Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Sherman refused to oblige him. Despite his ferocious reputation, "Uncle Billy" (as his men called him) had little taste for slam-bang combat: "Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families."43 Sherman's invasion force consisted of three "armies" under his single overall command: George Thomas's Army of the Cumberland, now 60,000 strong including the old 11th and 12th Corps of the Army of the Potomac reorganized as the 20th Corps; 25,000 men in the Army of the Tennessee, which had been Grant's first army and then Sherman's and was now commanded by their young protégé James B. McPherson; and John M. Schofield's 13,000-man corps, called the Army of the Ohio, which had participated in the liberation of east Tennessee the previous autumn. This composite army was tied to a vulnerable single-track railroad for its supplies. The topography of northern Georgia favored the defense even more than in Virginia. Steep, rugged mountains interlaced by swift rivers dominated the landscape between Chattanooga and Atlanta. Johnston's army of 50,000 (soon to be reinforced to 65,000 by troops from Alabama) took position on Rocky Face Ridge flanking the railroad twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga and dared the Yankees to come on.

  Sherman declined to enter this "terrible door of death." Instead, like a boxer he jabbed with his left—Thomas and Schofield—to fix Johnston's attention on the ridge, and sent McPherson on a wide swing to the right through mountain gaps to hit the railroad at Resaca, fifteen miles in the Confederate rear. Through an oversight by Johnston's cavalry, Snake Creek Gap was almost unguarded when McPherson's fast-marching infantry poured through on May 9. Finding Resaca protected

  42. Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 268.

  43. Basil H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (New York, 1929), 402.

  by strong earthworks, however, McPherson skirmished cautiously, overestimated the force opposing him (there were only two brigades), and pulled back without reaching the railroad. Alerted to this threat in his rear, Johnston sent additional troops to Resaca and then retreated with his whole army to this point on the night of May 12–13. Sherman's knockout punch never landed. "Well, Mac," he told the chagrined McPherson, "you missed the opportunity of your life."44

  For three days Sherman's whole force probed the Resaca defenses without finding a weak spot. Once again part of McPherson's army swung southward by the right flank, crossed the Oostanaula River, and threatened Johnston's railroad lifeline. Disengaging skillfully, the southerners withdrew down the tracks, paused briefly fifteen miles to the south for an aborted counterpunch against the pursuing Yankees, then continued another ten miles to Cassville, where they turned at bay. The rebels wrecked the railroad as they retreated, but Uncle Billy's repair crews had it running again in hours and his troops remained well supplied. In twelve days of marching and fighting, Sherman had advanced halfway to Atlanta at a cost of only four or five thousand casualties on each side. The southern government and press grew restive at Johnston's retreats without fighting. So did some soldiers. "The truth is," wrote a private in the 29th Georgia to his wife, "we have run until I am getting out of heart & we must make a Stand soon or the army will be demoralized, but all is in good spirits now & beleave Gen. Johnston will make a stand & whip the yankees badley."45

  Johnston's most impatient subordinate was John Bell Hood. The crippling of Hood's left arm at Gettysburg and the loss of his right leg at Chickamauga had done nothing to abate his aggressiveness. Schooled in offensive tactics under Lee, Hood had remained with the Army of Tennessee as a corps commander after recovering from his wound at Chickamauga, where his division had driven home the charge that ruined Rosecrans. Eager to give Sherman the same treatment, Hood complained behind his commander's back to Richmond of Johnston's Fabian strategy.

  At Cassville, Johnston finally thought the time had come to fight. But ironically it was Hood who turned cautious and let down the side. Sherman's pursuing troops were spread over a front a dozen miles wide, marching on several roads for better speed. Johnston concentrated most

  44. Lloyd Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet (New York, 1932), 357.

  45. Samuel Carter III, The Siege of Atlanta, 1864 (New York, 1973), 125.

  of his army on the right under Hood and Leonidas Polk to strike two of Sherman's corps isolated seven miles from any of the others. On May 19, Johnston issued an inspirational order to the troops: "You will now turn and march to meet his advancing columns. . . . Soldiers, I lead you to battle." This seemed to produce the desired effect. "The soldiers were jubilant," recalled a private in the ist Tennessee. "We were going to whip and rout the Yankees."46 But confidence soon gave way to dismay. Alarmed by reports that the enemy had worked around to his flank, Hood pulled back and called off the attack. The Union threat turned out to have been only a cavalry detachment. But the opportunity was gone; the rebels took up a defensive position and that night pulled back another ten miles to a line (constructed in advance by slaves) overlooking the railroad and the Etowah River through Allatoona pass.

  This latest retreat proved a serious blow to morale. Blaming Hood, Johnston's chief of staff wrote that "I could not restrain my tears when I found we could not strike." Mutual recrimination among Johnston and his corps commanders began to plague the army with the same factionalism that had nearly wrecked it under Bragg. Opinion in the government and press was similarly divided: Davis's supporters criticized Johnston, while the anti-Davis faction censured the government for fostering intrigue against the general. In northern Georgia people voted with their feet and took to the roads as refugees. "Nearly the whole Population is moving off, taking their negroes south," wrote one Georgian. "There will scarcely be any provisions raised about here this year, which will seriously effect us another year whether the war continues or not."47 In Atlanta a note of apprehension began to creep into the newspapers, though most of them continued to praise Johnston as a "masterful" strategist who was luring Sherman ever deeper into a trap to make his destruction more certain.

  But Johnston could not spring the trap at Allatoona, for Sherman never came near the place. Instead he paused to rest his men, repair the railroad, bring up twenty days of supplies, and cut loose from the railroad for another flanking move around Johnston's left. Sherman's objective was a road junction in the piney woods at Dallas, twenty miles

  46. Gilbert E. Govan and James W. Livingood, A Different Valor: The Story of General Joseph E. Johnston, C.S.A. (Indianapolis, 1956), 274; Sam R. Watkins, "Co. Aytch": A Side Show of the Big Show (Collier Books ed., New York, 1962), 169.

  47. Govan and Livingood, A Different Valor, 277; Carter, Siege of Atlanta, 130.

  in Johnston's rear and not much farther from Atlanta itself. But Johnston's cavalry detected the move in time for the rebels to fall back on the inside track and entrench another line before the Yankees got there. Sharp fighting took place on May 25 and 27 near New Hope Church before both armies settled in for weeks of skirmishing and sniping (in which Leonidas Polk was killed) as each vainly sought an opening for attack or maneuver. "A big Indian war," the frustrated Sherman called it as continual rains turned red clay roads to soft grease. The two armies gradually moved their lines eastward until both were astride the railroad just north of Marietta, where the Confederates entrenched a formidable position along Kennesaw Mountain and its spurs.

  Sherman chafed during this impasse. His concern focused not only on the rebels in his front but also on others 300 miles to the rear. Any significant interference with his rail supply line through Tennessee would cripple Sherman's campaign as decisively as a defeat here in Georgia. And with Bedford Forrest loose in Mississippi, anything might happen. This hard-bitten cavalryman had mauled the Yankees so often that—as Forrest himself would have said—he had "put the skeer on 'em." Forrest's most recent exploit had been the destruction on April 12 of the Union garrison at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River, where some of his men had murdered black soldiers after they surrendered.48 When Sherman began his campaign in Georg
ia, Johnston urged "the immediate movement of Forrest into Middle Tennessee" to cut the railroad. To prevent this, Sherman ordered the garrison commander at Memphis to send out 8,000 men to chase Forrest down. The Federals marched into Mississippi, found Forrest, fought him, and were routed at Brice's Crossroads on June 10 by a force little more than half their size. It was the most humiliating Union defeat in the western theater, but it did divert Forrest from the railroad in Tennessee. Nevertheless, an angry Sherman ordered another and larger expedition out of Memphis to "follow

  48. Although formerly disputed by southerners, the truth of a massacre of several dozen black prisoners and some whites—along with their commander Major William F. Bradford, who was captured and subsequently shot "while attempting to escape"—is now well established and generally accepted. For summaries and analyses of the evidence, see Robert Selph Henry, "First with the Most" Forrest (Indianapolis, 1944), 248–69; Albert Castel, "The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence," CWH, 4 (1958), 37–50; and John Cimprich and Robert C. Main-fort, Jr., "Fort Pillow Revisited: New Evidence about an Old Controversy," CWH, 28 (1982), 293–306.

  Forrest to the death, if it cost 10,000 lives and breaks the Treasury. There never will be peace in Tennessee till Forrest is dead."49 This time 14,000 Federals lured half as many rebels into an attack at Tupelo, Mississippi, on July 14 and repulsed them at a high cost in southern casualties, including Forrest himself who was wounded.

  This enabled Sherman to breathe easier about Tennessee—for the time being. The guards he had dropped off along the railroad between Chattanooga and Marietta also managed to keep Johnston's cavalry under Joe Wheeler from doing much damage. But the main rebel force at Kennesaw Mountain appeared to have him stymied as Lee had stalled Grant at Petersburg. Another flanking move on the glutinous roads seemed impossible—it was hard enough to move supplies only six miles from the railhead to the Union right wing. Sherman also feared that constant maneuver and entrenchment without battle was dulling his army's fighting edge. "A fresh furrow in a plowed field will stop the whole column, and all begin to entrench," he grumbled. "We are on the offensive, and . . . must assail and not defend." Reasoning that Johnston expected another turning movement, Sherman decided to "feign on both flanks and assault the center. It may cost us dear but in results would surpass an attempt to pass around."50

  It cost him dear, but the results were nil. On June 27 several Union divisions assaulted the southern spurs of Kennesaw Mountain near the points where small streams divided Johnston's center from his two wings. As the temperature rose toward a hundred in the shade, Yankees recoiled from breastworks that rivaled those at Petersburg. After the attacks had been beaten back, a Confederate soldier looked around at his fellows. "I never saw so many broken down and exhausted men in my life," he wrote years later. "I was as sick as a horse, and as wet with blood and sweat as I could be, and many of our men were vomiting with excessive fatigue, over-exhaustion, and sunstroke; our tongues were parched and cracked for water, and our faces blackened with powder and smoke, and our dead and wounded were piled indiscriminately in the trenches."51 By early afternoon Sherman recognized failure and called off the operation. He had lost 3,000 killed and wounded—small numbers compared with battles in Virginia, but the largest for any engagement

  49. Henry, Forrest, 277; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 39, pt. 2, p. 121.

  50. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 38, pt. 4, pp. 507, 492.

  51. Watkins, "Co. Aytch," 160.

  so far in Georgia—while inflicting only a fifth as many on the enemy.

  Perhaps worse, from the Union viewpoint, the battle of Kennesaw Mountain bolstered southern morale and increased northern frustration. "Everyone feels unbounded confidence in General Johnston," wrote an Atlanta woman, while one of the city's newspapers declared Sherman's army "whipped" and soon to be "cut to pieces."52 Admittedly the invaders had suffered altogether fewer than 17,000 casualties in the campaign while driving to within twenty miles of Atlanta. But Johnston had lost only 14,000 men compared with Lee's 35,000, and morale in the Army of Tennessee was reported to be "as good as could be desired." After two months of fighting and 90,000 casualties on all fronts, Union armies seemed little if any closer to winning the war than when they started. "Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of Grant's campaign?" asked the Democratic New York World. Even Republicans seemed "discouraged, weary, and faint-hearted," reported a New York diarist. "They ask plaintively, 'Why don't Grant and Sherman do something?' "53

  52. Mary Mallard quoted in Carter, Siege of Atlanta, 141; Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, July 3, 1864, quoted in A. A. Hoehling, Last Train from Atlanta (New York, 1958), 23.

  53. Carter, Siege of Atlanta, 141; New York World, July 12, 1864; Strong, Diary, 467.

  25

  After Four Years of Failure

  I

  Grant and Sherman certainly intended to "do something." But for two more long, weary months their doing seemed to accomplish little except more bloodshed. To be sure, during July Sherman made apparent progress toward the capture of Atlanta, a goal that had come to overshadow the destruction of Johnston's army. Atlanta was indeed a great prize. Its population had doubled to 20,000 during the war as foundries, factories, munitions plants, and supply depots sprang up at this strategic railroad hub. The fall of Atlanta, said Jefferson Davis, would "open the way for the Federal Army to the Gulf on the one hand, and to Charleston on the other, and close up those rich granaries from which Lee's armies are supplied. It would give them control of our network of rail-ways and thus paralyze our efforts."1 Because the South invested so much effort in defending the city, Atlanta also became a symbol of resistance and nationality second only to Richmond. As the Petersburg front stabilized to trench warfare, concern in the Confederate capital shifted, to Georgia, where mobile warfare resumed as the rains ceased.

  Slaves had prepared two more defensive positions between Kennesaw Mountain and the Chattahoochee River, which flowed from northeast to southwest only eight miles from Atlanta. Johnston had told a senator who visited his headquarters on July 1 that he could hold Sherman

  1. A. A. Hoehling, ed., Last Train from Atlanta (New York, 1958), 17.

  north of the Chattahoochee for two months. By the time Davis received word of this assurance on July 10, the Yankees had crossed the river. Once again Sherman had sent McPherson swinging around Johnston's left, forcing the rebels to fall back six miles on July 3 and another six to the river on the 4th. Sherman now reached deeper into his bag of tricks. Having always moved around the enemy's left, he instructed McPherson and a cavalry division to make a feint in that direction while another cavalry division and Schofield's infantry corps moved secretly upriver several miles above Johnston's right for a surprise crossing against a handful of cavalry pickets. At one point Yankee troopers swam the river naked except for their cartridge belts and captured the bemused pickets. At another ford, blue horsemen waded dismounted through neck-deep water with their Spencer carbines. "As the rebel bullets began to splash around pretty thick," recalled a Union officer, northern soldiers discovered that they could pump the waterproof metal cartridges into the Spencer's chamber underwater; "hence, all along the line you could see the men bring their guns up, let the water run from the muzzle a moment, then take quick aim, fire his piece and pop down again." The astonished rebels called to each other: "Look at them Yankee sons of bitches, loading their guns under water! What sort of critters be they, anyhow?"2 The pickets surrendered to this submarine assault; Sherman had part of his army across the river on Johnston's flank by July 9. The Confederates pulled back to yet another fortified position behind Peach-tree Creek, only four miles from downtown Atlanta. Civilians scrambled for space on southbound trains. Newspapers in the city still uttered defiance, but they packed their presses for a quick departure.

  In Richmond, consternation grew. Emergency meetings of the cabinet produced nothing but "a gloomy view of affairs in Georgia." Davis cast about for some way of "averti
ng calamity."3 In an unwise move he sent Braxton Bragg—whom he had appointed as his military adviser after the general's resignation as commander of the Army of Tennessee—to Georgia on a fact-finding mission. Bragg was no more popular now than he had been earlier. As a troubleshooter he seemed to cause more trouble than he resolved. He consulted mainly with Hood, who was clearly angling for the command. "We should attack," Hood declared.

  2. Ibid., 58–59.

  3. Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (New York, 1957), 165; Jefferson Davis to Joseph E. Johnston, July 7, 1864, in Rowland, Davis, VI, 283.

  "I regard it as a great misfortune to our country that we failed to give battle to the enemy many miles north of our present position. Please say to the President that I shall continue to do my duty cheerfully . . . and strive to do what is best for our country." Bragg urged Davis to appoint Hood in Johnston's place. Davis had already pretty much made up his mind to do so, even though Lee advised against it on the grounds that while aggressive, Hood was too reckless. "All lion," said Lee of him, "none of the fox."4 Davis decided to give Johnston one last chance: on July 16 he telegraphed the general a request for "your plan of operations." Johnston replied that his plan "must depend upon that of the enemy. . . . We are trying to put Atlanta in condition to be held by the Georgia militia, that army movements may be freer and wider."5 This hint of an intention to give up Atlanta was the final straw. Next day the thirty-three-year-old Hood replaced Johnston.

  This action stirred up a controversy that has echoed down the years. Like Lincoln's removal of McClellan, the removal of Johnston was supported by the cabinet and by the pro-administration faction in Congress but condemned by the opposition and deplored in the army.6 For his part, Sherman professed to be "pleased at this change." He wrote after the war that "the Confederate Government rendered us a most valuable service" by replacing a cautious defensive strategist with a bold fighter. "This was just what we wanted," declared Sherman, "to fight on open