This Great Struggle (47 page)

Later that day, Union signalmen intercepted a Confederate wigwag message from the mountaintop summoning an ambulance to retrieve Polk’s remains, and the next morning Federal skirmishers probed forward to find that the Rebels had abandoned Pine Mountain. Sherman wrote with grim satisfaction in a dispatch to Washington that day, “We killed Bishop Polk yesterday and made good progress today.” The bishop-general’s death was a blow to Confederate morale, especially within the Army of Tennessee and in the Confederate White House, off in Richmond, where Jefferson Davis, the admiring underclassman of Polk’s West Point days, lamented the loss as one of the worst that had befallen the Confederacy. White southerners had viewed the presence of a bishop among the leaders of their armies as evidence of the holy nature of their cause. Northerners had seen the prelate’s service as a sacrilege in the causes of slavery and rebellion. Whatever the moral impact of his Confederate career and sudden death, Polk, by his incompetence and stubborn willfulness as a general, had done much damage to Rebel fortunes west of the Appalachians, in the heartland of the South, where the decisive action was taking place. Thus, the shot Sherman’s gunners had fired produced mixed results.

Using the same methods that had persuaded the Rebels to relinquish Pine Mountain, Sherman, by stretching his line around one flank or the other and taking up advantageous artillery positions, succeeded in prying the Confederates out of several other segments of their line. Yet to the Union commander’s heightened frustration, his nemesis Johnston merely pulled his line back a few miles to an even stronger position anchored by Kennesaw Mountain. This time it seemed no amount of hitching and sidling would give Sherman the leverage he needed to dislodge Johnston from his lofty defenses. Sherman surmised that if Johnston had stretched his smaller army as far as Sherman’s larger forces had yet stretched, the Confederate line must be fatally thin somewhere, perhaps in the sector that included Kennesaw, where the natural strength of the position might have convinced the Confederate general he could afford to do so. A Union assault had driven this same Confederate army off of Missionary Ridge the preceding November. Perhaps it would work again. In any case, Sherman thought his repeated turning movements were becoming too predictable.

The attack went in on June 27. While elements of the Army of the Tennessee feinted against Johnston’s right and Schofield’s Army of the Ohio did the same on the Rebel left, one corps of the Army of the Tennessee assaulted the Confederate entrenchments on Kennesaw, and one corps of the Army of the Cumberland hit Johnston’s lines in the sector next door to the mountain. Both assaults ended in bloody failure before mid-morning.

The factor that Sherman had underestimated was the magnitude of the multiplying effect of the elaborate entrenchments both sides were routinely building this summer. Given the weapons technology of that era, the entrenchments made the tactical defensive all but invincible to anything less than a five- or six-to-one superiority in numbers by the attacking force. The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, as it came to be called, would go into the history books as Johnston’s greatest victory and Sherman’s worst blunder. As a set-piece defensive battle fought from entrenchments, it was characteristic of the Confederate general; as an ill-advised assault, it was out of character for his Union counterpart. The cost in casualties, about three thousand Union to about one thousand Confederate, was lower and less lopsided than most failed major assaults of the war. In Virginia that spring and summer, it would have been just another day of campaigning, but it stood out in Georgia because Sherman preferred other methods, and Johnston, happy in his entrenchments, let him use them.

Indeed, even as the assaults on the Kennesaw lines were running their bloody course, Schofield was finding that with Johnston’s attention focused on defending the Confederate center, the Army of the Ohio was able to pass around his left flank, several miles southwest of the scene of that day’s heavy fighting. In that sense, even the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain was a Union success, as Sherman shifted the Army of the Tennessee—his “whiplash,” as he called it, because of this army’s tactical flexibility and lightning speed— around to that end of the line to exploit Schofield’s success and turn the Kennesaw Mountain line.

Once again, as throughout the campaign to this point, Johnston faced the choice of either retreating or taking the offensive against Sherman in a battle in the open field. As before, Johnston chose retreat. Tramping down the back slopes of Kennesaw Mountain and their other positions along the line, the Confederates marched through Marietta under the eyes of its dismayed civilian population and took up a position several miles south of the town, near the hamlet of Smyrna, Georgia. Again Sherman threatened Johnston’s flanks, and again the Confederate retreated, this time to a semicircle of very strong fortifications on the north bank of the Chattahoochee River, covering the Western & Atlantic bridge. Johnston had had his chief engineer officer direct the construction of these works in advance and hoped from this position to be able to pose an insurmountable threat to any attempt Sherman might make to cross the river either upstream or down.

It proved a vain hope. Sherman, who in this campaign was demonstrating himself to be the war’s master of turning movements, successfully turned Johnston again, this time using Schofield’s army and crossing the Chattahoochee upstream from Johnston’s fortifications. Johnston, with his back to the river and in danger of being cut off should Schofield move in behind him on the south bank, quickly made his retreat, falling back behind Peachtree Creek, a tributary of the Chattahoochee. As in his previous retreats starting all the way up at Dalton, Johnston made the movement skillfully, but Johnston’s excessive willingness to retreat and surrender territory had previously hurt the Confederacy both in Virginia and in Mississippi and was part of the reason for the critical situation it now faced in Georgia.

Johnston’s army was backed up almost into the suburbs of Atlanta, and Peachtree Creek was the last natural obstacle left to defend. From hills on the north bank of the Chattahoochee, Sherman’s men could see the city toward which they had been marching and fighting for the past two months. The next time Sherman successfully turned Johnston, the Confederate general’s options would be either battle in the open field, as Sherman had been seeking throughout the campaign, or else the abandonment of Atlanta.

DAVIS SEEKS A FIGHTING GENERAL

Far off in Richmond, Jefferson Davis was deeply dissatisfied with the course of the campaign thus far. Back in the spring, before Sherman’s advance started, Davis had wanted Johnston to launch an offensive of his own, turning Sherman and perhaps finally recovering the vast territory and strategic advantage that the Confederacy had lost in its heartland. The president had offered to reinforce Johnston heavily if the general would undertake such a program. Johnston had refused every suggestion of offensive action but had insisted that Davis ought to send him the reinforcements anyway. When Sherman had advanced, Davis had indeed reinforced Johnston, ordering Polk to join him with his nineteen thousand, virtually the entire force that had been defending Alabama. Yet Johnston had still fallen back in the face of Sherman’s repeated turning movements, and despite almost constant skirmishing and the occasional repulse of a Union assault or two, the Confederate general had attempted nothing like the kind of all-out battle that might have had the potential, if all went well, to destroy Sherman’s force or compel it to retreat.

Though more than five hundred miles away, the Confederate president had kept close track of the campaign through various sources of information. Johnston’s reports, as was typical of that general, were relatively uncommunicative and gave no clue at all as to what Johnston might be planning in order to stop Sherman, but their very datelines, each progressively closer to Atlanta, told the story. Davis heard more about it from Georgia politicians, who were by now bombarding him with complaints and demands for a change of command in their state as more and more of their constituents passed under Union control or fled southward as refugees. Davis also had a source within the high command of the Army of Tennessee. Hood and Davis had become personally acquainted during the former’s convalescence in Richmond after his Chickamauga wound. Throughout the campaign in Georgia that spring and summer, Hood had sent Davis a steady stream of letters, reporting on operations in the kind of detail Johnston would not provide and presenting events—and his own performance—as he wished the president to perceive them.

Throughout the campaign Johnston’s dispatches to Richmond touted a single remedy for the situation in Georgia, and that was that the Confederate high command should send Nathan Bedford Forrest and his division of cavalry from Mississippi into Middle Tennessee, there to cut Sherman’s supply line. Davis rejected the proposal every time. Forrest was needed to protect Mississippi from Union forays, and besides, Johnston had his own cavalry and should send them to break the railroad in Tennessee. Johnston’s assertion that he could do nothing and that someone else ought to win the war for him was by this time all too familiar to the Confederate president. Johnston, for his part, claimed that he needed his own cavalry and could not spare them for the raid he wanted Forrest to make.

Sherman had, since before leaving Chattanooga, been concerned about the possibility of Forrest raiding his supply lines. Besides leaving small garrisons in blockhouses at key bridges and culverts along the railroad and pre-positioning repair crews and replacement parts for the tracks, Sherman had also arranged for Union expeditions, larger than Forrest’s command, to launch raids into Mississippi. Their goal was to destroy Forrest if possible but at all events to keep him busy in Mississippi. Major General Samuel D. Sturgis had led the first such venture, but he proved woefully inferior to Forrest in cunning and mental toughness. On June 10, while Sherman was facing Johnston’s lines on Pine, Brush, and Lost mountains, the wily Confederate scored his greatest tactical masterpiece, trouncing Sturgis at the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads near Tupelo, Mississippi. Sherman was disgusted when he heard the news, but as far as he was concerned even a tactical fiasco like Brice’s Crossroads was a strategic success if it kept Forrest in Mississippi and off his supply line in Tennessee. If necessary, Sherman could afford to send one such expedition after another for Forrest to thrash, as long as the ruthless Confederate stayed in Mississippi to do the thrashing.

For a second Mississippi expedition Sherman tasked Major General A. J. Smith commanding one of the corps of Sherman’s old Army of the Tennessee veterans that Banks had taken with him on his Red River Expedition. Smith’s competence and the hard-fighting skill of his troops had saved Banks from an even worse disaster in Louisiana. Now that that dismal campaign was at last over, Smith and company were available for other duty, and Sherman ordered him to go find Forrest and whip him. Smith did just that, getting the better of the Confederate raider and inflicting heavy casualties on his force at the July 14 Battle of Tupelo. Smith’s supply situation required him to return to his base immediately after the battle, without completing the destruction of Forrest’s command, but when Forrest tried to harass Smith’s return march the next day, one of Smith’s doughty midwestern soldiers shot the Confederate general in the foot, inflicting a minor wound but compounding Forrest’s frustration. Unlike Sturgis’s expedition, Smith’s had been both a tactical and a strategic success.

By that time, with the Army of Tennessee on the outskirts of Atlanta, Davis’s patience with Johnston was nearing an end. He had every reason to believe that the general would, within the next few weeks, abandon Atlanta with no more of a fight than he had put up during any of his other pauses in the long retreat from Dalton to the Chattahoochee, apparently content that despite whatever disasters had befallen the Confederacy on his watch, he was not to be blamed. Davis was well aware of the enormous transportation and manufacturing importance of Atlanta to the Confederacy and of the city’s even greater significance to the morale of both sides, and he was not willing to allow it to be given up the way Johnston showed every indication of being about to do. He sent a pointed telegram to Johnston demanding that the general spell out his plans for the defense of the city “so specifically as will enable me to anticipate events,” a clear indication that Davis expected Johnston to take the initiative against Sherman.
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Johnston replied that he was so badly outnumbered that he could do nothing but stand on the defensive and react to the enemy’s movements. This was exactly what he had been doing all the way down from Dalton, and every reaction had been a retreat.

Davis dispatched Braxton Bragg, who had by then become his top staff general in Richmond, to travel to Atlanta to investigate the situation and possibly replace Johnston with either of the Army of Tennessee’s two senior corps commanders, Hood or Hardee. Hardee’s near-mutinous behavior had helped to undermine Bragg during that general’s tenure in command of the Army of Tennessee, and he had turned down command of the army the preceding December. His army nickname, Old Reliable, was probably more of a commentary on the low average quality of the generals in the Army of Tennessee than it was a testimony to Hardee’s merits. Nothing in his career suggested him as a candidate for leading the kind of desperate fighting that was now going to be necessary if Atlanta were to be saved.