Jones encountered more problems on his left, for the force opposing his advance was significant and menacing. General Sherman claimed in his memoirs that he insisted the Army of the Tennessee fight the battle alone without help from Thomas or Schofield, his actions indicate otherwise. Not only was a division from the XXIII Corps deployed to the left of the XVI Corps, Sherman ordered some of Schofield’s batteries deployed near the Howard house, directing them to shell the woods west of the Troup Hurt house to prevent Confederate reinforcements from entering the breached earthworks. A brigade from the XXIII Corps was deployed in front of their batteries. As it turned out, the Army of the Ohio batteries and deployed infantry (including the division protecting Dodge) contributed little to the outcome, but the fact remains that nearly 10,000 troops outside of the Army of the Tennessee were immediately ready to take part in the Battle of Atlanta.14
Between the XXIII Corps and the Troup Hurt house stood the 1st Division of the XV Corps and the 6 cannons remaining from the same division (2-gun sections from three different batteries). Major Clemens Landgraeber commanded those batteries and took full advantage of his experience and the elevated, enfilading position on the same rise occupied by the house used as General Sherman’s headquarters. Landgraeber pulled the cannons from their pits and reoriented them toward the Troup Hurt house 800 yards south of the hill they occupied. Those guns rent the air with canister balls and spherical case shot. The rounds wreaked havoc on both sides. One mile south of the batteries, Colonel Reuben Williams was already forced to contend with flank fire from the Mississippians at the railroad on his right; Landgraeber’s cannons inadvertently magnified their predicament with “overshots” that landed uncomfortably close to those Union soldiers. Afterwards Williams reasoned, “The shelling of our own troops aided the enemy considerably, but it was one of those accidents that sometimes occur in the excitement, the thunder, the roar and the crash of battle, and which at times is difficult to avoid.”15
Firing toward his own troops was not only inevitable for Landgraeber; it was absolutely necessary. Moreover, artillery fire began to stymie the Southern surge with relatively large brigades into the breach. Two of Clayton’s brigades doubled the number of Confederates at the XV Corps line, but the enfilading Union fire kept most of those reinforcements from immediately entering the works and penetrating deeper into the Union rear. Those inside the Union line—Manigault’s brigade, Sharp’s brigade, and portions of Johnson’s and Jones’s brigades—had already lost much of their drive by accumulating prisoners and were virtually stopped by the cannon fire. “The artillery practice of the enemy was splendid,” admitted Manigault, whose brigade attracted the rounds from Landgraeber’s cannons. “Their shells tore through the lines or exploded in the faces of the men with unerring regularity.” The 36th and 38th Alabama regiments from Jones’s brigade ran a gauntlet as they traversed a field in front of the works on the left of Manigault’s men. They made it, but were not able to penetrate deep into the works. Still, they were satisfied for the moment to have a wall of protection to block the menacing rounds of artillery coming from northeast of them.16
The ebb and flow of battle had characterized the entire nature of the fight of July 22, 1864, but at 4:45 P.M. an unprecedented storm overtook the field—General Logan had returned to the corps he led earlier in the day. He arrived with his staff in tow, greeted by chants of “Black Jack, Black Jack” as he passed elements of his former corps. Logan imbued inspiration. A captain was awestruck as he gazed upon his general “galloping down the ranks like a man of iron.” An Ohio private was equally awed, as Logan, “with fire in his eyes, came dashing down the road.” An Iowan observed with pride as Logan galloped past him, “his long black hair floating in the wind and his big black mustache bristling with defiance.”17
Logan had no idea that while he was attempting to restore the line vacated by Lightburn’s 2nd Division and two brigades of Harrow’s 4th Division, General Harrow had sent retreat orders to the only remaining force between Bald Hill and Wood’s 1st Division near Sherman’s headquarters one and a half miles away. That was Walcutt’s brigade, the southernmost body of troops of the corps, split into one line facing toward Atlanta and the other directed southward to provide a protective cover to Bald Hill. When Oliver’s brigade had begun to peel away to join Reuben Williams’s regiments, Walcutt remained with his northern flank severely threatened by Coltart’s Alabamans. General Leggett rode up to Walcutt to confer with him about his position relative to the protection of Bald Hill. As the two talked, Harrow’s aide galloped in with an order to pull his brigade back to a new corps line 800 yards east of the threatened position. Leggett protested against that order; he had a vested interest in Walcutt’s position, for if Walcutt vacated his line, Leggett risked being completely surrounded on Bald Hill. “I said to him the order was a mistake,” recalled Leggett of that moment with Walcutt, informing him that Logan and Blair had ordered him to hold Bald Hill “at any hazard and at whatever cost,” an order that would risk the annihilation of his entire division if Walcutt’s men would no longer protect his northern flank.
COLONEL CHARLES CARROLL WALCUTT, U.S.A.
Walcutt oddly stood out in the battle for insubordination by refusing to pull his brigade back to a rearward line east of his position. His refusal to abandon his position preserved the Union defense of Leggett’s Hill and served as a rallying point for the Federal resurgence. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Walcutt assured Leggett that he would not abandon him. Leggett remembered the haughty pronouncement of that young and talented colonel, “Walc[u]tt responded promptly, that he could stay there as long as I could, and that he would take the responsibility of disobeying orders, and doing so.” Convinced by Walcutt’s pronouncement, Leggett returned to his hill. Walcutt turned several of his cannons to the most immediate threat, orienting them from south to northwest, right at the Alabamans occupying the works vacated by Colonels Oliver and Williams. As he softened the position with cannon fire, Walcutt’s regiments took up positions to conduct a charge to drive away Coltart’s Confederates.18
As Walcutt held his position and Logan rallied his corps, additional help arrived in the form of Colonel August Mersy’s brigade, from Sweeny’s division of the XVI Corps, the three regiments designated to be the shock troops of the battle. Twenty minutes after they peeled away from their XVI Corps brethren, Mersy’s regiments hustled up a dusty back road to the Georgia Railroad, reaching a curve in the rail line, bordered by a plank fence about half a mile east of the Troup Hurt house at 4:45 P.M. Logan met them here, urging and inspiring them. Colonel Mersy aligned his troops, the 12th Illinois on the left, the 81st Ohio in the center, and the 66th Illinois on the right. As those troops attempted to change their alignment from a marching column only 4-men wide to an attacking column 500 yards across, Confederate troops a few hundred yards to their west opened fire in an attempt to disrupt the formation. The color bearer went down along with several members of his company. Another bullet thudded into the side of Billy, Colonel Mersy’s horse. The animal reared in a death lurch, throwing Colonel Mersy and hurling itself across the board fence. With only the hind legs of the animal dangling over the side of the fence in sight of the brigade, Colonel Mersy was stunned by the blow from his fall and by a slight bullet wound in the leg, but appeared more hurt by the death of his horse. He turned over command to Colonel Robert N. Adams of the 81st Ohio. As Adams took over he heard Mersy moaning in his thick German accent, “Oh! My poor Billy, my poor Billy,” aware that the colonel loved his horse “more than some men love their wives.”19
Adams crossed his new brigade over the railroad tracks and ordered them forward at the double quick. “As the order was given,” remembered Thomas Shelley of the 81st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, “the boys started with wild yells that would have given credit to a whole tribe of Comanche Indians.” Rushing parallel with the railroad to their left, they negotiated through a belt of woods and exited with the contested works in
panoramic view. Surprised to see that region in total possession of Confederate forces, Colonel Adams continued to press his men westward. “We rushed for the bright guns,” recalled Private Shelley, training their faces and footsteps toward the 4 glistening Parrotts of De Gress’s Battery.20
The Southern troops around the Troup Hurt house, the railroad, and the captured cannons were threatened before the XVI Corps brigade stumbled out of the woods east of them. The initial Union XV Corps resurgence against their position emerged from south of the railroad. General Logan, General Lightburn, and General Morgan L. Smith, along with their respective cadres of staff officers and regimental officers, successfully collected enough troops from the routed 2nd and 4th divisions of the XV Corps to initiate a counterattack.
General Harrow observed Walcutt hold his position above Bald Hill and he used that brigade as a beacon to rectify his routed brigade under Colonel Oliver. Harrow countermanded the retreat order given to the 70th Ohio. Anchoring from that regiment, and spurred on by its throaty cheers, the 48th Illinois of Oliver’s brigade—the only other regiment in line at the time—re-formed and charged westward. Coltart’s Alabama brigade, occupying the works abandoned by Colonel Reuben Williams’s men, caught the brunt of the countersurge. With an unprotected right flank to blunt the assault of those two Union regiments southeast of them, the Alabamans were ordered to retreat. The cheering Federals, imbued with confidence, reclaimed their works but not without paying a price. Colonel Lucien Greathouse of the 48th Illinois was killed, and 40 members of his regiment went down dead or injured with him. About 20 members of the 70th Ohio likewise fell, but their achievement allowed Reuben Williams to return his two regiments to the line they were forced to abandon twenty minutes earlier, doing so, admitted the commander of the 12th Indiana, “with but little opposition.”21
Indeed, the Confederate opposition for half a mile south of the railroad had disappeared, only materializing again in the Georgia militia opposite Bald Hill. That void was serendipitous for General Harrow, who had only four regiments of his entire division occupying the works with no artillery supporting them at the time. It also aided Colonel James S. Martin, who had half of his brigade supporting the western end of the XVI Corps line when he with his 750 soldiers was ordered to return to his noontime position. Martin’s regiments caught no enfilading fire on their left as they traversed northwestward toward their original position.
Martin herded his men northward, parallel to the original line of works they awoke behind that morning. He came upon the remnant of his three detached regiments—the command of Lieutenant Colonel Mott—that had been routed by General Brown’s division of Cheatham’s corps half an hour earlier. Here Martin reunited his command. With his six regiments, and a few others positioned by General Morgan L. Smith (the new commander of the XV Corps) and General Lightburn (commanding Morgan Smith’s former division), all moved forward.22
Additional inspiration bubbled over those soldiers, as attested by a member of the 55th Illinois. “Just as the regiment when at the rear was moving forward to this counter charge,” he observed, “a well-known form came galloping furiously up the Decatur road on a coal-black charger streaked with foam, hatless, his long black hair flying, his eyes flashing with wrath—a human hurricane on horseback. It was ‘Black Jack.’ ” General Logan was a dynamo: barking orders, sounding his battle cry, and throwing out words of encouragement to his former command. After sending Mersey’s men off at the railroad, Logan had returned to the XV Corps urging everyone he could find to reclaim their lost real estate.23
Members of Logan’s staff proved equal to his leadership. Major John R. Hotaling had continued to collect squads of soldiers while tucked away in the ravine within striking distance of Sharp’s and Manigault’s Confederates. Sensing the momentum changing in that sector and detecting the countercharge of Martin’s brigade behind him, Hotaling and his hodgepodge regiment of 200 gun-toting men led Martin’s charge toward the Confederate-held works. Those at the works and around the Troup Hurt house could detect that mass movement south of the Georgia Railroad easier and earlier than Adams’s (Mersy’s) brigade in the woods north of the railroad. Feeling the pressure on their right and also sensing troops from Wood’s 1st Division of the XV Corps massing on the height north of them, General Brown and General Clayton both realized that the brigades of their respective divisions within the works were then vulnerable to cross fire. To prevent that, the two Southern generals quickly delivered orders for their men to fall back to the earthworks.24
Portions of three Confederate brigades were mingling around the Troup Hurt house and none was able to fire the spiked cannons of the captured guns of Battery H. Suffering from the lack of a unified command and without protection on their right and left, regimental commanders made two quick realizations: Adams’s and Martin’s men were converging upon them too fast and furiously for them to maintain their position and there was no time to bring off those captured cannons. Southern officers ordered all the battery horses shot, for slaying the animals would make it nearly impossible for the Yankees to roll them rearward should the Confederates be able to charge upon them again.
Martin’s and Adams’s brigades surged into the area overwhelmed by the sickening sound of screaming horses as they were slaughtered by Southern soldiers. The Federals pressed on and the Ohioans beelined to the prized battery. General Morgan L. Smith called it “as gallant a charge as I have seen during the war”—high praise, indeed, from a XV Corps commander about a brigade from another corps. Mason R. Blizzard of Company I, 81st Ohio, was the first soldier to reach the guns, getting there as Manigault’s and Abda Johnson’s men peeled away from them to fall back behind the earthworks. Close on the heels of the Ohioans rode the man who wanted those guns more than any other on the battlefield: Captain De Gress. “Going to the rear,” explained De Gress, “I saw a brigade of the 16th A[rmy] C[orps] advancing and driving the enemy from our old Position and following them up I took possession of my Guns again.”25
Mason R. Blizzard was the first man upon the battery, but the young Buckeye was joined by the rest of his Company I mates and the remainder of the charging regiment as well as Captain De Gress within seconds. De Gress enlisted the help of ten of the infantry and the sole member of Battery H with him to “unspike” the battery. A correctly spiked cannon could not be made operable in short order, but the makeshift method applied by De Gress in his hurry half an hour earlier then served in his favor. The impromptu gun crew loaded the first available gun and turned it westward toward the Southerners falling back toward safety. The 81st Ohio surprisingly proved a learned infantry regiment to work the artillery pieces. For the first two hours of the afternoon they watched Laird’s and Blodgett’s batteries in action, having carried ammunition to those batteries. Knowing that Laird had effectively fired double rounds, the Ohioans attempted to repeat the ingredients of that success. They loaded the gun with two twenty-pound shells. They pulled the lanyard, but the rammed shells exploded within the cannon, one that had a small defective crack in it from earlier in the campaign. That combination caused the cannon to explode with the shells, sending fifty- and hundred-pound pieces of brass and cast iron up and out 100 yards. “Not a man was hurt by the bursting of the Gun although they were standing thick around it,” marveled De Gress. The other 3 guns that remained intact were soon working, because only single rounds were rammed down their barrels.26
Within seconds of the recapture of De Gress’s guns, the 4 guns remaining from Battery A, Illinois Light Artillery were also seized by surging Union troops. The South Carolinians successfully removed two of the pieces but the other four were recaptured. Aiding in that recovery was the hodgepodge regiment formed by Major John R. Hotaling. Artillerist James W. Porter also lent a hand. Playing dead near the cannons while the Confederates were in charge of them, Porter popped up during their withdrawal, grabbed a rifle from a dead soldier, and fired away.27
Most of the organized Confederates had already pulled ba
ck behind the earthworks they created, but had belonged to the XV Corps that morning. General Brown was not satisfied at the position held by his division. Riding to and fro near the point of attack, he exhorted his regiments forward to reclaim their lost ground. “We charged with an awful yell,” said Lieutenant Gill of the 41st Mississippi, who watched the bluecoats opposing his regiment flee for a second time in an hour. Picking up loaded but discarded guns, the Mississippian relished the sight that befell his eyes. “I never enjoyed a thing better in my life,” he crowed in a letter to his wife the next day. “We had the pleasure of shooting at Yankees as they ran without being shot at much.”28
A small pocket of Union soldiers ran rearwards, mostly from Adams’s (Mersy’s) brigade. The majority held their hard-fought and reclaimed position, aided by Landgraeber’s batteries on the hill north of them. A new threat materialized on the left flank of the Confederates. General Charles Woods’s division—down to two brigades of 2,000 men after the reassignment of Hugo Wangelin’s brigade—had aligned to face the Confederate threat and awaited orders from General Morgan Smith to advance. Big and burly, Woods was an imposing figure at 6'3" in height and close to 250 pounds (“the most manly of men,” claimed a contemporary), with the most unimposing nickname in the army—“Susan.” According to Major General Oliver Otis Howard, a corps commander in the Army of the Cumberland, Woods earned the effeminate name at West Point, where the law of contraries was displayed in full bloom, “probably because of his ungirl-like qualities, except perhaps his modesty of deportment, for he was the largest, tallest, stoutest officer on the ground, showing at all times a nerve unconscious of danger.”29
The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta Page 22
