The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (78 page)

Johnston’s anger at this loss of a thousand badly needed veterans, once more as a result of Hood’s impetuosity, was exceeded by Sherman’s when he received an out-of-channels dispatch that evening from Hooker, proudly reporting that he had “repulsed two heavy attacks” and calling urgently for reinforcements before he was overrun. “Three entire corps are in front of us,” he added by way of lending weight to his proud cry for help. “Hooker must be mistaken; Johnston’s army has only three corps,” Sherman noted in passing the message along to Thomas, who, knowing only too well that Hardee and Loring were still in position to his and McPherson’s front, replied rather mildly: “I look upon this as something of a stampede.” Sherman agreed and next morning, still miffed, rode down to Culp’s Farm in a pouring rain to tell Fighting Joe he wanted no more of his boasts and misrepresentations. In reaction, Hooker went into a month-long pout; or, as his superior later put it, “From that time he began to sulk.”

This would have its consequences for all concerned; but the fact was, Sherman’s anger had its source in something far more irksome than Hooker’s inability to avoid exaggeration. Daylight showed the graybacks intrenched across Schofield’s front. This meant that the army had gone as far as it could go in that direction without turning loose of its supply line, already under threat from rebel horsemen, and the
drowned condition of the roads precluded any movement on them so long as the rain continued.

Confronted thus with the probability of a stalemate — which was not only undesirable on its own account, here in Georgia, but might also give Richmond the chance to reinforce Lee’s hard-pressed Virginia army from Johnston’s, biding its time north of the Chattahoochee — Sherman reverted to his notion, expressed a week ago, “to feign on both flanks and assault the center.” The trouble was that the center now was Kennesaw Mountain, and Kennesaw seemed unassailable. But there, perhaps, was just the factor that might augur best; an attacker would greatly increase his chance for success by striking where the blow was least expected. Besides, continued probes by McPherson today showed that Loring’s corps had been extended eastward to include a portion of the works abandoned yesterday by Hood when he set out-westward to counter Schofield’s flanking threat. That march, with its extension of the Confederate left while Loring spread out to cover the right, stretched Johnston’s line to a width of about eight miles, exclusive of the cavalry on his flanks. It must be quite thin somewhere, and that somewhere was likely to be dead ahead on Kennesaw, whose frown alone was enough to discourage assault. So Sherman reasoned, at any rate, in his search for some way to avoid a stalemate. Moreover, he explained afterwards, he conferred with his three army commanders, “and we all agreed that we could not with prudence stretch out any more, and therefore there was no alternative but to attack ‘fortified lines,’ a thing carefully avoided up to that time.”

Such a change in tactics, abruptly sprung, would also serve to increase the element of surprise, which figured largely in Sherman’s calculations. But the outlook remained grim, if not downright awesome. “The whole country is one vast fort,” he informed Halleck on June 23. “Johnston must have full fifty miles of connected trenches, with abatis and finished batteries.… Our lines are now in close contact and the fighting incessant, with a good deal of artillery. As fast as we gain one position, the enemy has another all ready.”

These were minor adjustments, permitting no more than a closer look at the honeycombed slopes of the mountain up ahead, and a closer look only magnified the original impression of impregnability. One-armed Howard, studying the rebel line from a position well to the front, pronounced it “stronger in artificial contrivances and natural features than the cemetery at Gettysburg,” which he had helped to hold despite Lee’s all-out efforts to oust him. But Sherman refused to be distracted, let alone dissuaded. Determined, as he had told Grant the week before, to “inspire motion into a large, ponderous and slow, by habit, army,” he believed that his soldiers, weary of roundabout marches that never quite managed to bring the enemy to bay, needed the stimulus
the pending assault would provide, even if most of the blood that was shed turned out to be their own — and he was concerned, as well, lest Johnston’s habitual caution, which had led him to give up so many stout positions in the course of the past seven weeks, should be replaced by a conviction that the Federals would never attack him once he was snugly intrenched. Both of these things counted heavily in the redhead’s calculations, as did the promise of all that would be gained if the attack was anything like as successful as the one up Missionary Ridge, seven months ago, by many of these same men against many of these same opponents, with the difference that there had been no unfordable Chattahoochee in the rebel rear on that occasion.

Other factors there were, too, no less persuasive because Sherman himself — defined by Walt Whitman as “a bit of stern open air made up in the image of a man” — was perhaps not even aware of their influence on him. For one, the Union army in Virginia was not only doing most of the bleeding in the double-pronged offensive, it was also getting most of the headlines, and despite his dislike of journalists, and indeed of the press in general, he could see that his troops would be heartened by a more equitable distribution of praise, such as the overrunning of Kennesaw would secure. Moreover, back in Nashville and Chattanooga, while preparing for the campaign, he had learned that certain observers snidely characterized him as “not a fighting general.” He dismissed the charge without exactly denying it, saying: “Fighting is the least part of a general’s work. The battle will fight itself.” Still, the imputation rankled, containing as it did some grains of truth, and he welcomed the opportunity, now at hand, to refute it for once and for all. On June 24 he issued a special field order directing his army commanders to “make full reconnaissances and preparations to attack the enemy in force on the 27th instant, at 8 a.m. precisely.”

That left two full days for getting set; Sherman, having decided to be rash, had also decided to go about it methodically, even meticulously, so as to minimize the cost if the breakthrough failed. For one thing, he would limit the weight of his assault to less than a fifth of the troops on hand, and for another, despite its regrettable but inevitable detraction from the element of surprise, the jump-off would be preceded by an hour-long bombardment from every gun that could be brought to bear on the critical objectives. Of these there were two, main and secondary, neither of them, properly speaking, on the mountain that would give the battle its name, although the secondary effort, assigned to McPherson, would be made against — and, if successful, across — the gently rolling southwest slope of the lower of the two peaks, called Little Kennesaw to distinguish it from Big Kennesaw, the taller and more massive portion of the mountain to the east, overlooking the slow curve of the Western & Atlantic on that flank. This attack
would be launched astride the Burnt Hickory Road, simultaneously with Thomas’s main effort, along and to the right of the Dallas Road, one mile south; both commanders would assault with two divisions, their others standing by to exploit whatever progress was achieved. Schofield and Hooker would feint on the far right, Garrard’s cavalry on the left, all at the same prearranged hour, hard on the heels of the softening-up artillery bombardment, so as to prevent Johnston from knowing which part of his line to reinforce from any other, or from his reserves if he had them, before it was swamped. “At the time of the general attack,” the special order ended, foreseeing a happy outcome to the rashness so meticulously prescribed, “the skirmishers at the base of Kennesaw will take advantage of it to gain, if possible, the summit and hold it. Each attacking column will endeavor to break a single point of the enemy’s line, and make a secure lodgment beyond, and be prepared for following it up toward Marietta and the railroad in case of success.”

Throughout that two-day interim, although few along the eight-mile curve of intrenchments knew what they were waiting or getting set for — “All commanders will maintain reserve and secrecy even from their staff officers,” the field order had cautioned — fire fights, picket clashes, and sudden cannonades would break into flame from point to point, then subside into sputters and die away, sporadic, inconclusive, and productive of little more than speculation. Whether off on the flanks or crouched near the critical center, men listened and wondered, unable to find a pattern to the action. The crash of guns would come from somewhere up or down the line, an Indiana soldier would recall, “then the hurrahing, sometimes the shrill, boyish rebel yell, sometimes the loud, full-voiced, deep-toned, far-sounding chorus of northern men; then again the roar of cannon, the rattle of musketry and the awful suspense to the listeners. If, as the noise grew feebler, we caught the welcome cheer, answering shouts ran along. But if the far-off rebel yell told of our comrades’ repulse, the silence could be felt.”

Across the way, within the horseshoe curve of works containing Kennesaw and Marietta, the reaction was much the same, but in reverse. No one there could discern a pattern either, including the men of Major Generals Samuel French’s and Benjamin Cheatham’s divisions
of Loring’s and Hardee’s corps, respectively astride the Burnt Hickory and Dallas roads, up which the two Union assaults were to be delivered on Monday morning, June 27, one week past the summer solstice.

The rain left off on Sunday and the sun came up in a cloudless sky next morning at 4.40 to begin its work of drying the red clay roads, the sodden fields and breathless woods. By the time it was three hours high the day was hot and steamy with the promise of much greater heat to come. Twenty minutes later, precisely at 8 o’clock and without preamble, 200-odd Union cannon roared into action, pounding away at the rebel line on the mountainside and across the flats beyond. Crouched in their pits and ditches, jarred and shaken about by the sudden hurtle of metal exploding over and around them, the defenders marveled at the volume and intensity of the fire, which was to them still another manifestation of Yankee ingenuity and wealth. “Hell has broke loose in Georgia, sure enough!” one grayback shouted amid shellbursts, and as the bombardment continued, sustained by an apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition, they began to snatch down the blankets pegged for shade across the open tops of their trenches, preparing for what they knew would come when the guns let up. Finally, close to 9 o’clock, the uproar reached a spasmodic end; the cannoneers stepped back from their pieces, panting, and the blue infantry started forward in two clotted masses, about a mile apart, to assail the Confederate center.

For a time they advanced in relative security, protected by the intervening woods and the butternut pickets trotting back to join their comrades along the main line of resistance. Then the attackers emerged into brilliant sunlight, silhouetted against the bright green backdrop of trees, and the rebel headlogs seemed to burst spontaneously into flame along their bottoms, all up and down that portion of the line. Sam French, whose left-flank division of Loring’s corps was challenged first on Little Kennesaw’s lower slopes, said later that the rattle and flash of musketry, combined with the deep-voiced boom of guns whose crews had held their fire till now, produced “a roar as constant as Niagara and as sharp as the crash of thunder with lightning in the eye.”

Such was the fury of the sound that accompanied McPherson’s attack, launched astride the Burnt Hickory Road by Brigadier General Morgan Smith, whose division was reinforced for the effort by a brigade from another division in Major General John A. Logan’s corps. Sound and fury were all it came to, however, in the end. In the course of their plunge across a rocky, brush-choked gully, unexpectedly encountered in rear of the line abandoned by the gray pickets, 563 of the 4000 attackers fell before they could get to grips with the defenders intrenched on the far side. At one point “within about thirty feet of the enemy’s main line,” Smith reported, they came close; but there, receiving the full blast of massed rifles, they “staggered and sought cover as best they could behind logs and rocks.” Stalled (“It was almost sure
death to take your face out of the dust,” one prone Federal declared, while another expressed a somewhat less gloomy view of the consequences, saying: “It was only necessary to expose a hand to procure a furlough”) they were no longer much of a threat to French, who turned his high-sited batteries a quarter circle to the left and added the weight of the metal to Hardee’s resistance, a mile away, astride and beyond the Dallas Road.

There Thomas was making a sturdier bid for a breakthrough, and Cheatham’s division had all it could do to keep from being overrun by nearly twice as many Federals as French had had to deal with. “They seemed to walk up and take death as coolly as if they were automatic or wooden men,” one defender was to say of these troops from two divisions under Jeff Davis and Brigadier General John Newton, respectively of Palmer’s and Howard’s corps.