The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (148 page)

Beginning the feint, Sherman sent Howard’s wing by boat to Beaufort, forty miles up the coast beyond Port Royal Sound, with instructions to move inland and occupy Pocotaligo, on the railroad about midway between Savannah and Charleston. By January 20 this had been done, and Slocum began slogging in the opposite direction, thirty miles up the drowned west bank of the Savannah River to Sister’s Ferry, as if about to close upon Augusta. Unrelenting rain made the march a roundabout nine-day affair, with much discomfort for the troops. For them, however, as for their chief, “city life had become dull and tame, and we were anxious to get into the pine woods again.” Moreover, they were sustained by anticipation of another kind. Ahead lay South Carolina, and they had been promised a free hand in visiting upon her the destruction she deserved for having led the Confederate exodus from the Union. “Here is where treason began, and by God here is where it shall end,” they vowed, pleased with their role as avenging instruments and eager to put into sterner practice the talents they had acquired on the march through Georgia, accounts of which had reached and frightened the people in their new path northward. Sherman approved of the fear aroused. “This was a power, and I intended to utilize it,” he said later, explaining: “My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ ”

Already there were signs that the two-pronged feint was working in both directions. Augusta was in ferment over Slocum’s approach, and in Charleston, menaced from the landward side by Howard and by Dahlgren from the sea, clerks were busy packing and shipping official records and historical mementos to Columbia for safe-keeping, never suspecting that the inland capital was not only high on Sherman’s list of prime objectives, but was also to be dealt with as harshly as Atlanta had been served two months ago. “I look upon Columbia as quite as bad as Charleston,” he wrote Halleck while cooling his army’s heels in Savannah, “and I doubt if we shall spare the public buildings there as we did in Milledgeville.” What was more, subordinates from private to major general took this prediction a step further when the march began
in earnest, February 1. Blair and Logan cleared Pocotaligo and Davis and Williams crossed the Savannah in force that day. On the far left, at Sister’s Ferry, Kilpatrick’s troopers led the way, hoofs drumming on the planks of a pontoon bridge thrown there the day before. Soldiers of a Michigan infantry regiment, waiting their turn to cross, had heard that the bandy-legged cavalry commander had instructed his men to fill their saddlebags with matches for the work ahead, and now they believed it; for as he rode out onto the bridge he called back over his shoulder, “There’ll be damned little for you infantrymen to destroy after I’ve passed through that hell-hole of secession!”

Here indeed was an end to what the Richmond editor termed “the repose of the tiger,” in the course of which Sherman had told Old Brains: “The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.”

2

A proposal that the women of the South cut off their hair for sale in Europe, thereby bringing an estimated 40,000,000-dollar windfall to the cause, had gained widespread approval by the turn of the year, despite some protests — chiefly from men, who viewed the suggested disfigurement with less favor than did their wives and sweethearts — that the project was impractical. After the fall of Fort Fisher, however, the Confederacy’s last port east of the Mississippi was no longer open to blockade runners, coming or going, and the plan was abandoned. Even if the women sheared their heads there was no way now for the bulky cargo to be shipped, either to Europe or anywhere else; or if it could somehow be gotten out — from Charleston, say, in a sudden dash by a high-speed flotilla — the odds were even longer against a return with whatever the money would buy in the way of necessities, all of which were running low and lower now that the war was about to enter its fifth spring. Like so many other proposals, farfetched but by no means impossible if they had been adopted sooner, this one came too late.

Another was a return to the suggestion advanced informally by Pat Cleburne the previous winter, soon after Missionary Ridge, that the South free its slaves and enlist them in its armies. Hastily suppressed at the time as “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor,” the proposition seemed far less “monstrous” now than it had a year ago, when Grant was not at the gates of Richmond and Sherman had not made his march through Georgia. Seddon, for one, had been for it ever since the fall of Atlanta, except that he believed emancipation should follow, not precede, a term of military service. In early January, Governor William Smith — “Extra Billy” to Old
Dominion voters — proposed that Virginia and the other states, not the central government, carry out the plan for black recruitment. Appealed to, R. E. Lee replied that he favored such a measure. “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions. My own opinion is that we should employ them without delay. I believe that with proper regulation they can be made efficient soldiers.” This was powerful support. If Lee wanted Negro troops, a once-oppugnant Richmond editor wrote soon afterward, “by all means let him have them.” Westward, Richard Taylor agreed. In Mobile, when he congratulated a group of impressed slaves on their skill in building fortifications, their leader told him: “If you will give us guns we will fight for these works, too. We would rather fight for our own white folks than for strangers.” Down in South Carolina, however, Mary Boykin Chesnut had her doubts. “Freeing Negroes is the latest Confederate Government craze,” the mistress of Mulberry Plantation wrote in her diary. “We are a little slow about it; that is all.… I remember when Mr Chesnut spoke to his Negroes about it, his head men were keen to go in the army, to be free and get a bounty after the war. Now they say coolly that they don’t want freedom if they have to fight for it. That means they are pretty sure of having it anyway.”

Opinions differed: not so much along economic lines, as might have been expected — large slave-holders versus the slaveless majority of small farmers, merchants, and wage earners — but rather as a result of opposition from die-hard political leaders who contended that no government, state or central, whatever its desperation under the threat of imminent extinction, had the right to interfere in matters involving social institutions: especially slavery, which Aleck Stephens had called the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy, insisting that it made the nation’s citizens truly free, presumably to establish a universal white aristocracy, by keeping the Negro in the inferior position God and nature intended for him to occupy down through time. As a result, after intense discussion, Virginia’s General Assembly voted to permit the arming of slaves but included no provision for their emancipation, either before or after military service. Little or nothing came of that, as Mrs Chesnut had foreseen, but even less seemed likely to proceed from a similar bill introduced in the Confederate House and Senate in early February, only to run into virulent Impossiblist opposition. Despite Lee’s earlier warning “that whatever measures are to be adopted should be adopted at once. Every day’s delay increases the difficulty. Much time will be required to organize and discipline the men, and action may be deferred until too late,” debate dragged on, week in, week out, as the legislators wrangled. Meanwhile, Federal enlistment teams kept busy in the wake of blue advances, signing up and swearing in black volunteers, many of them
substitutes to help fill the draft quotas of northern states. In the end, of the nearly 180,000 Negroes who served in the Union ranks — 20,000 more than the “aggregate present” in all the armies of the South on New Year’s Day—134,111 were recruited in states that had stars in the Confederate battle flag, and the latter figure in turn was several thousand greater than the total of 125,994 gray-clad soldiers “present for duty” that same day; when the North had 959,460 and 620,924 in those respective categories.

It was by no means as great, however, as the total of 198,494 listed that day as absent from Confederate ranks. Moreover, this invisible army of the missing grew with every passing week, its membership swollen even by veterans from the Army of Northern Virginia, whose morale was said to be high despite short rations and the bone-numbing chill of the Petersburg trenches. Adversity had given them a pinched and scarecrow look, hard to connect with the caterwauling victors of so many long-odds battles in the past. A Connecticut soldier, peering through a Fort Hell sight-slit one cold morning to watch a detail of them straggle out to relieve their picket line, wrote home that he “could not help comparing them with so many women with cloaks, shawls, double-bustles and hoops, as they had thrown over their shoulders blankets and tents which flapped in the wind.” Many by now had reached their limit of endurance; they came over into the Union lines in increasing numbers, especially from units posted where the rival works were close together and a quick sprint meant an end to shivering misery and hunger. A New England private told how he and his comrades would speculate each day on how many were likely to come in that night, depending on the darkness of the moon. “The boys talk about the Johnnies as at home we talk about suckers and eels. The boys will look around in the evening and guess that there will be a good run of Johnnies.” Lee of course felt the drain, and knew only too well what the consequences must be if it continued. Before the end of January he warned Davis that if Grant was appreciably reinforced, either by Thomas from the west or by Sherman from the south — or, for that matter, by Lincoln from the north — “I do not see how in the present position he can be prevented from enveloping Richmond.”

If in Virginia a sort of numbness obtained because of the military stalemate and the long-term deprivation of troops confined to earthworks, something approaching chaos prevailed at this time in the Carolinas while the various commanders — Bragg at Wilmington, Hardee at Charleston, G. W. Smith at Augusta, who between them mustered fewer than 25,000 effectives, including militia — engaged in a flurry of guesses as to where Sherman would strike next, and when, and how best to go about parrying the thrust, outnumbered and divided as they were. Yet the region in which conditions were by far the worst in regard to the physical state and morale of its defenders, even though there was no
immediate enemy pressure on them, was Northeast Mississippi: specifically in the vicinity of Tupelo, where the Army of Tennessee made camp at last, January 8–10, on returning from its disastrous five-week excursion into the state from which it took its name. Its strength was down to 17,700 infantry and artillery, barely half the number answering roll-call when the long files set out north in mid-November. Most of the foot soldiers had no shoes, having worn them out on the icy roads, and an equal proportion of batteries had no guns; 72 pieces had been lost, along with a score of brigade and division commanders. Edward Walthall, whose division had shared with Forrest’s horsemen the rear-guard duty that saved what remained of the army in the course of its ten-day retreat across the Tennessee, ended his official report on a sad and bitter note: “The remnant of my command, after this campaign of unprecedented peril and hardship, reduced by battles and exposure, worn and weary with its travel and its toil, numbered less when it reached its rest near Tupelo than one of its brigades had done eight months before.”