Southern Storm (40 page)

The group quickly passed along the artillery guns and wagons attached to Major General Blair’s corps. It was characteristic of Sherman that he was able to disconnect and relax once he had sifted through the variables to make his decisions. Catching sight of one of the battery officers, he rode over to the man to inquire how the foraging was going. They shared a laugh as his roving eye took in the pile of corn fodder
stashed on one of the cannon caissons. After complimenting the officer on the excellent condition of the unit’s horses, Sherman continued down the marching column. He came upon a pair of gunners (one on horseback, the other on foot) who were talking about nothing in particular. Spotting the General, the mounted enlisted man pulled his own animal to a stop, just as his companion commented, “This is pretty good land here.” Not missing a beat, Sherman segued into the chatter. “Yes,” he answered, “it is very good land, only a little too sandy.” The marching gunner turned on the interloper, to find himself face to face with the general commanding, “looking as smiling as you please.” When telling this story later, the gunner confessed “that about that time he felt like getting into a very deep hole.”

A ride of a few hours brought Sherman and his staff to the crossroads home of a Judge Tarver, where they decided to stop for lunch. The good magistrate had absented himself, but several women and children held the post. Sherman took a look at the fearful gaze of one of the older girls, counseled her to haul as many provisions into the house as she could manage, then assigned a guard to watch over the building. Major Hitchcock chatted briefly with the teenager, who contradicted her mother’s testimony by confirming that there had been some Rebels here just the other day. Hitchcock judged that if this girl had “been brought up in [a] city [she] would be very lady-like and refined looking.”

He was snapped out of his reverie by a female slave who implored him: “Please, Sir, soldiers robbing me of all I got, clothes and everything.” The major followed the woman to her cabin where he found “four or five soldiers turning things over.” He ordered them out; “all obeyed at once,” one even volunteering that he had been against the scavenging raid and had tried to prevent his associates from entering the cabin. Hitchcock watched them depart without further comment. Perhaps drawn by his action, another slave, an older man, recounted that a number of Wheeler’s cavalrymen had passed through here just two days earlier, but not before confiscating all the mules and horses they could lay hands on.

Hitchcock was still shaking his head as the group mounted to continue forward, eventually stopping for the night by Rocky Creek. The intelligence arriving was positive but still incomplete. There was no word about Kilpatrick, though from a black man Hitchcock learned
that the Federal riders had fought with Wheeler’s cavalry about thirty miles outside Augusta. Major General Slocum had pushed a brigade south from Louisville toward Station No. 9½, where he expected to take control of the bridge from the north side. A late-arriving courier brought an update from Howard, necessitating Hitchcock wake Sherman, who dictated a response. The major had just finished writing the orders when he espied his boss taking a night constitutional and joined him.

The General was anything but martial in appearance—“bare feet in slippers, and red flannel drawers…, woolen shirt, over which [he put] his old dressing gown, and blue cloth (½ cloak) cape.” As long as Hitchcock had known Sherman, he had never seen him sleep through an entire night. Other members of the staff guessed it was his neuralgia acting up, but Sherman just accepted it as the way of things. Chatting with Hitchcock, he said that he had come to appreciate the stillness at 3:00 or 4:00
A.M
. It was, he claimed, the “best time to hear any movement at a distance.” As the two talked about nothing special, all around them the campfires of the great army flickered and dimmed.

Even as Sherman’s headquarters moved from west to east, the forces around him continued the choreography begun on November 28. Immediately south of the rail line the Seventeenth Corps closed on Station No. 9½. The men generally made good time until they got close to the river, where they encountered its bordering swamps, which caused delays while the pioneers laid down corduroy paths. An Iowa man with an eye for topography observed that the landscape had definitely changed. “The country from Atlanta to the Oconee [River] is high land with considerable range of hills, principally rocky, the streams clear,” he noted. “From the Oconee river the country becomes low, mostly sandy, the streams yellowish and turbid, the bottoms and banks of streams generally muddy, swampy and in some places nearly impassable.”

Farther south marched the Fifteenth Corps, a portion of which unintentionally intersected with the Seventeenth, forcing it to chop a bypass through the pine thickets. This day’s marching was generally easy on the legs, but tougher on the soul. “All day in an awful pine
forest, hardly broken by fence or clearing,” grumbled an Illinoisan. “I never saw such a lonesome place.” “Trees tall and stately, with no underbrush,” added another Midwesterner. “One can see the troops and trains moving along, beneath them like a huge reptile.” “Only saw three houses to-day and they were nothing but dilapidated log cabins inhabited by tall sallow complected Georgia damsels,” said an Ohio boy.

What there was to consume was absorbed by the columns as they plodded eastward. “Poor people live here and are losing all their provisions,” commiserated a Missouri officer. One surprise came when they reached the swampy belt fringing the Ogeechee. There the persistent foragers “found the refugees’ camps who were trying to hide from the Yankee invaders, but we hunted them out most effectively.” According to an Iowan, the prowling Yankees “got 60 horses & 40 negroes [and] got lots of cattle.”

While these animals were being driven back to the main column, one of the horned cows decided to charge a file of marching infantry. A farm boy from the 50th Illinois got in front of the onrushing beast, planted himself with bayonet fixed, and prepared to meet the foe. “It was more of a shock than he had bargained for but he stood it manfully,” reported a comrade, “amid the cheers of the spectators.”

The major exception to the generally unencumbered Fifteenth Corps’ passage was that undertaken by the wayward brigade at Wrightsville, which had a lot of ground to cover to close the gap with its parent command. “Had to make right angle to the left in order to join the rest of the Div[ision],” related an Illinois soldier. “Every mile or oftener was a slough that delayed & vexed all. Took a north & north east course around & among swamps for ten miles…. A very pleasant day—got with the rest of the Div[ision] this evening. But little encouragement to know that we took the wrong road yesterday & required all of today’s work to get us right again.”

Two divisions of the Twentieth Corps continued to grind up the Central of Georgia Railroad track. “Our course is marked by a line of fire,” wrote a New York officer. This proved to be a problem, as noted by a Massachusetts officer in his journal. “The marching by the side of the burning track was perfectly infernal, & the word may be taken in a very literal sense,” he scribbled. “There was a swamp on each side in
many places so that we could not get away from it.” The swath of destruction stretched as far east as Station No. 10½, also known as Bethany.
*
One major find was a yard full of cut timber, stored in readiness to repair the line once the army had passed. An officer on the scene estimated the cache at three million board feet. “Burned it,” reported a New Yorker. “It made a splendid fire.”

The Third Division of the corps, babysitting the wagons and cattle, reached Louisville on November 19. The evidence of stubborn but futile resistance, and the feeling that Louisville’s citizens had asked to be taught a lesson, loosened the already slack restraints on the men’s behavior. “Hung an old man to try to make him tell where he hid his money,” related an officer. “Many are becoming highwaymen by their mode of life.” “It is really heart-rending to enter some of these houses and see how like demons our soldiers have behaved,” said a Wisconsin officer. “On the other hand, we find many noble incidents, where privates, as well as officers, generously alleviate the suffering of the inhabitants.”

All of the Fourteenth Corps was now settled around Louisville. Save for the one brigade shunted off to succor Kilpatrick’s cavalry, most of the other men not on duty spent the day foraging. A number scrapped with bands of Rebel cavalry roving around the outside of the picket perimeter. One Ohio officer was in charge of fifty men tasked with clearing out an unoccupied plantation a few miles beyond the security zone. “But as we were filling a cart large enough to haul one half of the Southern Confederacy,” he recollected, “a squad of Johnnies appeared and commenced firing on us. We soon were in condition to return the compliment. We were annoyed but a short time when they withdrew. We were not long in finishing our business at that point I assure you, but we got all we could haul away.”

Louisville was the first Southern town that the Fourteenth Corps had been able to pause in during the current campaign, so a sense of unwinding spread all along the chain of command. “Col. [James W.] Langley…Brigade Commander, and his whole staff, were on a big drunk tonight,” complained an Illinois soldier. “They have been out to a wine distillery and had imbibed to beastly intoxication, and are play
ing the fool on a large scale. If they were reported to their superiors they would be unstrapped
*
and sent home in disgrace.” Perhaps it was a coincidence, but back in the peaceful camp of the 52nd Ohio, a relaxed soldier was writing in his diary that the regimental band “is just now playing their evening tune and the lively notes of ‘Coming through the rye’ float gently on the breezeless air.”

W
EDNESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
30, 1864

Interlude in Violence

In one of those awful coincidences of war, a pair of bloody battles were fought this day—November 30—on opposite ends of Sherman’s march. Each was a product of the General’s decision to undertake the grand movement, though neither would have any immediate impact on his operations. One dwarfed the other in terms of numbers engaged or losses sustained, but in each scenes of carnage were terrible and commonplace.

The “lesser” of the two had its origins in Sherman’s ability to see several moves ahead on the chessboard of war. Writing on November 11 to the army’s chief of staff, Major General Henry W. Halleck, Sherman anticipated that as he approached the Atlantic coast, Southern leaders might try to concentrate a force in his front using the railroad running between Savannah and Charleston. To prevent that from happening, the General wanted a Union column from the Department of the South to raid inland in order to cut the route “about December 1.” Prodded by this request, a divisional-strength expedition was organized by cobbling together units borrowed from Charleston to Florida. The plan was to penetrate the coastline using the Broad River near Hilton Head, South Carolina, land at a peninsula-like bulge called Boyd’s Neck, and from there march west just seven miles to strike the railroad near Grahamville, South Carolina.

Simple enough in concept, the operation proved a disaster in execution. Staffed at the top with second-and third-rate commanders prone
to timidity, consisting of units that had never functioned together before in a large-scale expedition, and requiring effective coordination between the army and navy, the scheme was further crippled by dollops of bad luck. Delayed in landing thanks to a thick fog, then sent out initially on the wrong road, the weary invasion force—which should have reached the railroad on day one—flopped into camp a few miles short of the goal on the night of November 29. These proved to be critically important miles and hours for the Confederacy.

Between the Federal troops and the vital railroad route was a low ridge that provided a natural bastion, which eager hands had improved. Named Honey Hill, it was manned by a mix of South Carolina and Georgia troops, the latter just rushed there—including some Peach State units that had been mauled at Griswoldville. How these determined Georgians reached Honey Hill was a story in itself. Even as Sherman’s forces had pushed through Milledgeville, then on to Louisville, these units had marched south, then east, from Macon, eventually reaching a rail line to board cars that carried them into Savannah. Once there some courageous decision-makers realized that the threat to communication with Charleston overrode issues of parochial sovereignty, so they routed them into South Carolina just in time to meet the Federal advance on November 30.

The payback was all the sweeter when it became known that the Yankee force included black units. While Sherman himself was willing to defy his commanders in chief (Grant and Lincoln) by refusing to take any African-American units with him on the march, the broad strategic implications of his campaign thrust a number of them into harm’s way, including perhaps the most famous of all—the 54th Massachusetts (Colored). Of the eleven infantry regiments engaged on the Union side at Honey Hill, six were African-American.

The Confederates had a naturally strong position, were well dug in, and were highly motivated. Thanks to poor leadership, the bewildered Federal infantrymen were committed to the fight in a piecemeal fashion, with no overall plan. The engagement, begun at midday, ended at dusk when the bloodied, battered Federals withdrew. The Rebels defending the railroad (who never numbered more than 1,500) counted some 200 casualties, including 8 killed. The Union expedition (which totaled more than 5,000 men) lost 750, nearly 90 of these fatalities.
The critical rail line between Charleston and Savannah remained in operation. The next day, the victorious Georgia militiamen returned to Savannah, where they were added to the city’s garrison.