Southern Storm (68 page)

[Inclosure]

After dispatching the message, Sherman was talking with Slocum when an aide appeared with a matter for the Left Wing commander’s attention. Receiving a nod in response, the staff officer waved over Colonel Ezra Carmen, who had arrived from Argyle Island to better
understand how his little effort fit into the larger picture. Not one to be intimidated by high rankers, Carmen stood before the two senior commanders to explain how feasible it would be to push two brigades onto the South Carolina shore to cut the Union Causeway. When Sherman mentioned the danger from Rebel gunboats, Carmen expressed confidence in the field artillery’s ability to drive them off. Sherman lapsed into a moody silence, and Carmen shut his mouth. “My rank did not permit me to press the matter,” he later wrote, “though I thought a great opportunity was being lost.”

William J. Hardee had his hands full this day suppressing a mutiny in the battalion of troops recruited from disaffected Union prisoners of war. The two would-be deserters captured yesterday revealed an imminent plot among the men to immobilize their officers, spike their cannon, then surrender en masse to the Federals. Wasting no time, Hardee struck fast and hard. According to an officer in the city’s garrison, the battalion camp “was suddenly surrounded by detachments from the 55th Georgia, and by Jackson’s Augusta battalion, and two field-guns loaded with canister were brought to bear on them. The men were deprived of their arms, and the ringleaders, five in number…were seized. These, and the two privates apprehended the previous night in the act of deserting to the enemy, were tried by a drum-head court martial, on their own confessions convicted of mutiny and intended desertion to the enemy, sentenced and executed.” The impressed battalion was then “marched under guard to Savannah where it was closely watched during the rest of the siege.”

When he wasn’t handling this matter, Hardee was planning the military evacuation with Beauregard. Both officers were operating with consciences cleared by official sanction from Richmond. Beauregard had received the confirmation he sought for his decision to abandon Savannah after making “the fullest possible defense consistent with the safety of the garrison.” Hardee was the recipient of a personal note from President Jefferson Davis, assuring him that the cupboard had been scoured for possible reinforcements but that the shelves were bare. Davis cautioned Hardee to “make the dispositions needful for the preservation of your army.”

The arrival of Sherman’s surrender demand forced them to set aside
their work, and “after full consultation,” a response was crafted. Though dated December 17, it would not pass through the lines until the next day. One of Beauregard’s aides thought that Hardee’s riposte was “clear, firm, to the point. It was written with moderation and dignity, and in that respect was in contrast with the communication of the Federal commander.”

A Union staff officer familiar with the exchange of messages afterward noted that “both [Sherman and Hardee were] ‘only talking,’ and both knew it.”

S
UNDAY
, D
ECEMBER
18, 1864

Messages between Grant and Sherman crossed each other in transit today; Grant’s gracefully conceding to Sherman, Sherman’s still tactfully pressing his argument. Now that it was official that Sherman’s force had safely reached the coast, Grant was able to formally praise his subordinate “on the successful termination of your most brilliant campaign.” Then, after grumbling again about how hard it had been for him to get George Thomas moving, Grant did allow that he “has done magnificently [at Nashville], however, since he started.” This victory, coupled with some minor successes elsewhere, caused Grant to reconsider, and then cancel, his earlier orders for Sherman to join him in Virginia. Once more he was ready to defer to the older man’s judgment. “I want to get your views about what ought to be done and what can be done,” he wrote. Grant closed his note: “I subscribe myself, more than ever, if possible, your friend.”

Sherman’s missive, composed before Grant’s arrived, opened with a summary of recent events. The General felt the need to rebut several points made by Hardee in his rejection of Sherman’s demand. Then he went on to make sure Grant understood that the obstacles standing in the way of his transferring his army to Virginia—dense fogs, mud banks in the Ogeechee River, only six feet of low-tide water at the loading wharf—would inevitably result in “more delay than you anticipate.”

Regarding the capture of Savannah, Sherman’s thinking had jumped from slow but sure, to faster even if more costly. “I still hope that events will give me time to take Savannah,” said Sherman, “even if I have to assault with some loss.” In his
Memoirs,
Sherman said that from the moment he received Hardee’s “letter declining to surrender” he had decided that “nothing remained but to assault.” Orders were issued this day to his wing commanders “to make the necessary preparations at once for assaulting the place.” Sherman’s planning at this stage had little finesse. “I…resolved to make the attempt to break his line of defense at several places,” he said, “trusting that some one would succeed.”

For all his tough talk, Sherman was loath to spend lives on taking Savannah if there was a less costly way of winning the prize. “Of course I must fight when the time comes,” he admitted to his daughter Minnie before the start of the Georgia campaign, “but wherever a result can be accomplished without Battle I prefer it.” The best way to achieve that result was to pinch off Hardee’s connection to Charleston, and the force best placed to do that was Foster’s. Sherman said to Foster: “It is all important that the railroad and telegraph wire should be broken between the Savannah River and Charleston.” Sherman was hoping for a “bold rush,” but he was realist enough to realize he was pushing a weak reed. If a bold rush wasn’t possible, Sherman was content to let Foster’s men “whale away with their 30-pounder Parrotts and break the road with cannon balls,” something they hadn’t been able to accomplish in several days of trying.

The longer Sherman mulled it over, the greater seemed the risks in allowing Major General Slocum to pursue the same objective by sliding the Twentieth Corps across the Savannah River via Argyle Island, or even Hutchinson Island just below it. In making this argument to himself, the General reasoned that “the enemy held the river opposite the city with iron-clad gunboats, and could destroy any pontoons laid down by us between Hutchinson’s Island and the South Carolina shore, which would isolate any force sent over from that flank.” Haunted by a notorious defeat in the first year of the war when a Federal force was pinned against the Potomac River and almost annihilated, Sherman vowed not “to make a mistake like ‘Ball’s Bluff’ at that period of the war.”

Had he not been so determined to push the Foster option, a thoughtful review of his initial objections to Slocum’s suggestion would have revealed greater possibilities than he imagined. The Confederate Savannah River Squadron had but one fully operational ironclad in its arsenal, which could only reach Argyle Island with its guns from extreme range at high tide. The next largest gunboat (wooden) was in a similar fix. Slocum’s men had already demonstrated with the capture of the
Resolute
that a well-sited land battery could successfully engage timbered gunboats. Also, Colonel Carmen’s men had become very adept at moving troops by barge, a process that could be easily halted and concealed when an enemy smokestack was sighted. There were risks in such an operation. Where Sherman misjudged was in assessing
them. Ultimately, his decision to push Foster to do more would take extra time—something, as it turned out, he did not have.

On the southern front, the first elements of Hazen’s division (Fifteenth Corps) “commenced taring up the [rail]rode and twisting the irons,” according to an Indiana soldier. The brigade he was in, added an Ohio comrade, “went to work at once tearing, burning the railroad, twisting the iron rails, and destroying the telegraph wires and poles.” Farther south along the right-of-way, Mower’s division of the Seventeenth Corps was yet tramping to reach its assigned work zone. Still, the soldiers managed to find time to forage liberally on the countryside. Several regiments visited Walthourville, which one Yankee described as “a small aristocratic village, situated in a pine grove—pretty churches—residences vacated.” “There we got some corn meal and killed hogs,” added a Hoosier, “as they were the first chance we had to kill hogs since we had been in the [county],…we lived sumptuously that night and grew fat.”

Operating in the same neighborhood was a brigade from Baird’s Fourteenth Corps division, whose sole concern was getting grub. The men located all they needed near Hinesville, where one of them remembered that they “found plenty of sweet potatoes, rice & corn with which we loaded up our teams.” One detachment swung around toward Riceboro, passing Midway Church, which provided an Indiana boy a cause to meditate upon the people who built and used it. In the end, he was “glad after all to know that the citizens once knew one who was able to help in time of trouble.”

More than one of Baird’s soldiers took stock of the large number of alligators lurking in the swampy areas. This night a 75th Indiana enlisted man decided to play a joke on his recently acquired black servant, who was terrified of the creatures. Sending him into the swamp to fetch wood, the soldier trailed along out of sight, waiting until they had gone deep enough into the morass before making a convincing splashing sound in the water. The servant immediately dropped his load of kindling to race back to camp, where he babbled a vivid tale of his encounter with the terrible monster. The laughing soldier tried to explain it was all a joke, but the frightened black refused to reenter the
swamp. The prankster now had to fetch his own firewood, leaving him to wonder “whether the joke is on him or me.”

Immediately west of Savannah, the throaty grumble of artillery provided a steady backdrop to the day as the city’s defenders reacted quickly to provocative acts or just followed a prearranged program of harassing fire. The members of one Wisconsin regiment found themselves camped with Yankee guns behind them and Rebel cannon in front. The enemy’s “bombs, shells, and balls…would go over our heads,” said one in the unit. “Our batteries would reply by also shooting over our heads, so we were between two fires. But we were safer than if we had been on the firing line. Sometimes a ball would come low and break off a limb of a tree, but we could dodge the limbs.”

The engineers of the 58th Indiana labored throughout this day building fascines—stout bundles of rice straw fifteen inches in diameter, seven and a half feet long, stiffened with a pole through the center core, all held together by Confederate telegraph wire. Soldiers advancing to the attack would each tote a bundle for deposit into ditches or quicksand marshes as instant corduroy. The officer in charge, Colonel George P. Buell, set up something of an assembly line in the camp. The various fascine components were stacked in construction order so that the men could walk from one workstation to the next, building their bundle as they progressed. The task continued well after sunset, as the engineers turned out 700 of them. “It looks very romantic this evening to see the men making fascines by candle light,” observed a member of the regiment.