Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  There was never any argument that Brevet Major General Davis was exceeding Sherman’s guidelines, as there is no evidence that the General ever voiced any disapproval of his subordinate’s action. Davis was not ever compelled to account for what he did that December day. Whether or not this action was a factor, Congress eventually declined to confirm Davis’s promotion, so he ended the war holding just a “temporary” rank of major general.

  Even as this humanitarian tragedy was playing out at the tail end of the Fourteenth Corps column, its leading elements were making contact with another piece of Savannah’s outpost line. It happened near or on the plantation of a Dr. Cuyler, at a natural choke point where the wagon road meandered between two swamps. Here the Confederates had built a small earthwork manned with artillerists. The Rebels, reported an Ohio soldier, “opened upon us in a lively manner, and for a time we were at a standstill.”

  While regiments branched away from the column to splash into the swamp to engage the enemy skirmishers, Battery I of the 2nd Illinois Light Artillery came forward to challenge the enemy tubes. Its young commander, Lieutenant Albert L. Coe, acting with what one soldier called “his usual rashness,” galloped ahead of his men. “Sitting there on his horse, fearless of danger, looking for a good position for the battery,” related an onlooker, “a solid shot came whirling along and tore his right shoulder off.” “He was literally torn to pieces,” related a gunner, “and had only time to say, ‘My God, boys, I am killed.’” Once it became clear that the Confederates weren’t going to obligingly clear out, the decision was made to hold station until morning.

  Right Wing

  The soldiers in Brigadier General William B. Hazen’s division, Fifteenth Corps, awoke this morning to find that the Confederates defending the Canoochee River crossing had departed during the night. After sending a brigade to secure the stream’s opposite bank, Hazen ordered up his pontoniers, who had a bridge ready for traffic by late morning. Even as his main body deployed on the other side, Hazen set his leading brigade, Colonel John M. Oliver’s, marching hard for King’s Bridge, an important crossing point of the Ogeechee River.

  Oliver’s force was organized for speed, so the men passed over the Savannah and Gulf Railroad tracks without stopping. Not so the brigade coming behind them, which, after reaching the right-of-way at 3:00 P.M., immediately stopped to wreck it. The “order was for every man to take hold of a railroad tie;” recollected an Ohioan, “then at the command we turned the railroad upside down…. We threw rails of pine in the track then set the whole mass on fire.” An incident here reminded the soldiers that injury could happen at any time and in any fashion. “While this was being done, one man in Company E[, 47th Ohio,] was struck in the bowels by a tie, some of the spikes coming out.” The brigade racing to King’s Bridge arrived there to find that much of the sizable structure was ablaze. After dropping off a regiment to guard what remained, the rest of the brigade marched east to take out its frustrations by destroying the “magnificent…railroad bridge across the Ogeechee…500 yards long.” North of this activity, the troops of Brigadier General John M. Corse’s division began to exploit their lodgment across the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal. Two brigades probed forward, hoping to gain control of a strategic intersection with the Darien Road, possession of which would speed up communication with Hazen’s men away toward King’s Bridge. The only problem was that the Confederates had anticipated this move, with another of their detached works barring the route.

  According to one of Corse’s regimental commanders, the leading Union elements “soon encountered the enemy’s pickets and a brisk skirmish ensued.” The Rebel voltigeurs were steadily pressed back into the defensive work, which one Federal officer described as “breastworks hastily constructed of logs and rails, though in some places dirt had been thrown up.” “The rebels open fire from a mask[ed] battery,” wrote an Illinoisan. “Battery H, 1st Missouri [Light Artillery] replies with vigor and dismounts a rebel cannon.” It was a remarkable display of shooting, considering that the Yankee artillerymen had to set up in a dense woods and had “to fire altogether by the sound of [the enemy]…guns.” Companies from the 81st Ohio and 66th Illinois, in widely spaced skirmishing order, darted ahead to overrun the position, whose defenders had lost heart once their cannon had been knocked out. Pursuit lasted until the Federals reached a wrecked bridge over a branch of the Little Ogeechee River, where they halted to wait for orders.

  While the troops were resting here, they heard the whistle of a railroad train. Some of the soldiers caught sight of an engine pulling cars moving slowly southward on the Savannah and Gulf tracks, not more than a mile distant. The Missouri gunners hastily set up for a shot, but by the time they fired, the train was at extreme range, so no hits were registered.

  The train conductor may have thought he had left his troubles behind him, but his luck was definitely spent. A short while earlier, after the barricade had been overrun, Brigadier General Hazen released his mobile unit, the 7th Illinois Mounted Infantry, for a dash to the south and east. This put the troopers ahead of the train, so when they heard it coming, a few quick-thinking members of the regiment managed to pry up one rail. This was enough to alert the railroad engineer to his danger; he stopped and reversed, hoping to back into Savannah. “The Brigade was too far away to prevent him by its [gun]fire,” said a soldier in the 81st Ohio, “and he would have succeeded, but for the thoughtfulness of a soldier who happened to find a citizen’s mule team near a road crossing. He drove the wagon on the track and shot the mules, forcing a complete blockade. By the time the train reached this, re-enforcements came up and the train was a prize. Colonel [Robert N.] Adams made prisoners of the male passengers, gallantly released the ladies unconditionally, and burned the cars.” Among the haul of male citizens was Richard R. Cuyler, president of the Central of Georgia Railroad.

  For days the Seventeenth Corps had been marching without serious incident along the Central of Georgia, wreaking havoc on President Cuyler’s charge. Resistance was token for the most part, but today the iron rails unerringly led Major General Frank Blair’s men into Savannah’s outpost line for a fight and a deadly discovery.

  This on a day that began on a positive note. “Strong sea breeze in our faces,” wrote an optimistic Illinois diarist. At first, the Rebel videttes manning small barricades were content to fire a shot or two before scampering rearward. That all changed after about five miles, when the Federals encountered another of those Confederate outpost forts. “We found the enemy in position behind an earth-work at the end of a causeway leading through a swamp, the swamp extending around on both their flanks,” reported Major General Joseph A. Mower, commanding the First Division. Mower followed the standard playbook, ordering one brigade “to engage the enemy in front,” while two more waded into the swamp to flank the enemy’s right.

  The result was no different from any of the other outpost line encounters this day. Once the flanking force made its presence known, the Rebels pulled back. The soggy Yankees closed on the road behind the barricade, re-formed their lines, then continued the advance toward Savannah. Behind them, however, a defensive weapon was making its murderous debut in this campaign.

  From the very first days after Sherman commenced his grand movement into Georgia, Confederate president Jefferson Davis had reminded his subordinates that their arsenal included what he termed “subterra shells,” also known as torpedoes (in modern times called land mines). Several munitions officers familiar with the workings of these devices were assigned to Savannah to oversee the weapon’s deployment. It was on the causeway fronting the Rebel earthwork that Sherman’s soldiers blundered into one of several minefields that had been seeded at selected points along the city’s outpost perimeter.

  Sherman, closely monitoring the movement of the Seventeenth Corps, arrived on the scene not long after the barricade had been captured. His habit of yielding right-of-way to combat units on the march paid an unexpected dividend as he and his headquarters party approac
hed the position via an adjacent clearing rather than using the roadway. “Rode into the field,” noted Major Hitchcock, “when we saw by a group of men in the road on our right that something was the matter.” Sherman spurred forward to find himself joining “a group of men standing around a handsome young officer whose foot had been blown to pieces by a torpedo planted in the road.”

  The weapon came in a number of shapes and sizes. A passing artilleryman described one kind: “These torpedoes were 8 inches in diameter and had three wire prongs which stuck up above the surface of the earth just enough so that the pressure of a man’s foot was sufficient to explode the torpedo.” Similar versions were observed by Major Hitchcock, who found them “13 in. long x 7 in. diameter, and at one end were fitted on two brass nuts on which were screwed some sort of friction tube…[with] a sort of nipple projecting from the fuse-hole…. They would hold four or five lbs. powder and explode with terrible effect.”

  The victim in this case was a member of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, which provided a forward screen for much of the Seventeenth Corps. “He was waiting for a surgeon to amputate his leg,” continued Sherman, “and told me that he was riding along with the rest of his brigade-staff of the Seventeenth Corps when a torpedo trodden on by his horse had exploded, killing the horse and literally blowing off all the flesh from one of his legs.” “Poor fellow lay on the ground, covered all but his face with a blanket, only pale, but without a groan or complaint,” added Hitchcock. Even as they were contemplating the fallen officer, a squad of Confederate prisoners with armed escort reached them.

  Sherman now applied his rules of war to the situation. Under certain conditions he accepted his enemy’s use of land mines, but this was not one of them. The finer points of his reasoning were later articulated by two of his staff officers, majors George W. Nichols and Henry Hitchcock:

  Nichols

  In the entrance to forts, or in a breach made in line of works, such implements may be used to repel the assault, but the laws of war do not justify an attempt of the kind which has been so disastrous to-day.

  Hitchcock

  Torpedoes at the entrance to a fort are perhaps justifiable, for the fort itself is a warning. But here they run away, refuse to defend the road, but leave hidden in an open public road, without warning or chance of defense, these murderous instruments of assassination—contrary to every rule of civilized warfare.

  Sherman

  This was not war, but murder, and it made me very angry.

  The General turned to the prisoners, ordered them issued picks and shovels, then put them to work digging up the remaining torpedoes. “One of the Rebels asked where the General was and wished to see him,” wrote an Ohio soldier on the scene. “The guards informed him that it was General Sherman who set him at digging up torpedos. The Rebel looked rather astonished.” According to a gunner in the 1st Minnesota Light Artillery: “A Rebel major, who was in the squad, complained bitterly at this treatment, saying that he was not responsible for what the Savannah Confederates had done. ‘Go on with your digging,’ said Gen’l Sherman, ‘you had no business to be caught in such company.’” Major Hitchcock counted seven torpedos successfully excavated by the Rebel prisoners, who accomplished their task without any injury. “This is a new mode of killing Yanks that us western fellows ain’t used to,” sighed an artilleryman. “We have to step light now.”

  Even as this tableau was playing to its curtain, the head of Major General Blair’s column was running into more of the Confederates’ improvised arsenal. As the Federals neared Station No. 1, Pooler, the Rebels shelled them using a field piece mounted on a railroad car. The unexpected barrage panicked a company of short-timers—men due to be soon mustered out of service—who promptly “disappeared like a covey of partridges in the thick underbrush.” The situation was far more serious for a quartermaster officer, Lieutenant W. F. Hamrick, who came forward from his position of safety to observe the action. The soldier “was on his horse when a 12-pounder shot passed through his chest,” reported an Ohio soldier. “The event distributed a painful shock throughout the whole division,” said an officer.

  As soon as Blair’s men spread out in battle formation, the railroad car and its cannon scuttled toward Savannah. The Yankee boys now took possession of Pooler, which Major Hitchcock observed was “simply a small neat station house or shed, say fifteen or twenty feet square, by side of track.” What most impressed the staff officer was the way the soldiers automatically prepared their position for defense. The men, said Hitchcock, “went to work and built [a] barricade all along their line, made of three rows of logs one above another, about four feet high in all, and in front were placed on end, sloping forward from top log, sticks of cord wood of which they found [a] large pile ready cut and corded for R.R. use at the Station.”

  Now that Savannah’s outpost line had been overcome at each point of contact, Sherman prepared to maneuver his columns for his operation’s next phase. The time had come to begin to link together the various strands of his army in order to tighten his grip on Savannah’s principal defensive ring, its intermediate line. Toward that end, pontoniers marching with the Seventeenth Corps threw a floating span across the Ogeechee at the site of the wrecked Dillon’s Bridge, linking Blair’s men with the Fifteenth Corps. “To-morrow we may expect to concentrate our army so as to form a continuous line about the city of Savannah,” Major Nichols declared.

  There was one more incident to play out before fading sunlight closed this day’s operations before Savannah. A small group of men gathered behind the newly established Union front at the place where the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal intersected the Ogeechee River. Three men stood apart from the others: Captain William Duncan and Sergeant Myron J. Amick, 10th Illinois Cavalry, and Private George W. Quimby, 32nd Wisconsin. A correspondent who saw them later reported that they were “dressed in what may be considered the habits of Confederate citizens, not omitting in their make-ups a moderate allowance of rents and tatters, to give their garb an air of plausibility.”

  The plan was simple enough. Using a small dugout, Duncan and his companions were to descend the Ogeechee River to its mouth, where they expected to contact the Union fleet, hungry for word of Sherman’s arrival. The officer carried with him a short message from Major General Howard as well as instructions for the fleet signal officers regarding the codes to use for communicating with the land forces.

  The three squeezed into the small craft; one in the stern to steer, one in the middle to paddle, and one up front to provide relief for the other two. It wasn’t the most stable of vessels, so the men worried as much about capsizing as they did being captured. Everyone on shore crossed their fingers as the trio pushed off just before sunset. All three were landlubbers born and bred. “I don’t think the two men had any more experience on the water than I had,” admitted Duncan, “and I did not have any.”

  After an hour or so of paddling and drifting on the inky black river, the scouts passed under King’s Bridge, still smoldering from the Rebel torching earlier in the day. Fortunately for them, their passage went unnoticed by the Federal infantry overwatching the place, though the picket fires on the shore gave the reluctant sailors some tense moments. By midnight, the tide having turned against them, they realized they were making very little headway. Any hope they had this night of slipping past dangerous Fort McAllister was extinguished by the surging current.

  The men steered for the right bank, grounded on the shore, then went searching for assistance. They found some slave cabins and, counting on the help they had received so willingly from other blacks during the march, boldly entered one of the huts. “We were not disappointed in finding the occupants friendly and as we required information, we told them who we were,” related Sergeant Amrick. The slaves described the river’s course downstream, then, when the trio proved unable to locate their dugout (which had drifted a bit), the knowledgeable blacks fetched it for them. A glance at the still incoming tide convinced the scouts to hold up until the
next evening. The obliging slaves helped them secrete their craft before leading them to a piece of dense timber where they would be safe for the day. “We were very tired and wrapped ourselves in our ponchos and went to sleep,” said the sergeant.

  General P. G. T. Beauregard spent this day in Savannah receiving all the bad news. The briefing he heard from Lieutenant General Hardee contained nothing that could be construed as positive. The enemy, whose strength Hardee had seriously underestimated at 35,000 to 40,000, was clamping down on the city’s “overflow” line. To oppose them he had maybe 10,000 soldiers of all types, from veterans to armed civilians. He reckoned he had supplies sufficient to feed his force for about thirty days. In order to garrison his intermediate line at even minimum levels, Hardee was shortchanging positions north of the town shielding the all-important connection with Charleston. Finally, Wheeler’s cavalry was off on its own, operating somewhere behind Sherman’s force.

  Beauregard, who already regarded Savannah as lost, chided Hardee for not having made adequate preparations to evacuate his garrison into South Carolina. Apparently, it had been Hardee’s intention to rely on river craft to ferry his soldiers with their accoutrements across the Savannah River, while Beauregard much preferred a floating bridge. At his insistence, Colonel John G. Clarke of his engineering staff was put in charge of the project. Beauregard yet again reminded his subordinate that his orders were “to defend the city so long as consistent with the safety of his command.” He pledged to have the Charleston commander, Major General Samuel Jones, extend his forces closer to Savannah to better protect the all-important corridor north.