Shattered Nation

by Jeffrey Brooks

  *****

  September 28, Night

  “General Mackall!” Johnston called as he dropped off of Fleetfoot and onto the ground.

  The chief-of-staff appeared at the door of the farmhouse housing the headquarters seconds later. “Yes, sir?”

  “My maps!” Johnston snapped. The commander hurriedly stepped inside and strode toward the table as Mackall frantically motioned for the staff officers to lay the maps out. Johnston leaned against the table, his hands clenched into fists, staring down hard at the representation of the battlefield. For several minutes, he neither moved nor spoke.

  The staff officers watched silently, knowing their general’s moods and not wishing to interrupt his thoughts. They quietly went about their business, the headquarters now illuminated by the pale yellow light of several hanging lanterns.

  At long last, Johnston slowly nodded. “William, you remember that the woods here appeared to be thicker and heavier than the rest of the surrounding terrain?” He thumped the map just to the north of the right flank of the Confederate line, where Stewart’s corps was located.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You said they were thick enough to conceal a division?”

  “Yes. As you requested, sir, I had General Stewart post additional pickets there to prevent the Yankees from approaching our right flank undetected.”

  Johnston nodded hurriedly, his mind racing. When he had first considered the heavy woods on his right, he had been concerned about the possibility of Grant hiding a division within them. For the same reason that the woods were a potential threat, they might also provide an advantage.

  “What is it, General?” Mackall said. He had grown adept at reading his commander’s mind over their time in service together. He could tell that Johnston already had some scheme afoot.

  “William, if a Union division might be concealed undetected in the woods, so might one of our own divisions, yes?”

  Mackall thought for a moment. “I suppose so.”

  “General Cheatham has pulled one of his divisions into a reserve position, yes?”

  “That’s right,” Mackall answered. “Stevenson’s division is in reserve.”

  Johnston frowned. Stevenson was a competent officer, but his troops had often showed a lack of offensive punch. At the Battle of Knob’s Farm, fought a few days before the engagement at Kennesaw Mountain, they had demonstrated a marked reluctance to come to grips with their Yankee foes. While he would not have hesitated to assign them the task of holding any position against an attack, for what he now had in mind he would need a more hard-hitting outfit.

  “Clayton’s division is in the line?”

  “Yes, sir. They fought off the most serious Yankee attack today.”

  “Casualties?”

  Mackall shrugged. “Not bad, from what I understand.”

  Johnston nodded. “I want General Cheatham to pull Clayton’s division out of the line and replace it with Stevenson’s division. General Clayton shall march his men to the right flank and report directly to army headquarters until further notice. Understood?”

  Mackall’s eyes narrowed in confusion, yet he nodded. “I shall have the orders drawn up at once, General.”

  “Let me know when Clayton is in position. I shall want to speak to him myself.”

  *****

  September 28, Night

  Through breaks in the clouds, McFadden could see the stars dancing overheard. For the first time in many months, he actually felt cold, occasionally rubbing his arms roughly to warm them through friction. He and the ten picked men of his clandestine force were kneeling silently on the ground just outside the northwestern Atlanta defenses. No one spoke, but the tension mounted appreciably. The men tightened their grips on their rifles, impatiently waiting for the signal to advance.

  Maddox, armed with a pistol and cradling the carpetbag containing his time bomb, showed no sign of anxiety. Despite only having known him for a few hours, McFadden had taken an instant dislike to him. He knew his type, the sort of man who regarded life as nothing but a game and seemed to delight in causing mayhem. While he would hopefully prove useful to the army in the operation they were about to launch, McFadden was eager to be out of his presence as quickly as possible.

  The plan they had agreed upon was simple enough. A quick surprise attack organized by General Granbury would open a gap in the Union line through which McFadden, Maddox and a few chosen men would slip through. All of the infiltrators were wearing Union uniforms, taken off the corpses of enemy soldiers who had died in the Blood Bucket. This would obviously aid their penetration of the Union lines but, as had been carefully explained to the men who had volunteered for the mission, it would also mean that they would be shot as spies if they were captured.

  To better disguise themselves, the Texans had exchanged their Enfield rifles for Springfield rifles. Although both models were in use in both armies, the proportion of Enfields to Springfields was slightly higher in the Confederate army. The men were grumbling, as the Springfield was longer and heavier than the Enfield. McFadden wondered if the bother would be worth the comparatively small impact the exchange would have on their disguise.

  “Mind if I join you, Lieutenant?” a familiar voice asked.

  Private Pearson scurried up to the group of soldiers, a sly smile on his face.

  “Pearson!” McFadden said, trying to keep his voice down. “You damn son of a bitch! I thought you were dead.”

  “Nah, just got separated from the brigade. Been on the rampart with some of the Arkansas boys today, till somebody told me where you were.”

  McFadden noticed that Pearson was wearing a Union uniform. “Someone filled you in?”

  “Yeah. I told them I wasn’t about to let you go into the Union lines all by yourself again.”

  McFadden nodded. Despite his long distaste for Pearson, it was nice to be reunited with a member of the Lone Star Rifles once again. His little band had grown from ten men to eleven, not counting himself and Maddox.

  Granbury came by, walking with a deep stoop and as quietly as possible.

  “Are your men ready, McFadden?” he asked in a whisper.

  “Ready when you are, sir.”

  “Good. Almost time.” He smacked McFadden’s shoulder and scurried on to the next team.

  McFadden glanced around at his men, wishing that he had had more time to acquaint himself with them. Six of them were soldiers from other regiments in the Texas Brigade, while the other five were Kentuckians from the Orphan Brigade. They had been selected by their commanding officers for their coolness and steadiness under fire. Those were qualities they would certainly need over the next few hours.

  He sadly thought to himself that most of the men around him would probably lose their lives in the mission, either by being killed outright or shot as spies after being taken prisoner. Though he would obviously do his best to obey Cleburne’s orders and inflict as much damage on the Yankee supplies as possible, he still thought that the undertaking was a fool’s errand and probably a suicide mission.

  “What’s going to happen down south tomorrow, do you think?” someone asked. Rumors as to the result of the day’s fighting between the two armies around Fairburn were sweeping through the army, though no one had any way to verify any of them.

  “Either Johnston’s going to attack Grant or Grant’s going to attack Johnston,” another answered. McFadden found this response annoying, since it was merely stating the obvious.

  “Never you mind, men,” he snapped. “Nothing we can do about it, anyway. Stay quiet, stay ready. The signal to advance can come any second.”

  McFadden’s words were prophetic, for less than a minute had passed before the sound of a solitary musket going off momentarily broke the silence of the near-darkness. About twenty yards ahead of them, the men saw the advance team, totaling about two hundred and fifty men, move forward without making a sound. Their officers had ordered the men to tie white stripes of cloth around their left arms,
so as to help distinguish them from the enemy in the hand-to-hand fighting that would soon be taking place.

  The Yankee lines were a few hundred yards away. Enemy sentries had been spotted making the rounds, but there had not seemed to be any undue alarm among the federal troops. It couldn’t be more than a few seconds before the pickets spotted the attacking Confederates, for all their efforts to avoid making noise. Every additional second they remained undetected would mean fewer of them being killed.

  A sudden chorus of confused cries emanated from the Yankee lines, followed by scattered gunshots.

  “The rebels!” a voice cried. “The rebels are coming!”

  McFadden and his men waited tensely, straining their eyes to peer through the darkness at what was happening. The Confederate troops vanished into the Union lines and they could soon hear the sounds of hand-to-hand fighting. Gunfire was also heard, but only in the form of sporadic single shots rather than full volleys. McFadden distinctively heard the short screams that he easily recognized as men being bayoneted to death.

  The wait was excruciating, for the instinct of everyone in McFadden’s company was to charge forward to help their comrades. Yet that was not the plan. Finally, after what seemed like an infinity but was probably no more than two or three minutes, the sounds of fighting seemed to diminish. Almost at once, McFadden heard the call from Granbury.

  “Go, McFadden!”

  They got up and began walking quickly forward. The men held their loaded rifles ready to be fired, scanning ahead of them searching for enemies. Within their midst, McFadden gripped his Navy Colt pistol and, beside him, Maddox clutched his deadly carpetbag.

  Fighting could now be heard to both the left and right of the small gap the storming party had torn in the Yankee line. McFadden and his men hurried to the northwest, soon lost to the sight of their comrades as they vanished into the darkness.

  Chapter Twenty

  September 29, Morning

  Grant sat impatiently on a tree stump amidst the half dozen tents containing the headquarters of the Army of the Cumberland, already smoking his second cigar of the day even though the sun had not yet risen. Behind him, he could hear Howard and his staff officers talking with one another, coordinating the complicated movements involved with approaching the enemy flank. Grant made no effort to intervene in their discussions. He assumed Howard knew what he was doing and the orders he had given him were fairly straightforward. During the night, one of the two corps of the Army of the Cumberland present on the battlefield had quietly marched westward a few miles before turning south, placing it in a position from which it could strike the exposed left flank of the rebel army.

  Grant was calm, although he knew that the day’s battle would probably be the most important of his life. Johnston was out there, dug into a strong position but with considerably fewer men than Grant had on the battlefield. Moreover, when the previous day’s attack had failed, Grant had ordered the troops fed and rested rather than attempting further assaults. Figuring that Johnston himself would not consider taking the offensive, Grant had decided against having his men entrench. Although they had been awoken well before dawn, he hoped that his men would therefore be in better spirits and more fit than they had been the day before.

  Grant momentarily thought about how it had come down to this, the outcome of the war likely to be decided in a battle between two comparatively small armies in an obscure town southwest of Atlanta. Military historians in the future would wonder whether Sherman would have won the campaign and the war had he not made the single mistake, stemming from momentary overconfidence, of allowing the Army of the Cumberland to be separated from the other Union forces and caught in an awkward position south of Peachtree Creek. The same attention would doubtless be drawn to his own campaign against Lee in Virginia. It didn’t matter in the end, though. The only thing that mattered was where they were, not how they got there. There was no sense in dwelling on the irretrievable past.

  There was a sudden, low boom, which instantly silenced the staff of the Army of the Cumberland. This was followed, at regular intervals of two seconds, by a further three booms. It was the agreed-upon signal for the launch of the Army of the Cumberland’s attack on the rebel left. The men of the headquarters began chattering excitedly, checking their watches and congratulating one another on the successful timing of the assault. Grant did not move from his tree stump and quietly continued whittling his stick.

  If the plan was being carried out as Grant had laid out the previous night, McPherson was even then moving forward as well, mounting a diversionary attack on the rebel right and center in order to prevent Johnston from detaching troops from that section of the line to reinforce the left. Grant would assume this was being done until he heard otherwise.

  Twenty minutes later, his confidence was rewarded when the unmistakable sound of artillery fire was distinctly heard coming from the east, signifying that McPherson’s attack had begun as well. The stick upon which Grant had been working had become too small to continue whittling, so he tossed it aside and picked up another, bigger stick and started anew.

  One of Howard’s officers brought him a cup of strong coffee and some biscuits, which he consumed gratefully. He strained his ears to pick up the sound of musketry, but he could not hear anything other than the artillery fire. The woods were too heavy and the distance was too great. An hour passed, then another.

  A courier arrived at the cluster of tents and asked to speak with Howard. After a discussion of a few minutes, the commander of the Army of the Cumberland did approach Grant’s tree stump.

  “Well?” Grant asked.

  “We’re driving them,” Howard responded. “We smashed into the left flank of the leftmost rebel division and drove them back in confusion.”

  Grant nodded. “Well, that’s first-rate news.”

  “Indeed,” Howard said. “The courier said he saw the attack go in and that we caught the rebels napping.”

  “Not like Johnston to get so careless,” Grant said. Yet such things happened in war. It had not been like Thomas to be so careless at Peachtree Creek, after all.

  “My other corps has mounted a frontal attack as well. The rebels facing them are holding for the time being, but I expect them to break as the rebel left collapses.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m delighted, sir,” Howard said with a smile. “I feel like I’m getting a little payback for the way my corps was treated by the rebels at Chancellorsville.”

  Grant grinned but didn’t pursue the point. “Any word from McPherson?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “That’s fine. No news from him is probably good news. He’d tell us if anything were going wrong on his front, and all he has to do is keep the rebels there occupied.”

  For a brief moment, Grant wondered if anything worth his attention might be happening around Atlanta. He considered sending a message on the field telegraph inquiring as to the situation around the city, then decided against it. Cleburne’s garrison was shattered and incapable of any action aside from manning the city’s defenses. The ten thousand men Grant had left to hem them in were more than sufficient to keep the Irishman from causing any trouble. It was best to remain focused on the task of defeating Johnston.

  *****

  September 29, Morning

  McFadden and his men paused briefly as the sound of artillery fire rolled over the ground from south to north. Instinctively, they gazed toward the sound, despite the fact that they could not see a thing. Obviously, the day’s battle between Grant and Johnston had begun.

  “Move along, men,” McFadden said sternly. “Nothing we can do about it.”

  It had been three hours since they had departed the lines. Thus far, they had not had any trouble. McFadden had given strict orders to the men that they were not to speak, for he did not want Southern accents to be heard by any Yankee ears. Any talking that needed to be done would be done by himself or Maddox, whose Scottish accents would provide a reasonab
le disguise.

  As soon as they had started to the northwest, they had begun encountering Union troops in large numbers. Initially, there were regiments of infantry hurrying forward to shore up the line, probably in response to word of the surprise attack that had opened the gap for them. When they moved into the area beyond artillery range of the Atlanta defenses, however, they entered into the logistical centers of the Union rear areas.

  Still miles away from the Western and Atlantic Railroad bridge, where they assumed the main supply depot was located, McFadden and his men looked around at the profusion of plenty all around them. They passed a well-ordered hospital with hundreds of beds cradling wounded men, who were being waited on by a number of doctors and male nurses. The sheets actually appeared to be clean, which was something a wounded Southerner in an Atlanta hospital couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams.

  As they continued northwest, they passed by several sutler wagons, some of which were surrounded by eager Union soldiers haggling with the peddler for flour, coffee, tobacco, and bags of sugar. The passed by an enormous bakery and the scent of baking bread filled the air. McFadden, who had not eaten anything other than hardtack in many days, felt his stomach ache with desire. He was sure the same was true of his men.

  What McFadden found hard to believe was that the Union forces had only been in occupation of the area for about a week. In that time, they had built what amounted to a small city. The logistical power of the Union never ceased to amaze him. He hoped he might now use Maddox’s infernal device to inflict some damage on that power, though he still felt the use of hidden explosives to be somehow ignoble.

  No one paid them the least bit of attention. With so many blue-coated soldiers milling about, they did not look at all out of place in their Union uniforms. However, McFadden was growing increasingly frustrated at his men for the way in which they stared at the material abundance all around them, their eyes wide in wonder. None of them had seen such plenty in years. He worried that if they didn’t shake the looks of astonishment off their faces, some keen-eyed Union soldier would realize they didn’t belong there. He wanted to say something, but kept silent out of fear of creating exactly such a situation.