The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Grant wanted to return to his western headquarters. He believed the war would be won there. However, it could be lost in the North. Political conditions made it impossible for him to stray far from Washington or the Virginia battlefield. With the twin capital cities so near each other, the northern theater of operations captured public and media attention in a way the more remote western battlefields could not. Although the western armies could boast of multiple victories, Northerners perceived little beyond their own states’ borders. The South’s ill-clad, poorly equipped, and undernourished armies had invaded the North, carried out spectacular raids seemingly almost at will, threatened Washington, D.C., itself, and held off and badly bloodied a huge Army of the Potomac that approached within eyeshot of Richmond’s church spires.

  Maintaining political support for the war required that its foremost general remain close by the president’s power to deflect those who would inevitably question his strategic decisions. Those who were ready to criticize the army were now legion. The horrific, once inconceivable carnage tolled far worse in the North than the South. Confederate troops fired rifled guns that ripped apart attacking lines of Union men with astonishingly lethal effect. With the war entering its third year, the North had suffered 100,000 more deaths than the South to that point. Lincoln continued to increase the call for men to fill the holes in the line, and increasingly men at home were unwilling to go. Bounties helped attract new soldiers, but men so enticed very often took their money and departed into the night. For every five bounty men who enlisted in the army, grumbled Grant, “we don’t get more than one effective soldier.” Desertion plagued the Union army almost as much as the Confederate. High taxes, draft riots, resentment of the substitution exemption, harsh suppression of dissent resulting in the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in several states, imprisonment and even exile of opposition figures, and other constitutional infringements had soured popular support for the war. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, many outside New England rebelled against fighting other white men to free black slaves.

  Abraham Lincoln was acutely aware of these issues. In the previous off-year’s election, the Republicans had suffered heavy losses. Some prophesized that without victory by the end of the coming summer, Lincoln would fall, and his Democratic successor would sue for peace with the Confederates. Radicals in his own party, concerned about his demonstrated willingness to “reconstruct” the rebellious states, set a movement afoot to replace him as their candidate in the fall of 1864 election. Lincoln himself issued a “blind memorandum” advising that “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be reelected.” While the president’s ingrained pessimism seemed to have gotten the better of him, the New York Times reported on “a manifest ebb in popular feeling through the whole country . . . a regular period of despondency” because of the seeming inability of the Northern armies, even when victorious, to subdue the rebellion.

  “Upon the progress of our arms,” Lincoln said, “all else chiefly depends.” With so many pressures to prove that the three-year-old war could be won, Grant would take personal charge in Virginia. He entrusted his wider strategic plan for ending the war in the West to a man he knew he could coordinate with well and one who understood personally what challenges lay ahead. He appointed Sherman to succeed him in command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, vaulting him over several more senior generals.

  The logic of the choice was the right hand knowing the left. Even Sherman described himself as Grant’s “second self.” The two planned for the first time a coordinated western and eastern campaign. Grant laid out simple goals for each: in Virginia to pin down and kill Lee’s army and capture Richmond, in Georgia to chase down and crush the Army of Tennessee and take Atlanta. The two generals would launch their spring campaigns simultaneously.

  NOW FORTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, “Uncle Billy,” as his soldiers affectionately called Sherman, was, according to a staff officer who described him in Georgia that year, “tall and lank, not very erect, with hair like a thatch, which he rubs up with his hands, a rusty beard trimmed close, a wrinkled face, prominent red nose, small bright eyes, coarse red hands . . . he smokes constantly.” He wore a brown field officer’s coat with a high collar and no stripes, muddy trousers, and a single spur. He walked awkwardly, keeping his hands in his pockets, and talked nonstop and so quickly that those around him could barely take in one sentence before the next was complete. The officer memorialized afterwards, “General Sherman is the most American man I ever saw.”

  On January 31, while still in command in the West, Grant had Sherman embark with the Army of the Tennessee then in Vicksburg on a flank move through the center of Mississippi with a goal of keeping Confederate bands from raiding Union river shipping and bases by inflicting as much damage as possible around the countryside. Like the Lord of Hosts trumpeting the dominion of his god, the U.S. Constitution, Sherman issued a message to the people of the country he was about to invade. He wanted to “prepare them for my coming.” He represented the U.S. government, which could exercise “any and all rights” against rebels—“to take their lives, their horses, their lands, their everything.” He intended to make “war, pure and simple: to be applied directly to the civilians of the South,” until they “submit.”

  The strategic lessons he had assimilated as a second lieutenant fresh out of West Point in the Second Seminole War in Florida could now be applied to another recalcitrant resistance force in the South. A force not unlike the natives—living off their homeland and fighting passionately for sovereign rights that they claimed as their own—continued to refuse to submit to his nation’s authority. For Sherman, the time had come to fulfill what he knew needed to be done to put down the rebellion: convince the Confederates that they were a defeated people. “The army of the Confederacy is the South,” he wrote his brother in late December, “and they still hope to worry us out. . . . We must hammer away and show strict persistence, such bottom that even that slender hope will fail them.”

  His army, he reported, “worked hard and with a will” through the Mississippi campaign of pillage without battle. After reducing Meridian, “with its depots, storehouses, arsenal, hospital, offices, hotels and cantonments,” to rubble and ash, the army moved on from there. He concentrated less on seeking out and killing the enemy than on destroying his ability to make war. Encountering scant resistance, his army wrecked 115 miles of railroad lines and bridges previously able to move Confederate men and supplies. Teams of men ripped up iron rails and then roasted them red hot over intense fires made with railroad ties. They laced the softened glowing track into a bow about a tree or post. When the Confederates returned, they discovered thousands of deposited lengths of metal scrap. Confederate railroad crews could not relay the twisted lengths of track they nicknamed “Sherman neckties.” His rapacious scavengers didn’t stop there: Columns fanned out through the countryside plundering farms, plantations, and villages, eating what they needed, taking what they wanted, and destroying anything and everything that might serve to maintain Confederate resistance. They left behind a scraped-over landscape that could not support a grazing mule, let alone human life.

  For Sherman, this was the cruel homecoming to the South that he had prophesized when secession came. He reminded his daughter Maria of his long sojourns in the South. Some of the boys his own troops now fought had once been students at the Pineville, Louisiana, military academy which he had superintended before the war. “In every battle I am fighting some of the very families in whose houses I used to spend some happy days,” he told her with obvious regret. He preferred not to kill his enemy or place his own men in harm’s way. “Of course I must fight when the time comes, whenever a result can be accomplished without battle I prefer it.” His personal sentiment soon would become a strategic discipline that made war without battle a means to the nation’s ends. Grant’s orders to Sherman in planning for the Atlanta campaign left him complete freedom “to move against Joh
nston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” He answered Grant a month before the 1864 campaign commenced that he intended to reach Atlanta without the need to engage Johnston in a major battle.

  SHERMAN HAD A GREAT advantage over the Confederate general Johnston. He knew the land they would fight over better than its defending army’s leader. The geographical and engineering surveys he had made while living and traveling through up-country Georgia twenty years earlier could now providentially be brought back to mind in planning his invasion. His forces would move in a southeasterly direction, heading through a heavily forested region netted underfoot with junglelike tangles of vines and cut diagonally by steep ridges, the southwestern-most fingers of the Appalachian Mountains, and barred by rivers. It would be hard to imagine a terrain better suited for a defending army. Those ridges and rivers provided the Confederates with a successive series of natural palisades, barriers, and shelters. They required that the invaders attempt to advance through narrow gaps where they could easily be bottled up and forced to face impenetrable fire from three sides. Johnston, a temperamentally conservative military tactician, need not advance, merely defend, to emerge victorious. In Dalton, Johnston’s men spent the winter constructing fortifications and artillery emplacements. They even dammed up streams to flood out the valley before Dalton. “A better drilled, better disciplined or more contented army is not in the Confederacy,” proclaimed A. J. Neal to his brother. He was convinced that the Army of the Tennessee would soon reverse the fall’s losses and return northwards.

  Moreover, the Yankee course of invasion would follow in the main the route of the Western & Atlantic Railroad—and the bluecoats’ advance would depend on holding that rail line. “The great question of the campaign,” Sherman recalled a decade later, “was one of supplies.” Supplies for his advancing army would need to roll down it. Like Grant (and Johnston), he was a former supply officer. In contemplating a campaign deep into hostile territory, keeping his army supplied would be crucial to victory. As the railroad was conquered, though, and he advanced ever deeper into enemy territory, its single track would become his huge army’s sole supply artery. “Railroads,” knew Sherman, “are the weakest things in war, a single man with a match can destroy and cut off communications.” He would be invading into enemy territory, fighting along a broad front and leaving, as his army advanced, an ever more extended and tenuous lifeline behind, requiring guards along its difficult-to-defend length to protect it. When his army advanced, like a swimmer through water “the war closed in behind and [left] the same enemy behind.”

  He surveyed the work of war that lay ahead and the enemy army he faced. “The Devils,” he wrote his wife, Ellen, “seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired—No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith—niggers gone—wealth & luxury gone, money worthless, starvation in view within a period of two or three years, are causes enough to make the bravest tremble, yet I see no signs of let up—Some few deserters—plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight it out.” He considered Grant’s great command to him to conquer the West and concluded, “All that has gone before is mere skirmishing—The War now begins.”

  CHAPTER 17

  CANDLE ENDS

  WHILE GEN. JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON was on his way to Dalton and his new command, President Jefferson Davis wrote him to convey his expectation that the Army of Tennessee would not delay its move back into East Tennessee. He wanted “vigorous action.” Braxton Bragg, the Army of Tennessee’s former commander and the president’s new military affairs advisor, assured Davis that the army he left behind was “still full of zeal and burning to redeem its lost character.” Corps commander William Hardee told Davis the troops were “in good spirits” and “ready to fight.” Once in Dalton, though, Johnston surveyed his rebel army and saw things very differently. He did not wait long to rebuff Davis’s request that he attack.

  With Bragg at his elbow, Davis fumed at ceding first-strike advantage to the Yankees and at enduring the political costs his Southern nation was paying for letting the whole of Tennessee linger so long in the invader’s hands.

  Davis had no choice. He knew from experience that if he ordered his newly installed general to move before he was ready, the easily affronted Johnston would, in all likelihood, submit a hasty resignation—something the Army of Tennessee and the Confederate president could afford even less than leaving the Yankees in control of East Tennessee for now. The differences between the general’s and the president’s views were not surprising. They involved more than their perspectives on the way things stood in North Georgia. Davis and Johnston had a long history already and not a successful one. Both men were West Pointers and had served in Indian Removal conflicts, but the reserved and genteel Johnston, with his imperial beard, melancholy and penetrating dark brown eyes, and aristocratic Virginia plantation manners, loathed the often prickly Davis, a self-confident and at times arrogant Westerner, smooth politician, and former U.S. secretary of war who trusted his own military generalship more than he did his general’s. The touchy Johnston had felt slighted by Davis, believing the president should have made him the ranking general in the Confederate army at the war’s outset. Instead Davis had designated four other generals higher. The two men had also disagreed over the defense of Richmond, which led Davis to place the more aggressive Robert E. Lee in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the South’s foremost army, which Johnston considered rightfully to be his. Now, fearing he was being set up to fail by Bragg and Davis, Johnston sized up the odds he faced and the dug-in strength of his fortifiable positions along the ridges. With his army hunkering down for the winter in what the Atlanta Southern Confederacy called “the Valley Forge of the Western Campaign,” Johnston wrote back to Davis that the only strategy he could see was “to beat the enemy when he advances and then to move forward.” He insisted, “I can see no other mode of taking the offensive here.” He hoped, of course, soon to recover the lost territories, but a quick offensive to drive out the invaders was out of the question. “Difficulties,” he explained, “are in the way,” including a badly depleted and demoralized army. The Union forces had 130 freight cars of supplies rolling into Chattanooga each day, 193 at its peak. The single overtaxed Western & Atlantic Railroad track posed severe logistical challenges for the troops at Dalton; taking the offensive would require knocking the Yankees out of a heavily fortified base and grabbing their stockpiles. Confederate raiders had enjoyed such successes before, but never against a force not only double their number but also energized by recent victories. Johnston intended to stay put. He even considered making a retrograde movement back to the sturdier barrier of the Etowah River, with its slave-built fortifications.

  Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, one of the Army of Tennessee’s three corps commanders, was much the opposite of Johnston. Also a West Pointer, he was twenty-four years younger, brash, combative, and certain that in battle the bolder leader reaped the rewards. With “the face of an old Crusader,” he was all lion. He had a killer’s impassive blue eyes and a readiness to send men charging headlong into the Yankee lines. His body showed his own fearlessness. Little below the apron of his massive light-brown beard remained whole. It took three aides to strap him into the saddle. His left arm, turned to a limp pulp by shrapnel at Gettysburg, hung useless within its sleeve. His right leg ended a hand’s width below the hip; a surgeon’s bone saw had removed the rest after a minié ball shattered his thighbone at Chickamauga. As offensive-minded as Johnston was conservative, Hood grew impatient for a fight as Johnston worked to restore his army and dug in to face the coming invasion. In March, he went behind his commander’s back. He wrote a series of letters directly to Davis, Bragg, and Secretary of War James Seddon calling for a “march to the front as soon as possible, so as not to allow the enemy to concentrate and advance upon us.” All the Confederate president could do was warn Johnst
on against even considering any further retreat, which “would be so detrimental both from military and political considerations”; otherwise, he kept his peace.

  The table for the spring campaign was set, but set for a campaign unlike any before in history. The invading army was led by a general who preferred to avoid battle whenever possible, and the defending army’s general intended to fight only when the aggressor carried the war to him. It was as if the same poles of two magnets were preparing to meet, each constitutionally predisposed to veer away from the other. A Georgia up-country reel was in the offing in which the partners would approach like courting mates, touch briefly and tellingly, and then deflect across and away until they met again, around ridges and rivers, repeating their steps until, like lovers, they fell into a deep embrace. But here the embrace was that of war.