The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (138 page)

The slowness of the Federals in getting back to grips with their opponents was due to the scattered condition of the army when it bedded down the night before. On the right, Wilson and Schofield
were in reasonable proximity to Cheatham on Shy’s Hill, and so presently, on the left, was Steedman in relation to Lee, whose skirmishers he encountered as he approached Overton Hill, east of the Franklin Pike, around midmorning. It was in the center, in particular the right center, that the worst delays occurred; Smith and Wood were at right angles to each other, and neither knew, when the day began, whether the rebels had pulled out in the night, or, if not, what position Hood had chosen for another stand. By the time they found out, and got their troops aligned for the confrontation, noon had come and action had opened on the left. This was as it had been the day before, except that at no stage of the planning was Steedman’s effort, reinforced by one of Wood’s divisions, intended as a feint. His orders called for the Confederates to be “vigorously pressed and unceasingly harrassed,” for if Hood’s right could be turned and “his line of retreat along the Franklin Pike and the valley leading to Brentwood commanded effectually,” Thomas would succeed today in bringing off the Cannae he had intended yesterday. The result, here on the Union left, was the bloodiest fighting of the two-day battle.

Two of Lee’s divisions, under Major Generals Henry Clayton and Carter Stevenson, not only had scarcely been engaged the day before, they had not even taken part in the assault at Franklin, and their conduct here today, astride the Franklin Pike and on the crest of Overton
Hill, gave some notion of what Hood’s whole army might have accomplished at the gates of Nashville, just over two weeks later, if it had been spared the late-November holocaust that cost it 6000 of its best men, including Pat Cleburne and a dozen other brigade and division commanders. At full strength, both in numbers and morale, these five brigades — reinforced by a sixth from Johnson, whose division was on their left, adjoining Stewart’s corps in the center — stood off, between noon and 3 o’clock, a series of combined attacks by Wood and Steedman, whose persistence cost them dearly. Suffering little themselves, despite massed incoming artillery fire that Wood pronounced “uncommonly fine” and one defender said “was the most furious I ever witnessed,” they inflicted such heavy punishment on the attackers that finally, after three hours of surging up and stumbling down the muddy slopes of the hill on the far Confederate right, the blue flood receded. Steedman’s losses were especially cruel. One unit, the 13th U.S. Colored Infantry, suffered 221 casualties in all, the greatest regimental loss on either side. “After the repulse,” Wood later reported, “our soldiers, white and colored, lay indiscriminately near the enemy works at the outer edge of the abatis.”

When this attack first opened, threatening to turn his right and cut the Franklin Pike, Hood ordered Cheatham to send three of the four brigades from the division on his left — formerly Cleburne’s, now under its senior brigadier, James A. Smith — to reinforce the opposite flank. As it turned out, this was a serious mistake. Lee not only needed no help, but by the time Smith’s men reached him, around 3.30, the attack had been suspended. Worse, there wasn’t time enough for them to return to their former position below Shy’s Hill, which they had no sooner left than they were sorely missed. Stewart had been watching in both directions from his command post in the center, east of the Granny White Pike, and had seen trouble coming: not on the right, though the Overton Hill assault was even then approaching its climax, but on the left, where the situation was uncomfortably similar to the one he himself had faced the day before, when his had been the corps on that flank. “Should Bate fall back,” he said in a hastily-written 2 o’clock note to Walthall, whose division adjoined Bate’s on Cheatham’s right, “keep your left connected with him, falling back from your left toward right and forming a new flank line extending to hills in rear.”

There was more to this than a generally shared mistrust of Bate, whose three brigades had not done well in recent operations. All morning, though none of the five blue infantry divisions arrayed in a nearly semicircular line confronting Shy’s Hill from the north and west had so far come to grips with the defenders, Wilson, fighting with two divisions dismounted while the other two ranged wide, had been pressing Chalmers’ horsemen back on their supports. By noon, as a result, the Granny White Pike was firmly in Union possession to the south,
no longer a possible rebel escape route, and Cheatham’s left was bent in the shape of a fishhook. Hood pulled Ector’s troops back from the crest of the hill to help Smith’s remaining brigade hold off Wilson’s attackers, whose repeaters gave them a firepower out of proportion to their already superior numbers. This caused Bate to have to extend his line still farther westward in taking over the works Ector’s men had occupied, and worst of all, now that the rapid-firing blue troopers had pushed within carbine range, this part of the line was taking close-up fire not only from its front and flank but also from its rear. “The Yankee bullets and shells were coming from all directions, passing one another in the air,” a butternut private would recall.

By 3 o’clock, when the blue attack finally sputtered out on the Confederate right, a good part of the night-built breastworks on Shy’s Hill had been flattened or knocked apart — small wonder; one of Schofield’s batteries, for example, pumped 560 rounds into the hill before the day was over — by well-aimed shots from artillery massed north and west and south. A cold rain had begun at midday, and the defenders could do little, under the fall of icy water and hot metal, but hug the earth and hope for a let-up that did not come, either of raindrops or of shells. It was more or less clear to everyone here, as it was to Stewart in the center, that the position now being pounded by close to a hundred guns could not be held much longer than it took the commanders of the three Union corps — one in its front, one on its flank, one in its rear — to stage the concerted push the situation called for.

Thomas, though he still declined to be hurried in his conduct of the battle — not even by a midday wire from the Commander in Chief, in which, after tendering “the nation’s thanks for your good work of yesterday,” Lincoln ended on a sterner note, as if on cue from Grant: “You made a magnificent beginning. A grand consummation is within your easy reach. Do not let it slip” — saw clearly enough what was called for, and was moving even now to bring it off. About the time the Overton Hill attack subsided he set out from his Franklin Pike command post and rode westward through the pelting rain in rear of the extension of Wood’s line, on beyond the Granny White Pike, where A. J. Smith had his two remaining divisions in position, and then around the southward curve of front to Schofield’s headquarters, due west of Shy’s Hill. Wilson was there, remonstrating against Schofield’s delay in giving the prearranged signal he and Smith had agreed would launch the converging assault by all three corps. The cavalryman had sent a series of couriers urging action for the past two hours, ever since he gained the rebel rear, and now at last — within an hour of sunset — had come in person to protest, although with small effect; Schofield wanted another division from Smith before advancing, on grounds that to attack high-sited intrenchments without a greater advantage in numbers than he now enjoyed would be to risk paying more in blood for
the hill than it was worth. Thomas heard him out, then said dryly: “The battle must be fought, if men
are
killed.” He looked across the northwest slope of the fuming hill, where it seemed to him that McArthur, adjusting his line for a closer take-off, was about to slip the leash. “General Smith is attacking without waiting for you,” he told Schofield. “Please advance your entire line.”

Here at last was a direct order; Schofield had no choice but to obey. He did so, in fact, so promptly that Wilson, riding happily south to rejoin his troopers in rear of the blue-clamped rebel left, did not get back in time to direct their share of the three-sided push that drove the defenders from Shy’s Hill. So sudden indeed was the gray collapse that Hood himself, watching from horseback in rear of his left center, said later that he could scarcely credit what he saw. “Our forces up to that moment had repulsed the Federals at every point, and were waving their colors in defiance, crying out to the enemy, ‘Come on, come on.’ ” With the crisis weathered on his right and sunset barely an hour away, he planned to withdraw after nightfall for a dawn assault on the Union right, which he believed was exposed to being turned and shattered. Alas, it was his own flank that was shattered as he watched. “I beheld for the first and only time” — he had not been on Missionary Ridge with Bragg, just over a year ago — “a Confederate army abandon the field in confusion.”

Old Straight had seen disaster coming two hours before, and it came as he had warned. Assailed by Smith and Schofield on both sides of the angle, all the while taking fire from Wilson’s dismounted horsemen in their rear, Bate’s three brigades gave back from their enfiladed works, fought briefly, and then for the most part fled, although some units — the Tennesseans under twenty-five-year-old William Shy, for instance, whose fall gave the lost hill its future name — resisted till they were overrun. By that time, the attack had widened and the panic had infected Stewart’s corps, along with the rest of Cheatham’s; “The breach once made, the lines lifted from either side as far as I could see,” Bate would report. All three of his brigade commanders were captured, and so was Edward Johnson when the break extended beyond the center, under pressure from Smith and Wood, and spread to his division on Lee’s left. Everywhere to the west of there, eastward across the rear of what had been the Confederate left and center, butternut veterans were in headlong flight for the Franklin Pike, the one remaining avenue of escape. They wanted to live: perhaps to fight another day, but certainly not here.

“It was more like a scene in a spectacular drama than a real incident in war,” a colonel on Thomas’s staff would note. “The hillside in front, still green, dotted with boys in blue swarming up the slope, the dark background of high hills beyond, the lowering clouds, the waving flags, the smoke rising slowly through the leafless treetops and drifting
across the valleys, the wonderful outburst of musketry, the ecstatic cheers, the multitude racing for life down into the valley below — so exciting was it all that the lookers-on instinctively clapped their hands as at a brilliant and successful transformation scene; as indeed it was. For in those few moments an army was changed into a mob, and the whole structure of the rebellion in the Southwest, with all its possibilities, was utterly overthrown.”

But that was to overstate the case, if not in regard to the eventualities, then at any rate in regard to the present dissolution of Hood’s army. On Overton Hill, in the final moments before the opposite flank gave way, Stephen Lee observed that his troops were “in fine spirits and confident of success,” congratulating themselves on their recent repulse of Wood and Steedman. Then out of nowhere came the collapse, first of Cheatham’s corps, then Stewart’s, and the blue attack rolled eastward to engulf them; Johnson’s division wavered and broke, its commander taken, and Stevenson’s, next in line, seemed about to follow. East of the Franklin Pike, in rear of Clayton’s division, Lee spurred his horse westward, taking the fences on both sides of the turnpike, and drew rein amid the confusion behind his center, crowded now with graybacks who had bolted. He leaned down and snatched a stand of colors from a fugitive color bearer, then brandished it from horseback as he rode among the panicked veterans, shouting hoarsely at them: “Rally, men, rally! For God’s sake, rally! This is the place for brave men to die!”

Some few stopped, then more. “The effect was electrical,” one among them was to write. “They gathered in little knots of four or five, and he soon had around him three or four other stands of colors.” They were not many, but they were enough, as it turned out, to cause the attackers — confused as much by their abrupt success today as they had been at the same late hour the day before — to hesitate before moving forward again through the smoky, rain-screened dusk that followed hard upon sunset. By that time Clayton, unmolested on the right, had managed to withdraw his division from Overton Hill and form it in some woods astride the Franklin Pike, half a mile below. When Lee fell back to there, the same observer noted, “he was joined by a few pieces of artillery and a little drummer boy who beat the long roll in perfect time.” Stevenson’s fugitives rallied too, in response to this steady drumming, and together the two divisions comprised a rear guard that kept open, well into darkness, the one escape route still available to the army.

This was of course no help to the men already rounded up in their thousands on the field of battle, including Johnson — he had just been exchanged in October, five months after his previous capture at Spotsylvania — and all three of Bate’s brigade commanders, Brigadier Generals Henry Jackson and T. B. Smith and Major Jacob Lash. Old Clubby,
still crippled from the leg wound he had suffered at McDowell, two and a half years ago, was taken while trying to limp away from his shattered line, and it was much the same with Jackson, a forty-four-year-old former Georgia lawyer-politician, who found the rearward going slow because of the mud that weighted down his boots. He had stopped, and was trying to get them off with the help of an aide, when a blue-clad corporal and three privates came upon him by the roadside.