Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Amid the day’s bustle, one of the chief actors in the drama quietly slipped off the stage. General Braxton Bragg, rushed over from the North Carolina coast by Jefferson Davis to guide efforts from Augusta, packed his bags to depart from Charleston, where he had conferred with Beauregard. With no real authority for him to wield, Bragg was feeling very much like a fifth wheel. Declaring that his “services [were] not being longer needed in this department,” he transferred himself back to North Carolina. Watching him go, a clerk in the Richmond War Department mused that Bragg’s principal contribution had been to play “the part of chronicler of the sad events from Augusta.”

  As promised, the USS Harvest Moon steamed up the Ogeechee River from Ossabaw Sound, carrying Major General Sherman and Rear Admiral Dahlgren. Breakfast was served and consumed by the time the boat hove to near the captured redoubt. Dahlgren now played the part of tourist, with Sherman his guide. The naval officer thought McAllister “a truly formidable work; so crammed with bombproofs and traverses as to look as if the spaces were carved out of solid earth, a very strong and complete work.” Also taking the tour was Major Hitchcock, who spent a while gazing at the spiky ditch alongside the steep fort wall and thinking about that awful climb to the parapet. “How on earth they ever did what they did is wonderful,” he proclaimed. The biggest surprise for Dahlgren was the sight of the surrendered Rebel garrison, “still there cooking, etc., as if nothing had happened.”

  Sherman’s break from the war ended as the group piled aboard the admiral’s barge to be rowed up to Cheves’ Rice Mill, where horses and more staff were waiting. Here the two leaders parted; Sherman continued on to Major General Howard’s headquarters, while Dahlgren returned to Fort McAllister. When the rear admiral reached it, he noticed approvingly that the Dandelion was already “very busy pulling up the piles driven across the river by the rebels [to obstruct the channel]…and the most labored device of torpedoes I have yet seen, stout piles being secured slanting down river, with an iron shell on the head. Much ingenuity exercised.”

  Sherman reached Howard “about noon, and immediately sent orders to my own headquarters, on the Louisville road, to have them brought over to the plank-road, as a place more central and convenient; gave written notice to Generals Slocum and Howard of all the steps taken, and ordered them to get ready to receive the siege-guns, to put them in position to bombard Savannah, and to prepare for the general assault.” The effort of getting his hands back on the reins of authority, controlling operations against Savannah, kept Sherman occupied well into the evening.

  There was some time for a little healthy unwinding. Major Hitchcock was part of a “group of twenty-five or thirty officers around the campfire,…chatting, telling stories, singing songs—and there was some excellent singing to a guitar,—and having a good time generally, which nobody enjoyed more than the General, though he took chiefly a listening part, with intervals of the most entertaining reminiscences of former campaigns, etc. Besides this, the Headquarters band…gave us some very pretty music.”

  Probably between 10:00 and 10:30 P.M. Sherman received Major General Slocum’s request to push a division (backed by the rest of the corps) into South Carolina using their foothold on Argyle Island. At roughly 11:00 P.M. Sherman finished dictating his response to Major Hitchcock. “For the present do not send more than one brigade,” he told Slocum. There were a number of variables involved in the proposed strike that Sherman needed to consider. Even as Major Hitchcock began composing the note for delivery, Sherman fell fast asleep. But not for long.

  Colonel Maxwell Van Zandt Woodhull, an aide on Major General Howard’s staff, was sitting by a campfire burning between the tents of his boss and Sherman. It being a pleasant evening, the colonel was “thinking of various things, and of nothing in particular, but not sleepy enough to seek my cot.” Two riders materialized out of the darkness, drawing up at the fire, where one of the pair dismounted. Woodhull saw that the stranger was a lieutenant colonel.

  “I am Colonel Babcock, of General Grant’s staff, and I have just arrived with dispatches for General Sherman,” he announced. “Is the General here?”

  Woodhull indicated Sherman’s tent. “Please inform him of my arrival,” the newcomer said, with an air suggesting he expected to be obeyed. There was no one from Sherman’s staff on hand, so Howard’s man knocked on the tent pole, lifted the closed flap, and went in. Sherman, coming awake quickly, listened to Woodhull’s explanation for the interruption as he slipped on his coat. “Get me a light,” the General said. “Show Babcock in.”

  As Grant’s aide entered Sherman’s tent, Woodhull sat back down in front of his fire “with something fresh to think of.” Inside, Babcock produced a page of foolscap and handed it over. It was a note from Grant dated December 6. Up to this instant the General had been the lord and master of his fate, but Grant’s dispatch was an abrupt reminder to Sherman that even he answered to a higher authority. Sherman scanned the letter.

  It was the worst possible news. Looking at the total military picture, Grant had concluded that “the most important operation toward closing out the rebellion will be to close out [General Robert E.] Lee and his army.” Toward that end, Grant wanted Sherman and his best troops to join him, in Virginia, right away. “Unless you see objections to this plan, which I cannot see, use every vessel going to you for purposes of transportation.”

  “The contents [of this letter]…gave me great uneasiness, for I had set my heart on the capture of Savannah, which I believed to be practicable, and to be near,” related Sherman; “for me to embark for Virginia by sea was so complete a change from what I had supposed would be the course of events that I was very much concerned.” Asking Babcock for a moment, Sherman stepped outside, where he again came under the scrutiny of Colonel Woodhull.

  “He now stood before me without a hat, with his military coat buttoned loosely across his breast, in gray drawers and gray stockings without his boots,” recalled the aide. “He was utterly unconscious of physical comfort or discomfort, lost completely in the great thoughts which filled his mind….

  “He stood in the warm ashes, at times unconsciously brushing the ashes over one foot with the other, and he drew as close to the campfire as his subconsciousness deemed to be prudent, but with the exception of this automatic and purely physical impulse he was lost to every surrounding.”

  At last Sherman turned and reentered his tent. A short while later the word was passed for Major Hitchcock to join them. There was much to do.

  CHAPTER 21

  “I Beg to Present You as a Christmas Gift the City of Savannah”

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1864

  William Tecumseh Sherman spent much of the morning crafting his response to Grant’s December 6 message. Just as before, when he obtained permission for the march through Georgia, he did not directly debate his superior’s proposition; rather, he provided him with information that he hoped would lead him to Sherman’s preferred option, even as he took only small steps toward actually carrying out Grant’s directive. When he had written in haste from the Dandelion, Sherman was intent on capturing Savannah. Now that he better understood Grant’s priorities, Sherman began his note with the assurance that he had “initiated measures looking principally to coming to you with 50,000 or 60,000 infantry, and, incidentally, to take Savannah, if time will allow.”

  Sherman made sure that Grant understood what a magnificent military force he had: “four corps, full of experience and full of ardor,…equal to 60,000 fighting men.” He mentioned how well his men had supplied themselves on the riches of Georgia’s bounty—most of which he’d have to leave behind, along with Kilpatrick’s cavalry. Sherman guessed that if he undertook a northward march “to Columbia, S.C., thence to Raleigh, and thence to report to you,” it would require six weeks. Putting these same legions on transports would take about four—assuming enough ships could be found. In his Memoirs, Sherman estimated he needed a “little less than a hundred steamers and sailing-vessels,” repres
enting a very significant drain on such resources at the same time Grant was mounting a combined army-navy assault on North Carolina’s Fort Fisher, which guarded Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last still functioning seaport.

  Grant’s request meant that Sherman would have to abandon any serious effort to cut Savannah off from South Carolina because of the risk it represented of his becoming entangled in an operation that he couldn’t easily shut down once it began. He did mention in his response Major General Slocum’s proposal to put a corps north of the city, “but, in view of the change of plans made necessary by your order of the 6th, I will maintain things in statu[s] quo till I have got all my transportation to the rear and out of the way, and until I have sea transportation for the troops you require.” However, just to be sure that there was no question where he stood, Sherman closed the lengthy note with the comment: “I feel a personal dislike to turning northward.”

  In his summary, Sherman continued to play loose with the facts—glossing over the condition of his army and highlighting the imminent collapse of the Savannah garrison. Grant’s parting shot at George Thomas in Nashville mandated a response. Here Sherman was less than supportive of his senior subordinate, professing to being “somewhat astonished at the attitude of things in Tennessee.” Thomas was “full of confidence” when he left him with more than enough force to stop Hood. “I know full well that General Thomas is slow in mind and in action, but he is judicious and brave, and the troops feel great confidence in him,” Sherman declared, in something less than a ringing endorsement of the officer he had hand-picked to hold that state for the Union.

  This time Grant did not need Sherman’s memoranda to sway him. He had already had second thoughts about his call for his friend to join him. “I had no idea originally of having Sherman march from Savannah to Richmond, or even to North Carolina,” Grant later admitted. “The season was bad, the roads impassable for anything except such an army as he had, and I should not have thought of ordering such a move.” Still, for the moment Grant put his order on hold. He informed Major General Henry W. Halleck in Washington, who in turn told Sherman that for the present he was to “retain your entire force [in Georgia]…and…operate from such base as you may establish on the coast.” Almost as an afterthought, Halleck closed his dispatch with late-breaking news: “It is reported that Thomas defeated Hood yesterday near Nashville, but we have no particulars nor official reports, telegraphic communication being interrupted by a heavy storm.”

  The battle referred to by Halleck actually took place over two days—December 15 and 16—across the open fields and hills just south of Nashville. Following the bloody fight at Franklin, General John B. Hood had stubbornly stuck to his plan by trailing after the retreating Union force until he stopped just short of Nashville on December 1, where he ran out of ideas. Major General George Thomas had used the time allotted him to ring the city with a belt of defensive works that would have given pause to a fresh, well-equipped enemy. Hood’s was neither. More to the point, many of the troops that Sherman had long ago credited in the plus column had finally arrived. Despite his disadvantageous position, Hood, in a decision that remains controversial and perplexing to this day, spread his 21,000 infantry across the high ground in sight of Nashville’s defenses, boldly confronting Thomas’s 50,000.

  The period from December 1 to 14 was marked with useless side actions initiated by Hood, much suffering on the part of his men, and an increasingly acerbic barrage of messages from Washington to Thomas, urging him to attack. Hardly had Hood’s foot soldiers settled into place before he sent off his 6,000 cavalry under Major General Nathan B. Forrest to chew up some strategically unimportant railroad blockhouses as well as keeping an eye on 8,000 Yankees occupying Murfreesboro. Thomas, taking great care to properly position his forces, still hoping to get sufficient horses for his mostly dismounted cavalry, and trying to gauge the fickle weather for a viable operational window, had his deliberate progress interpreted as fatal indecision by a nervous War Department and U. S. Grant.

  On December 6, Grant ordered: “Attack Hood at once and await no longer the remount of your cavalry.” Thomas dutifully set December 10 as the date to commence operations, only to see his force pummeled on December 9 by a sleet and ice storm that made all movement treacherous. Fuming at his fair-weather central command near Petersburg, Virginia, Grant vented his impatience by lining up a replacement for Thomas in the person of Major General John A. Logan, who should have been marching with Sherman, but who had been caught away on leave when the army decamped from Atlanta. Logan was dispatched to Nashville with orders to relieve Thomas if no offensive was under way by the time he arrived.

  After he had departed, Grant, who shared Sherman’s lower opinion of political generals (of which Logan was one), decided that he had better go in person. He left Petersburg on December 14, reaching Washington that evening. There he found that telegraphic communication with Thomas was cut owing to the terrible weather. There was nothing to do but wait until the situation was clarified. The message that finally came through on December 15, followed by others the next day, carried news of victory—a great and complete success.

  Thomas attacked Hood on December 15, feinting against his enemy’s right, which enabled him to fall like an avalanche on his left. Badly outnumbered, debilitated by lack of supplies, and stung by the same weather that had slowed Thomas, Hood’s men savagely resisted. By day’s end, however, the Confederate army had not only been shoved off its line but pressed back two miles into a second, more compact defensive position. Thomas repeated the offensive program on December 16, this time crushing Hood’s left flank. At the end of the day, the Army of Tennessee wasn’t in retreat, it was in flight. In the words of one Indiana soldier: “They all scampered.”

  Hood’s initial report to Richmond regarding the debacle was an exercise in denial. Yes, his army had retreated from Nashville, but its casualties had been very small, and he was moving to a new defensive position. Had Hood bothered to ask the common soldiers in his ranks, he would have learned that his once-proud legions were now, according to one of them, “the worst broke down set I ever saw.” The only saving grace for the Rebel army was the less than vigorous pursuit by Thomas. Bedeviled by bad weather, snarled logistics, and quibbling commanders, Thomas’s men did little more than herd the remnants of Hood’s force southward. Only Major General Forrest seemed to know what to do and how to get it done. Several times his men successfully executed delaying actions that further slowed the triumphant pursuers.

  The campaign ended on December 28, when Hood withdrew into Alabama, allowing Thomas to halt his exhausted command at the Tennessee River. At the cost of 6,000 killed, wounded, or missing, George H. Thomas had whittled down Hood’s army from the 21,000 soldiers fighting to hold outside Nashville to less than 15,000 dispirited men who crossed the Tennessee River, heading south.

  Thomas had done what Sherman had asked of him; indeed, what Sherman had needed done if his own campaign was to be crowned with success. In the years following the war, while Sherman would readily acknowledge the importance of the Nashville victory, there was always a qualification in his praise. Thomas, said the General in his Memoirs, “was slow, deliberate and almost passive in the face of exasperating danger, but true as steel when the worst came.”

  Sherman’s operational orders for December 16 included the return of an old theme—railroad wrecking. Captain Poe was told to finish the remaining track-twisting in the immediate Savannah vicinity. For the men of Poe’s primary unit, the 1st Michigan Engineers, the new orders merely extended what they had been doing since December 11. This day proved a little more exciting. “Our company tore down a bridge,” scribbled one Michigan technician. “The Rebs fired upon us, and we returned the fire.” Major General Howard was instructed to select two Right Wing divisions to knock out the Savannah and Gulf Railroad as far south as the Altamaha River. Howard picked Hazen’s division from the Fifteenth Corps, plus Major General Joseph A. Mower’s from the Sev
enteenth, for the task. Since the latter had drawn the stretch nearest the Altamaha River, those soldiers set off today.

  There was major construction to match the destruction. By Special Orders No. 308, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Hickenlooper, inspector general for the Seventeenth Corps, was “hereby placed in charge of the building of the wharf at King’s Bridge.” Hickenlooper found himself commanding what he later tallied as “a total force of about 600 skilled mechanics, 150 experienced axemen, 300 detailed men, six wagons, two saw mills, and a fleet of boats of various sizes.” Within three days, his laborers completed what he proudly described as “fine a dock and wharf as was ever constructed for the accommodation of the commerce of any city.”

  On the siege lines the business of war continued with few interruptions. “Johnnies have thrown a few shells most too close to be really safe,” wrote an Ohioan in his journal. “Sharpshooting rather sharp today.” Farther along the line a Michigan soldier noted that the Rebels “make us lay uncomfortably low some times & between shot, shell, grape & canister & sharp shooters we have all we want to do to avoid them.”

  December 16, 1864

  While most of the diary keepers recorded only routine matters this day, at least one stared death in the face. Captain William E. Fisher received orders this evening to take his command (Company D, 17th New York) to occupy some breastworks situated within point-blank range of a large Rebel fort. “Now thinks I,” wrote Fisher, “the man who ordered me there must be a D——d fool, but go I must.” To make matters worse, the only approach was along a narrow road with swamps on either side. Fisher cautioned his men “to keep closed up and march without noise.” A providential cloud blocked the moon, so the detail made it undetected to the breastworks, which proved to be “nothing but a hole with a bank about three feet through to cover my company from the shots of a 64-pounder,” said Fisher. His men dubbed the place “Fort Useless,” and the young officer was certain that when they were discovered at daylight, the Rebel cannon would blast his little company out of existence. Nature now intervened by providing a thick blanket of fog to accompany the recall orders, which reached the officer in the early morning. Sighed Fisher when they had all safely returned to their camp, “We were very lucky.”