Less than a year later, as one of Johnston’s corps commanders and a favorite of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Hood was once more clamoring for the elusive decisive winner-take-all battle against Sherman. Rumors circulated that Johnston had become gun-shy and hesitant, in part because of his slow recuperation during two years in Virginia from his own severe wounds. In contrast, Hood seemed all the more impatient for having lost a leg and the use of an arm. Age no doubt explained more: Hood was thirty-three, Johnston a tired but sober fifty-seven.
Even with Sherman less than ten miles from the city, Hood was still the wrong replacement for Johnston and exactly the wrong sort of Confederate army commander to stop Sherman’s slow strangulation of Atlanta. For all his tenacity—at least three men were needed to strap the general to his horse—Hood had destroyed many of the divisions of which he had been given command. A third to a half of the men under his direct command were lost at each of the battles of Second Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. Sherman’s subordinate commanders, especially those who knew Hood’s character (“bold even to rashness”) as fellow cadets at West Point, were eager to see Hood take over.41
Johnston let it be known that he surely had done better than Lee had against Grant. His relative numerical disadvantages were far worse than those of Lee, and yet he had lost proportionally far fewer troops. In his further defense, he had also forced Sherman to advance far more slowly to Atlanta than Grant had to the outskirts of Richmond in roughly the same time. Just as Lee had stiffened outside Richmond, so, too, would Johnston in front of Atlanta, where the advantages would increasingly accrue to the defense. Johnston’s point was that, until his relief, he had been readying his army for a long war of attrition and fortified defense outside Atlanta that would stall and then wreck Sherman’s army as Lee had nearly done to Grant. Why relieve him before his strategy had fully a chance to come to fruition?42
Hood later remarked of his appointment, “Was it General Johnston’s policy to retreat till he had demoralized the army?” But Hood’s immediate problem—other than the fact that the troops resented Johnston’s abrupt removal—was not boosting morale, but finding a better strategy. Sherman was at the height of his powers, masterfully organizing and directing an enormous and constantly resupplied military machine of some hundred thousand veterans, who had grown in confidence with each mile they had advanced southward. Indeed, as Sherman neared Atlanta, he wrote as if he were a divine Nemesis, as if he were a tool to remind an entire people of the wages of their folly: “They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunder-storm. War is the remedy our enemies have chosen.” For the new commander Hood, it quickly became apparent that he was dealing not just with a good tactician and master strategist, but with a missionary as well, bent on teaching the entire South his version of a moral lesson. More mundanely, Hood would soon learn that the Confederate army outside Atlanta had only poor choices: either be outflanked and bypassed by Sherman, or be forced to fight head-on in unfavorable circumstances. Sherman’s genius was that he usually controlled the conditions of battle, and somehow he had managed to supply his invading army far better than the defenders were provisioned on their home soil.43
Nonetheless, Hood was promoted to fight, and fight he would. He began the final round of the campaign in a series of three engagements within just ten days: at Peachtree Creek (July 20, nearly 5,000 Confederate casualties), Decatur/Atlanta (July 22, 8,500 casualties), and Ezra Church (July 28, 3,000 casualties). The battles were memorable—aside from the fact that Sherman’s favorite army commander, General James McPherson, fell outside Atlanta—in that Sherman left the tactical details to his subordinates. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. But by the end of July, Sherman was ready to turn his full attention to the siege of Atlanta.
Most important, about eleven days after assuming supreme command, John Bell Hood’s forces had suffered twice the casualties of Sherman’s larger army, squandering sixteen thousand combatants without materially deterring the enemy. Now morale among the Confederates truly plummeted—with most soldiers nostalgic for the Fabian tactics of Johnston that were increasingly seen as about the only way to wear out the Sherman juggernaut. By the end of the battle of Ezra Church, decimated Southern troops—some three thousand were lost—sometimes would not follow the raised swords of their regimental officers into battle.44
Nor did Sherman rashly charge into Atlanta. Instead, in the final month, he systematically began cutting Atlanta off from all rail and wagon traffic, while bombarding the city. In theory, the Confederates at last were in the position that Johnston had once envisioned might turn the tide: a nucleus of thousands of troops, entrenched behind stout fortifications, housed among civilians in Atlanta, and guarded only by miles of thinning Union troops at the end of tenuous supply lines. Confederate mobile columns could leave the city and nearby camps to hit Sherman from the rear should he engage in a lengthy siege. Given that there was really no more army to outflank, Sherman finally had to choose between besieging and starving out the surrounded Hood in Atlanta or assaulting the city directly.
For most of August, Sherman sought pitched battle with Hood by daily shelling and sending cavalry out to cut the last rail link to Atlanta from Macon to the south. When his horsemen under Generals Stone-man and Kilpatrick proved unable to tear up the last rail line to Atlanta, Sherman sent his infantry out to destroy the tracks. As Sherman’s troops seemed to leave his entrenchments around Atlanta, Hood and others in the city dreamed the Yankees were retreating back to Tennessee. Indeed, the Confederates and thousands in Atlanta began celebrating the defeat of Sherman’s army on the assumption that the Yankees were dumbfounded as to how to stop the city’s lifeline, out of supplies, and more worried about a counterattack from Hood.45
That fantasy dissipated almost immediately. Following the battle of Jonesboro on August 31, Sherman’s forces finally severed the remaining rail artery from Macon. General Hardee’s mounted forces were forced back into Atlanta, which lacked any source of fresh supplies. To prevent his troops from being trapped altogether, Hood pulled out the entire Confederate army on September 1, blowing up the city’s munitions in a terrible conflagration even as Sherman’s forces began entering the city the next day.
In less than fifteen weeks since leaving Tennessee, Sherman with relatively light casualties had taken the second most important city of the Confederacy. His army remained over eighty thousand soldiers strong—not that much smaller than when he had begun the Atlanta campaign. Of course, Sherman was not done; he was in position to cause far more havoc inside the heartland of the South. Indeed, Hood scattered from Atlanta with fewer than forty thousand troops—the Southerners in defense losing in the Atlanta campaign some thirty-four thousand casualties to the attacking Sherman’s thirty-one thousand.
In this colored lithograph by the Swedish-born illustrator Thure de Thulstrup, a mounted Sherman (on the right) gazes out from behind the breastworks at the Union shelling of a soon-to-be-captured Atlanta. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
At the beginning of the struggle in spring 1864, Joe Johnston had originally been charged with ensuring that Sherman could not come east to aid Grant. But a somewhat different threat confronted the Confederates. There were very few forces between Sherman and the Atlantic coast—and so nothing to stop the victors from marching to the rear of Lee’s army. As for Sherman, again historians would fault him for letting Hood escape Atlanta with the remnants of his army, when Union troops had virtually surrounded the city. But if he failed in one objective of destroying outright the Army of Tennessee, he succeeded in many others.
First, by taking Atlanta, Sherman provided an enormous emotional lift to a shaken Union as the November elections neared. In twenty-four hours, Sherman had essentially destroyed the candidacy of Democratic nominee George McClellan. Second, Sherman fought in a way that ensured his losses
would be light at a time when Union casualties were unsustainable elsewhere. Third, Sherman had worn Hood’s army down to less than half its original size. Fourth, he had prevented Hood from reinforcing Lee. Fifth, Sherman had positioned a large Northern army inside the South, where it could continue to raid and pillage the heartland as it headed eastward. And sixth, Sherman had saved Grant’s sinking reputation. By taking Atlanta and giving deference to Grant, Sherman had enlightened the public about the Union’s dual strategies of tying down one army in the east while encircling others in the west: Suddenly the bloodbath in Virginia could be reinterpreted as complementary to Sherman’s quite different mobile warfare rather than antithetical and misguided.
In any case, after Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman was not about to risk another set battle against a desperate Confederate army. He would leave behind General George Thomas to deal with Hood if the latter went northward into Tennessee. Rather than being trapped in a destroyed city, Sherman was liberated—free to cut his supply lines, leave an Atlanta a wreck, ravage where he pleased, and live off the post-harvest Georgia landscape.46
“So Atlanta Is Ours and Fairly Won” (September 1864)
For a public sickened by the Richmond campaign, anything Sherman did that did not result in comparable carnage was welcome. But once Atlanta fell, everything changed. The reaction up north was electrifying. Sherman had taken a symbolic Southern city. His army was still intact. He was preparing even more campaigns. Who knew what the wily wild Sherman would do to the rebels next?
The once venomous press that had damned Lincoln, Grant, and at times Sherman was calling Sherman a national savior and a brilliant strategist who could not be stopped. All worries about the escape of Hood’s army or uncertainties over Sherman’s next move were drowned out by the public exultation. President Lincoln wrote Sherman the next day, “The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations, that have signalized the campaign, must render it famous in the annals of war, and have entitled those who have participated therein to the applause and thanks of the nation.”47
The papers, both pro- and anti-Lincoln, went wild. The pro-Lincoln New York Times blared, “The political skies begin to brighten.” The Chicago Tribune boasted, “The dark days are over.” The erstwhile Lincoln antagonist Horace Greeley in his New York Tribune announced, “Henceforth we fly the banner of Abraham Lincoln for our next president.” A reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial wrote of the capture and destruction of Atlanta, “Grant walked into Vicksburg, McClellan walked around Richmond, but Sherman is walking upon Atlanta.” In turn, the once cocky South that had been assured that Grant’s terrible losses would usher in a Northern peace party was stunned. Most Confederates wailed that Lincoln would be reelected. The loss of Atlanta proved even more disheartening than that of Vicksburg or Gettysburg. The issue was not just the loss of Atlanta, but how and where Sherman could be stopped.48
The electoral effects were immediate. In an eerie happenstance, the antiwar Democrats had just met in Chicago on August 31 to nominate George McClellan. Abruptly “Little Mac” was put in the impossible position of either seeming churlish by downplaying Sherman’s magnificent achievement, or praising it and thereby diminishing the reason for his own anti-Lincoln peace candidacy. The growing jubilation among the ranks of voting soldiers ensured that most would favor Lincoln—not an apparently has-been general, tainted by a Copperhead platform, who would throw away all the past sacrifice to make an unconditional peace with a spent South reeling and on the verge of collapse. The Union heretofore may have been sick of a losing war, but it was not sick enough to give up on what at last appeared to be a winning cause.49
Sherman himself was always acutely aware that the capture of Atlanta would be critical to Lincoln’s success in defusing the recently nominated McClellan. In his memoirs, he recalled a conversation with Lincoln in which the president gave credit to Sherman for his reelection:
The victory was most opportune; Mr. Lincoln himself told me afterward that even he had previously felt in doubt, for the summer was fast passing away; that General Grant seemed to be checkmated about Richmond and Petersburg, and my army seemed to have run up against an impassable barrier, when suddenly and unexpectedly, came the news that “Atlanta was ours, and fairly won.”
In critiquing the importance of the McClellan candidacy, Sherman himself concluded of his capture of Atlanta:
Success to our arms at that instant was therefore a political necessity; and it was all important that something startling in our interest should occur before the election in November. The brilliant success at Atlanta filled that requirement, and made the election of Mr. Lincoln certain.50
In a September 15 letter to his foster father, Thomas Ewing Sr., right after the capture of Atlanta, Sherman also pointed out that all the grand Union schemes hatched in March 1864 had until then come to naught—except his own: “The Grand Outlines contemplated these Grand Armies moving on Richmond, Atlanta & Montgomery Alabama, & Mine alone has reached its goal.” Sherman was not much of a Lincoln partisan (“I suppose Lincoln is the best choice, but I am not a voter”), but he knew well enough that without Lincoln’s reelection—the choice was either an unstable Frémont on the left or an appeasing McClellan to the right—his own efforts might come to naught.51
In a belated letter, nearly a month after the fall of Atlanta, the new Democratic candidate, General George McClellan, sent Sherman a word of congratulations: “Your campaign will go down in history as one of the most memorable of the world.” His apologies for the tardy thanks reflected the embarrassment of his own position, given the sudden radical improvement in Lincoln’s reelection chances.52
The Reelection of Lincoln (November 1864)
Despite the contemporary consensus, controversy still persists over whether the fall of Atlanta—coming more than two months before the election on November 8—by itself saved Lincoln’s presidency. Skeptics point out that the tide had already turned somewhat by late summer. Admiral David Farragut, for example, had taken Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864. By the end of September, General Philip Sheridan had cornered Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley, and so devastated the rich Virginia landscape that it would never again serve as a Confederate conduit into Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Moreover, Lincoln would win the November election by over 400,000 votes, 55 percent of the votes cast, with a huge Electoral College win of 212 to 21. McClellan carried only New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware. Surely not all of Lincoln’s success was predicated on the news of Atlanta’s fall. While Lincoln won overwhelmingly among on-duty Union troops (especially in Sherman’s army, where he won an 80 percent majority), the soldiers’ vote probably did not provide the margin of victory. And even had Lincoln lost to McClellan, Little Mac might not have been able to quit the war without splitting the Northern citizenry in two.53
All that said, a shift of a mere 80,000 votes in certain key states would have won McClellan the Electoral College vote in an election that did not seem to break until September and October—and only on good news from the west. Moreover, it was not just Sherman’s capture of Atlanta that restored Northern confidence, but the manner in which he took, occupied, and was planning to leave the city. By late August, most in the North, depressed over the near-destruction of Grant’s army in Virginia, had forgotten the capture of Mobile. In addition, Sheridan’s success followed Sherman’s. While it enhanced the sense of momentum, Sheridan’s devastation did not in itself foster a newfound Union confidence. Liddell Hart called all of these political considerations, both in the east and west, “the dark background to the final phase of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign,” adding, “Grant could do nothing, and any serious repulse to Sherman might have a fatal effect on public opinion. Caution was essential, yet success was equally so.”54
As he occupied Atlanta, Sherman soon tired of being continually harassed by Southern cavalry and Hood’s flying columns. He delegated the problem of Hood to the reliable George Thomas. Sherman was happy to see Hood go nort
hward to meet the numerically superior and utterly reliable Army of the Cumberland under Thomas, thus enabling him to cut loose from Atlanta to head eastward. Yet he was wise enough to stay in Atlanta until after the election to avoid the implication to Northern voters that he had given up or been forced out of the key city—and to ensure that he did not begin a risky new campaign before the ballots were cast. After examining a number of possible marches to Southern ports, Sherman set out across Georgia soon after the election, on November 17, by cutting loose and living off the country. That gambit (“Let Hood go north, and I’ll go south”) made Hood’s efforts at cutting Northern supply lines superfluous. Sherman believed that he could reach Savannah, after making Georgia “howl”; but he doubted that Hood could do the same in his northward march to Nashville.55
Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and subsequent plans for further great marches helped to restore Grant’s reputation among the Northern public. Whereas in spring 1864 the North expected that the hero of Vicksburg would shortly come east, take command of the Army of the Potomac, capture Richmond, defeat Lee, and end the war—perhaps within a hundred days—now, by the end of August, they had no such illusions. After the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Grant transmogrified into “the butcher” and lost the goodwill of the public.
But after Sherman took Atlanta and rumors spread that the city’s capture was the beginning, not the end, of his extensive marching, Northerners gradually began to see Grant in a different, much more favorable light. As Sheridan, Sherman, and Thomas operated more freely and deeply in Southern territory (and without incurring great losses), Grant’s campaign began to be seen as a necessary holding action—a gritty effort to tie Lee down, isolate the Confederate capital, and wear down the Army of Northern Virginia while other Confederate armies were routed and Southern soil violated by more mobile Northern forces.
The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Page 16
