Shrouds of Glory, Page 3

  At any rate, by the time Sherman was ready to make his move in the spring of 1864 he had amassed some one hundred twenty thousand men, as well as mountains of supplies and rail cars to carry them. Now the temperamental Ohioan was fully prepared to do as Grant had ordered him: “Move against Johnston’s army, break it up, and get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.”

  Confederate commander Joe Johnston, however, a trim fifty-seven-year-old West Pointer, wasn’t prepared to take this lying down. He had a plan of his own, though, unfortunately, it did not jibe with what the authorities in Richmond had in mind. Studious and cautious—some would say a “textbook general”—Johnston had divined a scenario he believed would cope with the numerical odds against him: stay flexible, fortify every position, and let Sherman come on. Make him attack, make him pay, retreat if necessary but always be on the lookout for a mistake. Surely, Sherman must make one—and then he could be whipped. Richmond, on the other hand, with an eye on the political storm gathering in the North, still wished to see Johnston go on the offensive and aggressively push Sherman back into Tennessee—if possible, all the way up to Nashville and beyond—and this difference of opinion soon gave way to bitter and acrimonious communications between the Confederate commander and his overlords in Virginia.

  * * *

  The Union Army of the Tennessee amassed by Sherman was, like the Confederate’s Army of Tennessee, an amalgam of various smaller armies that over the years of fighting—and as Confederate territory shrunk—had been consolidated into a single, powerful engine of destruction. It was composed of the armies of the Cumberland, Ohio, and Tennessee, commanded respectively by Generals George Thomas, John Schofield, and James McPherson. Each army could contain about thirty to forty thousand men, depending on the task at hand. Each was further divided into three corps of ten to twelve thousand, which in turn were comprised of three divisions of about three to four thousand infantrymen each. In addition, Sherman had at his disposal some three divisions of cavalry commanded by Generals Edward M. McCook, Kenner Garrard, and George Stoneman, as well as 254 pieces of artillery. With this one-hundred-twenty-thousand-man juggernaut he moved out in early May to smash Joe Johnston.

  Initially, Johnston’s Army of Tennessee contained only two corps, Hood’s and that of General William J. Hardee, each totaling about twenty thousand men. As Sherman began his campaign, however, Johnston was reinforced by Bishop Polk and his twenty-thousandman corps from Mississippi, bringing his total infantry to sixty thousand, more or less. His cavalry consisted of five thousand sabers under the command of Major General Joseph Wheeler, and with the addition of Polk’s artillery, Johnston boasted 188 guns—to take on an army twice that size.

  In the old days, Confederates might have said the two sides were about evenly matched, but the old days were long gone. This Union army was vastly improved by three years of fighting from Shiloh to Vicksburg, Stones River to Chattanooga, Chickamauga to Lookout Mountain; and now here they were in Johnston’s face at Dalton, Georgia, and it was going to take a lot more than courage and savvy to keep them off his back.

  * * *

  As the crow flies, Atlanta is a hundred miles southeast from Dalton, and Johnston figured that gave him some pretty good room to maneuver. Not only that, but since armies didn’t fly, to get at either Johnston or Atlanta, Sherman was going to have to traverse some of the roughest terrain ever contested during the war—myriad mountains, hills, valleys, gaps, forests, swamps, gullies, passes, rivers, and ravines, each presenting Johnston with a formidable opportunity for defense. At the outset, Johnston had his army drawn up along several miles of stone and clay called Rocky Face Ridge, facing west, with a passage known ominously as Buzzard’s Roost dividing it in two. It was not a position a prudent man would attack head-on, and William Tecumseh Sherman was a prudent man. He had learned his lesson the hard way a year before, at Chickasaw Bluffs above Vicksburg, when he had embarrassingly failed to carry such a position, and he wasn’t about to repeat the mistake now.

  First, Sherman sent Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland at Johnston’s center to hold him while Schofield’s Army of the Ohio attacked due south into the Confederate right flank. McPherson, meanwhile, had maneuvered his Army of the Tennessee way around the Confederate left flank to the southeast and was aiming at the railroad linking Dalton with Atlanta. Trouble was, when McPherson got there, he found the cat was out of the bag. Outflanked, and with their only escape route about to be cut, the Confederate army had withdrawn southward without a fight to the small railway town of Resaca, where they had set up another defense. This time Johnston stood firm while Sherman attacked him to no avail, and then he launched a counterattack of his own, led by Hood. The federals were driven back, but darkness set in, and by morning it was apparent that Sherman was executing another flanking movement. After desultory fighting all day, Johnston decided to abandon Resaca and retreat southward again. Thus, he conformed to the pattern that he had in mind, more or less, of fortifying and causing Sherman to pay for his ground, all the while waiting for him to make his mistake. Sherman wasn’t making mistakes, however, and Johnston was letting his enemy shove him that much closer to Atlanta.

  Johnston cunningly laid a few traps for Sherman along the way, moving Hood and Hardee around in hopes of catching one of the three federal armies alone and where it could be cut off. But none of that worked, and Johnston continued his retreats until he had lost nearly two-thirds of the ground between Dalton and Atlanta. Though no major battle had yet been fought, attrition was taking its toll, mostly on the Union army, which so far was losing men two to one against the Confederates. In a dispatch to Washington, Sherman reported that his loss at Resaca was 3,375 wounded. William Murray of the 20th Tennessee, who was there, remarked later that Sherman “did not say how many he had killed, but there are 1,790 Yankees buried there and 170 Confederates.” In another telegram shortly afterward, Sherman sourly told Washington, “Johnston retires slowly, leaving nothing and hitting hard if crowded.”

  Hood, meanwhile, in whatever spare time there was, had been sending private reports on the progress of the campaign to Jefferson Davis and Braxton Bragg, who, after being replaced by Johnston, had been elevated to chief military advisor to the Richmond authorities. Davis, Bragg, and Secretary of War James A. Seddon composed a sort of triumverate for running the war from Richmond. Mostly they had let Robert E. Lee alone to do what he thought best, but in the western theater there had been nearly as many lost battles and changes in high command as the federals had experienced in the Army of the Potomac. Hood had gotten on excellent personal terms with Davis during the months he spent in Richmond recuperating from the loss of his leg, and it was later suggested that his correspondence with the Confederate president and other authorities was in the nature of an intrigue against Johnston, with whose defensive policies Hood had begun to strongly disagree. Whatever the case, by the time Johnston reached the area of Kennesaw Mountain, about twenty-five miles northwest of Atlanta, he knew he had to make a stand. It was a little more than a month since the campaign had started; he had lost nearly five thousand men and had yet to give Sherman a serious check.

  In addition, Sherman was having his own problems. In pursuing the elusive Johnston, he had saved time and distance by cutting loose from the Western & Atlantic Railroad that ran from Atlanta through Dalton and north to Chattanooga and Nashville and beyond, from whence came the material to supply his army. He still had one flank astride the tracks, but further maneuvering in a southeastern sidle to turn Johnston’s left would leave him without a means of resupply by rail, and three weeks of rainy weather had rendered the roads impassable. For several weeks Sherman tested and feinted and demonstrated without success trying to dislodge the Confederates, but they would not budge from their strong position. About the only thing of substance he accomplished was the killing of General Polk, who was struck by a cannonball in the presence of Generals Hardee and
Johnston while they were reconnoitering the enemy from a hill. So this time Sherman swallowed the bait and attacked, perceiving that not only the Confederates but, he said, “Our own officers had settled down into a conviction that I would not assault fortified lines. All looked for me to outflank.” But any army, he declared, “must be prepared to execute any plan which promises success.” Thus convinced, he ordered an assault on the Confederate center at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27.

  The attack was a miserable failure, reaffirming the opinions of veteran soldiers that assaulting troops who were behind fortifications was suicidal. Three thousand of Sherman’s men were lost, and several generals were killed while inflicting “comparatively little loss on the enemy,” according to Sherman, who sought to put a better face on it by reporting that at least it was “demonstrated to General Johnston that I would assault, and that boldly.”

  Johnston, on the other hand, was finally able to report a victory to the Confederate high command in Richmond. Telegraphing on the day of the Kennesaw battle that Sherman had been repulsed with great losses, Johnston now undertook to provide his superiors with an explanation of why he had retreated to the very outskirts of Atlanta without giving Sherman a major offensive battle. Citing “long cold wet weather,” “sickness,” and “the superior forces of the enemy,” Johnston wrote that he had “intended to take advantage of the first good position to give battle” but had so far not found one.

  Understandably, the Richmond authorities were upset. Two days after receiving Johnston’s telegram, Braxton Bragg fumed to Jefferson Davis, “No doubt [Johnston] is outnumbered by the enemy, as we all are everywhere, but the disparity is much less than it has ever been between those two armies.” As they worried and waited and wondered whether Johnston was going to defend Atlanta at all, or simply let himself get outflanked by Sherman all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, Bragg and Davis must have remembered Hood’s secretive letters to them, in which he outlined his own strategy for dealing with Sherman: “We should march to the front as soon as possible . . . so as not to allow the enemy to concentrate and advance upon us.” In another of those private letters, Hood wrote, “I . . . am sorry to inform you that I have done all in my power to induce General Johnston to accept the proposition you made to move forward. He will not consent.” Possibly it was about this time that Davis began to mull over a change in command for the Army of Tennessee.

  In any event, the undaunted Sherman immediately began his maneuvering again and was able to wire Washington that “the effect was instantaneous. The next morning Kennesaw was abandoned,” and Sherman maneuvered on, minus nearly sixteen thousand casualties since his campaign had opened six weeks before, compared to Johnston’s losses of nine thousand. This episode went to prove by example the theory of attritive warfare embraced by Sherman and Grant: that the North could afford to lose more men than the South because it had more men, and sooner or later the Confederacy was going to run out of replacements. Such a reduction of military science to its most brutal basics foretold by fifty years the awesome slaughter that would visit European battlefields in the century to come.

  For the next several weeks Johnston fought what seemed to be little more than a delaying action all the way to the Chattahoochee River, the final big defensive terrain feature before Atlanta, then he drew himself up for another fight. But Sherman flanked him again this time turning his right with an upriver sweep by McPherson’s army. Johnston retreated once more, toward Peachtree Creek, and resumed calling on the Richmond authorities for reinforcements—mainly for the cavalry divisions of Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan, then operating in other states, which he wished to send to Sherman’s rear up in Tennessee to cut off Union supplies and communications. All this was about enough for Jefferson Davis, whose relationship with Johnston had been fitful and unpleasant since the two were at West Point, not to mention early in the war when Johnston quarreled with him over the seniority of his promotion. Frightened that Atlanta would be surrendered without a fight, Johnston’s friend Georgia Senator Benjamin Hill telegraphed Johnston after testing the mood of the Richmond government, “You must do the work with your present force. For God’s sake do it.”

  But Johnston did not do it. On July 11 he wired Richmond his recommendation that the Union prisoners at Andersonville be evacuated, clearly a sign to the Confederate authorities that Atlanta was about to be forsaken. General Bragg was immediately sent down to meet with Johnston and assess the situation. On the 15th of July Bragg reported back gloomily, “I cannot learn that he has any more plan for the future than he has had in the past.” Two nights later the following wire from the adjutant general was received at Johnston’s headquarters:

  Lieutenant General J. B. Hood has been commissioned to the temporary Rank of General under the late law of Congress. I am directed by the Secretary of War to inform you that as you have failed to arrest the advance of the enemy to the vicinity of Atlanta, far in the interior of Georgia, and express no confidence that you can defeat or repel him, you are hereby relieved from the command of the Army of the Department of Tennessee, which you will immediately turn over to General Hood.

  And so the army’s fate was sealed, for better or worse, as it now had as its leader a “fighting general” to contend with the seemingly irresistible maneuvering of Sherman.

  The decision to replace Johnston with Hood was not made without considerable handwringing in Richmond. Davis and the rest of the government obviously wished for the Army of Tennessee to attack Sherman, but Johnston simply would not do it—or at least he had not done it—and time was running out. Everybody knew Hood’s reputation as a fighter; he was a proud alumnus of the Robert E. Lee—Stonewall Jackson “get ‘em on open ground and hit ’em with all you’ve got” school of military thought. He had proved that from the beginning during the Peninsular campaign in 1862 and at Second Manassas and of course at Gettysburg and Chickamauga. But there was more than just lingering doubt about Hood’s ability to command an entire army. Less than a year before, the biggest command he had held was a division, and he had led a corps for only a few months. Now he was to be responsible for one of the two great armies that held the key to survival for the Confederacy.

  In recommending Hood to Davis during his panicky visit to Atlanta, Bragg had candidly stated that the young Kentuckian was not “a man of genius, or a great general.” But under the present emergency, Bragg went on to say, Hood was “far better” than anybody else available. A few days earlier and on his own hook, Davis had wired Lee about the proposed change. Lee, who had his hands full with Grant around Richmond, telegraphed back, “Hood is a bold fighter. I am doubtful as to other qualities necessary.” Soon afterward Lee followed up with a letter to the president in which he described Hood as “a good commander, very industrious on the battlefield, careless off” and went on to say, “I have had no opportunity to judge his action when the whole responsibility rested upon him. I have a high opinion of his gallantry, earnestness and zeal.” It was almost as though Hood got the job through default—the best of a bad lot.

  Nor was the ascension of General Hood greeted with boundless enthusiasm by the Army of Tennessee. In fact, it was viewed in most quarters with shock—in some cases, bitter disappointment and even tears. Sam Watkins, a twenty-five-year-old private in a Tennessee regiment, who had been with the army since the beginning of the war, decried Hood’s appointment as “the most terrible and disastrous blow that the South ever received.” He went on to say, “I saw thousands of grown men cry like babies.” An entire squad of pickets, Watkins recalled, threw down their guns upon hearing the news and marched off, “the last we ever saw of them.” W. D. Murray, of the 20th Tennessee Regiment, complained that the replacement of Johnston “threw a damper over [the] army from which it never recovered.” Murray described how “great stalwart, sun-burnt soldiers by the thousands would be seen falling out of line, squatting down by a tree or in a fence corner, weeping like children.”

  Exaggerated
as some of this might have been, the news was not met with much welcome in the officer corps, either. Lieutenant General William Hardee, who had graduated from West Point fifteen years before Hood and was a year his senior in rank, asked to be relieved, miffed at being passed over for the promotion. One division commander remarked that Hood had “ ‘gone up like a rocket.’ It is to be hoped that he will not come down like the stick.” Another told Hood face to face that he regretted Johnston’s removal, although he promised him cooperation. Others expressed similar sentiments—not an encouraging start for the new commander of the Army of Tennessee.

  Hood himself recalled his reaction to the news of his promotion—or, as he described it, “the embarrassing circumstances under which I assumed command of the Army of Tennessee”: “About 11 o’clock, on the night of the 17th, I received a telegram from the War Office, directing me to assume command of the Army. This totally unexpected order so astounded me, and overwhelmed me with the sense of the responsibility thereto attached, that I remained in deep thought throughout the night.”

  Near sunrise next morning the sleepless Hood set out for Johnston’s headquarters and was met by General A. P. Stewart, who had been promoted to command of the late Bishop Polk’s corps. Stewart, likewise disturbed by the news, suggested to Hood that they “unite in an effort to prevail on General Johnston to withhold the order, and retain command of the Army until the impending battles have been fought.” Hood readily assented to this plan, possibly because in spite of whatever earlier ambition he might have harbored to command the army, he surely recognized the immediate danger it was in now and did not wish to preside over its defeat. In any case, Johnston, saying in effect that “orders is orders,” would have none of it. By this time General Hardee had arrived on the scene, and, Hood, Hardee, and Stewart fired off a telegram to Jefferson Davis asking that the command change be suspended until the battle of Atlanta was fought. Davis declined, citing Johnston’s policies as “disastrous” and concluding that he could not suspend the order “without making the case worse than it was.”