Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  70. London Daily News, Sept. 27, 1864, quoted in Nevins, War, IV, 141.

  71. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 132; Rowland, Davis, VI, 386.

  27

  South Carolina Must Be Destroyed

  I

  John B. Hood's Army of Tennessee did not crawl into the woods and die after losing Atlanta. Quite the contrary; inspired by a visit from Jefferson Davis, the aggressive Hood planned to circle around to Sherman's rear, cut his rail lifeline from Chattanooga, and pounce at leisure on the fragments of the stricken and starving Yankee army. Meanwhile Forrest had returned to his wonted occupation of smashing up Union railroads and supply depots in Tennessee. President Davis told cheering crowds in Georgia and South Carolina what to expect next. "I see no chance for Sherman to escape from a defeat or a disgraceful retreat," he declared a month after Atlanta's fall. "The fate that befell the army of the French Empire in its retreat from Moscow will be re-enacted. Our cavalry and our people will harass and destroy his army, as did the Cossacks that of Napoleon, and the Yankee general, like him, will escape with only a bodyguard." That accomplished, "we must march into Tennessee" where "we will draw from twenty thousand to thirty thousand to our standard, and . . . push the enemy back to the banks of the Ohio and thus give the peace party of the North an accretion no puny editorial can give."1

  This glorious prospect may have pumped new life into flagging southern spirits. But when Grant read of Davis's speeches he snorted: "Who

  1. Rowland, Davis, VI, 341-42, 353, 358.

  is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat?"2 A clever riposte; but in truth Sherman was vulnerable to enemy harassment. Having attained one of his objectives—the capture of Atlanta—he had not achieved the other—the destruction of Hood's army. Forty thousand strong, these tired but game rebels moved along the railroad to Chattanooga during October attacking targets of opportunity. Sherman left a corps to hold Atlanta and pursued Hood with the rest of his army. Skirmishing and fighting northward over the terrain they had conquered while marching southward four months earlier, the Yankees finally drove Hood's gray-backs into Alabama and repaired the railroad.

  Sherman grew exasperated with this kind of warfare. To continue chasing Hood would play the rebel game. "It will be a physical impossibility to protect the [rail]roads," Sherman told Grant, "now that Hood, Forrest, and Wheeler, and the whole batch of devils, are turned loose, without home or habitation. By attempting to hold the roads, we will lose a thousand men monthly and will gain no result." Instead, Sherman wanted to ignore Hood and march through the heart of Georgia to the coast. "I could cut a swath through to the sea," he assured Grant, "divide the Confederacy in two, and come up on the rear of Lee."3 Lincoln, Halleck, and even Grant resisted this idea at first. To leave Hood loose in his rear while the Union army abandoned its supply lines in the midst of enemy territory seemed doubly dangerous. But Sherman intended to station George Thomas in Tennessee with 60,000 men, more than enough to cope with anything the rebels might try. Sherman's own army of 62,000 hardened campaigners could find plenty to eat in the interior of Georgia. "If I turn back now, the whole effect of my campaign will be lost," Sherman insisted. But if I "move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea . . . instead of being on the defensive, I would be on the offensive." And the psychological effect of such a campaign might be greater even than its material impact. "If we can march a well-appointed army right through [Jefferson Davis's] territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist. . . . I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!"4

  Sherman persuaded Grant, who in turn persuaded a still skeptical Lincoln. Sherman returned to Atlanta and prepared to move out a week

  2. Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1897), 313.

  3. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 39, pt. 3, p. 162; Porter, Campaigning with Grant, 292–93.

  4. Foote, Civil War, III, 613; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 39, pt. 3, pp. 161, 202, 595, 660.

  after the presidential election. Like Lincoln, he believed in a hard war and a soft peace. "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," Sherman had told Atlanta's mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But "when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker." Until then, though, "we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war." Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist—must be devastated. "We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."5

  Sherman's soldiers shared their leader's total-war philosophy. Acting on it, they put the torch to everything of military value (by a broad definition) that Hood had left standing in Atlanta and marched out on November 15. As Sherman started south, Hood prepared to move north from Alabama into Tennessee, creating the odd spectacle of two contending armies turning their backs on each other and marching off in opposite directions. As it turned out, there was more method in Sherman's madness than in Hood's.

  No enemy stood between Sherman's army and Savannah 285 miles away except several thousand Georgia militia and 3,500 rebel cavalry commanded by Joseph Wheeler. Union cavalry kept the gray horsemen at bay while weaving back and forth across the flanks of four infantry corps spread over a front varying from twenty-five to sixty miles wide. The militia attacked a rear-guard Union infantry brigade on November 22, but after suffering 600 casualties to the Yankees' sixty they made no more such efforts. Southerners wrecked bridges, burned provisions, toppled trees and planted mines on the roads ahead of the Yankees, but this accomplished little except to make them more vengeful. In truth, nothing could stop the bluecoats' relentless pace of a dozen miles a day. For most northern soldiers the march became a frolic, a moving feast in which they "foraged liberally on the country" and destroyed everything of conceivable military value—along with much else—that they did not consume. "This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion

  5. William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 2nd ed. rev., 2 vols. (New York, 1886), II, 126—27; Burke Davis, Shermans March (New York, 1980), 109; John Bennett Walters, "General William T. Sherman and Total War," JSH, 14 (1948), 463, 470.

  ever planned," wrote one officer on the second day out of Atlanta. "It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering, and promises to prove much richer yet."6

  Indeed it did. Groups of foraging soldiers, soon called "bummers," roamed through the countryside and found more than enough food for their regiments. Under slack discipline, they helped themselves to anything they wanted from farms, plantations, even slave cabins. The pillage of Sherman's bummers has become legendary; like most legends it has some basis in fact. Not all the bummers were Yankees, however. Georgia unionists and liberated slaves hung on the flanks and rear of the army and lost few chances to despoil their rebel neighbors and former masters. Confederate deserters and stragglers from Wheeler's cavalry were perhaps even worse. Southern newspapers complained of "the destructive lawlessness" of Wheeler's troopers. "I do not think the Yankees are any worse than our own army," said a southern soldier. They "steal and plunder indiscriminately regardless of sex."7

  The worst havoc, nevertheless, was caused by Sherman's soldiers who, in the words of one of them, "destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally." The hell-raising became grimmer after an incident at Milledgeville, the state capital. The soldiers' Thanksgiving Day feast there was interrupted by the arrival of several prisoners who had escaped from Andersonville. Hollow-cheeked, emaciated, with nothing but rags on their backs, these men wept uncontrollably at the sight of food and the American flag. This experience "sickened and infuriated" Sherman's soldiers who
thought "of the tens of thousands of their imprisoned comrades, slowly perishing with hunger in the midst of . . . barns bursting with grain and food to feed a dozen armies."8

  An Alabama-born major on Sherman's staff censured the vandalism committed by bummers. But he recognized that only a thin line separated such plundering from the destruction of enemy resources and morale necessary to win the war. "It is a terrible thing to consume and

  6. Davis, Sherman's March, 42.

  7. Charleston Courier, Jan. 10, 1865; William M. Cash and Lucy Somerville Howard, ed., My Dear Nellie: The Civil War Letters of William L. Nugent to Eleanor Smith Nugent (Jackson, Miss., 1977), 211.

  8. Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Pocket Books ed., New York, 1967), 395; Lloyd Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet (New York, 1932), 448.

  destroy the sustenance of thousands of people," the major wrote in his diary. But

  while I deplore this necessity daily and cannot bear to see the soldiers swarm as they do through fields and yards . . . nothing can end this war but some demonstration of their helplessness. . . . This Union and its Government must be sustained, at any and every cost; to sustain it, we must war upon and destroy the organized rebel forces,—must cut off their supplies, destroy their communications . . . [and] produce among the people of Georgia a thorough conviction of the personal misery which attends war, and the utter helplessness and inability of their "rulers," State or Confederate, to protect them. . . . If that terror and grief and even want shall help to paralyze their husbands and fathers who are fighting us . . . it is mercy in the end.9

  As the Yankees closed in on Savannah in mid-December the 10,000 rebel soldiers defending it decided that discretion was the better part of valor and escaped before they could be trapped in the city. Sherman sent one of his sportive telegrams to Lincoln: "I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and . . . about 25,000 bales of cotton." The president responded with "many, many thanks" to Sherman and his army for their "great success," especially when "taking the work of Gen. Thomas into the count," which had brought "those who sat in darkness, to see a great light."10

  Thomas had indeed weighed in with an achievement equalling Sherman's—the virtual destruction of Hood's Army of Tennessee. Hood's activities after Sherman left Atlanta seemed to have been scripted in never-never land. Although he faced Union forces under Thomas totaling more than 60,000 men with only 40,000 of his own—one-fourth of them wearing shoes so rotten that by December they would march barefoot—Hood hoped to drive through Tennessee into Kentucky, where he expected to pick up 20,000 recruits and smash Thomas. Then, Hood fantasized, he would move eastward to Virginia, combine with Lee, and defeat Grant and Sherman in turn.

  This enterprise started well. Moving into Tenneessee during the last week of November, Hood tried to get between Thomas's advance force of 30,000 commanded by John Schofield at Pulaski and the 30,000

  9. Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, ed., Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock (New Haven, 1927), 82, 125, 168.

  10. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 44, p. 783; CWL, VIII, 181–82.

  at Nashville seventy-five miles to the North. Schofield detected this effort in time to fall back to the Duck River at Columbia, where Hood skirmished with the Federals, November 24–27. Not wishing to risk a frontal assault, Hood sent Forrest's cavalry and two infantry corps on a deep flanking march to get into Schofield's rear, hoping to emulate "the grand results achieved by the immortal Jackson in similar maneuvers."11 But Union horsemen spotted this move and Schofield rushed two divisions to hold the turnpike in his rear at the crossroads village of Spring Hill. Uncoordinated rebel attacks failed to dislodge these Yankees—and nothing went right for Hood's army ever again.

  During the night of November 29–30 Schofield pulled his whole force back and entrenched a line covering the crossings of the Harpeth River at Franklin, fifteen miles south of Nashville. An angry Hood blamed his subordinates and even his predecessor Joe Johnston for the failure at Spring Hill. Since taking over the army four months earlier, Hood had frequently complained of its defensive mentality instilled, he believed, by Johnston. On November 30 he followed Schofield to Franklin and ordered his infantry to make a head-on assault, almost as if by such punishment to purge them of their supposed timidity. Hood's corps commanders protested this order to attack equal numbers who were dug in with strong artillery support, while nearly all the Confederate artillery and part of the infantry were far in the rear and could not arrive in time for action on this short November afternoon. Their protests only confirmed Hood's suspicions of the army's élan and his determination to force it to fight. He had broken the enemy line at Gaines' Mill and at Chickamauga; he would do it again here.

  Twenty-two thousand southern soldiers swept forward in the slanted sunlight of an Indian summer afternoon. Parts of Patrick Cleburne's hard-hitting division and another gray division temporarily broke the Union line but were driven out with heavy losses in hand to hand combat as fierce as anything at the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania. For hours after dark the firing raged until toward midnight the bluecoats broke off and headed north to Nashville. Hood could hardly claim a victory, however, for his 7,000 casualties were three times the enemy total. Hood lost more men killed at Franklin than Grant at Cold Harbor or Mc-Clellan in all of the Seven Days. A dozen Confederate generals fell at Franklin, six of them killed including Cleburne and a fire-eating South

  11. John B. Hood, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies (New Orleans, 1880), 283.

  Carolinian by the name of States Rights Gist. No fewer than fifty-four southern regimental commanders, half of the total, were casualties. Having proved even to Hood's satisfaction that they would assault breastworks, the Army of Tennessee had shattered itself beyond the possibility of ever doing so again. Southerners were appalled by the news from Franklin of "fearful loss and no results."12

  The lack of results galled Hood too as he prodded his battered troops northward toward Nashville, where they entrenched a defensive line along the hills four miles south of Tennessee's capital. Like Micawber, Hood seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—specifically, reinforcements from across the Mississippi. But Union gunboats prevented that. Afraid that a retreat to Alabama would trigger wholesale desertions by Tennessee soldiers, Hood hunkered down and waited for Thomas to attack. So did an impatient General Grant. Unaware of the crippled condition of Hood's army, northern leaders far from the scene feared that this rebel raid, like Jubal Early's the previous summer, might undo all the results of recent Union successes. While Thomas methodically prepared to attack, Stanton fumed that "this looks like the Mc-Clellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country."13 Grant bombarded Thomas with telegraphic exhortations to action, and he started for Nashville himself to relieve the ponderous general from command when news came that Thomas had finally made his move.

  When he did, it turned out like Joe Louis's second fight with Max Schmeling—a devastating knockout that almost annihilated the adversary. The analogy is appropriate, for Thomas's battle plan called for one division (including two brigades of black soldiers) to pin down Hood's right with a left jab while three Union infantry corps and the cavalry smashed the other flank with a roundhouse right. All worked as planned, though it took two winter days to finish the job. On December 15 the lifting fog at midmorning revealed 50,000 bluecoats coming on against Hood's 25,000 (most of Forrest's cavalry was thirty miles away watching a small Union force at Murfreesboro). All day the rebels hung on by their fingernails against the feinting jabs at their right and sledgeham-

  12. Quotation from Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: TheDiary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (New York, 1957), 181. For a recent and thorough study of the battle of Franklin, see James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly, Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin (Knoxville, 1983).

  13. O.R., Ser. I,
Vol. 45, pt. 2, pp. 15–16.

  blows at their left. As darkness began to fall the fingernails on the left let go, and during the night Hood pulled his army back two miles to a new and shorter line anchored by hills on both ends.

  The Federals moved forward with titanic inexorability next day and repeated the tactics of left jab and right uppercut. Again the Confederates parried groggily until late afternoon. But dismounted Union cavalrymen with rapid-firing carbines had worked around to the rear of Hood's left while two infantry corps hit this flank head-on. When the collapse finally came during a drenching rain and gathering darkness, it came with calamitous suddenness. From left to right, southern brigades toppled like dominoes. Thousands of rebels surrendered, and others streamed southward throwing away their arms and equipment to make better time. Officers tried to rally them, "but the line they formed," a private recalled, "was like trying to stop the current of the Duck River with a fish net."14

  Yankee cavalrymen scrambled to find their horses and take up the pursuit over roads shin-deep in mud. For nearly two weeks the chase continued from one river to the next through Tennessee into Alabama and Mississippi. At each river or creek Forrest's cavalry would make a stand and fall back, while the exhausted infantry—half of them now without shoes—leaked stragglers and deserters by the hundreds. By the beginning of 1865 the remnants of Hood's army had fetched up at Tupelo, Mississippi, where a head count found barely half of the 40,000 who had marched northward seven weeks earlier. Heartsick and broken, Hood resigned his command on January 13—a Friday.