The State of Jones (32 page)

“I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” Sherman wrote to his wife.

In the superheated bedlam, the 7th Mississippi Battalion’s position was overrun. Sixty men from the regiment went missing, eight of them members of the Knight band whom Lowry had towed back into service, including Sim Collins. These men were “captured” by Sherman’s forces, though some of them later said they voluntarily turned themselves over to the Yankees. They refused to be exchanged or paroled, pleading to ride out the war as captives. They were eventually transferred to Midwest prison camps—Camp Morton in Indiana and Camp Douglas in Illinois—where they remained until surrender. But if prison was preferable to battle, it didn’t necessarily mean escape from death; their health had been badly undermined, and some of them had been wounded. Sim Collins and James Ewlen would not see another summer. They died of their wounds and ailments in the winter-spring of 1865.

By mid-July Sherman had pushed to within six miles of Atlanta, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis was uneasy. Davis wanted the Confederate army on the attack. On July 17 he made an intrusive error, removing the defensive-minded Joe Johnston from command and replacing him with the almost psychotically combative John Bell Hood. The change of command was a matter of “cold, snaky” second-guessing by the Confederate president, critics charged. But Davis was supercilious in matters of strategy; he was a great believer
in his own stentorian oratory and coinlike visage, square jawed with almost no upper lip to speak of, just a grim line of self-certainty. He had “an exalted opinion of his own military genius,” Grant wrote of him sardonically. “On several occasions he came to the relief of the Union army.” The handing of command to Hood was one of those occasions. Hood immediately went on the offensive and played right into Union hands. It was “just what we wanted,” Sherman wrote, “to fight on open ground.”

The blond-maned, limpid-eyed, Viking-chested Hood had already fought crippled, his left arm incapacitated at Gettysburg and his right leg torn off at Chickamauga. He was physically indefatigable, riding into battle strapped to his horse, but he was “all lion, none of the fox,” Robert E. Lee said of him. To diarist Mary Chesnut he exuded martyrdom with his “sad Quixotic face, the face of an old Crusader,” and he had recently experienced a religious awakening. Shortly before Polk was killed, Hood asked the Episcopal bishop to baptize him. Polk conducted the ceremony in Hood’s tent, using a tin wash pan to douse the young general, who braced himself upright on crutches. But religion had not gentled Hood’s approach to battle, and he proceeded to do to the army what he had done to his own body.

Hood attacked, attacked, and attacked again—in three offensives over eight days, he took 15,000 casualties, all to no avail as Sherman continued his advance. Walter Rorer lost the use of a hand. During a respite in Decatur, the exhausted William Nugent and a captain from the 28th Mississippi Cavalry found an old bedstead under a pear tree. Nugent collapsed onto it, and the captain was about to join him when shrapnel exploded into the tree. The officer fell dead on top of Nugent, in a shower of bark. It seemed to Nugent that serving under Hood meant inevitable annihilation.

“He is for fighting all the time,” Nugent wrote to his wife. “This sort of fighting, unless we meet with some more decided success will dissipate our army very soon. Eight more such fights and we will have no army at all.”

Nugent’s prediction came true. On September 1, battered and
outflanked, Hood evacuated Atlanta, dynamiting all the manufacturing and industry in it as he left. “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman reported to Washington, an announcement that set off hundred-gun salutes. If Corinth and Vicksburg bent the spine of the Confederacy, Atlanta all but snapped it. Democratic peace candidate McClellan suddenly struggled not to sound faint voiced and defeatist. On November 8, Lincoln would win the popular vote by roughly half a million and carry the electoral count by 212 to 21, on a platform calling for the constitutional end to slavery everywhere in the United States. Lincoln owed his victory in part to Sherman, whose successful campaign convinced Northern voters that the war would soon be over.

Jefferson Davis toured the South in a vain attempt to restore Confederate morale. He promised that the fierce Hood would yet force Sherman to retreat. But he also declared grimly, “We are fighting for existence.” In fact, fighting was the only option left; there would be no merciful truce.

As Hood evacuated Atlanta, he burned anything that might be of value to the Union army. Sherman finished the destruction that Hood began. When the mayor of Atlanta protested his all-consuming policy, Sherman retorted, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Next, Sherman set out for the coast, intending to “make Georgia howl.” In mid-December he wired Lincoln, “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah.”

Hood, meanwhile, presented the South with nothing but corpses. On November 30, he engaged another Union force under General John M. Schofield at Franklin, Tennessee. There, he all but murdered his own troops, many of the Mississippi regiments among them, with one of the most manifestly lunatic charges of the war.

Hood arrived at Franklin “wrathy as a rattlesnake” at the Southern defeats and what he believed was the reluctance of the men to fight except in trenches. He stared out over two miles of flat, pleasant countryside at a heavily fortified Union position showing the black bores of cannon and decided that he would
make
his men
fight. Almost as a punishment, Hood ordered a full frontal attack, unsupported. His generals protested—the ground was too open. He ignored them.

At 4:00 p.m., 22,000 obedient Southerners quick-stepped into the exposed fields, moving in a grand parade alignment, with their fixed bayonets shimmering. Advancing in formation were scores of Mississippians, previously far-flung men for whom Franklin would be a bloody crossroads: Lowry, Rorer, Brown, Sykes, and the Jones Countians of the 7th Mississippi Battalion. Riding in a cavalry force on the fringes of Franklin was William L. Nugent.

Regimental banners fluttered, and bands played martial airs like “Annie Laurie” and “Ben Bolt.” Half a mile from the Yankee trenches, in full view of the gunsights, the Confederates paused and shifted into two battle lines. A few officers waved their hats. The men in line began to scream shrilly—and then charged.

As they ran, witnesses noticed strange flurries of movement along the ground. Rabbits and quail were scattering ahead of the pounding booted feet of the men in gray.

Yankee artillerymen yanked at their lanyards, and flames stabbed out of the mouths of the guns. Boiling smoke and plunging fire engulfed the rebel troops. The Mississippi regiments were scythed down by repeating rifle fire from the front and canister that tore into them at close range from their right. As they pressed forward some of them stumbled into a thorny hedge of Osage orange, fifty yards from the Union line, on which they became hung up. The bullets and shrapnel were so thick that men imagined they could reach a hand up and grab pieces of lead from the air.

To get the troops moving again a thirty-nine-year-old Confederate brigade commander, General John Adams, spurred his bay horse toward Union gun emplacements. Just as his horse leaped onto the parapet, it was shot down. The horse sprawled dead, his hooves draped over the barricade, while Adams fell riddled with a half dozen Minié balls.

As Confederates continued to roll across the field in waves, whole
outfits smashed into the ramparts and shattered in the smoke and flames. Men huddled, pinned down at the base of the Union emplacements. Generals and privates fought side by side, swinging whatever they could lay their hands on: picks, shovels, staves, and flagstaffs. Unit flags wavered and fell.

The blood pooled in ditches. “Many of the men were shot to shreds,” one Mississippian wrote. “And I saw scores of [wounded] men … who had put their thumbs in their mouths and had chewed them into shreds to keep from crying, coward-like, as they lay exposed to the merciless fire … Franklin was the only battlefield I ever saw where the faces of the majority of the dead expressed supreme fear and terror.”

The assaults continued for five hours, until past dark. Mississippians stumbled over their own dead and wounded, aghast to hear shrieks “as we trod on their mangled limbs.” Men groped blindly forward in the night and smoke, only to be illuminated as if by lightning strikes when the big guns fired, white flame searing their faces.

Finally, the booming of guns and snapping of musketry ebbed. By 10:00 p.m., the firing ceased. Men peered over the entrenchments and saw the once flat field was covered by hillocks—the outlines of dead and wounded.

Hood had seven thousand casualties—a third of his army. He had slaughtered more men in five hours at Franklin than in two days at Shiloh. Lowry had survived, and so had William Nugent, wet from wading a river in retreat after a heavy firefight. But Walter Rorer was dead on the field—shot down while bearing the unit flag. His superior, Brown, had suffered two serious wounds. There were fifteen Confederate generals and fifty-four regimental commanders among the casualties.

Incredibly, Hood issued a statement declaring victory. His traumatized men received it stony eyed.

Next, Hood ordered yet another advance, this one to Nashville, where seventy thousand Union troops were garrisoned. Hood rationalized
his decision by saying “the sinking fortunes of the Confederacy” had made retreat impossible. Wearily, the men lifted their gear for another march behind their homicidal commander. On December 16, Hood’s skeletal lines were engulfed at Nashville by the Union forces under General George H. Thomas. Somehow, Lowry, who had taken over the slain Adams’s brigade command, survived this battle too.

At last Hood led his tattered remnant of a force into retreat. He arrived back in Tupelo with no more than 15,000 infantrymen. Many of them were in bare feet, bloodied from walking in snow. Their thin shoulders shuddered from cold.

The men had never felt so beaten and seemed to know the end of the war was imminent. Henry St. John Dixon of the 28th Mississippi told his diary that he had “seen retreats before today but none to compare with this—Disorganization, straggling, dissatisfaction & disaffection bad—worse than bad … I confess my self to be discouraged, & sick at heart … Death, destruction & slavery only present themselves to view.”

Hood had lost fully half his army in only two weeks. It took Confederate high commanders some time to realize fully the wreckage he had wrought—it was difficult to get a complete picture with so many officers dead or wounded and thus incapable of filing official reports.

But one way they assessed the campaign was by counting their flags. As the extent of the casualties became apparent, authorities took stock of their pennants, those symbols of inflamed patriotism. The surviving brigade leaders were ordered to report whether they still flew their colors, the standards men had charged behind and died for.

Lowry replied “with honor” that only one of his six regiments, the 15th Mississippi, had given up its banner. But he added this:

“Four men were shot down in bearing it,” he wrote.

———

Mississippi fought on, though
scourged, shell shattered, weed grown, and vandalized. There was no final catastrophe; the Confederacy didn’t fall so much as it slowly disintegrated into piles of loose masonry and sagging neglected buildings, as deserters in stained and torn brown-gray flitted among the ruins like specters.

Yankees continued to ravage the state, destroying farms, railroads, and sometimes whole towns. They reduced Oxford to cinders and shards, burning thirty-four stores, the courthouse, the Masonic hall, the two best hotels, all of the carpenter and blacksmith shops, and the five finest homes. What was left looked like the prongs of a broken fork.

Skirmishes were tinged with vengefulness. Nehemiah Davis Starr, a Missourian who fought against Hood’s army in Tennessee, reported that no Union soldier could hope to survive capture; every one caught was executed. “The Rebels are killing all they catch here whenever a man straggles from the army he is no longer.” A quartermaster and a surgeon who paused to get dinner in a village were taken by Confederate guerrillas and shot through the head with pistols pressed so close that their hair was burned with powder.

Anson Hemingway of the 72nd Illinois was on picket duty on the Mississippi-Louisiana border in the summer of 1864 with a unit of colored troops. He had volunteered as a first lieutenant with the 70th U.S. Colored Infantry and was no longer a naive private. Atrocity, he decided, should be met with atrocity.

“A scouting party was sent out from here, in which was a company of colored cavalry commanded by the colonel of a colored regiment,” he wrote home. “After marching some distance, they came upon the party of whom they were in pursuit. There were seventeen prisoners captured and shot by the colored soldiers. When the guerillas were first seen, the colonel told them in a loud tone of voice to ‘Remember Fort Pillow.’ And they did: all honor to them for it. If the Confederacy wish to fight us on these terms, we are glad to know it, and will try to do our part in the contest. I do not admire the mode of warfare, but know of no other way for us to end the war than to retaliate.”

It seemed as if the conflict would continue interminably, even as the end was inevitable. Grant had Lee under siege at Petersburg, and Sherman controlled the Deep South, that part of it he hadn’t destroyed—still, surrender didn’t come. Starr tried to gauge the progress of the war from the attitude of the Confederate prisoners taken at Franklin and Nashville. “Some say the war is near over some say it will never end,” he wrote, “… some were tired of fighting and some others declared they meant to fight to the last men.”

To Newton, it seemed like years since he had rested. His animal-like existence in the swamp had worn him down, and so had the weight of responsibility, of protecting so many people: his men, Rachel, his wife and children, the local slave community, and yeoman families who counted on him. He was more fugitive than free. “I have only the freedom of the air I breathe,” he is supposed to have said to his cousin Alpheus. “I do not have the freedom of a slave, for a slave can lie down and sleep, unless his belly pinches to keep him awake.”