by Shelby Foote
Thus to define the problem was to solve it, so far at least as the choice of directions was concerned: Sherman decided to break the pattern of his campaign and move by the left, crossing the river well upstream for a preliminary strike at the Georgia Railroad. Schofield in fact had already begun the movement three days ago, when his improvised amphibious assault teams emerged from the mouth of Soap Creek to surprise the rebel pickets across the way, and Sherman had followed through by sending one of McPherson’s corps to join Garrard at Roswell, seven miles beyond Schofield. On July 13, having reached a firm decision the night before, he continued the buildup by ordering McPherson to take his second corps upriver and reinforce the first, leaving the third in position on Thomas’s right to maintain the downstream feint until Stoneman got back from the ride designed to mislead Johnston still further into thinking that the Federals were about to cross below.
“All is well,” Sherman wired Halleck next day. “I have now accumulated stores at Allatoona and Marietta, both fortified and garrisoned points. Have also three places at which to cross the Chattahoochee in our possession, and only await General Stoneman’s return from a trip down the river, to cross the army in force and move on Atlanta.”
Stoneman got back the following night and McPherson’s third corps set out for Roswell next morning, July 15. Reunited, the whiplash Army of the Tennessee would thus be on the rim of what Sherman described as “a general right wheel,” designed to roll down on the city from the north and east, with Schofield about midway out the twelve-mile radius and Thomas holding the hub, or pivot, to confront and fix the Confederate main body in position for the crunch. McPherson would cross the river and march south to strike the railroad near Stone Mountain, six miles east of Decatur, Schofield’s preliminary objective, about the same distance east of Atlanta. The two commands would then advance westward in tandem along the right-of-way, tearing up track as they went, and link up with Thomas for the final push that would assail Johnston along his front, outflank him on his right, and drive him back through the streets of the city in his rear.
“Each army will form a unit and connect with its neighbor by a line of pickets,” the warning order read. “Should the enemy assume the offensive at any point, which is not expected until we reach below Peachtree Creek, the neighboring army will at once assist the one Attacked.… A week’s work after crossing the Chattahoochee should determine the first object aimed at, viz, the possession of the [Georgia Rail] road east of Decatur, or of Atlanta itself.”
July 17 was the jump-off date, a Sunday, and everything went as ordered for all three armies involved in the grand wheel. Crossing with Schofield in the center, Sherman grew concerned, as usual, about what was happening out of sight: particularly in Thomas’s direction, where the going was likely to be slow. “Feel down strong to Peach Tree and see what is there,” he urged the Virginian. “A vigorous demonstration should be made, and caution your commanders not to exhibit any of the signs of a halt or pause.” Next morning he rode over to check on the progress of the Cumberlanders, and found them crossing Nancy’s Creek on schedule to descend on Buckhead, a crossroads hamlet where Thomas would set up headquarters before sundown, within a mile of Peachtree Creek and its intrenched defenders.
“I am fully aware of the necessity of making the most of time,” Sherman wired Halleck, “and shall keep things moving.” Accordingly, he kept prodding Thomas: “I would like you to get to Buckhead early today and then to feel down strong on Atlanta,” meantime fretting about McPherson’s progress on the far left: “I want that railroad as quick as possible and the weather seems too good to be wasted.”
Informed after nightfall that both Schofield and McPherson had reached their objectives and would begin their wrecking marches westward along the railroad at daybreak, Sherman exulted: as well he might, having accomplished within two days what he had predicted would require “a week’s work after crossing the Chattahoochee.” He had control of the Georgia Railroad from Stone Mountain through Decatur, and now, secure against reinforcements sped from Virginia by Lee, he was out to take Atlanta by bringing his combinations to bear on its outflanked defenders. The question was whether Johnston would stand, as he had done at Kennesaw, or skedaddle, as he had done everywhere else in the course of the seventy-seven-day campaign.
Riding out to confer on the matter with Thomas next morning, July 19, the red-haired Ohioan encountered an answer of sorts in a copy of yesterday’s newspaper, brought out of the semi-beleaguered city by a spy. Johnston, it seemed, would neither stand nor skedaddle. “At this critical moment,” Sherman later put it, looking back, “the Confederate Government rendered us most valuable service.”
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In Atlanta, all this time, there had been growing consternation as Sherman’s “worse than vandal hordes” bore down on the city, preceded by a stream of refugees in wagons and on foot, mostly old men and boys, below or beyond the conscription limits of seventeen and fifty-two, and “yellow-faced women and their daughters in long-slatted sun-bonnets and faded calico,” who had fled their upcountry farms and hamlets at the approach of the blue outriders. City parks were no longer parks; they bloomed instead with gray-white clusters of hospital tents, where the reek of disinfectants competed with the morbid stench of gangrene, and both combined to rival the predominant smell of horses. Trains chuffed into the station, day and night, loaded with sick and wounded soldiers, many of them dying, many dead before they got there. “Embalming: Free from Odor of Infection,” signs proclaimed, soliciting business, and Bohnefield’s Coffin Shop on Luckie Street had more orders than it could fill. “Give us this day our daily bread,” the Second Baptist minister had taken as his text the previous Sunday, when news came that Marietta had been abandoned in still another retreat. And before the dawn of another sabbath, so quickly did things move at this late stage of the campaign, word arrived that the gray army had retired across the Chattahoochee, burning in its rear the bridges spanning the last natural barrier between Atlanta and destruction. “Stay a few days longer,” a member of Hardee’s staff advised a family he joined in town that afternoon for Sunday dinner. “I think we will hold this place at least a week.”
They did not take the colonel’s advice, but left next morning, scrambling with others like themselves for places on a southbound train. Places were hard to get now, for the military had commandeered most of the cars for removal of the wounded, along with all government stores and the vital machinery taken from outlying mills and factories, a salvage project assigned by Johnston to a high-ranking volunteer aide, Major General Mansfield Lovell, who presumably was experienced in such matters, having given up New Orleans two years back. Atlanta had not expected to share the fate of the Crescent City, but as the fighting grew nearer, week by week, the possibility seemed less and less remote, until finally even diehards had to admit that it had developed into a probability. Loyal admirers of Old Joe — including an editor who maintained, even now, that his reputation had “grown with every backward step”—were hard put to defend the general from charges that he intended to give up the city without a fight. For the most part, he retained the confidence and above all the devotion of his soldiers, but there were those who questioned his Fabian strategy, which they saw as leading only to one end: especially after he turned loose of Kennesaw and fell back to the Chattahoochee.
“There was not an officer or man in this Army who ever dreamed of Johnston falling back this far,” a young artillery lieutenant, whose home in Atlanta was then only seven miles in his rear, wrote his mother from the north bank of that river, “or ever doubted he would attack when the proper time came. But I think he has been woefully outgeneraled and has made a losing bargain.”
Official concern had been growing proportionately as the Union forces closed down on Atlanta. “This place is to the Confederacy as important as the heart is to the body. We must hold it,” Joe Brown wrote Jefferson Davis in late June, appealing for strategic diversions and substantial reinforcements to help Johnst
on avert what seemed certain to happen without them. The governor was in touch with other prominent men throughout the South, and he urged them to use their influence on the President to this end.
His chief hope was in a fellow Georgian, Senator Benjamin Hill, who occupied the unusual position of being the friend of both Davis and Johnston, a relationship they could scarcely be said to enjoy in reference to each other. Brown’s hope was that Hill could serve as a go-between, if not to bring the two leaders together, then in any case to improve communications — particularly at the far end of the line, where Brown believed the messages were having the greater difficulty in getting through. He suggested that the senator write at once to the Commander in Chief, urging a more sympathetic response to the general’s pleas now that the crisis was at hand. Hill said he would do better than that; “Time is too precious and letters are too inadequate”; he would go to Richmond and talk with Davis face to face. First, though, he thought it best to confer with Johnston for a clearer understanding of the hopes and plans he then would pass along. Accordingly, he rode up to the general’s headquarters at Marietta next morning, July 1, and had what he later called a “free conversation” along these lines with the Virginian.
Reviewing the situation, Johnston declared that his principal aim, up to now, had been to defeat Sherman by obliging him to attack Confederate intrenchments, but after the limited effort which had been so decisively repulsed, four days ago at Kennesaw, he doubted that his adversary could be persuaded to try the thing again. As for himself, he certainly had no intention of wasting his outnumbered veterans in any such attempt. All he could do with his present force, he said, was block the direct path to Atlanta, thus delaying another Union advance until such time as Sherman again compelled his retreat by “ditching round his flank.” Aside from the long-odds chance that the enemy mass would expose itself to piecemeal destruction by dividing into segments he could leap at, one by one, he saw but a single hope for reversing the blue tide, which even then was lapping the flanks of Kennesaw and would otherwise in time no doubt roll down to the Chattahoochee and beyond. This was that 5000 cavalry be thrown without delay against Sherman’s life line up in Tennessee, either by Forrest or John Morgan; in which case, Johnston said, the Federals would have to accept battle on his terms — that is, attack him in his intrenchments — or else retreat to avoid starvation. Asked why he did not use his own cavalry for such a profitable venture, the general replied that all his horsemen were needed where they were. Observing that “I must go to Richmond, and Morgan must go from Virginia or Forrest from Mississippi, and this will take some time,” Hill expressed some doubt whether either body of gray cavalry could reach the Federal rear before the Federals reached Atlanta. “How long can you hold Sherman north of the Chattahoochee River?” he pointedly asked Johnston, who replied somewhat evasively that the bluecoats had covered less than a dozen southward miles in the past month, shifting their ground from around New Hope Church to Kennesaw Mountain, where they had made no progress at all in the past two weeks; Hill could figure for himself, the general said, how long it would take them to reach the river at this rate. Hill calculated, accordingly, that the Confederates could remain north of the Chattahoochee “at least fifty-four days, and perhaps sixty.”
Johnston assented, but not Hood, who though present throughout the interview had held his peace till now. He disagreed, saying: “Mr Hill, when we leave our present line, we will, in my judgment, cross the Chattahoochee River very rapidly.” Johnston turned on the tall blond Texan, who was twenty-four years his junior in age, as well as in length of service. “What makes you think that?” he asked, and Hood replied: “Because this line of Kennesaw is the strongest line we can get in this country. If we surrender this to Sherman he can reconnoiter from its summit the whole country between here and Atlanta, and there is no such line of defense in the distance.” Johnston demurred. “I differ with your conclusion,” he said. “I admit this is a strong line of defense, but I have two more strong lines between this and the river, from which I can hold Sherman a long time.”
Hill took his leave, pleased to learn that two more stout positions had been prepared for the army to defend before it retired across the Chattahoochee, some fifty-four to sixty days in the future, according to his Johnston-approved calculations, or in any case “a long time” from now. Delayed by personal matters, he took a train for Virginia before the end of the following week, passing en route a group of public men proceeding by rail on a mission similar to his own, except that the two were headed in opposite directions toward diametric goals. Hill was going from Atlanta to Richmond in hope of impressing Johnston’s views on Davis, while they were going from Richmond to Atlanta in hope of impressing Davis’s views on Johnston. Congressmen all, they had been delegated by their colleagues, as friends of the general, to warn him that his conduct of the Georgia campaign was under heavy attack in the capital and to urge him to disarm these rearward critics by taking aggressive action against the enemy in his front.
Reaching Atlanta on the evening of July 8 they proceeded next morning to army headquarters for a conference with Johnston, who by then had fallen back through Smyrna, the first of his two stout positions south of Kennesaw, to his bridgehead on the north bank of the Chattahoochee, which was his second. The Virginian received them graciously, heard them out, and replied, alas, as if they had been dispatched for irksome purposes by the President himself: “You may tell Mr Davis that it would be folly for me under the circumstances to risk a decisive engagement. My plan is to draw Sherman further and further from his base in the hope of weakening him and by cutting his army in two. That is my only hope of defeating him.”
There was silence at this until one delegate, a Missourian, remarked that what was required, both for the country’s sake and the general’s own, was for him to strike the Yankees “a crushing blow,” and then went on — tactlessly, but apparently in hope of jogging Johnston into action — to say that lately he had heard the President quoted to the effect that “if he were in your place he could whip Sherman now.” The general was jogged into action, all right, but not of the kind intended. He bridled and did not try to hide his scorn.
“Yes,” he said icily, “I know Mr Davis thinks he can do a great many things other men would hesitate to attempt. For instance, he tried to do what God failed to do. He tried to make a soldier of Braxton Bragg, and you know the result. It couldn’t be done.”
This might have wound up the matter then and there, to no one’s satisfaction, but a courier arrived at that point with news of a development to which Johnston’s response provided the conference with an upbeat ending. Schofield had effected a south-bank lodgment yesterday, seven miles upriver, the courier reported, and this morning he had continued the crossing with what appeared to be most, if not all, of his command.… If the general’s visitors expected him to react with dismay to this information that he had been flanked, they were agreeably disappointed. Pointing out that Sherman had thus divided his army, north and south of the deep-running Chattahoochee, Johnston declared that the time at last had come to strike and “whip him in detail.”
The delegates returned to Atlanta expecting to hear before nightfall the roar of guns that would signal the launching of the attack. It did not come, either then or the following morning, July 10, when all that broke the sabbath stillness was the peal of church bells, summoning the city’s dwindling population to pray for a deliverance which Johnston himself seemed less and less willing to attempt.
Bells were tolling that Sunday morning in Richmond, too, when Benjamin Hill stepped off the train from Georgia. He went straight to his hotel and stayed there only long enough to wash up before going to the White House for the appointment he had secured by wiring ahead. Having, as he said, “repelled the idea that any influence with the President was needed, if the facts were as General Johnston reported them,” the senator was convinced that all the situation required was for him to relay the general’s requests to Davis; “I did
not doubt he would act promptly.”
He was ushered without delay into the Chief Executive’s residential office, and as he advanced across the white rug that was said to provoke temerity in the breasts of men who called in unscraped boots, the Mississippian rose to greet him with a geniality that matched the Virginia general’s own, nine days ago in Marietta. Davis heard him out, his smile fading when Hill spoke of Morgan and Forrest as presumably lying more or less idle in Southwest Virginia and North Mississippi. As for Morgan, he replied, it was true that he was where Johnston said he was, having just returned, sadly depleted, from just such an expedition as Johnston recommended, whipped and in no condition for anything more than an attempt to pull his few survivors together for operations necessarily weeks in the future. Forrest too was unavailable, Davis said, although for different reasons. Having disposed of Sturgis at Brice’s Crossroads in mid-June, he now was engaged in opposing a 15,000-man Union force that had left Memphis two weeks ago under A. J. Smith, bound either for Georgia to reinforce Sherman, in front or in rear of Atlanta, or for Mobile in conjunction with an even larger blue column reported to be on the march from New Orleans under Canby; he not only could not be spared for the proposed raid into Middle Tennessee, but his superior, Polk’s successor Stephen Lee, was protesting hotly — as Johnston had only recently been informed — that he needed “his troops now with Johnston more than the latter can need Forrest.”
