over the creek, orders were given to the engineers to take up the pontoons, and not let a negro across,” he admitted afterward. “The order was obeyed to the letter.” Weary blacks who had made it from Ebenezer watched in horror as a second crossing was denied them. “Rushing to the water’s brink, they raised their hands and implored from the corps commander the protection they had been promised,” said Kerr. Once the pontoons had been secured, the rear guard moved off, the men closing their ears to the plaintive wails that gradually faded out behind them.

  Later, when this day’s events became widely known and infamous, more lurid details would be added to the story, none of which came from eyewitnesses. Sadly, what had happened was bad enough. Given the determination they had already demonstrated, it is beyond doubt that some number of the blacks did make it across both creeks to remain with the column. It is also tragically probable that a number drowned in the attempt, while others either slipped away or allowed themselves to be rounded up by Wheeler’s troopers. In his official report, the Confederate cavalryman noted only that “a great many negroes were left in our hands, whom we sent back to their owners.” That some were shot or physically abused by their captors is not out of the question; it is even more likely that most of those so corralled were returned to face whatever retribution their owners thought to inflict.