The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (127 page)

This began to be fairly obvious to the right-wing marchers on their second day out of Atlanta, when Howard veered southeast from Jonesboro, leaving Kilpatrick to keep up the feint down the railroad nearly to Forsyth, twenty miles short of Macon, where he too turned off to rejoin the infantry column beyond the bypassed town. Slocum continued eastward from Atlanta for three days, ripping up track as he went, and then on the fourth — by which time the two wings were close to fifty miles apart — turned south along the near bank of the Oconee River toward Milledgeville, some forty miles downstream. “God has put a ring in Sherman’s nose and is leading him to destruction,” a Richmond clergyman had remarked when the widespread march began. But now, as a result of conflicting reports by his adversaries, which in turn were the result of careful planning on his part, scarcely anyone but God and the farmers whose crops he was consuming as he progressed knew where he was.

If the march had its rigors, mainly proceeding from the great distance to be covered and the occasional hard work of bridging creeks and corduroying roads, it also had its attendant compensations derived from the fatness of the land and the skylark attitude of the men fanned out across it in two columns, foraging along a front that varied from thirty to sixty miles in width. “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned,” one of Howard’s veterans declared after swinging eastward on the second day out of Atlanta. “It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering, and promises to prove much richer yet.” Expectations were as high, and as amply rewarded, in the column to the north. Riding with Slocum past Stone Mountain that same day, Sherman pulled off on the side of the road to review the passing troops and found them unneglectful of such opportunities as had come their way. One marcher who drew his attention had a ham slung from his rifle, a jug of molasses cradled under one arm, and a big piece of honeycomb clutched in the other hand, from which he was eating as he slogged along. Catching the general’s eye, he quoted him
sotto voce
to a comrade as they swung past: “Forage liberally on the country.”

Sherman afterwards told how he “reproved the man, explaining that foraging must be limited to the regular parties properly detailed,” but he was not long in showing that despoilment had a place in his calculations, quite as much as it did in theirs. Four days later, after turning south toward Milledgeville just short of the Oconee, he came upon a well-stocked plantation which he happened to learn belonged to Major General Howell Cobb. A leading secessionist and one-time speaker of
the U.S. House and Treasury Secretary under Buchanan, Cobb had been appointed by Joe Brown to command the state reserves in the present crisis; in which capacity — though it turned out there were no “reserves” for him to command — he had been exhorting his fellow Georgians to resist the blue invasion by the destruction of everything edible in its path. “Of course, we confiscated his property,” Sherman would recall, “and found it rich in corn, beans, peanuts, and sorghum molasses.… I sent back word to General Davis to explain whose plantation it was, and instructed him to spare nothing. That night huge bonfires consumed the fence rails, kept our soldiers warm, and the teamsters and men, as well as the slaves, carried off an immense quantity of corn and provisions of all sorts.”

His aim, he said, in thus enforcing “a devastation more or less relentless,” was to convince the planters roundabout “that it is in their interest not to impede our movements.” Simultaneously, however, this conclusion was discouraged by the activities of his foragers — “bummers,” they were called, and called themselves, although the term had been one of opprobrium at the start — who worked along the fringes of the march, sometimes as “regular parties properly detailed,” sometimes not. Isolated plantation owners, mostly wives and mothers whose sons and husbands were with Hood or Lee in Tennessee or Virginia, buried their silver and jewels on hearing of Sherman’s approach, and the search for these provided fun, as well as the possibility of profit, for the blue-clad visitors. Out would come the ramrods for a vigorous probing of lawns and flowerbeds. “It was comical to see a group of these red-bearded, barefooted, ragged veterans punching the unoffending earth in an apparently idiotic but certainly most energetic way,” an officer who observed them was to write. “A woman standing upon the porch of a house, watching their proceedings, instantly became an object of suspicion, and she was watched until some movement betrayed a place of concealment. Fresh earth thrown up, a bed of flowers just set out, the slightest indication of a change in appearance or position, all attracted the gaze of these military agriculturists. If they ‘struck a vein’ a spade was instantly put in requisition and the coveted wealth was speedily unearthed. It was all fair spoil of war, and the search made one of the excitements of the march.” Other diversions included the shooting of bloodhounds, hated for their use in tracking runaway slaves and convicts through the swamps. Sometimes, by way of a joke, the definition was expanded to cover less offensive breeds. For example, when a poodle’s mistress appealed for her lap dog to be spared, the soldier who had caught up the pet and was bearing it off to execution replied: “Madam, our orders are to kill every bloodhound.” “But this is not a bloodhound!” she protested, only to be told: “Well, madam, we cannot tell what it will grow into if we leave it behind.”

If there was a core of cruelty to such humor, it was precisely in
such cruelty that the humor had its source. In time Sherman would concede that “many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence were committed by these parties of foragers.” He had also “heard of jewelry taken from women and the plunder of articles that never reached our commissary,” though he insisted that such depredations were “exceptional and incidental.” In any case, whatever factors contributed to the total, he would report at the end of the march across Georgia that the damage inflicted came to no less than $100,000,000: “at least twenty millions of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction. This may seem a hard species of warfare,” he declared, “but it brings the sad realities of war home to those who have been directly or indirectly instrumental in involving us in its attendant calamities.” Such, after all, was one of the main purposes of the expedition, and if, in its course, southern women had been subjected to certain discourtesies in their homes, there was a measure of justice in that as well, since they were among the fieriest proponents of a war that might have ended by now except for their insistence that it be fought to the last ditch. Many of the soldiers believed as much, at any rate. “You urge young men to the battlefield where men are being killed by the thousands, while you stay home and sing
The Bonnie Blue Flag,”
an Ohio colonel heard one of his troopers lecture a resentful housewife, “but you set up a howl when you see the Yankees down here getting your chickens. Many of your young men have told us they are tired of war, and would quit, but you women would shame them and drive them back.” This applied only to white women, of course. Black ones were far more sympathetic to the invaders, especially on visits to their roadside bivouacs at night. “And they didn’t charge us a cent,” one grateful infantryman recorded.

So far, except for skittery detachments of butternut cavalry, not so much opposing as observing Kilpatrick’s movement down the Macon & Western, neither Union column had encountered any organized resistance. One reason for this, in addition to their confusion as to Sherman’s whereabouts or goal, was that the Confederates had little or nothing with which to confront him except Wheeler’s 3500 scattered horsemen and an overload of brass. Within a week of his departure from Atlanta, both Hardee and Richard Taylor were at Macon, ordered there from Charleston and Selma by Beauregard — who himself was on the way from North Alabama — to confer with the Governor and his two chief military advisers, Howell Cobb and Major General G. W. Smith. Of these four high-ranking commanders, only the last brought any troops along, and all he had was 3000 Georgia militia summoned back into service by Brown to help meet the impending crisis. Learning that the blue infantry had left the railroad at Jonesboro, Hardee decided that Milledgeville, not Macon, was Howard’s intermediary objective on a march that would continue southeast, through Millen to Savannah,
and that Slocum would most likely push on eastward, through Augusta, to reach Charleston. He therefore advised that the militia be shifted northward to stand in Slocum’s path, while he himself returned by rail to Savannah to prepare for its defense. Brown approving, the four makeshift brigades — so called, though none was much larger than a standard regiment — were ordered to set out at once, commanded by a militia brigadier named P. J. Phillips; Smith remained behind to make arrangements for supplies. That was on November 22, the day Sherman had one of Slocum’s divisions clean out Cobb’s plantation, ten miles north of Milledgeville, and that was how it came about that a brigade from one of Howard’s divisions, ten miles east of Macon, fought that afternoon the only sizeable infantry action of the campaign between Atlanta and the Atlantic.

Aside from the high rate of casualties on one side, in contrast to the low rate on the other, there was little to distinguish the engagement from other such exercises in futility, staged for the most part in the early, picture-book days of the war, when blue and gray were green alike. Howard had bypassed Macon the day before, quarter-circling it clockwise from the north, and today, while Brown and the four generals were conferring, had posted a rear guard beyond Griswoldville, nine miles out the Central Georgia Railroad, which he crossed at that point on his way toward the Oconee for a crossing about midway between Milledgeville and Dublin. This rear guard, a single brigade from the tail division of Osterhaus’s corps, had taken position along the crest of a hill one mile east of the station, its flanks protected by swampy ground and with open fields in front. So far, there had been no threat except from rebel troopers, who were easily kept off, but late that afternoon the 1500 defenders saw a heavy column of infantry moving toward them through the town. To their surprise, the marchers formed for attack and came straight at them across the stubble of the fields, displaying what one Federal called “more courage than discretion.” With accustomed ease, the XV Corps veterans leveled their rifles and blasted the attackers back, only to see them reassemble and come on again, in much the same style and with similar results. Three times they charged uphill in close formation, and three times they were blown rearward by heavy volleys from the breastworks on the crest; until at last they gave it up and limped away, back through Griswoldville, toward Macon. Whooping, the victors moved out into the field to gather up the booty. Soon, however, the cheers froze in their throats at the sight of what lay before them in the stubble. They saw for the first time, to their horror, that they had been fighting mostly old men and young boys, who lay about in attitudes of death and agony — more than 600 of them in all, as compared to their own loss of 62.

“I was never so affected at the sight of dead and wounded before,” an Illinois infantryman afterwards wrote home. “I hope we will never
have to shoot at such men again. They knew nothing at all about fighting and I think their officers knew as little.” A comrade, reacting not only to this but also to the pillage he had seen and shared in, put his thoughts in stronger words. “There is no God in war,” he fumed. “It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

Slocum’s lead corps entered Milledgeville that same afternoon, twenty miles northeast of this scene of innocent valor, and the other arrived the following morning, accompanied by Sherman, who slept that night in the mansion vacated two days ago by Joe Brown, the fifth Confederate governor to be routed from his bed or desk by the approach of blue invaders. Unlike Nashville, Baton Rouge, Jackson, and Little Rock, all firmly in the Federal grip, the Georgia capital underwent only a temporary occupation; Slocum crossed the Oconee next morning, November 24, slogging eastward along the Central Georgia through Sandersville, toward Millen, while Howard took up a parallel route, some twenty miles to the south, toward Swainsboro. Brief as it was, the Milledgeville layover had been welcome, not only as a chance to get some rest after hiking the hundred miles from Atlanta, but also as a diversion from the workaday grind of converting more than sixty miles of railroad into a trail of twisted iron. Ebullient young officers, under the influence of what Sherman called “the spirit of mischief,” assembled in the abandoned Hall of Representatives, and there, after a rousing debate, repealed the ordinance of secession and appointed committees to call forthwith on Governor Brown and President Davis for the purpose of landing official kicks on their official rumps. While this parliamentary business was in progress, soldiers ransacked the State House and amused themselves by heaving out of its windows all the books and papers they could find. A New Englander on Osterhaus’s staff took private exception to such conduct, which seemed to him to go beyond a line that could not be crossed without a loss, if not of honor, then anyhow of due propriety. “I don’t object to stealing horses, mules, niggers, and all such little things,” he recorded in his journal, “but I will not engage in plundering and destroying public libraries.”