Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (43 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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As the army advanced, the men acting as foragers quickly established themselves as an odd elite. Each morning some thirty or forty men from each brigade set out, often on captured horses or mules and frequently using captured carts, some men moving ahead of their massive column and others moving along the flanks. Known as “bummers,” their job was to pass through the countryside, taking anything useful that they found on farms or plantations—corn for men and horses, vegetables, livestock—and bring it to the roads on which the main forces were passing, where the regular supply wagons would take charge of what they had stripped from the land. Their skills at finding useful things impressed the blacks on the farms and plantations: one just-freed slave said, “Yankee soldiers have noses like hounds. Massa hid his horses way out dar in de swamp. Some soldiers come along. All at once dey held up dere noses and sniffed and sniffed, and stopped still and sniffed, and turned into de swamp and held up dere noses and sniffed, and … went right straight to where de horses was tied in de swamp.”
A number of foragers frequently acted for their own profit, sometimes harshly, doing things such as choking an aged plantation owner until he told the soldiers where the family’s silver dinner service was concealed. In addition to their foraging, the bummers acted as scouts, directing larger units forward to attack Confederate patrols they had spotted. Occasionally they were able to team up among themselves and rout small parties of enemy horsemen. Both the bummers and the marching rank and file picked up various animals as pets and brought them along: in addition to dogs and cats, there were lambs, raccoons, and hundreds of gamecocks, the last pitted against one another in nightly cockfights.
Other men, including freed slaves who were being paid for their labor, pried lengths of rails loose from railroad ties, heated them in the middle until they were orange in color and soft enough to be twisted, and left them wrapped around trees; these became known as “Sherman Neckties.” Occasionally these workers bent the rails into the letters “U” and “S” and placed the “U S” on a hillside for the Southern populace to contemplate. They also became so skilled at rebuilding destroyed bridges and clearing enemy obstructions on the roads that when it became necessary to open closed tunnels, they did it so swiftly that the Confederates began to say that the Yankees had brought their own spare tunnels with them. As for the impression Sherman’s advancing columns made on the slaves who became free as they passed, one of them joyously shouted, “Dar’s millions of ’em—millions! Is dere anybody left up north?”
The original orders were to restrict the foraging to supplies needed by the army and to avoid entering Southern homes, but a student of the campaign observed that “the distinction between forage and pillage is easily obscured.” In addition to the bummers, rank-and-file soldiers began entering the houses of Southern civilians and stealing whatever objects struck their fancy. In one town, a Union officer saw “soldiers emerging from doorways and backyards, bearing quilts, plates, poultry, and pigs.” This kind of looting led to confrontations with enraged Southern women, most of whom equaled and often surpassed the most ardent Confederate soldiers in their detestation of the Northerners coming into their neighborhoods. Few among the Union soldiers, to whom one long red road through Georgia looked like another, comprehended the sense of emotional violation, existing quite apart from the issues of secession and slavery, felt by Southerners who saw only an invasion of their land. A man from Iowa was met by a Georgia woman on the porch of her house, and she launched into him: “My husband is a captain in the Confederate army and I’m proud of it. You can rob us, you can take everything we have. I can live on pine straw the rest of my days. You can kill us, but you can’t conquer us.”
Some of these encounters, including situations in which Union soldiers were not engaged in theft, turned into interesting debates. A major from Illinois found an old woman, the mistress of a plantation, lecturing him that the Northern policy of freeing the slaves would lead to what she called “Amalgamation”—racially mixed children. “The old lady forced it on me,” he recalled, “and as there were three or four very light colored mulatto children running around the house, they furnished me an admirable weapon—She didn’t explain to my entire satisfaction how her slaves came to be so much whiter than African Slaves are usually supposed to be.” When Southern women stared disdainfully at them, one of Sherman’s soldiers wrote, “The boys would stir up the female Rebels, just to hear them talk, like the boys at the menagerie stir up the lions just to hear them roar.”
Other Union soldiers had more amiable experiences. Brief as some of these meetings with Southern girls were, they made an impression. On the same day, a captain from Ohio met a Miss Glenn, who he noted in his diary was “well dressed polite and agreeable … pretty foot and ankle, beautiful complexion,” and later encountered two sisters, “one talkative, rebellious but sensible in every other way, both good looking and one finely developed bust, luscious.”
It was in Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia, that things became uglier. Reaching there on the ninth day of their march, the troops saw for the first time some Union soldiers who had escaped from the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. Starved and sick, with what a colonel from Indiana described as a “wild-animal stare” as they spoke, these living skeletons told tales of their mistreatment that quickly spread through Sherman’s ranks. When a Southern woman walked up to a federal soldier on the street in Milledgeville and spat on him, he and his comrades did not touch her but burnt down her house. At the same time, the men became aware of an order from Jefferson Davis to all Confederate officers in Georgia, exhorting them to make “every effort” to obstruct the Union advance, these measures to include “planting sub-terra shells [land mines].” (Sherman’s response to this was, when his men suspected land mines had been laid in front of them, to have Confederate prisoners take the risks of digging them up.) On a lighter note, a group of troops spontaneously conducted a mock session in the state’s legislative chamber in Milledgeville, voting Georgia out of the Confederacy and back into the Union, and named a committee to punish Jefferson Davis, if he were captured, by kicking him repeatedly from behind.
The army that left Milledgeville was required to move only ten, instead of fifteen, miles a day. One reason for this was the intensification of the manner in which the countryside was being laid waste. Foragers who had begun by rounding up chickens and pigs now decided that wrecking farm equipment and burning barns was in keeping with the idea of destroying the South’s ability to raise food. Although many houses were left standing, the next step went from torching a farmer’s barn to setting fire to his house, and a lot of bummers took the added time to do that. The headquarters companies of Sherman’s major units had brought with them flares that could be shot aloft at night, so that each of the four columns would know where the others were. This was no longer necessary: the location of each advancing corps could be seen by the flames along its route.
There were exceedingly few cases of rape, murder, or beating of civilians, but the original standards of behavior for the march largely vanished. Sherman later wrote: “I know that in the beginning, I too had the old West Point notion that pillage was a capital crime, and punished it by shooting.” In that view, confiscating crops and all kinds of food, as well as animals and equipment, was acceptable as long as it was for the good of the army as a whole, but a man was severely punished for stealing for his own profit. As the campaign progressed, this distinction vanished, and Sherman said that he and his officers “ceased to quarrel with our own men about such minor things, leaving minor depredations to be charged up to the rebels who had forced us into the war, and deserved all they got and
more
.”
The troops became particularly aggressive when they came to the handsome houses of those who were both slaveholders and the owners of objects they might steal. The mistress of a plantation described the scene as Union cavalrymen entered her house and plundered it. “It is impossible to imagine the horrible uproar and stampede through the house, all of them yelling, cursing, quarreling, and running from one room to another in wild confusion. Such was their blasphemous language, their horrible countenances and appearance … their mouths filled with curses and bitterness and lies.”
The thousands of freed blacks, most of them determined to stay right with the Union troops they hailed as their liberators, added liveliness and confusion to the daily scenes of the march. The black men walked beside the troops, happy to carry their muskets. At night they cooked spicy dishes and danced around the campfires. Many black girls gave themselves freely to the young troops, and one man noted that “I have seen officers themselves very attentive to the wants of pretty octoroon girls, and provide them with horses to ride.”
It was not all levity and licentiousness. An officer from Indiana wrote his wife:
It was very touching to see the vast number of colored women following us with babies in their arms, and little ones … clinging to their tattered skirts. One poor creature, while nobody was looking, hid two boys, five years old, in a wagon, intending, I suppose, that they should see the land of freedom if she couldn’t. Babies tumbled from the back of mules to which they had been told to cling, and were drowned in the swamps, while mothers stood by the roadside crying for their lost children and doubting whether to continue with the advancing army.
 
Ironically, Sherman, who was being hailed by the freed blacks as their savior, still saw them as greatly inferior beings and remained opposed to enlisting black men as soldiers. At the moment, he was out of communication with anyone in the North, but he would soon write to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, “The negro should be a free race, but not put on any equality with the Whites,” and to an old friend in St. Louis he said in a letter, “A nigger as such is a most excellent fellow, but he is not fit to marry, to associate, or vote with me, or mine.” Sherman was far more interested in military victory than in ending slavery, and he worried about how he could continue to feed the increasing masses of freed slaves who insisted on accompanying his troops on their way to the sea. Nonetheless, he had moments of revulsion at things he saw. Coming to a plantation near Milledgeville owned by the Confederate general Howell Cobb, who had been President Buchanan’s secretary of the treasury before the war, Sherman inspected the wretched slave quarters and was struck by the pitiful condition of the slaves who greeted him as their hero. He ordered his men to “spare nothing,” and the destruction began.
Amid all this, Confederate bullets were still killing a number of Union soldiers as they moved through the countryside. Because this army had no rear bases with hospitals, the wounded had to be carried along day after day in wagons, with no hope of receiving full medical attention until the march ended. Some Union troops were captured in surprise Confederate forays. Two days after leaving Milledgeville, a major in an Illinois regiment wrote in his diary of the determined, punitive frame of mind that “has settled down over the army in its bivouac tonight. We have gone so far now in our triumphant march that we will not balk. It is a question of life and death for us, and the considerations of mercy and humanity must bow before the inexorable demands of self preservation.”
For those in Sherman’s army who thought about justifying it all, some were shocked when they saw that the backs of some freed slaves were a mass of scars from whippings, but for many the most comforting idea was that relatively bloodless violence, right then, could save much more bloodshed on both sides later. A soldier from Wisconsin said in a letter to his parents, “Anything and Everything, if it will help us and weaken them, is my motto,” but another enlisted man probably got closest to the soldiers’ deepest feelings when he wrote: “The prevailing feeling among the men was a desire to finish the job; they wanted to get back home.”
On December 10, Sherman neared Savannah. He had moved sixty-two thousand men through 225 miles of enemy territory in twenty-four days. His troops could smell but not see the ocean, because Savannah’s defender, General William J. Hardee, had flooded the rice fields along the coast, leaving just five causeways running into the city. Sherman decided not to attack Savannah along these exposed perilous approaches but to begin a siege and see if the enemy garrison of some eighteen thousand men would surrender.
Since no one in the North knew just where Sherman and his army were, he could not yet make contact with the federal ships that he was sure were offshore. His men would soon need more to eat, and for the moment they could not get any of the supplies of all kinds that he had been promised would be aboard those vessels.
Fort McAllister, a lightly garrisoned post on the south bank of the Ogeechee River, below the city, protected the city’s access to the Atlantic, and its twenty-three cannon denied any invading fleet the opportunity to come close enough to bombard it. Although keeping to his decision not to launch a major attack at Savannah itself, within three days Sherman had one of his divisions ready to storm this fort. Just before sunset on December 13, with his selected division about to make its attack, Sherman was watching from the roof of a rice mill beside the river. A Union steamship came into view down the river and used its signal flags to ask Sherman’s staff, “Is Fort McAllister taken?” Sherman signaled in response, “Not yet, but it will be in a minute.” Fifteen minutes later, after a tactically perfect assault that cost eleven men killed and eighty wounded, the fort surrendered.

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