The Fateful Lightning

by Jeff Shaara

  By March 15, Sherman had marched his entire army across the Cape Fear River, on the roads that would lead to Goldsboro. As before, Howard’s wing, the Seventeenth and Fifteenth corps, took the eastward path, while Slocum’s Fourteenth and Twentieth marched more to the west. The maps showed the obvious, that if Johnston was gathering any substantial force of rebels at Raleigh, Slocum’s men were closer, and would likely bear the brunt of any assault. In response, Sherman ordered Kilpatrick’s men to shield Slocum’s columns.

  He rode with his staff, the misery of another storm soaking through him yet again, the slop of the roads bogging the artillery in front of him, men gathering in work brigades to free the wheels. He moved past cursing teamsters, ignored the work. He tried to keep his back straight, but the cold wetness had already flooded down the back of his neck, souring his mood, keeping the staff at bay.

  There was a wagon now, down in a shallow ditch, a quartet of men straining against one wheel. Sherman halted the horse, tried to see past the disguise of the raincoats, looking for an officer.

  “Get more men, for God’s sake! Who’s in command?”

  One man stood straight, a salute, the telltale sign of a young officer. “Yes, sir. Lieutenant Folyard. General Sherman, it is an honor, sir.”

  “Shut the hell up. You have any more men than this under your command?”

  “Yes, sir. A platoon, up ahead.”

  “Well, bring them back here and use them. What the hell do you think they’re for?”

  The man saluted again, and Sherman spurred the horse, cursed under his breath, the young lieutenant running past him through ankle-deep mud. The column resumed ahead, and Sherman fought the despair, an odd blanket of gloom that seemed to soak him as easily as the rain. He wanted to stop, to find some dry place, had passed at least a half-dozen small farmhouses. But the men were on the move, and he knew to keep them there, that every mile was one less before they reached Goldsboro. Damn it all, he thought. Has there ever been a campaign that survived drowning as much as this one? Is it just the time of year? I don’t recall New Orleans this miserable. Where’s Kilpatrick? If he’s got some wayward beauty stuffed in his camp wagon again, I’ll skin him myself. If there was anyone else out here who outranked him, Kilpatrick would be haying horses.

  Sherman closed his eyes, fought a budding headache, struggled to see past the gloom, a mood as black as any in weeks. Why now? he thought. Is it just the damned weather? I’m just so sick of so many days doing nothing. He had a sudden thought, remembered Georgia, the approach to Savannah. We pressed them, compacted them, and so I thought there was danger in that. Interior lines, a tight defense, all of it. Hardee wrote the textbook, for God’s sake. But he didn’t make use of it. Or maybe he didn’t have the strength. What about now? Johnston’s giving him orders. What does that mean? He’s retreating, we know that. Running like rabbits, with this big damned sixty-thousand-man hound dog on his tail.

  He tried to take some comfort in that, forced himself to say aloud, “We’re winning. Damn it all. No reason to be so down in the mud about it. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  He tried to think of happier times, better places, Ellen, his children. But those memories were poisoned too easily by thoughts of his son Willie. He felt enormous guilt for his lack of feelings for the infant, had never seen him, had no idea what he looked like. That will be a problem, he thought. Ellen will not understand. She endured both of them, suffered through two dead children. God help me, I can only feel for Willie. He was me. No other way to see it. Nine years old, and he would have grown up to command an army. I know it.

  He blinked away tears, glanced to the side, no one there, the staff keeping well back. The guards rode out to each side of him, Lieutenant Snelling up front, seeming as miserable in the saddle as Sherman was now. He won’t show it, he thought. Most loyal man in the army. Willie loved him. Loved everyone of them. Damn, stop this!

  He saw a rider, moving toward him along the side of the muddy road. The man stopped at Snelling, the lieutenant pointing back, sending the man on past. Sherman tried to focus, the headache in full blossom, the man closing the distance, the face familiar, one of Slocum’s men.

  “Sir! General Slocum offers his respects, and wishes to inform you that the rebel line has been driven back. General Kilpatrick is heavily engaged, but has made way for units of the Twentieth Corps.” Sherman felt a spark of alarm, stared hard at the man. “What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t heard a damned thing.”

  The man pointed toward the front, and for the first time, Sherman heard the thump of artillery.

  “Where is Slocum?”

  “Just ahead, sir.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Sherman turned, the staff already coming alive, McCoy and Dayton leading a handful of aides closer. Dayton said, “What is it, sir?”

  “A fight. You heard anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, let’s find out what’s happening.”

  Sherman spurred the horse, Slocum’s man moving out front, Snelling and the guards keeping pace. Damn you, he thought. Wrapped up inside your own head, whining about dead children. You forget where the hell you are?

  The sounds were reaching him consistently now, heavy thumps, the rain slowing. He saw Slocum, a cluster of officers, Slocum pointing, giving orders, men in motion. Sherman was there now, called out, “What the hell’s going on?”

  Slocum peered at him from the brim of a dripping hat. “Kilpatrick ran into a heavy skirmish line at six this morning. Stood toe-to-toe with a bunch of rebels for a while, until he called for help. I moved infantry up, drove in their line. But there’s another behind it.”

  “You can’t flank them? How many can there be?”

  “The river is over that way a short hop. There’s a flooded creek to the left. No choice but to drive straight ahead.”

  Sherman rode past the officers, stared out, the rain finally stopping. The musket fire was reaching him now, most of it out along the soggy road. He eyed the trees to both sides, thought of the rivers, the swamplands, Hardee. You chose this ground.

  Slocum was beside him now, said, “Doesn’t appear to be a large force. But they’ve got good defensive lines. Hardee’s making use of the terrain, that’s for certain.”

  Of course he is, Sherman thought. He wrote the book.

  A courier came hard, splashing mud high as he rode. He focused on Slocum, reined up, said, “Sir! The 105th Illinois has driven in the flank of the enemy’s position. Major Reynolds is moving up more of the artillery.”

  Sherman thought, Reynolds. Good. Knows how to place his guns.

  Another courier rode close, eyed Sherman, tossed up a salute. “General! The rebels are giving way!”

  “Who’s pushing them back?”

  The man looked at Slocum, then back to Sherman. “The First and Third divisions are in line, sir. Making a whale of a fight!”

  Sherman looked past the man, the only sounds a steady chatter of musketry, broken by the heavy thunder of Reynolds’s big guns. Hitchcock was up beside Sherman now, said, “Sir! Should we ride forward, see what’s happening?”

  There was too much energy in the question, and Sherman looked at the young man, shook his head. “Let the men do their jobs, Major. They need us, they can find us.”

  —

  The fight near the village of Averasboro settled into haphazard skirmishing for several hours, Hardee’s well-chosen defense making perfect use of the protection on his flanks by the two waterways. But by midafternoon, Slocum’s infantry gained the momentum. Hardee’s men continued to resist, and even as they gave way, Hardee kept his men together with enough organization to continue the skirmishing throughout most of the following day.

  Aided by the misery of the weather, and the narrow peninsula of land framed by the two rivers, Hardee had laid his troops out in three defensive lines. The first two were manned by his weakest, most inexperienced troops, with his seasoned veterans at the rear. The fr
ont lines were certain to give way, Hardee anticipating that the stout line of veterans could absorb and rally their collapse. As the Federals struggled to advance, they confronted each line, and when that line gave way, the Federals followed their victory by a mad dash forward, only to stumble into Hardee’s next line. Though maneuver was difficult, both sides probed and poked the other, momentum swinging both ways. But Hardee understood mathematics, and with more of Slocum’s infantry driving into Hardee’s narrow position, Hardee had only one final maneuver he could make. He withdrew.

  The fight at Averasboro produced casualties on both sides, but in the end it amounted to only a heavy skirmish, the best fight Hardee could make. But there was a success for the rebels that even Hardee didn’t completely understand. Averasboro forced Slocum’s entire wing to delay their march, while farther to the east, Howard’s columns continued onward. Instead of Sherman’s two halves advancing in tandem, each wing capable of moving to a rapid support of the other, a gap had opened between them, a gap that Joe Johnston’s cavalry scouts watched with great care. As Hardee pulled his men away from the fight, he only knew he had given Slocum a bloody nose. What Johnston realized was that Hardee might have given him the one desperate opportunity he had hoped for.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  FRANKLIN

  The march had been as miserable as most, the roads sucking the shoes off the soldiers’ feet, the single advantage Franklin had by wearing no shoes at all. Colonel Jones had offered to find him a pair, but Franklin had spent most of his young life in bare feet, and the effort to confine his toes inside stiff leather was at best uncomfortable. As the soldiers struggled with the mud, Franklin did what he had always done before. He just walked through it.

  The promotion had come to Toland Jones in mid-February, someone in the army noting that a regiment should be led by a man with a higher rank than captain. To Jones’s surprise, and the delight of every man in the unit, he had been promoted two ranks, to lieutenant colonel. If the soldiers weren’t certain just how the army made these decisions, to Franklin it was one more source of outright confusion. How could a man be both a lieutenant and a colonel? The explanation had made little sense to him and for reasons Franklin still didn’t understand, Jones was referred to by his men as simply the colonel.

  Jones rode at the head of the column, the proper place for a regimental commander, and Franklin had kept in line with the men close behind, trying to fit in wherever there was space. He felt awkward without a musket, envied the men their marvelous weapons, imagined he was carrying one. He had found a heavy stick, carried it against his shoulder, mimicking them, drawing the small joke. But the soldiers mostly ignored him, nothing like the teasing he had heard the first time he assumed a place in line. They knew him now, even his name, and to Franklin’s relief, they seemed to accept him for what he was, a camp servant. Officially he was Colonel Jones’s aide-de-camp, a title that meant only what Jones intended it to mean at any given moment. Still, there was no uniform, no weapon, no rank. Even if Franklin functioned more or less as the regimental gofer, watering the horses, gathering forage, carrying messages to other officers when the couriers were busy, the job meant that Franklin was a part of this army. Gone were the evil smirks, the crude comments that the soldiers had aimed toward Clara. He was grateful for that, felt more than ever that leaving her in Savannah was the best thing for both of them, no matter what he realized now was the price he would pay.

  Since leaving Savannah he had missed Clara with an ache that surprised him, a longing to be with her. She was his mate, but also his fellow novice, ignorant of the ways of the world, in almost anything beyond their former lives as slaves. As he observed everything new, from people to the countryside, he imagined her there, would talk to her in his mind, pointing out some tidbit that no one else around him would notice at all. At night she seemed to fill him completely, the silent conversations in his mind full of explanations and wonder, the pride of marching with the soldiers, only swept away by the daylight, the sadness of starting a new day enduring the reality of her absence. For the first time in his life, sleep had meaning for him that he had never imagined before. The dreams were pleasant, happy times with her, so very different from a boy’s nightmares, chased by dogs, the sight of his father’s horrible injury. Even more, the dreams offered him glimpses of some kind of future he still couldn’t quite understand, and certainly couldn’t predict, pieces of a life with her that still seemed a marvelous fantasy.

  Since their last goodbye, he hadn’t heard anything from her, no letters even from the old preacher, but there was nothing strange about that. Franklin still didn’t understand the army’s mail system, was hesitant to ask Colonel Jones or anyone else if he was allowed to mail a letter, or what kind of thoughts he would put to paper. He had seen what the soldiers used for stamps, another oddity, like a tiny bit of currency, what seemed to be an adornment on the letters, a decoration that had meaning Franklin still didn’t comprehend.

  On the march through South Carolina, he had been careful to keep close to the soldiers, though it was unlikely any of the Georgia plantation owners were extending their search for their freed slaves this far north, Franklin seeing the wide Savannah River as a boundary that meant more to him than the army’s struggle with pontoon bridges. He had never known anything of this place called South Carolina, but he understood it now, that the army marched through this new land carrying a serious anger, the explanation coming from anyone he asked, that this awful war had been born here, that these people deserved to feel the pain of that.

  The farther they marched from the seacoast, the more hilly the land became, the flat swamplands rising into lush forests, more fertile farms. The trees changed, too, fat oaks and tall pines taking the place of so much scrub, the thickets of cypress and palmetto bogs. He had observed all of that with a keen eye, marveled at the similarities with Georgia, had begun to wonder if the whole world looked like the places he had already seen. That inspired laughter from the soldiers, but they were eager to set him straight, the men describing to him their homes up north in very different ways. Their seriousness had impressed Franklin, the soldiers growing sad as they spoke of towns and villages, homes and family, the place they called Ohio. They pointed, too, to the trees they passed, comparing the tall pines to what they had back home, vast forests of broad-leafed hardwood trees, how those would change color in the fall, glowing orange and red, some of the men calling it God’s great paintbrush, wiping across the landscape to signal the coming of winter. He had seen snow before, but not what the men described to him, powdery white, as deep as a man’s waist, the lakes and ponds freezing hard, so that a man could walk across. He had been skeptical at those kinds of stories, knew that they thought him stupid, but the stories were passed between the men themselves, memories of what they were missing, where their families waited for their return. Franklin saw real emotion there, and for the first time he understood that these white soldiers felt the same kind of ache, the longing he felt every day for Clara.

  There were plantations in South Carolina as well, not as many, and most of those not nearly as grand as what he had seen in Georgia. There were exceptions to that, of course, and in every case, the army marched past the mansions to cheers from a fresh crowd of Negroes, who flowed out away from the estates to follow the great Sherman, leaving behind a life that Franklin had to believe was no better than what he had left in Georgia.

  He didn’t see the destruction of Columbia, the Fourteenth Corps sent farther out along the river, making their crossing several miles from the capital city. The soldiers seemed angry about that, as though missing out on some wonderful victory. But there were fires still, homes along the way, smaller villages where the bummers had been, leading the way as they had done across Georgia. Franklin had seen what was left of many of those homes, smoldering wreckage, had seen the white people still lingering, buried in sadness for what this army had done to them. The soldiers had mostly ignored that, still sought out the treasure
s, mostly food and spirits, anything the bummers might have missed. But there was little time for treasure hunting, the orders passed along from high above that this march had a purpose, and it wasn’t to end in South Carolina.

  And then, the talk changed, a new excitement, and when they crossed yet another wide river, Franklin was told by the colonel that they were now in North Carolina. It was another marvel, Colonel Jones’s adjutant showing Franklin a map, pencil lines in odd shapes, marked by rivers and railroads, and small X’s for the towns. All Franklin could see from the map was that North Carolina was larger, but he saw for himself that the land was not so different from what they had left behind, vast woods, the tallest pine trees he had ever seen. The towns were the same as well, peopled by somber white women, old and young, and enormous numbers of Negroes, many of them leaving their homes and masters, now following behind the army. The greatest difference between the two Carolinas came from the soldiers themselves, the loud talk, the obvious thirst for vengeance calming now. The officers seemed determined to convince their men that this was nothing like South Carolina, that Sherman himself had told them to treat these people with respect.

  But then, there was a different order, this one directed toward the civilians who followed the army. Not all were slaves, some of them poor whites, what the officers described as refugees, another word Franklin didn’t know. When the army reached Fayetteville, many of those people, black and white, were gathered together, officers reading from pieces of paper, the people told that the army could not feed them, that there was a better life for them down the river. The boats were there, black smoke from tall stacks, sailors standing aside as the people were herded aboard, watched over by men with muskets. When each boat reached its fill, the whistle sounded, ropes cast off, the boat belching smoke as it swung out into the river, slowly moving away until it disappeared. From the packed throngs on board the boats to the people left waiting on the wharves, the reaction to this new experience bordered on panic, rumors spreading among the Negroes that they were being hauled back home, to face their overseers. The most frightening rumor Franklin heard claimed that the boats were going straight out to sea, only to drown the former slaves in the ocean, ridding the army of their black curse. Franklin struggled not to believe that, had heard too many ridiculous rumors all along the march, none of them true. But the fear and the cries and the tears were real, even the white refugees not quite believing that they were being taken anywhere other than some kind of prison.