Never Call Retreat (49 page)

It looked like a bad place to try to make a finish fight. Johnston had his men arrayed in front of Dalton, Georgia, a junction point on the railroad to Atlanta, thirty miles southeast of Chattanooga. West of Dalton, extending several miles to the north and south of the town, there was a craggy mountain called Rocky Face Ridge, coming almost to a knife-edge at its crest, with its western wall almost perpendicular. The main approach from Chattanooga came down through an opening near the northern end of this ridge, a gap with the ominous name of Buzzard Roost, held by Hood's corps. This position was so tough and had been fortified with such care that Sherman (always a man for the picturesque word or phrase) called it "the terrible door of death." A few miles to the south there was a narrower opening, Dug Gap, where the prospects were even worse. A stronger defensive position could hardly have been invented, and Confederate Pat Cleburne was conservative when he said that if Sherman tried to fight his way through here Johnston could hold him off for months, perhaps even until winter, killing numerous Yankees the while.

Sherman believed he knew what to do about this. Thirteen miles south of Dalton the railroad that came up from Atlanta ran through a town called Resaca, and a few miles west of Resaca was the opening of a long shallow valley, Snake Creek Gap, which angled off to the northwest toward the old Chickamauga battlefield. Snake Creek Gap thus was an avenue leading straight to Joe Johnston's lifeline, and by some flaw in Confederate arrangements—Cleburne blamed disobedience of orders by the cavalry—the gap had been left unprotected. So Sherman planned to have Thomas and Schofield press ostentatiously against Rocky Face Ridge while McPherson slipped in through Snake Creek Gap to break the railroad at Resaca. Johnston would have to make a disastrous retreat; attacked in front and in rear, and cut off from supplies, his army might well have to surrender or disperse.

It was a good plan, and as a matter of fact George Thomas had worked it out, and had asked permission to execute it, away back in February. In the general reshuffling of Federal command arrangements his proposal had been lost to view; now Sherman was reviving it, and he might have won the war with it if his insight and his luck had been a little better.

Believing that McPherson would move faster than Thomas, Sherman used Thomas for the holding operation and McPherson for the stroke at the rear, and his orders to McPherson were a little too mild: McPherson was to break the railroad at Resaca and then dig in at the mouth of the gap and prepare to smite the Rebels when they took off in flight. In other words, Sherman was using his most powerful unit for a feint that a smaller force could have made, and was striking his main blow with much less than his full strength; and, arranging things so, he gave the commander of his striking force orders that had a fatally defensive overtone. In addition, the situation at Resaca was not at all as Sherman had supposed it would be. Added together, these factors brought frustration.

The armies moved as ordered. Schofield and Thomas demonstrated around the terrible door of death, at considerable cost in casualties, and McPherson moved down Snake Creek Gap, came out at Resaca on May 9—and found the place strongly held by Confederate infantry and artillery. He advanced tentatively, drew a heavy fire, considered that if he moved on to break the railroad he would expose himself to a ruinous flank attack, and went back to the mouth of the gap, dug in, and awaited developments. Sherman ruefully said later that McPherson had had the sort of opportunity that a soldier gets only once in a lifetime—he could have walked right through Resaca, he said, overstating the case slightly—but he confessed that McPherson was entirely justified in what he did by the orders he had received.
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So McPherson stayed there, and both armies regrouped at Resaca, Johnston moving down east of Rocky Face Ridge and Sherman coming down in McPherson's trail—and the big trap was not sprung.

One reason for McPherson's trouble was the fact that a thousand miles to the west General Banks had got entangled along the Red River in a campaign he could neither break off nor win. His projected advance against Mobile—the "main feature" of the whole western operation, according to Sherman—was neither made nor threatened, and Richmond ordered Bishop Polk to come to Johnston's aid with an army corps that should have been fully occupied in southern Alabama. As a result, a division of 5000 of Polk's soldiers under Brigadier General James Cantey got to Resaca on May 7. If Thomas and his 60,000 Cumberlands had come down through Snake Creek Gap they could have shouldered this force out of the way and Johnston would have been caught, but Cantey was just strong enough to make McPherson wait.
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Beginning on May 13 there was sharp fighting at Resaca, and after three days of it Sherman had lost 6800 men and Johnston's position remained intact. Johnston had lost nearly as many men, but Bishop Polk had come into camp with another division, Loring's, and his army was stronger than it had been when the campaign began. Sherman had clearly been foiled in his effort to destroy the force that opposed him.'
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Then the campaign began to fall into the pattern that it followed all the way to Atlanta.

Keeping most of his army in front of Johnston at Resaca, Sherman sent infantry and cavalry on a long swing beyond his right, striking south to hit the railroad in Johnston's rear. Heavily outnumbered, Johnston could do nothing but shift his own army to meet this threat. He evacuated Resaca, ordering things so deftly that the Federals confessed he left behind not so much as a solitary wagon or a disabled cannon, and he marched down across the Oostenaula River and halted at Adairsville, fifteen miles to the south. Again Sherman skirmished in his front and sent out a flanking column beyond the Confederate left, and again Johnston quickly shifted his army to meet him, going ten miles south to Cassville, where he posted his troops north and north-east of the town.

Sherman's advance elements came out, a long spray of skirmishers in their front, there was a hard rear-guard action, and Johnston rode forward to study the situation. He realized, presently, that a good half of the Federal army was off to the west, at a town called Kingston—beginning, apparently, another of those flanking maneuvers—and it struck him that he had a fine chance to crush the half that was in his immediate front. Posting Hardee's corps off to the left, to guard against the Federals at Kingston, he ordered Hood and Polk to make the attack.

First and last, Hood complained that Johnston would rather retreat than fight, and he lodged these complaints in the highest quarters. But now, on May 19, when Johnston ordered a fight, Hood found reasons why a fight should not be made. He advanced a mile or so, reported that Federal troops were menacing his right and rear—a delusion, for there were no Federals in that vicinity—and took up a defensive position. Johnston then pulled back to a ridge south of Cassville and, after dark, Hood and Polk—who had not been especially co-operative when Bragg tried to go on the offensive—went to Johnston and told him he must retreat, arguing that they could not hold their ground next day because the Federals held a strong position and had artillery posted so that it could blast the whole Confederate line. Johnston thought they were wrong, and when he was able to get in touch with Hardee he found that Hardee thought so too; still, he did not see how he could attack if two of his three corps commanders were convinced that they were going to be defeated, and so, reluctantly, he ordered another retreat. This time he took his army south of the Etowah River and posted it around Allatoona Pass, where the Atlanta railroad passed through a defile in a forbidding rocky ridge.
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This was no place for a frontal attack, and Sherman did not dream of making one. He relied again on the flanking operation, this one on a large scale. Twenty-five miles south and slightly east of his headquarters at Kingston there was a little nowhere of a place called Dallas, notable because it was the center for a modest network of country roads and also because it was a dozen miles behind Johnston's position at Allatoona Pass. If Sherman could reach Dallas quickly he might get behind Johnston and cut him off from Atlanta, and so he sent McPherson off on a wide arc, marching for Dallas, and brought Thomas and Schofield down farther eastward, where they could keep Johnston from breaking into the Federal rear.

Johnston recognized the move and marched his men over to meet it, and on May 25 the armies began a round of vicious engagements near Dallas, the Federals trying to brush past the Confederate left and failing. The roads were bad, the country was inexpressibly dreary with scattered farms making lonely clearings in the spiky forests, there was heavy rain, and the soldiers floundered into a series of battles with homespun names like New Hope Church, Pumpkin Vine Creek, and Pickett's Mills. By the Chickamauga standard these were not large battles; mostly they were fought by divisions or brigades, each fight isolated from the others but all developing a singular characteristic—it was almost impossible to win one of them, in the ordinary sense, because no attack could really succeed. The smallest knoll or ravine or stand of dense underbrush could become a place where determined men might hold on as long as they had ammunition, and even when the fighting stopped the battle lines were so close together that the shooting would flare up savagely if either side tried to move.

It was here that the soldiers learned the value of entrenchments. Sherman called it "a big Indian war," and said that in this wooded country an enterprising foe could, in a remarkably short time, make an almost impassable barrier of felled trees and earth parapets; the Confederates used spade and ax so fast, he said, that they could build new works as fast as he could dislodge them from the old ones, they were always protected by these barricades, and they were so obscured by branches and underbrush that "we cannot see them until we receive a sudden and deadly fire."
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The campaign became a queer blend of rapid movement and utter immobility. Johnston had slaves dig trenches in advance, and his army had ready-made protection almost everywhere it went; when it did not, the men in the ranks dug themselves in without delay whenever they came to what looked like a place to fight. Federal soldiers did the same, on the sound theory that an unprotected man could not fight a man who had protection, and the interconnected trench systems became intricate and elaborate and sometimes seemed to cover half of north Georgia. A Federal soldier asserted that one area measuring roughly ten by twenty miles "was cut up by earthworks almost as thick as furrows in a ploughed field," said there was hardly half a square mile that was not so marked, and estimated that between 400 and 500 miles of earthworks had been built by the two armies in the six weeks following their arrival at Dallas. There was no end to the skirmishing, picket-line sniping and general volleying that went on from these trenches, and for a time the Army of the Cumberland was expending 200,000 rounds of small arms ammunition every day. Veteran soldiers grew very canny when it came to attacking trenches, and some ardent generals thought they were losing their fighting edge. General Schofield saw it otherwise, saying that reluctance to make hopeless assaults simply showed that the men had good sense. He added a remark that applied to both sides: "The veteran American soldier fights very much as he has been accustomed to work his farm or run his sawmill; he wants to see a fair prospect that it is going to pay."
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It soon became clear that the effort to beat Joe Johnston in this area was never going to pay, and Sherman put his troops on the road again; moving this time northeast toward the railroad line, and then striking southeast in an attempt to get past Johnston's right. Federal cavalry managed to compel the Confederates to evacuate the works at Allatoona Pass, thus clearing Sherman's own line of supply back to Chattanooga, but Sherman could not get past Johnston; that officer once more saw what was coming and moved to meet it, so that Sherman presently found his men facing a long line of trenches that ran across mountainous country a few miles in front of the town of Marietta. Once more the business of shifting, feinting, and probing began, the weather became worse—one man recalled that there were three weeks of rain during the month of June—and Sherman grew edgy. His temper flared up once with singular results; examining the lines opposite a height called Pine Mountain on June 14, he saw on that eminence a group of Confederate officers with field glasses studying his position, and he irritably told General Howard to have his artillery throw a few shells to drive them away. A Federal battery went into action, and the second shell it sent over struck Bishop Polk and killed him instantly. (The legend grew that Sherman with his own hands had sighted the gun that fired this shell, but that was not so, and Sherman did not until some time later know that Polk had even been present.)
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If the commanding general was developing a temper there was some reason for it. His line of supply was growing longer, and the need to protect it kept men away from the firing line; early in June he told Halleck that he had garrisons at Dalton, Resaca, Rome, Kingston, and Allatoona Pass, and although reinforcements made up for these detachments and for battle losses the fact remained that after a month of hard campaigning he still had not really come to grips with Joe Johnston. He briefly fell victim to the suspicion that all of these trenches had done something to army morale, and he wrote to Grant that Thomas' army was dreadfully slow. "A fresh furrow in a ploughed field will stop the whole column, and all begin to entrench," he wrote. "I have again and again tried to impress on Thomas that we must assail and not defend."
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The enemy was there to be assailed, and late in June Sherman made up his mind to try it. Conditions were unfavorable. Johnston held a strong line, with the center solidly posted on the wooded slopes of Kennesaw Mountain, Little Kennesaw to the south, and a rise now known as Cheatham Hill. The defense had all the advantages. But the long rains had raised the creeks and soaked the dirt roads so badly that flanking movements were impossible, stalemate here was intolerable, Atlanta was little more than twenty miles away if one measured the distance in an air line—and it is possible that Sherman remembered how Thomas' soldiers had stormed an even worse position on Missionary Ridge, seven months ago. Anyway, on June 27 his guns opened a furious cannonade, and in the middle of the morning Thomas and McPherson sent three divisions forward in a driving, headlong assault up the mountainside.