Southern Storm (8 page)

(Not mentioned in Sherman’s orders was the substantial cattle
herd—about 5,500 head—that would accompany the wings. These cattle had to be driven along the dirt roads and, more importantly, across all watercourses and swamps encountered. By way of comparison, most of the celebrated cattle drives that ambled across the wide open western plains after the war averaged 2,000 to 3,000 head. These were usually managed by a twelve-man crew who moved the animals strung out in a line perhaps five miles long. Using this measure, and remembering that the Georgia terrain was anything but wide open, Sherman’s cattle train likely stretched eight to ten miles.)

Sherman took great care to calculate how many rations he needed to bring along and what foodstuffs he could expect to find on the way. He utilized a map prepared by the Department of the Interior that displayed the Georgia counties he intended to traverse, over which he hand wrote livestock and crop production from information he found in the 1860 Census. “I had wagons enough loaded with essentials, and beef cattle enough to feed on for more than a month,” he wrote, “and had the Census statistics showing the produce of every county through which I designed to pass. No military expedition was ever based on sounder or surer data.”

Sherman understood exactly what the nonmilitary implications were of these orders. He realized from experience that it would be impossible to strictly enforce the limitations he had set. He knew his boys, and surmised that hardly any approached the status of sainthood. He expected them to be what he would later describe as a “little
loose in foraging,” and was prepared to accept that a few would do “‘some things they ought not to have done.’” After a recent addition to Sherman’s staff pondered these foraging guidelines, he came to a grim conclusion. “Evidently it is a material element in this campaign to produce among the
people of Georgia
a thorough conviction of the personal misery which attends war, and of the utter helplessness and inability of their ‘rulers,’ State or Confederate, to protect them.”

Sherman’s means of imposing some restraint upon the foragers rested on his personal example and the influence exerted on his behalf by his officers. Through past practices and inferences, as well as occasional publication of his orders and communications on the subject, Sherman believed that the thin line between a stern military policy and uncontrolled looting could be managed.

“Of course you cannot question my right to ‘forage on the country,’” he lectured an enemy commander late in the conflict. “It is a war right as old as history. The manner of exercising it varies with circumstances, and if the civil authorities will supply my Requisitions, I will forbid all foraging. But I find no civil authorities who can respond to calls for forage or provisions, and therefore must collect directly of the People.” Because the South was in conflict with the North, southern civilians had no basis for complaint. “There are well established principles of War & the People of the South having appealed to War are barred from appealing for protection to our Constitution which they have practically and publicly defied. They have appealed to War and must abide
its
Rules & Laws…. A People who will persevere in War beyond a certain limit ought to Know the consequences. Many, Many People with less pertinacity than the South has already shown have been wiped out of national Existence.”

In the war’s last year, Sherman codified his thinking on this matter: “Now it is clearly our war right to subsist our army on the enemy. Napoleon always did it, but could avail himself of the civil powers he found in existence to collect forage and provisions by regular impressments. We cannot do that here, and I contend if the enemy fails to defend his country we may rightfully appropriate what we want.”

It is certain that Sherman had no comprehension or care to comprehend the powerful effect that the appearance of his armies had upon the slaves in his path. Twenty-plus years after the fighting ended, he could still avow that “domestic slavery at the South before the war was not cruel and inhuman.” To him the matter was one of cold equations, a bloodless calculus. “The U.S. has its hands full, and must first assert its authority and maintain it as against the Armies of the Confederacy, and then it will have time to give some attention to these negroes who have been turned loose by the Planters and former owners,” he reasoned in late 1863. More than a year later this outlook was unchanged by experience. “Now you Know that military success is what the nation wants, and it is risked by the crowds of helpless negroes that flock after our armies.”

While most of the soldiers in Sherman’s columns shared their com
mander’s prejudices, what they encountered led some to a deeper appreciation of the matter. Long after the war, speaking to a gathering of veterans in Ohio, a Union officer who participated in the march told a likely apocryphal tale of coming upon a grinning blind black man sitting amid the ruins of his former owner’s plantation, his family scattered to the winds. Asked how he could be so merry with such desolation around him, the black man replied that “bress God, freedom’s come.” The officer telling the story then reflected: “That was his conception of freedom; it took the place of eyesight and home and friends and children; it was every thing to him; and so I say that the war gave to us a conception of freedom that we never had before.”

The pontoon trains were Sherman’s secret weapon, whose critical role in the coming campaign would be seldom recognized or acknowledged. The route that Sherman ultimately settled on pushed his columns over nine separate rivers or creeks that represented sixteen distinct crossing points (one river, the Ogeechee, would be bridged seven times before the end of the expedition). While men and horses may have splashed over a number of these, the all-important wagons could not. Without a means for prompt and efficient crossing of these obstacles, Sherman’s columns faced inordinate delays that in turn degraded foraging results, since the longer the files stood in place, the harder it became to supply them from the nearby countryside. Such delays also offered time for the enemy to concentrate against their opponent’s known course. Whether or not Sherman’s
bold scheme would succeed depended very much on maintaining celerity of movement, which in turn depended on how well the pontoniers did their job.

The man Sherman assigned to make this happen was another individual whose outstanding contributions to the war effort did not translate into postwar fame, except perhaps in the obscure lexicons of military engineers. Orlando M. Poe was a West Pointer with brains (graduating sixth in the class of 1856) whose wartime career path would have severely vexed a less patient man. Although busy in the engineering branch when the Civil War erupted, Poe (like many professionals of his caste) was soon put in charge of leading volunteers into combat.

The skills needed to wrestle nature into compliance transferred well to getting citizen soldiers into fighting shape, so by early 1863 Poe was a brigadier general in charge of a division. Congress now let him fall into administrative limbo by neglecting to confirm his volunteer rank, leaving him the unhappy choices of either resigning from the service or reverting to his lower rank in the regular army. Poe, choosing his first career, returned to the engineers, where he was demoted to captain. It was in this capacity that he entered upon the campaign.

The table of organization for Sherman’s forces included three engineer units reporting directly to Poe. The men of the 58th Indiana were responsible for managing the pontoon train for the army’s left wing, and to the 1st Missouri Engineers went similar duty for the right. The third engineering unit, the 1st Michigan Engineers and Mechanics, constituted Poe’s emergency reserve, to be assigned at his discretion as circumstances arose.

Poe’s brief included a number of other activities of importance to Sherman’s operation. One was cartography. It was Poe’s task to provide Sherman and his key commanders with maps sufficient to enable the four columns to advance in rough parallel with each other. (“I have enough on hand to supply one to each corps and division commander,” Poe reported with pardonable pride on November 1.) Working from charts captured from Confederate sources and those compiled by the U.S. Coast Survey, Poe created and duplicated a broadly accurate master layout that showed the principal roads, water barriers, and towns, but was noticeably lacking other significant topographic features and smaller passageways. Once the march was under way, the
master maps would be regularly updated by actual observation and from scouting reports, with major changes reproduced photographically for distribution.

Also in the chief engineer’s portfolio was general oversight of the various pioneer details. These were construction gangs dedicated to road improvements, clearing bridge approaches, and camp preparations. Each corps was responsible for its own pioneer force (which by the end of the campaign would include a large number of blacks), but Poe represented Sherman’s quality control. There was also an amount of scouting undertaken by engineer officers, and when the need arose to destroy some substantial structure or machinery, Poe could expect the call.

“I would be lost without him,” Sherman later said of his chief of engineers.

There was one critically important piece in the mosaic of Sherman’s planning that he could not control, though, characteristically, he thought he could—the weather. The prospect of heavy rains was Sherman’s nightmare, for it would mire his columns as effectively as a major enemy effort. Yet accurate forecasting was much more a folk art in 1864 than a codified science. The concept that weather wasn’t a purely local phenomenon but the product of a dynamic process whose origins could lie many hundreds of miles distant was only beginning to take hold. America’s great generic genius Benjamin Franklin had grasped this on an intuitive level, but until it was possible to record simultaneous weather observations from stations located across the country, it remained an unproven inspired hunch. Telegraphic communication made such a reporting network technically possible, and a scientist at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution named Joseph Henry was taking the first steps in that direction before the war. Henry’s efforts halted abruptly when the military commandeered the whole communication infrastructure for its use.

Most of Georgia’s weather in November and December was generated by systems spawned in the Colorado region, where cold Canadian air tumbled in with warmer Gulf air in a natural spin cycle. A whirling mass acquires motion with steering largely provided by strong upper-atmosphere wind currents that would remain unknown until the mid-
twentieth century, when they would be named after a technology of that era—the jet stream. The irony was that had the knowledge base been there, the network of wires was in place for the military to have provided officers like Sherman with weather reporting information that could have aided their prognostications.