The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (83 page)

“If any change is made,” Bragg concluded, “Lieutenant General Hood would give unlimited satisfaction.” Then, as if aware of the misgiving Lee had expressed three days ago, he added: “Do not understand me as proposing him as a man of genius, or a great general, but as far better in the present emergency than any one we have available.”

Davis agreed that Hood was the man for the post, if its present occupant had to be replaced, but he would not act without giving Johnston one last chance to commit himself to a fight to save Atlanta, in which case he would keep him where he was. Accordingly, in a wire next day, July 16, he put the case to the general in no uncertain terms: “I wish to hear from you as to present situation, and your plan of operations so specifically as will enable me to anticipate events.”

Johnston felt no more alarm at this than he had done at Hill’s
“For God’s sake do it” telegram, received the day before. Busy with tactical matters, he did not take the time or trouble to outline for the Commander in Chief what he afterwards claimed was his plan for the overthrow of the blue host in his front: which — as he would set it forth some ten years later, after the guns had cooled but not the controversy — was to engage the enemy “on terms of advantage” while they were divided by Peachtree Creek. If this did not work he planned to hold the intrenchments overlooking the creek with 5000 state militia, lately sent him by Governor Brown, “and leisurely fall back with the Confederate troops into the town and, when the Federal army approached, march out with the three corps against one of its flanks.” If this was successful, the bluecoats would be driven back against the unfordable Chattahoochee and cut to pieces before they could recross; if not, “the Confederate army had a near and secure place of refuge in Atlanta, which it could hold forever, and so win the campaign.” So he later said — “forever” — but not now. Now he merely responded, as before, that he would have to be governed by circumstances; circumstances which it was clear would be of Sherman’s making. “As the enemy has double our number, we must be on the defensive,” he replied to Davis’s request for specific information. “My plan of operations must, therefore, depend on that of the enemy. It is mainly to watch for an opportunity to fight to advantage. We are trying to put Atlanta in condition to hold it for a day or two by the Georgia militia, that army movements may be freer and wider.”

On the defensive. A day or two. The Georgia militia. Freer and wider movements.… Johnston would later maintain that just as he was about to deliver the blow that would “win the campaign,” and which he had had in mind all along, his sword was wrenched from his grasp by the Richmond authorities; but the fact was, he signed his own warrant of dismissal when he put his hand to this telegram declaring, more clearly than anything else it said, that he had no plan involving a battle to save Atlanta.

Word came next morning — July 17, another Sunday — that Sherman’s whole army was over the Chattahoochee, apparently engaged in an outsized turning movement designed to close down on the city from the north and east. After nightfall Johnston was at his headquarters three miles out the Marietta Road, conferring with his chief engineer about work on the Atlanta fortifications, when a message for him from Adjutant General Samuel Cooper clicked off the telegraph receiver:

Old Joe spent most of the rest of the night in the throes of composition, preparing first a farewell address, in which he expressed his affection for the troops who had served under him, and then a response to his superiors, in which he managed to vent a measure of the resentment aroused by the backhand slap they had taken at him in the order for his removal. “I cannot leave this noble army,” he told its members, “without expressing my admiration of the high military qualities it has displayed. A long and arduous campaign has made conspicuous every soldierly virtue, endurance of toil, obedience to orders, brilliant courage. The enemy has never attacked but to be repulsed and severely punished. You, soldiers, have never argued but from your courage, and never counted your foes. No longer your leader, I will still watch your career, and will rejoice in your victories. To one and all I offer assurances of my friendship, and bid an affectionate farewell.”

The other document was briefer, if no less emotional under its surface of ice. “Your dispatch of yesterday received and obeyed,” it began, and passed at once to a refutation of the charges made in the dismissal order: “Sherman’s army is much stronger compared with that of Tennessee than Grant’s compared with that of Northern Virginia. Yet the enemy has been compelled to advance much more slowly to the vicinity of Atlanta than to that of Richmond and Petersburg, and has penetrated deeper into Virginia than into Georgia.” Then at the end came the stinger. “Confident language by a military commander is not usually regarded as evidence of competency. J. E. Johnston.”

Hood too got little if any sleep after he received at 11 p.m. the War Department telegram which, he said, “so astounded and overwhelmed” him that he “remained in deep thought throughout the night.” He had in fact much to ponder, including a follow-up wire from Seddon: “You are charged with a great trust. You will, I know, test to the utmost your capacities to discharge it. Be wary no less than bold.… God be with you.” His appointment was plainly an endorsement of the aggressive views he had been propounding all the way south from the Tennessee line, and he was clearly expected to translate them into action. But he perceived that to do so here on the flat terrain south of the Chattahoochee, with his back to the gates of the city in his care, was a far more difficult undertaking than it would have been in the rugged country Johnston had traversed in the course of his long retreat from Dalton. “We may lose Atlanta and the army too,” Lee had warned Davis five days ago, and though Hood had not seen the message, he was altogether aware of the danger pointed out — as well
as of his own shortcomings, which Lee had by no means listed in full.

For one, there was his youth. He had just last month turned thirty-three, the crucifixion age, which made him not only younger than any of his infantry corps or division commanders, but also a solid ten years younger than the average among them. Then too there was his physical condition; Gettsyburg had cost him the use of his left arm, paralyzed by a fragment of bursting shell as he charged the Devil’s Den, and at Chickamauga his right leg had been amputated so close to the hip that from then on he had to be strapped in the saddle to ride a horse. Worst of all, though, was the timing of the change now ordered by the War Department. Sherman’s final lunge at Atlanta was in full career, and only Johnston knew what plans had been made, if any, to meet and survive the shock. Certainly Hood knew nothing of them, except as they applied to the disposition of his corps on the Confederate right, astride the Georgia Railroad. Emerging at last from the brown study into which the telegram had plunged him, the blond, Kentucky-born Texan came out of his tent before dawn, mounted his horse with the help of an orderly, and set out for Johnston’s headquarters near the far end of the line.

On the way there, about sunrise, he encountered Stewart on the way there too. Old Straight, who had led a division under Hood until his recent promotion to head the corps that had been temporarily under Loring, was also disturbed by the untimely change. He proposed that they unite with Hardee “in an effort to prevail on General Johnston to withhold the order and retain command of the army until the impending battle has been fought.” Hood readily agreed, and they rode on together.

At headquarters, where a candle flickered atop a barrel with the telegram beside it, Johnston received them courteously, but when Hood appealed to him to “pocket that dispatch, leave me in command of my corps, and fight the battle for Atlanta,” the Virginian would have no part of such an irregular procedure. He was off the hook and he intended to stay off. “Gentlemen, I am a soldier,” he said. “A soldier’s first duty is to obey.” So that was that.

Or perhaps not. Hardee having arrived by now, the three lieutenant generals dispatched a joint telegram to the President requesting that he postpone the transfer of command “until the fate of Atlanta is decided.”

Davis’s answer was not long in coming, and it was a flat No: “A change of commanders, under existing circumstances, was regarded as so objectionable that I only accepted it as the alternative of continuing a policy which had proved so disastrous.… The order has been executed, and I cannot suspend it without making the case worse than it was before the order was issued.”

Hood made one last try, returning to plead a second time, “for the
good of the country,” that Johnston “pocket the correspondence” and remain in command, “as Sherman was at the very gates of the city.” Old Joe again declined: whereupon Hood launched into a personal appeal, referring to “the great embarrassment of the position in which I had been placed.” Not only was he in the dark as to such plans as had been made for meeting the enemy now bearing down on Atlanta and its defenders, he did not even know where the other two corps of the army were posted. “With all the earnestness of which man is capable,” Hood later wrote, “I besought him, if he would under no circumstances retain command and fight the battle for Atlanta, to at least remain with me and give me the benefit of his counsel whilst I determined the issue.” Touched at last, and “with tears of emotion gathering in his eyes,” Johnston assured his young successor that, after a necessary ride into Atlanta, he would return that evening and help him all he could. So he said. According to Hood, however, “he not only failed to comply with his promise, but, without a word of explanation or apology, left that evening for Macon, Georgia.”

There was some fear, according to a number of observers, that the men in the ranks “would throw down their muskets and quit” when they learned of the transfer of command: not so much from distrust of Hood, who at this stage was little more than a damaged figurehead to most of them, as because of their “love for and confidence in Johnston,” who many said “had been grievously wronged” by his superiors in Richmond. “A universal gloom seemed cast over the army,” a lieutenant on Hood’s own staff declared, and a Tennessee private — a veteran who remembered Bragg and the aftermath of Missionary Ridge — later told why the news was received with so much sorrow and resentment: “Old Joe Johnston had taken command of the Army of Tennessee when it was crushed and broken, at a time when no other man on earth could have united it. He found it in rags and tatters, hungry and brokenhearted, the morale of the men gone, their manhood vanished to the winds, their pride a thing of the past. Through his instrumentality and skillful manipulation, all these had been restored.… Farewell, old fellow!” he cried, breaking into an apostrophe of remembered grief as he approached the end of this “saddest chapter” of the war; “We privates loved you because you made us love ourselves.”

Not all who felt that way about the Virginia general had to say goodbye from such a distance, either of time or space. Between the reading of his farewell address that Monday morning and his actual departure for Macon that afternoon, several units passed his headquarters on their way up to the lines on Peachtree Creek, and thereby got the chance to demonstrate their affection in his presence. A Georgia regiment happened to march out the Marietta Road, for example, and the colonel left a record of how he and his men reacted to what they
thought would be their last look at their former commander, who came out of the house and stood by the gate to watch them pass. “We lifted our hats. There was no cheering. We simply passed silently, our heads uncovered. Some of the officers broke ranks and grasped his hand, as the tears poured down their cheeks.”

Higher up the ladder of rank, the reaction was scarcely less emotional. Hardee, upset at having someone more than a year his junior in grade promoted over his head, promptly asked to be relieved, complaining that the President — who in the end persuaded him to withdraw his application for a transfer — was “attempting to create the impression that in declining the command [six months ago] at Dalton, I declined it for all future time.” He doubted Hood’s ability to fill the position to which he had been elevated, and others felt, as one of them put it, that the appointment was an “egregious blunder.” Sam French called at headquarters that evening to assure the new commander of his full coöperation, but did not fail to add, with his usual forthright-ness, that he regretted the change. “Although he took my hand and thanked me,” he later said of Hood, “I was ever afterwards impressed with the belief that he never forgave me for what I said.” Still others, aware of the reason behind the shift, foresaw hard fighting and had mixed opinions concerning the fate of Atlanta, as well as their own. Undoubtedly, Hood being Hood, they were about to go over to the offensive; Pat Cleburne, for one, believed that this was likely to take them far — in miles, at any rate. “We are going to carry the war to Africa,” he predicted, “but I fear we will not be as successful as Scipio was.”

Across the way, on the far side of Peachtree Creek and eastward out the Georgia Railroad, the reaction among Federals of rank was not dissimilar, so far as expectation of a step-up in the scale of fighting went, when it became known next day that the Confederates, in Lincoln’s current campaign phrase, had “swapped horses in midstream.”

McPherson and Schofield had been West Point classmates of Hood’s, standing first and seventh respectively in a class of fifty-two, while he stood forty-fourth — ten places below even Sheridan, who had been held back a year for misconduct. Schofield in fact had been his roommate, and by coaching him in mathematics, which gave the Kentucky cadet a great deal of trouble, had managed to keep his military career from ending in academic failure and dismissal. “I came very near thinking once or twice that perhaps I had made a mistake,” the Illinois general would remark in later years, though for the present he simply warned his chief: “He’ll hit you like hell, now, before you know it.” McPherson agreed, and so did Thomas, under whom Hood had served five years ago in Texas. But perhaps the most convincing testimony as to this new opponent’s boldness came from a Union-loyal
fellow Kentuckian who had watched him play old-army poker. “I seed Hood bet $2500,” this witness declared, “with nary a pair in his hand.”