The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  This was in fact what Hood intended, if only because he felt he had no other choice. Determined to do something, yet lacking the strength to mount a siege or risk another large-scale confrontation on the outskirts of Atlanta, he had begun to prepare for a rearward strike while exchanging verbal shafts with his opponent inside the city. First he asked Richmond for reinforcements, and was told: “Every effort [has been] made to bring forward reserves, militia, and detailed men for the purpose.… No other resource remains.” This denial had been expected, but it was promptly followed by another that had not. By gubernatorial proclamation on September 10, one week after Atlanta’s fall, Joe Brown withdrew the Georgia militia beyond Confederate reach, granting blanket furloughs for his “pets,” as they were called, “to return to their homes and look for a time after other important interests,” by which he meant the tending of their farms. Discouraged but not dissuaded by this lengthening of the numerical odds, Hood held to his plan for a move northward, requesting of the government that the 30,000 Andersonville inmates, ninety miles in his rear, be transferred beyond reach of the Federals in his front and thus permit him to shift his base from Lovejoy Station, on the Macon & Western, to Palmetto on the Atlanta & West Point; that is, from south of the city to southwest. This, he explained in outlining his proposed campaign, would open the way for him to recross the Chattahoochee, west of Marietta, for a descent on the blue supply line north of the river. Sherman most likely would follow to protect his communications, leaving a strong garrison to hold Atlanta; in which event Hood would be able to fight him with a far better chance of winning than if he tried to engage him hereabouts, with the odds at two-to-one. If, on the other hand, Sherman responded to the shift by moving against Augusta, Mobile, or some other point to the east or south, Hood would return and attack his rear. In any case, whatever risk was involved in his proposal, he was convinced that this was the time to act, since “Sherman is weaker now than he will be in the future, and I as strong as I can expect to be.”

  Richmond, approving this conditional raid-in-force, ordered the transfer of all able-bodied prisoners from Andersonville, near Americus, to stockades down in Florida. This began on September 21, by which time Hood had completed his twenty-mile shift due west to Palmetto, about the same distance southwest of Atlanta, and had his subordinates hard at work on preparations for the march north around Sherman’s flank. They were still at it, four days later — September 25, a rainy Sunday that turned the red dust of their camps to mire — when Jefferson Davis arrived for a council of war.

  He came for other purposes as well, including the need — even direr now than at the time of his other western trips, in early winter and late fall of the past two years, when Bragg had been the general in trouble — “to arouse all classes to united and desperate resistance.” Outwardly at least, Davis himself never quailed or wavered under adversity, Stephen Mallory would testify after working close to him throughout the war. “He could listen to the announcement of defeat while expecting victory, or to a foreign dispatch destructive to hopes widely cherished, or to whispers that old friends were becoming cold or hostile, without exhibiting the slightest evidence of feeling beyond a change of color. Under such circumstances, his language temperate and bland, his voice calm and gentle, and his whole person at rest, he presented rather the appearance of a man, wearied and worn by care and labor, listening to something he knew all about, than of one receiving ruinous disclosures.” But this reaction was by no means characteristic of the high-strung people, in or out of uniform, to and for whom he was responsible as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive: and it was especially uncharacteristic now that the Federal penetration of the heartland had regional leaders of the caliber of Brown and Aleck Stephens crying havoc and talking of calling the dogs of war to kennel. Leaving Richmond five days ago, the day after Early’s defeat at Winchester provided a companion setback in the eastern theater, Davis remarked to a friend: “The first effect of disaster is always to spread a deeper gloom than is due to the occasion.” Then he set out for Georgia, as he had done twice before, in an attempt to dispel or at any rate lighten the gloom that had gathered and deepened there since the fall of Atlanta, three weeks back.

  Army morale was a linked concern. Addressing himself to this on the day of his arrival at Palmetto, he attempted to lift the spirits of the troops with a speech delivered extemporaneously to Cheatham’s Tennesseans, who flocked to meet him at the station. “Be of good cheer,” he told them, “for within a short while your faces will be turned homeward and your feet pressing the soil of Tennessee.”

  Shouts of approval greeted this extension of the plan Hood had proposed; but other responses had a different tone. “Johnston! Give us Johnston!” Davis heard men cry or mutter from the ranks, and though he made no reply to this, it pointed up another problem he had come west to examine at first hand — the question of possible changes in the structure of command. Hardee, for example, had recently repeated his request for a transfer that would free him from further service under Hood, who blamed him for the collapse of two of his three Atlanta sorties, as well as for his failure to whip the enemy at Jonesboro, which had brought on the fall of the city. So Hood said, at any rate, wiring Richmond: “It is of the utmost importance that Hardee should be relieved at once. He commands the best troops in this army. I must have another commander.” One or the other clearly had to go. Now at Palmetto, in tandem interviews, Davis heard the two generals out, recriminations abounding, and arrived at a decision that pleased them both: Hood by replacing Hardee with Cheatham, his senior division commander, and Hardee by ordering him to proceed at once to Charleston, where he would head the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

  That was Beauregard’s old bailiwick, and he was there even now, conducting a rather superfluous inspection of the coastal defenses. But there would be no overlapping of duties when Hardee arrived, since Davis planned for the Creole to be gone by then, summoned west as the solution to another command problem in the Army of Tennessee, this one at the very top. In mid-September, just before he left Richmond, he had received from Samuel French, who led a division in Stewart’s corps, a private communication reminiscent of the famous round-robin letter that reached him after Chickamauga. This one was signed only by French, though it was written, he said, at the request of several high-ranking friends “in regard to a feeling of depression more or less apparent in parts of this army.” His suggestion — or theirs, for the tone of the letter was strangely indirect — was that the President “send one or two intelligent officers here to visit the different divisions and brigades to ascertain if that spirit of confidence so necessary for success has or has not been impaired within the past month or two.” Hood was not mentioned by name or position, as Bragg had been in the earlier document, but he was clearly responsible for conditions in a command which he had assumed “within the past month or two” and from which, the letter implied, he ought to be removed. This, combined with the public outcry over the loss of Atlanta, was part of what prompted the President’s visit, and even before he set out he had arrived at a tentative solution to the problem by inviting Beauregard to go along. Old Bory was down in Charleston at the time, and Davis could not wait for him. He did, however, ask R. E. Lee to find out whether the Louisianian would be willing to return to duty in the West. Frustrated by subservience to Lee for the three months since Petersburg came under formal siege, Beauregard replied that he would “obey with alacrity” any such order for a transfer, and Davis wired from Palmetto for the Creole to meet him in Augusta on his way back in early October.

  Beauregard, receiving the summons, assumed that he was about to return, as Hood’s successor, to command of the army that had been taken from him more than two years ago, after Shiloh and the evacuation of Corinth. In this he was mistaken: though not entirely. Davis had it in mind to put him in charge not only of Hood’s but also of Taylor’s department, the whole to be known as the Military Division of the West, containing all of Ala
bama and Mississippi, together with major parts of Georgia and Louisiana and most of Tennessee. Assigned primarily in an advisory capacity, he would exercise direct control of troops only when he was actually with them — and only then, in Davis’s words, “whenever in your judgment the interests of your command render it expedient.” This was the position in which Johnston had fretted so fearfully last year; “a political device,” a later observer was to term its creation, “designed to silence the critics of Hood, satisfy the friends of Beauregard, and save face for the Administration.” That was accurate enough, as far as it went, but for Davis the arrangement had two other pragmatic virtues. One was that Hood’s accustomed rashness might be tempered, if not controlled, by the presence of an experienced superior close at hand, and the other was that there was no room left for Joe Johnston, whose return Davis was convinced would result in a retreat down the length of the Florida peninsula. In any case, Beauregard was highly acceptable to the generals Davis talked with at Palmetto, including Hood, and he was determined to offer him the post when they met in Augusta the following week.

  Mainly, though, the presidential visit was concerned with the strategy Hood had evolved for drawing the blue army north by striking at its supply line beyond the Chattahoochee, where he would take up a strong defensive position inviting a disadvantageous attack. Now in discussion this was expanded and improved. If Sherman appeared too strong even then, or if Hood, as Davis put it, “should not find the spirit of his army such as to justify him in offering battle” at that point, he was to fall back down the Coosa River and through the mountains to Gadsden, Alabama, where he would establish a new base, supplied by the railroad from Selma to Blue Mountain, and there “fight a conclusive battle” on terrain even more advantageous to the defender; Sherman, drawn far from his own base back in Georgia, might then be annihilated. If, on the other hand, the Ohioan declined battle on those terms and returned to Atlanta, Hood would follow, and when Sherman, his supply line cut, moved from there, Hood would still pursue: either northward, across the Tennessee — which would undo the Federal gains of the past four months and open the way for a Confederate march on Nashville — or south or east, through Selma or Montgomery to the Gulf or through Macon or Augusta to the Atlantic, in which case the Union rear could be assaulted. That was the expanded plan, designed to cover all contingencies, as Hood and the Commander in Chief developed it over the course of the three-day visit. Then on the evening of September 27 Davis took his leave.

  In Macon next morning, at a benefit for the impoverished Atlanta refugees, he took up the spirit-lifting task he had begun at Palmetto when he told the Tennessee soldiers their faces would soon turn homeward. “What though misfortune has befallen our arms from Decatur to Jonesboro,” he declared, “our cause is not lost. Sherman cannot keep up his long line of communications; retreat sooner or later he must. And when that day comes, the fate that befell the army of the French Empire in its retreat from Moscow will be re-enacted. Our cavalry and our people will harass and destroy his army, as did the Cossacks that of Napoleon, and the Yankee general, like him, will escape with only a bodyguard.…

  “Let no one despond,” he said in closing, and repeated the words the following day in Montgomery, speaking at the Capitol where he had been inaugurated forty-three months ago. “There be some men,” he told the Alabamians, in support of his advice against despondence, “who when they look at the sun can only see a speck upon it. I am of a more sanguine temperament perhaps, but I have striven to behold our affairs with a cool and candid temperance of heart, and, applying to them the most rigid test, am more confident the longer I behold the progress of the war … We should marvel and thank God for the great achievements which have crowned our efforts.”

  Closeted that night with Richard Taylor, who had transferred his headquarters from Meridian to Selma, he was glad to learn the particulars of Forrest’s current raid into Middle Tennessee, but disappointed to be told that any hopes he retained for securing reinforcements from beyond the Mississippi were quite groundless, not only because the situation there would not permit it, but also because of the gunboats Taylor had had to dodge, even at night in a small boat, when he returned. Davis was able to counter this with news that Hood had begun today a crossing of the Chattahoochee near Campbelltown, twenty miles southwest of Atlanta, for his strike at the Federal life line. Taylor was pleased to hear it, remarking that the maneuver would no doubt “cripple [Sherman] for a time and delay his projected movements.” Whatever enthusiasm surged up in him on hearing of this new offensive was certainly well contained. Moreover: “At the same time,” he later wrote of the exchange, “I did not disguise my conviction that the best we could hope for was to protract the struggle until spring. It was for statesmen, not soldiers, to deal with the future.”

  This was chilling in its implications, coming as it did from a friend and kinsman whose opinion he respected and whose experience covered all three major theaters of the war, but Davis refused to be daunted; like Nelson off Copenhagen, putting the telescope to his blind eye, he declined to see these specks upon the Confederate sun. The two men parted to meet no more in the course of a conflict Taylor believed was drawing to a close, and Davis resumed his journey eastward from Montgomery next day, joined en route by Hardee for the scheduled meeting with Beauregard in Augusta on October 2, the President’s second Sunday away from Richmond. Old Bory’s spirits took a drop when he learned that he was to occupy an advisory rather than a fighting post, but they soon revived at the prospect of conferring with Hood on plans for reversing the western tide of battle. In the end, he was as pleased as Hardee was with his new assignment, and both generals sat on the rostrum with their chief the following day at a patriotic rally. “We must beat Sherman; we must march into Tennessee,” Davis told the Augustans. “There we will draw from 20,000 to 30,000 to our standard, and, so strengthened, we must push the enemy back to the banks of the Ohio and thus give the peace party of the North an accretion no puny editorial can give.” Such was the high point of his last speech in Georgia, and having made it he presented the two generals to the crowd. Beauregard, who had fired the first gun of the war, was cheered for saying that he “hoped to live to fire the last,” and Hardee, a native son, drew loud applause when he reported that Hood had recently told him “he intended to lay his claws upon the state road in rear of Sherman, and, having once fixed them there, it was not his intention to let them loose their hold.”

  Next day, October 4 — by which time the three speakers had reached or were moving toward their separate destinations: Beauregard west, Hardee east, and Davis north to the South Carolina capital — Hood had carried out at least the first part of this program. Completing his crossing of the Chattahoochee before September ended, he struck the Western & Atlantic at Big Shanty and Acworth, capturing their garrisons, and now was on the march for Allatoona, the principal Union supply base near the Etowah. Best of all, Sherman had taken the bait and was hurrying northward from Atlanta with most of his army, apparently eager for the showdown battle this gray maneuver had been fashioned to provoke. While the opening stage of the raid was in progress, and even as Hood’s troops were tearing up some nine miles of track around Big Shanty, Davis delivered in Columbia the last in his current series of addresses designed to lift the spirits of a citizenry depressed by the events of the past two months.

  “South Carolina has struggled nobly in the war, and suffered many sacrifices,” he declared, beginning as usual with praise for the people of the state in which he spoke. “But if there be any who feel that our cause is in danger, that final success may not crown our efforts, that we are not stronger today than when we began this struggle, that we are not able to continue the supplies to our armies and our people, let all such read a contradiction in the smiling face of our land and in the teeming evidences of plenty which everywhere greet the eye. Let them go to those places where brave men are standing in front of the foe, and there receive the assurance that we shall have final success and
that every man who does not live to see his country free will see a freeman’s grave.” He himself was on his way back from such a visit, and he had been reassured by what he saw. “I have just returned from that army from which we have had the saddest accounts — the Army of Tennessee — and I am able to bear you words of good cheer. That army has increased in strength since the fall of Atlanta. It has risen in tone; its march is onward, its face looking to the front. So far as I am able to judge, General Hood’s strategy has been good and his conduct has been gallant. His eye is now fixed upon a point far beyond that where he was assailed by the enemy. He hopes soon to have his hand upon Sherman’s line of communications, and to fix it where he can hold it. And if but a half — nay, one fourth — of the men to whom the service has a right will give him their strength, I see no chance for Sherman to escape from a defeat or a disgraceful retreat. I therefore hope, in view of all the contingencies of the war, that within thirty days that army which has so boastfully taken up its winter quarters in the heart of the Confederacy will be in search of a crossing of the Tennessee River.” Having claimed as much, he pressed on and claimed more. “I believe it is in the power of the men of the Confederacy to plant our banners on the banks of the Ohio, where we shall say to the Yankee: ‘Be quiet, or we shall teach you another lesson.’ ”