Never Call Retreat (62 page)

By noon of the next day, November 30, Schofield's army reached Franklin, on the Harpeth River, a dozen miles to the north. Finding no pontoons to make a crossing, Schofield entrenched his men at the top of a long rise on the south side of the river, put details to work building temporary bridges, made preparations to continue the retreat and waited for his opponents to come up.

They came up fast, driven by Hood's fury, and when Hood saw the Federal battle line he ordered an immediate assault: a wild, reckless order, born of anger over the failure at Spring Hill. With Forrest to lead the march, Hood could have repeated the flanking maneuver that had eased Schofield out of the way earlier. As an alternative, if he had simply waited a few hours the Federals would have been gone: Schofield was in telegraphic communication with Thomas and learned that he could retire to Nashville, eighteen miles away, whenever his trains were safe, and he was prepared to leave Franklin that evening.
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In addition, the Federal position here was as powerful as the one Meade held at Gettysburg against Pickett, and to attack it was to invite a repetition of Pickett's fate. But Hood had a score to settle— with the Yankees, with his own men, probably with himself —and so he lined his men up in a broad front and sent them straight on to the Federal line.

The field was a long treeless slope, with tough westerners dug in at the crest, taking everything in over the sights of their rifles, quietly waiting; and two miles away 20,000 soldiers as good as any in the country dressed their ranks, took a last speculative look to right and left, and marched up under the cold autumn sun. For months their commander had complained that they were too defensive-minded to fight out in the open, and now they were in the open for General Hood to see. They made their charge, reached and briefly cracked the Yankee line, got into desperate hand-to-hand fighting in back yards and gardens around a big cotton-gin house, were driven off by a shattering counterattack—and at last had to give it up, after they had done all that any soldiers could have done and more than any ought to have been asked to do; a survivor wrote that "the enemy's line was crossed in one or two places, but no man who went over was ever known to return." In fighting that began late in the afternoon and lasted until after dark, nearly 6500 Confederates were lost, among them twelve general officers. One of the dead was General Pat Cleburne, who tried to talk Hood out of this attack and went into action remarking: "If we are to die, let us die like men." Another general killed was a South Carolina brigadier named States Rights Gist. In the fall of 1860 he had gone across the cotton belt as an emissary from his state, trying to concert united action in the face of a Black Republican's election; his mission ending now in a Federal trench.
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The fighting continued far into the evening, but the Federal position was unshaken. Hood's army was half-wrecked, and for whatever it was worth to him General Hood had learned that his men still had the heart to fight. During the night Schofield got his men out of their trenches and went on back to Nashville, and Hood's shattered army followed, to take position on the hills a few miles south of that city and await further developments.

There was nothing much to wait for except disaster, because by now Hood was strategically bankrupt. He was far too weak to storm Thomas' lines: Nashville was the most strongly fortified city in America, A. J. Smith and his troop: were on hand, and Thomas was building up an army that would soon number 55,000 men or more, most of them veterans who had learned their way around many battlefields To swing out past this host and head for the Ohio was a vain dream, to sidestep and march for Virginia was equally vain, and to turn about and go back south would be to confess total defeat; and so the Confederates waited, expecting nothing, while Thomas methodically got ready to hit them And that was how things were on December 6 when Abraham Lincoln assured the Congress that even with Sherman off in the darkness the Federal power now was strong enough ‘to confront and hold in check every active force of the enemy."

If this was true, as it unquestionably was, the war was about to be won, and Mr. Lincoln was looking to the future which was still plastic. Americans at that moment had s strange, terrifying power. Not only could they shape the future; they had conquered time, so that what they did now could send the future's meaning backward, putting significance into the insensate killings that ran from Franklin all the way back to Shiloh and Bull Run. Out of pain and horror already endured they could light a beacon fire. Mr. Lincoln invited the Congress to adopt and submit to the state; a constitutional amendment that would outlaw slavery for ever.

Here was the final step. The President had come to it slowly, with many heart-searchings. When the war began he had endorsed a statement of war aims confessing that the peculiar institution was not to be touched, and when he proclaimed emancipation he did it hesitantly, freeing slaves only partially and where the invocation of freedom looked convenient to those who had never worn chains. Even now two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, most of America's slaves were still slaves by any law anyone could call to mind. Only the amendment would strike off all the chains, and it was the amendment that the President was demanding now.

He had been groping his way to this point all along. The light to guide his feet had been there from the first, but it had been hard to know when to follow it. In the faraway winter of 1861, when he was on his way to Washington to become President of a dissolving Union, he had spoken broodingly to the New Jersey Senate about the meaning of an earlier revolution. It always seemed to him (he said then) that George Washington's army at Trenton had been struggling "for something more than common . . . something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world, to all time to come." He had gone on to say that he hoped himself to become an instrument in the hands of the Almighty "and of this, His almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle."
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Now the instrument was ready to act, offering opportunity to the almost chosen people who had paid a terrible price to reach this moment.

This was fair enough; but Mr. Lincoln faced a problem in arithmetic. The Congress he was talking to had been elected in the fall of 1862, when many Republicans were defeated. In the spring of 1864 the amendment had passed the Senate, but the House of Representatives had turned it down. (Actually, the House had approved the bill by 93 votes against 65, with 23 absent or not voting; but this was not enough because a resolution sending a constitutional amendment to the states needed a two-thirds majority.) The same House would handle it now, and the case was unchanged . . . except that the war was visibly nearing its end, Mr. Lincoln had won re-election, and things began to look different. The President was going to try it.

He might have waited. In 1865 there would be a new Congress, elected in the Republican landslide of 1864, and the lower House then would unquestionably have a two-thirds majority for the 13th Amendment. But Mr. Lincoln refused to wait. Under the idealism that had seen something more than common beyond the blood-stained snows at Trenton he had the objective eye of a tactician, and he saw the amendment now as he had seen the Emancipation Proclamation: as a means to help win the war. Rightly or wrongly, he believed that with the destruction of slavery written into the Federal constitution—and, most particularly, written in with the support of the slave-holding border states that had never left the Union—the South would realize that it was useless to prolong a losing fight in the hope of winning some slavery-saving concession. He made this clear when he wrote to Congressman James S. Rollins of Missouri, urging him to support the amendment: "This is my chief hope and main reliance to bring the war to a speedy close. . . . The passaj of this amendment will clinch the whole subject; it will brir the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close."
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As a matter of practical fact this tactical stroke was m really needed. The war was indeed moving rapidly to a close not because of anything Congress did but because of things done by the soldiers commanded by General Thomas and General Sherman, and this was obvious long before the amendment came to a vote.

On December 15, a fortnight after Hood had appeared in front of Nashville, Thomas completed his preparation marched out of the city, and struck Hood's army with overwhelming force. Hood retreated a few miles, drew a new line, tried to make a fresh stand, and was struck again on the next day, and this time his army was completely routed. It went streaming south to the Tennessee River and beyond hopelessly beaten, saved from total destruction only by Forest's skillful handling of the rear guard. It reassembled, at last, far down in Tupelo, Mississippi, out of the war. Hood was relieved of his command, and although some of his soldiers were used later in other fields this army was no longer a factor in anybody's calculations. Thomas had won one of the decisive victories of the entire war.

It seems strange, but the one man who had really worried about Hood was the soldier who ordinarily did not worry about anything: Ulysses S. Grant.

The fortnight Hood spent facing Thomas at Nashville was the only time when Grant's nerves got the better of him Grant apparently overestimated both Hood's numbers and the strategic possibilities open to him. He also felt that Thomas the solid rock of defensive fighting, might not move smartly enough to meet this threat and he entirely ignored the fact that a December ice storm made it impossible for Thomas to move at all for a few days. In a most uncharacteristic way Grant became obsessed briefly with the thought of the calamity that would come if Hood by some mischance got away and made that march to the Ohio. He harassed Thomas with demands for immediate action; signed an order relieving the man in favor of Schofield; suspended the order before was sent, then ordered John A. Logan west to take charge - and, at last, made up his mind to go to Nashville himself and take personal command. Logan had got as far as Louisville and Grant had reached Washington when news of Thomas' sweeping victory arrived. Logan came back east, and Grant sent Thomas his congratulations and returned to his own lines in front of Petersburg. This one time, if never before or afterward, General Grant had had the jitters.
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While the welcome news from Nashville was still being digested, Sherman came up out of the darkness and captured Savannah. He had marched 60,000 men through the heart of the South, leaving a blackened desolation behind him and proving once and for all that the final hours were arriving. His march had been practically unopposed. The Confederacy had been able to send some most distinguished generals to Georgia—Beauregard, Bragg, Hardee, enough top brass for a host—but in this hour of supreme crisis it could not provide enough enlisted men to make an effective fight. Sherman went where he pleased and did what he pleased because the Confederacy simply was not strong enough to stop him. His march to the sea was not so much a military campaign as a convincing demonstration of the Federal power to smash things.

That power was used relentlessly. Sherman began by burning Atlanta, and when his army moved out the XX Corps was rear guard; it marched through smoke clouds, with bands playing, the soldiers singing "John Brown's Body." The army went down to the sea like a prairie fire forty miles wide, living on the supplies it took from plantation barns and smokehouses and pantries, looting where it did not burn, making war with the lid off as if the whole business had come down to a wild Halloween brawl. What the regular foraging parties did not take was seized by a swarm of uncontrolled stragglers, and what these men missed was often enough despoiled by Confederate deserters and by casuals from Wheeler's cavalry, and all in all the rich Georgia farming country got a heavy scar. One of Slocum's New Yorkers confessed that "we had a gay old campaign," and he defined it thus: "Destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally." A Confederate officer estimated that at least 10,000 slaves ran away to follow the army, and said that hundreds of these died of hunger, disease, or exposure along the way; he added that the Federals killed so many cattle, hogs, mules, and horses that "the whole region stunk with putrefying carcasses, and earth and air were filled with innumerable turkey buzzards battening upon their thickly strewn death feasts." Sherman himself wrote that his army had inflicted $100,000,000 worth of damage. Of this, he said, about one fifth "inured to our advantage" while "the remainder is simple waste and destruction."
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The army came up to Savannah in mid-December. It stormed Fort McAllister, on the Ogeechee River, thus getting in touch with the Federal fleet and establishing a secure supply line, and Sherman occupied the land approaches and prepared to capture the city. He was careless, so that General Hardee and the 10,000 Confederates who held the place found an opening and slipped out, escaping into South Carolina, but Sherman was unabashed; he wanted Savannah as a place where he could rest and refit and prepare for a new campaign, and he seems to have cared very little what happened to Hardee. He marched into the city, his troops suddenly stopped looting and went on their good behavior, and on December 22 Sherman sent a jaunty telegram to President Lincoln announcing that he was presenting him with the city of Savannah as a Christmas gift. From Savannah, in due time, his army could go anywhere—clear across the Carolinas to Richmond, if Grant wanted it that way— and the fact was clear to the blindest. In Richmond the Assistant Secretary of War, John A. Campbell, wrote to his former colleague, Justice Samuel Nelson of the United States Supreme Court, offering to confer about means of ending the war; to a friend Campbell confessed that "it will all end in reconstruction and that the only question now is the manner of it."
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