The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (95 page)

But that was later, when he could spare the time. Just now he responded to the news that McPherson’s horse had come riderless out of the woods in back of Leggett’s Hill by ordering John Logan, the senior corps commander, to take charge of the army and counterattack at once to recover the ground on which his chief might be lying wounded. Logan did so, and within the hour McPherson’s body was brought to headquarters in an ambulance. Someone wrenched a door off its hinges and propped it on two chairs for a catafalque, and Sherman went on directing the battle from the room where his fellow Ohioan was laid out. Already he had sent a brigade from Schofield to support the one Dodge had defending Decatur from Wheeler’s attack, but aside from this he sent no reinforcements to help resist the assault on his left flank and rear. “I purposely allowed the Army of the Tennessee to fight this battle almost unaided,” he later explained, partly because he wanted to leave to McPherson’s veterans the honor of avenging his fall, and also because he believed that “if any assistance were rendered by either of the other armies, the Army of the Tennessee would be jealous.”

His confidence in his old army — it had also once been Grant’s, and had yet to come out loser when the smoke of battle cleared — was justified largely today because of Logan, who exercised his new command in style. Dubbed “Black Jack” by his soldiers, the former Illinois politician knew how to translate stump oratory into rousing military terms. Clutching his flop-brim hat in one hand so that his long raven hair streamed behind him in the wind, he spurred from point to embattled point and bellowed: “Will you hold this line with me? Will you hold this line?” The veterans showed they would. “Black Jack! Black Jack!” they chanted as they beat off attacks that soon were coming from all directions: particularly on Leggett’s Hill, which Hood by now had ordered Cheatham to assault from the west while Cleburne kept up pressure from the south and east. Brigadier General Manning Force’s brigade, menaced front and rear, was obliged at times to fight on alternate sides of its breastworks. At one critical point he called for a flag, and a young lieutenant, assuming from the look of things that the time had come to surrender, began a frantic search for a white handkerchief or shirt. “Damn you, sir!” Force shouted. “I don’t want a flag of truce; I want the
American
flag!” Shot in the face shortly thereafter, he lost the use of his voice and fell back on conducting the hilltop defense with gestures, which were no less flamboyant and seemed to work as well. The hill was held, though at a cost of ten guns — including the four McPherson had planned to use against Atlanta at long range — fifteen stands of colors, and better than a thousand prisoners, mostly
from Blair’s other division under Brigadier General Giles A. Smith (one of an even dozen Federal generals with that name, including one who spelled it Smyth) which had given way at the outset, badly rattled by Cleburne’s unexpected flank-and-rear assault.

Although there were no other outright surprises, the issue continued to swing in doubt from time to time and place to place. Sherman watched with interest from his headquarters on the central ridge, and when Cheatham scored a breakthrough around 4 o’clock, just north of the railroad, he had Schofield mass the fire of several batteries to help restore Logan’s punctured right. Word came then from Decatur that the two brigades of infantry had managed to keep Wheeler’s troopers out of the town square, where the train was parked, and from Dodge that he was confident of holding against weakening attacks on the left rear. Mercurial as always, despite the tears that trickled into his stub red beard whenever he thought of McPherson laid out on his improvised bier inside the house, Sherman was in high spirits as a result of these reports, which reached him as he paced about the yard and watched the progress of the fighting in all directions. Presently the headquarters came under long-range fire, obliging him and his attendants to take cover in an adjoining grove of trees. Sheltered behind one of these, he noticed a terrified soldier crouched nearby in back of another, moaning: “Lord, Lord, if I once get home,” and: “Oh, I’ll be killed!” Sherman grinned and picked up a handful of stones, which he then began to toss in that direction. Every pebble that struck the tree brought a howl or a groan from behind it. “That’s hard firing, my man,” he called to the unstrung soldier, who replied without opening his tight-shut eyes: “Hard? It’s fearful! I think thirty shells have hit this tree while I was here.” The fire subsided, and the general stepped into the open. “It’s all over now; come out,” he told the man, who emerged trembling. When he saw who had been taunting him, he took off running through the woods, pursued by the sound of Sherman’s laughter.

From end to end, the Federal line was held or restored, except where Smith’s unfortunates had been driven back across the lower slopes of Leggett’s Hill, and though the fighting was sometimes hand-to-hand and desperate, on past sundown into twilight, there was by then no doubt that Hood’s Second Sortie — aside, that is, from the capture of a dozen guns and an assortment of Union colors — had been no less a failure than his First, two days ago. It was, however, considerably more expensive; for this time the Confederate leader held almost nothing back, including the Georgia militia, which he used in a fruitless attack on Schofield that had no effect on the battle except to swell the list of southern casualties. In the end, Hood’s loss was around 8000 killed, wounded, and missing, as compared to Sherman’s 3700.

All next day the contending armies remained in position, licking their wounds, until Hardee withdrew unimpeded the following night
into the Atlanta works. Saddened by the loss of Walker, who had called at headquarters on the eve of battle to assure him of his understanding and support, as well as by the news about McPherson — “No soldier fell in the enemy’s ranks whose death caused me equal regret,” he later said of his West Point friend and classmate — Hood was profoundly disappointed by the failure of his two sorties to accomplish the end for which they had been designed; but he was by no means so discouraged that he did not intend to attempt a third, if his adversary presented him with still another opportunity. He knew only too well how close he had come, except for the unlucky appearance of Dodge’s corps in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, to wrecking the encircling Union host entirely.

Frank Blair, for one, concurred in this belief. Hood’s flanking movement, he afterwards declared, “was a very bold and a very brilliant one, and was very near being successful. The position taken up accidentally by [Dodge’s] corps prevented the full force of the blow from falling where it was intended to fall. If my command had been driven from its position at the time that [Logan’s] corps was forced back from its intrenchments, there must have been a general rout of all the troops of the Army of the Tennessee … and, possibly, the panic might have been communicated to the balance of the army.”

Sherman was not much given to speculation on the might-have-beens of combat, and in any case he no more agreed with this assessment than he did with subsequent criticism that, in leaving Schofield and Thomas standing comparatively idle on the sidelines while Logan battled for survival, he had missed a prime chance to break Atlanta’s inner line, weakened as it was by the withdrawal of a major portion of its defenders for the attack on his south flank. What he mainly concluded, once the smoke had cleared, was that in staging two all-out sorties in as many days — both of them not only unsuccessful but also highly expensive in energy, blood, and ingenuity — Hood had shot his wad. And from this Sherman concluded further that he was unlikely to be molested in his execution of the maneuver he had described to McPherson at their final interview; that is, “to withdraw from the left flank and add to the right,” thereby shifting his whole force counterclockwise, around to the west of the city, in order to probe for its rail supply lines to the south.

First, though, there was the problem of finding a permanent replacement for his fallen star, McPherson. On the face of it, Logan having performed spectacularly under worse than trying conditions, the solution should have been simple. But it turned out to be extremely complicated, involving the exacerbation of some tender feelings and, in the end, nothing less than the reorganization of the command structure of two of the three armies in his charge.

Thomas came promptly to headquarters to advise against keeping
Logan at his temporary post. Although there was bad blood between them, dating back to Chattanooga, basically his objection was that Black Jack, like all the other corps and division leaders in the Army of the Tennessee — not one of them was a West Pointer, whereas two thirds of his own and half of Schofield’s were Academy graduates — was a nonprofessional. “He is brave enough and a good officer,” the Virginian admitted, “but if he had an army I am afraid he would edge over on both sides and annoy Schofield and me. Even as a corps commander he is given to edging out beyond his jurisdiction.” Sherman agreed in principle that volunteers from civilian life, especially politicians, “looked to personal fame and glory as auxiliary and secondary to their political ambition.… I wanted to succeed in taking Atlanta,” he later explained, “and needed commanders who were purely and technically soldiers, men who would obey orders and execute them promptly and on time.” That ruled out Logan, along with Blair. Who then? he asked Thomas, who replied: “You cannot do better than put Howard in command of that army.” Sherman protested that this would make Logan “terribly mad” and might also create “a rumpus among those volunteers,” but then agreed. One-armed and two years younger even than McPherson, O. O. Howard, West Point ’54, a Maine-born recent eastern import to the western theater, was then announced as the new commander of the army that had once been Sherman’s own.

Returned to his corps, Logan managed to live with the burning aroused in his breast by this disappointment. But the same could not be said for Old Tom’s ranking corps commander, the altogether professional Joe Hooker. Outraged at having been passed over in favor of the man he largely blamed for his defeat at Chancellorsville, Fighting Joe characterized the action as “an insult to my rank and services” and submitted at once a request to be relieved of his present duties. Thomas “approved and
heartily
recommended” acceptance of this application, which Sherman was quick to grant, remarking incidentally that the former commander of the Army of the Potomac had not even been considered for the post that now was Howard’s, since “we on the spot did not rate his fighting qualities as high as he did.” Hooker departed for an inactive assignment in the Northern Department, where he spent the rest of the war, further embittered by the news that his successor was Major General Henry W. Slocum, another enemy, who had been sent to Vicksburg on the eve of the present campaign to avoid personality clashes between them. Pending Slocum’s arrival from Mississippi, Alpheus Williams would lead the corps as senior division commander, much as Major General David S. Stanley had succeeded to the command of Howard’s corps, though on a permanent basis.

By July 25, within five days of the Peachtree crossing, when work on it began, the railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee — 760 feet long and 90 high — was completed and track relaid to a forward base immediately
in Thomas’s rear. Sherman, his supplies replenished and generals reshuffled, was ready within another two days to begin the counterclockwise western slide designed to bring on the fall of Atlanta by severing its rail connection with the world outside. Already this had been accomplished up to the final step; for of the four lines in and out of the city all but one had been seized or wrecked by now, beginning with the Western & Atlantic, down which the Federals had been moving ever since they chevied Johnston out of Dalton. Then Schofield and McPherson had put the Georgia Railroad out of commission by dismantling it as they moved westward from Stone Mountain and Decatur. Of the remaining two — the Atlanta & West Point and the Macon & Western, which shared the same track until they branched southwest and southeast at East Point, five miles south of the city — the former, connecting with Montgomery and Mobile, had been severely damaged the week before by Major General Lovell Rousseau, who raided southward through Alabama with 2500 troopers, practically unopposed, and tore up close to thirty miles of the line between Montgomery and Opelika, where it branched northeast for West Point and Atlanta. That left only the Macon road, connecting eastward with Savannah, for Hood’s use in supplying his army and for Sherman to destroy. He began his large-scale semicircular maneuver to accomplish this on July 27, ordering Howard to swing north, then west — in rear of Schofield and Thomas, who would follow him in turn — for a southward march down the near bank of the Chattahoochee, which would serve as an artery for supplies, to descend as soon as possible on that one railroad still in operation out of a place that once had boasted of being “the turntable of the Confederacy.”

Simultaneously, by way of putting two strings to his bow, he turned 10,000 horsemen loose on the same objective in an all-out double strike around both rebel flanks. Brigadier General Edward McCook, his division reinforced to a strength of 3500 by the addition of a brigade from Rousseau — who, it was hoped, had established the model for the current operation, over in Alabama the week before — would ride down the north bank of the Chattahoochee for a crossing at Campbelltown, under orders to proceed eastward and hit the Macon & Western at or below Jonesboro, just under twenty miles on the far side of Atlanta. This was also the goal of the second mounted column, 6500 strong, which would set out from Decatur under Stoneman, who had Garrard’s division attached to his own for a southward lunge around the enemy right. Both columns were to start on July 27, the day the infantry slide began; Sherman expected them back within three days at the most. But when Stoneman asked permission to press on, once the railroad had been wrecked, to Macon and Andersonville for the purpose of freeing the prisoners held in their thousands at both places, he readily agreed to this hundred-mile extension of the raid, on condition that Garrard head back
as soon as the Macon road was smashed, to work with McCook in covering the infantry’s left wheel around Atlanta. The redhead’s hopes were high, but not for long: mainly because of Joe Wheeler, who, though outnumbered three-to-two by the blue troopers, did not neglect this opportunity to deal with them in detail.