The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (96 page)

Right and left, at Campbelltown and Decatur, both of them closer to Jonesboro than they were to each other at the outset, the two columns took off on schedule, though not altogether in the manner Sherman intended. Stoneman’s mind was fixed so firmly on his ultimate goal — Andersonville and its 30,000 inmates, whose liberation would be nothing less than the top cavalry exploit of the war — that he no longer had any discernible interest in the limited purpose for which the two-pronged strike had been conceived. Accordingly, without notifying anyone above him, he sent Garrard’s 4300 troopers pounding due south to draw off the enemy horsemen while he and his 2200 rode east for Covington, which Garrard had raided five days ago during the Battle of Atlanta. In this he was successful; he reached Covington undetected and turned south, down the east bank of the Ocmulgee River, for Macon, the first of his two prison-camp objectives. Garrard meantime had been no less successful in carrying out his part of the revised design, which was to attract the attention of the rebels in his direction. On Snapfinger Creek that afternoon, barely ten miles out of Decatur, he ran into mounted graybacks whose number increased so rapidly overnight that at Flatrock Bridge next morning, another five miles down the road, he had to turn and ride hard, back to Decatur, to keep from losing everything he had. His nimbleness kept down his losses; yet even so these would have been much heavier if Wheeler, about to give chase with eight brigades — just over 6000 sabers in all — had not received word that McCook had crossed the Chattahoochee, en route for the Macon & Western, and that Stoneman was beyond the Ocmulgee, apparently headed for Macon itself. The Georgia-born Alabamian, two months short of his twenty-eighth birthday, left one brigade to keep up the pressure on Garrard and turned with the other seven to meet these rearward threats, sending three brigades to deal with Stoneman while he himself set out with the rest to intercept McCook.

As it turned out, the interception came after, not before, McCook struck the railroad at Lovejoy Station, seven miles beyond Jonesboro. He got there four hours ahead of Wheeler, which gave him time to burn the depot, tear up a mile and a half of track, and destroy a sizeable wagon train, along with its 800 mules, before the graybacks arrived to drive him off and pursue him all the way to the Chattahoochee. Overtaken at Newnan, due west on the West Point road, McCook lost 950 troopers killed and captured, along with his pack train and two guns, between there and the river, which he crossed to safety on July 30, reduced in strength by nearly a third and much the worse for wear.

By that time Stoneman had reached the outskirts of Macon, only to find it defended by local militia. While he engaged in a long-range duel across the Ocmulgee with these part-time soldiers, hoping to cover his search for a downstream ford, the three brigades sent after him by Wheeler came up in his rear. He tried for a getaway, back the way he had come, then found himself involved in a running fight that ended next day near Hillsboro, twenty-five miles to the north, when he was all but surrounded at a place called Sunshine Church. He chose one brigade to make a stand and told the other two to escape as best they could; which they did, while he and his chosen 700 were being overrun and rounded up. One of the two surviving brigades made it back to Decatur two days later, but the other, unable to turn west because of the swarm of rebels on that flank, was wrecked at Jug Tavern on August 3, thirty miles north of Covington. Stoneman and his captured fellow officers were in Macon by then, locked up with the unfortunates they had set out to liberate, and the enlisted men were in much the same position, though considerably worse off so far as the creature comforts were concerned, sixty miles to the southwest at Andersonville.

“On the whole,” Sherman reported to Washington in one of the prize understatements of the war, “the cavalry raid is not deemed a success.”

In plain fact, aside from McCook’s fortuitous interception of the 800-mule train — the break in the track at Lovejoy’s, for example, amounted to nothing worse than a two-day inconvenience, after which the Macon & Western was back in use from end to end — the raid not only failed to achieve its purpose, it was also a good deal harder on the raiders than on the raided. Sherman’s true assessment was shown by what he did, on the return of his badly cut up horsemen, rather than by what he wrote in his report. Garrard’s division, which had suffered least, was dismounted and used to occupy the intrenchments Schofield vacated when he began his swing around the city in Howard’s wake, and the other two were reorganized, after a period of sorely needed rest and refitment, into units roughly half their former size. Not that Sherman expected much from them, offensively speaking, in the critical days ahead. “I now became satisfied,” he said later, “that cavalry could not, or would not, make a sufficient lodgment on the railroad below Atlanta, and that nothing would suffice but for us to reach it with the main army.”

But that turned out to be about as difficult an undertaking as the one assigned to Stoneman and McCook. For one thing — against all his expectations, which were founded on the belief that Hood by now had shot his wad — he had no sooner begun his counterclockwise wheel, shifting Howard around in rear of Schofield and Thomas to a position west of the city so that his right could be extended to reach the vital railway junction at East Point, than he was confronted with still a third
sortie by his Confederate opponent, quite as savage as the other two.

All had gone well on the first day, July 27; Howard pulled out undeterred and took up the march, first north, then west along the near bank of Peachtree Creek. Riding south next morning in rear of Logan, whose corps was in the lead, Sherman and the new army commander came under fire from a masked battery as they approached the Lickskillet Road, which ran due east into Atlanta, three miles off. Howard did not like the look of things, and said so. “General Hood will attack me here,” he told his companion, who scoffed at the notion: “I guess not. He will hardly try it again.” But Howard remained persuaded that he was about to be struck, explaining later that he based his conviction on previous acquaintance with the man who would do the striking; “I said that I had known Hood at West Point, and that he was indomitable.”

Indomitable. Presented thus with a third chance to destroy an isolated portion of the enemy host, Hood had designed still another combined assault, once more after the manner of Lee and Jackson, to forestall this massive probe around his left. His old corps, now under Stephen D. Lee — the South Carolinian had been promoted to lieutenant general and brought from Alabama to take over from Cheatham — would march out the Lickskillet Road on the morning of July 28 to occupy a position from which it could block Howard’s extension of the Union right and set him up for a flank attack by Stewart, who would bring his corps out the Sandtown Road that evening, a mile in Lee’s rear, to circle the head of the stalled blue column and strike from the southwest at Howard’s unguarded outer flank next morning. Hardee, reduced to three divisions, each of which received a brigade from the fallen Walker’s broken-up division, would hold Atlanta’s inner line against whatever pressure Schofield and Thomas might exert. Lee, who had assumed command only the day before, moved as ordered, determined to prove his mettle in this first test at his new post — two months short of his thirty-first birthday, he was six years younger than anyone else of his rank in the whole Confederacy — but found himself involved by midday, three miles out the Lickskillet Road, near a rural chapel known as Ezra Church, in a furious meeting engagement that left him no time for digging in or even getting set. So instead he took the offensive with all three of his divisions.

They were not enough: not nearly enough, as the thing developed.
Howard, who was only two years older than Lee and no less anxious to prove his mettle, having also assumed command the day before, had foreseen the attack (or anyhow forefelt it, despite Sherman’s scoff) and though there was no time for intrenching, once he had called a halt he had his lead corps throw up a rudimentary breastwork of logs and rails; so that when Lee’s men charged — “with a terrifying yell,” the one-armed commander would recall — they were “met steadily and repulsed.” They fell back, then charged again, with the same result. Busily strengthening their improvised works between attacks, Logan’s four divisions stood their ground, reinforced in the course of the struggle by others from Dodge and Blair, while Sherman rode back and alerted Thomas to be ready to send more. These last were unneeded, even though Hood by then had abandoned his plan for a double envelopment and instead told Stewart to go at once out the Lickskillet Road to Lee’s assistance. Stewart added the weight of one division to the contest before sundown, without appreciable effect. “Each attack was less vigorous and had less chance than the one before it,” a Union veteran was to note.

Alarmed by reports coming in all afternoon from west of Atlanta, Hood had Hardee turn his corps over to Cheatham, who had returned to his division, and proceed without delay to Ezra Church to take charge of the other two. Old Reliable arrived to find that the battle had sputtered out, and made no effort to revive it. Lee and Stewart between them had lost some 2500 killed and wounded — about the same number that had fallen along Peachtree Creek eight days ago — as compared to Howard’s loss of a scant 700. Nor was that the worst of it, according to Hardee, who afterwards declared: “No action of the campaign probably did so much to demoralize and dishearten the troops engaged in it.”

Sherman knew now that he had been wrong, these past five days, in thinking that Hood had shot his wad in the Battle of Atlanta. He would have been considerably closer to the truth, however, if he had reverted to this belief on the night that followed the Battle of Ezra Church. Moreover, there were Confederates in the still smoky woods, out beyond Howard’s unbroken lines, who would have agreed with him; almost.

“Say, Johnny,” one of Logan’s soldiers called across the breastworks, into the outer darkness. “How many of you are there left?”

“Oh, about enough for another killing,” some butternut replied.

This attitude on both sides, now that another month drew to a close, was reflected in their respective casualty lists. Including his cavalry subtractions, which were heavy, Sherman had lost in July about 8000 killed, wounded, and missing — roughly the number that fell in June, and better than a thousand fewer than fell in May. The over-all Federal total, from the outset back at Tunnel Hill, came to just under 25,000.
Hood, on the other hand, had suffered 13,000 casualties in the course of his three sorties, which brought the Confederate total, including Johnston’s, to 27,500. That was about the number Lee had lost during the same three-month span in Virginia, whereas Sherman had lost considerably fewer than half as many as Meade. Grant could well be proud of his western lieutenant, if and when he got around to comparing the cost, in men per mile, of the campaigns in Georgia and the Old Dominion, West and East.

Still, there was a good deal more to war than mere killing and maiming. “Lee’s army will be your objective point,” he had instructed Meade before the jump-off, only to have the eastern offensive wind up in a stalemate, a digging contest outside Petersburg. Similarly, he had told Sherman to “move against Johnston’s army,” and the red-haired Ohioan had done just that — so long as the army was Johnston’s. But now that it was Hood’s, and had come out swinging, a change set in: particularly after Ezra Church, the third of Hood’s three roaring sorties. Lopsided as that victory had been for Sherman, it served warning that, in reaching for the railroad in his adversary’s rear, his infantry might do no better than his cavalry had done, and indeed might suffer as severely in the process.

Inching southward all the following week he found rebel intrenchments bristling in his path. On August 5, having brought Schofield around in the wake of Howard, he reinforced him with a corps from Thomas and ordered the drive on the railroad resumed. Schofield tried, the following morning, but was soon involved in the toils of Utoy Creek and suffered a bloody repulse. It was then that the change in Sherman — or, rather, in his definition of his goal — became complete. Formerly the Gate City had been no more than the anvil on which he intended to hammer the insurgent force to pieces. Now it became the end-all objective of his campaign. He would simply pound the anvil.

“I do not deem it prudent to extend any more to the right,” he wired Halleck next day, “but will push forward daily by parallels, and make the inside of Atlanta too hot to be endured.”

In line with McPherson’s proposal at their farewell interview, he sent to Chattanooga for siege guns and began a long-range shelling of the city, firing over the heads of its defenders and into its business and residential districts. “Most of the people are gone; it is now simply a big fort,” he informed his wife that week, and while this was by no means true at the time, it became increasingly the case with every passing day of the bombardment. “I can give you no idea of the excitement in Atlanta,” a southern correspondent wrote. “Everybody seems to be hurrying off, especially the women. Wagons loaded with household furniture and everything else that can be packed upon them crowd every street, and women old and young and children innumerable are hurrying to and fro. Every train of cars is loaded to its utmost capacity.
The excitement beats everything I ever saw, and I hope I may never witness such again.” Presently, though the destruction of property was great and the shelling continued day and night, the citizens learned to take shelter in underground bombproofs, as at Vicksburg the year before, and Hood said later that he never heard “one word from their lips expressive of dissatisfaction or willingness to surrender.” Sherman’s reaction was to step up the rate of fire. “We can pick out almost any house in town,” he boasted to Halleck. He was by nature “too impatient for a siege,” he added, but “One thing is certain. Whether we get inside of Atlanta or not, it will be a used-up community when we are done with it.”