Southern Storm (53 page)

Confederate cavalry under the command of Major General Joseph Wheeler represented the principal force opposed to Sherman’s March. A fierce competitor (he was wounded three times, lost sixteen horses in combat, and had thirty-six staff officers wounded by his side), the youthful Wheeler had to live down a popular sobriquet as the “War Child.” He answered to a number of officers and officials during Sherman’s March, and the poor discipline of his men led to them being dubbed “Wheeler’s robbers.”

Among those Davis called upon was William J. Hardee, a past commandant of cadets at West Point who was known as “Old Reliable.”

Another ordered into the breech by Davis was General Braxton Bragg, whose military strictness, personal insensitivity, and notable battlefield failures cast him as one of the most detested of Confederate generals.

It fell to Confederate president Jefferson Davis with his vice president, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, to rally dispirited Georgians and put together a winning team to defeat Sherman’s forces.

Davis put much of his hope for turning things around with General John B. Hood, who gave up making defensive moves against Sherman and went on a high-risk offensive into Tennessee.

Thursday, December 8, 1864

T
HURSDAY
, D
ECEMBER
8, 1864

Left Wing

Advancing along the center of the Savannah peninsula, the Twentieth Corps met little opposition from enemy fighters, but a great deal from the land itself. In an effort to keep things moving, the Second Division—the first in line—was shunted onto a “small road branching off to the right, with a view of finding some middle road.” The route, more a question mark on the map, did not exist; at least, no one was able to locate it. As a consequence, the division plowed ahead, carving its own byway out of the forests and swamps in the general direction of Savannah.

That left the only known thoroughfare clear for the First Division, followed by the Third, which was also dragging along the wagons. The former had a rather uneventful tramp; forage was good, and the sections of blocked passageway were swiftly cleared by what a Wisconsin soldier called “the lusty black pioneers.” The First Division’s passage served mainly to churn up the already fragile road bed, making matters exponentially worse when the Third finally came along.

A musician marching with the Third’s First Brigade pronounced them “the worst roads I ever saw.” Matters were so bad that the division commander, Brigadier General William T. Ward, was described by one staffer as “cussing mad.” If an officer with the 85th Indiana is to be believed, the frustrated Ward turned to drinking. The soldier and his company were busy corduroying a swampy swath of road when the general rode up to supervise. “Captain,” he slurred, “corduroy it good, its shaky down here. Corduroy it good, its shaky. The first wagon will go down, down, and the next wagon will go clear to the hub, and the next wagon will go down to H——l. I tell you Captain, its shaky.” With that Ward rode off, now possessing a nickname. From here on the men of the 85th Indiana referred to their commander as “Old Shaky.”

Running behind time with the Twentieth Corps was the Fourteenth, which held the extreme left flank of Sherman’s movement. A combination of treacherous ground and Rebel opposition (including a surprise appearance by the Confederate Navy) guaranteed that Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis’s men would not close the gap this day.

The path followed by the Fourteenth Corps snaked alongside the Savannah River, where it slithered through a latticework of creeks and accompanying swamps. It was especially bad near Ebenezer Church, where Ebenezer Creek emptied into the Savannah, but not before splitting into several miry branches. The lone bridge here was approached by a corduroy causeway with occasional culverts and drains. The Confederates, reported a Wisconsin man, “had raised ‘Hail Columbia’ here in general. The corduroy was torn up the whole length; the bridge burned and not satisfied with that they had slashed the cypresses from both sides across the road and making a complete tangle of it.”

Somehow, four companies from the 58th Indiana had reached the
bridge (a trestle affair) and were busily fixing it up, even as pioneer details replanked the corduroy sections. Among the first units to arrive when the crossing was declared open at noon was a pontoon detail from the 58th. There was another wrecked crossing a few miles farther on at Lockner Creek requiring their skills. Hardly had the initial regiments begun tramping over the Ebenezer Creek trestle when the Confederates surprised everyone. “Like a flash of lightning out of a clear sky, a loud explosion was heard a short distance down the stream, and a sixty-four pound shell came whizzing over our heads,” recorded an engineer on the spot.

It was the Confederate gunboat
Macon,
operating on orders from Lieutenant General Hardee to do what it could to interdict the progress of the Federal columns along the Savannah River. “Our Brigade just got over when a rebel gun-boat opened on the bridge and stopped operations for a while,” said an Ohio soldier. The enemy craft fired perhaps a half dozen times, more for show than effect. Its distant gunners could only aim in a general direction, without any sightings for corrections to improve accuracy. The warship became more of a novelty than a threat. “The curiosity of all to see a live Rebel Gunboat in operation overcame whatever alarm might have been felt and there was a rush to the river bank in such numbers that the boat was frightened away and soon disappeared up the river,” chuckled an Illinois soldier.

More serious was an accompanying crescendo of carbine and rifle fire to the north as several groups of mounted Rebels attacked the rear guards, both cavalry and infantry. A number of Yankee pickets were gathering pine knots for lunchtime fires when the enemy appeared, among them a captain in the 101st Indiana who promptly dropped his load to scramble for safety with his men. “I dare say the captain was scared but he done some pretty fast running to get away,” commented an amused observer. “We had our dinner ready but not eaten when the reb cavalry made a charge on us,” growled a Minnesotan. “Most of the coffee was spilled in the hurry to get into line.”

The Confederates had driven in Kilpatrick’s cavalry screen as far as Baird’s infantry rear guard. Once it became plain that the foot soldiers were holding their line, the mounted Rebels eased up, allowing the Federals time to sort out a defensive alignment with the cavalry on the right and the infantry to the left. Each side glared at the other for
the rest of the day. Words replaced bullets after sunset, as opposing pickets exchanged banter. “The Rebels said they would drown the whole pack of Sherman’s thieves in the swamps about Savannah, and our men replied that Savannah would be in our possession within three days,” said an Illinois trooper.

“The negroes come into our lines by hundreds,” continued that cavalryman, “but we cannot do anything for them. They are of all sizes, all ages, all sexes, and all colors, from the whitest white to coal black; women of all ages, and little children, all barefooted, and with scarcely clothing enough to cover them.” “Up to this time the Darkies have been following the army from sections through which we passed and have accumulated thousands of all sizes and sex,” added an Indiana infantryman guarding the Ebenezer Creek bridge, “and our orders is not [to] let them cross the river.” Another Hoosier, this one an officer in a different Indiana regiment, marched past the growing refugee crowd near the checkpoint. “The groups gathered around the bridge presented a picture of misery seldom equaled,” he attested.

The officers who had tried and failed to stem the unwanted procession at Buckhead Creek on December 3 now looked to the crossings at Ebenezer Creek and Lockner Creek as presenting them with another, even better opportunity.

Right Wing

Major General Sherman moved his headquarters with the sweep of the Seventeenth Corps along the Central of Georgia Railroad, today’s objective being Station No. 2, Eden. It was steady but slow progress. “Trees had been felled in the road, and our march otherwise obstructed,” related an Ohio soldier. “A good deal of corduroy built,” commented a brigade commander in the Third Division. “Houses of two men burnt, neighbors informed on them as the men who had obstructed the roads.” The torching of one of the two residences was noted with approval by Major Hitchcock.

After the General’s staff broke camp at 7:00
A.M
., they soon observed firsthand the challenges presented by the sandy crusted roads crossing the lengthening patches of swamps. The relatively placid pace did not bother Sherman, as he was more concerned about keeping his
army concentrated. With the Fourteenth Corps lagging behind, it would not do for the other columns east of the Ogeechee River to travel too fast. “The army has been advancing slowly and surely,” observed a member of Sherman’s staff, “but as cautiously as if a strong army were in our front.”

For lunch break Sherman’s party stopped at the home of a Reverend Heidt, who proved to be one of those duplicitous civilians that Major Hitchcock had come to loathe. When Union infantry foraging his property came to the General with handfuls of rifle cartridges found hidden in his hen coop, the good cleric loudly proclaimed them planted by the Yankee soldiers. Sherman’s aide-de-camp, Major Lewis F. Dayton, examined the evidence with a grim smile. “We don’t draw ours from the Macon Arsenal,” he said, displaying the manufacturing stamp on the cartridges. Heidt stammered a new excuse, but Sherman was utterly uninterested in dispensing any justice this day. The good reverend’s house would be spared, much to Major Hitchcock’s amazement.

Headquarters night camp was along the wagon road near Station No. 2, where Sherman received a verbal report from his Left Wing commander, Major General Slocum, who promised to tighten up his deployments. From Major General Howard came copies of recent Savannah dailies with news reprinted from New York sources about the fight at Franklin, Tennessee. The Southern sheets also contained full copies of Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 120, issued at the start of the campaign. “General very much provoked, and quite bitter on newspapermen everywhere,” observed Major Hitchcock. “I don’t wonder.”

Once more it was the Fifteenth Corps that most aggressively carried the fight to the enemy. It was now operating in four separate detachments. For the Third Division, herding the lumbering wagons, today would be spent in camp near Jenks’ Bridge. An officer and diarist in the 59th Indiana wrote that his men “had washing done and a general cleaning up.” “We sent our forage detail & wagon out this morning,” recorded an Illinois captain. “We got plenty of corn, sweet potatoes, beef, & sheep.”

The Second Division, supported by the First, continued to drive south toward the Canoochee River. Since the Confederates still seemed determined to contest the stream crossing, Brigadier General William
B. Hazen, commanding the Second Division, decided to consolidate a short distance away at Bryan County Court House. “Our camp was in a pine woods, where we put up breastworks of logs,” reported an Ohio soldier. The supporting division swung east to the Ogeechee River to bivouac near a historic fortification site known as Fort Argyle, where the Yankee boys made some nineteenth-century improvements. The Federals, wrote a member of the 9th Iowa, “built works [and] sent out a foraging party that had a fight but nothing serious.”

It fell to the Fourth Division to knock on Savannah’s front door. Setting out from its encampment on the west bank of the Ogeechee, the division crossed at Jenks’ Bridge to take up a rapid march following the River Road. The men, recorded one of them, “moved without supply trains, but with two days’ rations in their haversacks.” Opposition was light, “not sufficiently serious…to occasion much detention,” said the expedition’s commander, Brigadier General John M. Corse. He continued that the “first line of [enemy] works…we found evacuated.” The lack of any resistance allowed some of the soldiers to slip into their best tourist mode. “Around us are magnificent live oaks, beautifully hung with festoons of Spanish moss,” marveled an Illinois diarist.

Corse’s column made it as far as Dillon’s Bridge, near where the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal met the Savannah River. The crossing here was still in flames, but it was routine by now for pioneers and engineers to extinguish the fire in order to quickly get it back into operation. A small force was established on the city side of the canal, with scouts reporting a manned Rebel barricade farther down the road. Corse, deciding he was far enough out on a limb, ordered his division to entrench along the canal’s country side. Things were so quiet that a few of the boys took it easy. “Went in swimming to-day,” reported an Illinois soldier. “The water was quite warm.”

A rider raced back with a report for Major General Howard, who promptly passed the news to Sherman. “This is an important point gained,” declared Major Hitchcock. The General was already looking ahead to making contact with the Union fleet off Savannah. In a note to General Howard, Sherman authorized risking a scouting party to navigate the Ogeechee River to its mouth in order to “inform the naval commander that we have arrived in fine condition and are moving directly against Savannah.” Major Hitchcock believed that it would
only be a matter of “two days [before] we shall know whether Savannah will stand a siege.”

The effort Wheeler was making to keep up the pressure on Sherman’s Left Wing stretched Confederate logistics well past their breaking points. Keeping his troopers in constant contact with the slowly moving Federal columns was all that mattered; consequently, Wheeler never questioned how his men kept themselves supplied. After this campaign had ended, one exasperated citizen wrote the C.S. secretary of war to protest “against the destructive lawlessness of members of General Wheeler’s command.” He continued: “Beeves have been shot down in the fields, one quarter taken off, and the balance left for buzzards. Horses are stolen out of wagons on the road, and by wholesale out of stables at night…. It is no unusual sight to see these men ride late into camp with all sorts of plunder.”