Southern Storm (56 page)

Sherman now applied
his
rules of war to the situation. Under certain conditions he accepted his enemy’s use of land mines, but this was not one of them. The finer points of his reasoning were later articulated by two of his staff officers, majors George W. Nichols and Henry Hitchcock:

The General turned to the prisoners, ordered them issued picks and shovels, then put them to work digging up the remaining torpedoes. “One of the Rebels asked where the General was and wished to see him,” wrote an Ohio soldier on the scene. “The guards informed him that it was General Sherman who set him at digging up torpedos. The Rebel looked rather astonished.” According to a gunner in the 1st Minnesota Light Artillery: “A Rebel major, who was in the squad, complained bitterly at this treatment, saying that he was not responsible for what the Savannah Confederates had done. ‘Go on with your digging,’ said Gen’l Sherman, ‘you had no business to be caught in
such company.’” Major Hitchcock counted seven torpedos successfully excavated by the Rebel prisoners, who accomplished their task without any injury. “This is a new mode of killing Yanks that us western fellows ain’t used to,” sighed an artilleryman. “We have to step light now.”

Even as this tableau was playing to its curtain, the head of Major General Blair’s column was running into more of the Confederates’ improvised arsenal. As the Federals neared Station No. 1, Pooler, the Rebels shelled them using a field piece mounted on a railroad car. The unexpected barrage panicked a company of short-timers—men due to be soon mustered out of service—who promptly “disappeared like a covey of partridges in the thick underbrush.” The situation was far more serious for a quartermaster officer, Lieutenant W. F. Hamrick, who came forward from his position of safety to observe the action. The soldier “was on his horse when a 12-pounder shot passed through his chest,” reported an Ohio soldier. “The event distributed a painful shock throughout the whole division,” said an officer.

As soon as Blair’s men spread out in battle formation, the railroad car and its cannon scuttled toward Savannah. The Yankee boys now took possession of Pooler, which Major Hitchcock observed was “simply a small neat station house or shed, say fifteen or twenty feet square, by side of track.” What most impressed the staff officer was the way the soldiers automatically prepared their position for defense. The men, said Hitchcock, “went to work and built [a] barricade all along their line, made of three rows of logs one above another, about four feet high in all, and in front were placed on end, sloping forward from top log, sticks of cord wood of which they found [a] large pile ready cut and corded for R.R. use at the Station.”

Now that Savannah’s outpost line had been overcome at each point of contact, Sherman prepared to maneuver his columns for his operation’s next phase. The time had come to begin to link together the various strands of his army in order to tighten his grip on Savannah’s principal defensive ring, its intermediate line. Toward that end, pontoniers marching with the Seventeenth Corps threw a floating span across the Ogeechee at the site of the wrecked Dillon’s Bridge, linking Blair’s men with the Fifteenth Corps. “To-morrow we may expect to concentrate our army so as to form a continuous line about the city of Savannah,” Major Nichols declared.

There was one more incident to play out before fading sunlight closed this day’s operations before Savannah. A small group of men gathered behind the newly established Union front at the place where the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal intersected the Ogeechee River. Three men stood apart from the others: Captain William Duncan and Sergeant Myron J. Amick, 10th Illinois Cavalry, and Private George W. Quimby, 32nd Wisconsin. A correspondent who saw them later reported that they were “dressed in what may be considered the habits of Confederate citizens, not omitting in their make-ups a moderate allowance of rents and tatters, to give their garb an air of plausibility.”

The plan was simple enough. Using a small dugout, Duncan and his companions were to descend the Ogeechee River to its mouth, where they expected to contact the Union fleet, hungry for word of Sherman’s arrival. The officer carried with him a short message from Major General Howard as well as instructions for the fleet signal officers regarding the codes to use for communicating with the land forces.

The three squeezed into the small craft; one in the stern to steer, one in the middle to paddle, and one up front to provide relief for the other two. It wasn’t the most stable of vessels, so the men worried as much about capsizing as they did being captured. Everyone on shore crossed their fingers as the trio pushed off just before sunset. All three were landlubbers born and bred. “I don’t think the two men had any more experience on the water than I had,” admitted Duncan, “and I did not have any.”

After an hour or so of paddling and drifting on the inky black river, the scouts passed under King’s Bridge, still smoldering from the Rebel torching earlier in the day. Fortunately for them, their passage went unnoticed by the Federal infantry overwatching the place, though the picket fires on the shore gave the reluctant sailors some tense moments. By midnight, the tide having turned against them, they realized they were making very little headway. Any hope they had this night of slipping past dangerous Fort McAllister was extinguished by the surging current.

The men steered for the right bank, grounded on the shore, then went searching for assistance. They found some slave cabins and,
counting on the help they had received so willingly from other blacks during the march, boldly entered one of the huts. “We were not disappointed in finding the occupants friendly and as we required information, we told them who we were,” related Sergeant Amrick. The slaves described the river’s course downstream, then, when the trio proved unable to locate their dugout (which had drifted a bit), the knowledgeable blacks fetched it for them. A glance at the still incoming tide convinced the scouts to hold up until the next evening. The obliging slaves helped them secrete their craft before leading them to a piece of dense timber where they would be safe for the day. “We were very tired and wrapped ourselves in our ponchos and went to sleep,” said the sergeant.

General P. G. T. Beauregard spent this day in Savannah receiving all the bad news. The briefing he heard from Lieutenant General Hardee contained nothing that could be construed as positive. The enemy, whose strength Hardee had seriously underestimated at 35,000 to 40,000, was clamping down on the city’s “overflow” line. To oppose them he had maybe 10,000 soldiers of all types, from veterans to armed civilians. He reckoned he had supplies sufficient to feed his force for about thirty days. In order to garrison his intermediate line at even minimum levels, Hardee was shortchanging positions north of the town shielding the all-important connection with Charleston. Finally, Wheeler’s cavalry was off on its own, operating somewhere behind Sherman’s force.

Beauregard, who already regarded Savannah as lost, chided Hardee for not having made adequate preparations to evacuate his garrison into South Carolina. Apparently, it had been Hardee’s intention to rely on river craft to ferry his soldiers with their accoutrements across the Savannah River, while Beauregard much preferred a floating bridge. At his insistence, Colonel John G. Clarke of his engineering staff was put in charge of the project. Beauregard yet again reminded his subordinate that his orders were “to defend the city so long as consistent with the safety of his command.” He pledged to have the Charleston commander, Major General Samuel Jones, extend his forces closer to Savannah to better protect the all-important corridor north.

There was an unintended indignity when the time came for Beauregard to depart Savannah that evening. He had entered town on a Charleston train, but the latest reports indicated that during the day the enemy had cut that rail line near the South Carolina border. Used by now to having his travel plans complicated by Sherman’s designs, Beauregard commandeered a launch to carry him up the Savannah River as far as the railroad bridge, where he changed over to a train to carry him to Charleston. As one of his aides later summed up the situation: “The outlook for the immediate future of the Confederacy had become very alarming.”

S
ATURDAY
, D
ECEMBER
10, 1864

Left Wing

The Rebel roadblock that had cost the impetuous Lieutenant Coe his life and held up the Fourteenth Corps was very silent this morning as Federal skirmishers brought it under fire, then edged closer. “The battery that annoyed our march last night fell back during the night toward Savannah,” noted a relieved Illinois soldier. “They had earthworks thrown up across the road and embrasures for four guns.” The idling columns began shuffling southward, following the Augusta Road, toward a link-up with the Twentieth Corps near Monteith.

The Yankees were now passing through a rice-producing region where the residences were few and far between. Supply parties prowling close to the Savannah River found one, described by an Ohioan as “a splendid plantation well stocked with forage.” Continued an Illinois comrade, “The proprietor had fled to an island in the river, which is a part of his plantation, taking with him most of his effects, but the boys succeeded in capturing a large flatboat loaded with rice, meat, &c, which was duly appropriated without a trial by jury.” All the men knew their business, for, as the Ohio man explained, “if we did not clean it out on short notice it was our own fault.”

For one successful forager, today was a lesson learned about the prerogatives of command. William Bircher’s division had stopped near a stretch of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, where some
detachments got busy prying up the rails, while the others were warned to remain close because of reports of Rebel cavalry in the neighborhood. Bircher, in the 2nd Minnesota, cheerfully ignoring the restrictions, wandered about a mile and a half before he came upon an abandoned farmstead not yet visited by other Federals. A few helpful blacks loaded the boy with potatoes and eggs, and as he departed, he gazed longingly at a pair of plump cows destined for some regiment’s commissary.

Returning to where his comrades were working the road, Bircher tried to sneak in with his stash, but instead ran right into his colonel, who was sitting on a pile of track ties, supervising the line’s destruction. The officer eyed the youngster lugging a rubber poncho filled with something.

“What have you got in your blanket?” he asked evenly.

“Potatoes,” answered Bircher, knowing that it would do him no good to lie about something that could be easily checked.

“What have you got in your handkerchief?” continued the colonel.

“Eggs.” They had arrived at the moment of truth. If Bircher was to keep his plunder, he had to convince the colonel that no rules had been broken. He was mentally ready when the officer popped the next question.

“Where did you get them?”

“Oh,” said Bircher in his most casual tone, “about two hundred yards from here.”

The colonel smiled. “Is that so?” he said.

“That’s so.”

“About two hundred yards from here?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hoping to close the sale, Bircher began to describe the stout bovines he’d seen, but the colonel cut him off, saying that they’d talk about cows later. For the moment he instructed the young man to place his goods on the ground, then join the regiment tearing up the tracks. “I never got humpbacked from the amount of work I did,” Bircher recollected in later years. “I principally kept one eye on the colonel and the other on the potatoes and eggs.” The colonel’s cook made an appearance, gathered in his takings, then headed toward camp. Bircher intercepted the man, but his protestations of ownership carried no weight
with him. “Well,” reflected the young soldier, now imbued with a veteran’s philosophical skepticism, “that was the last I saw of the eggs and yams.”

Some of the units assigned to the railroad job were told to follow the line to the river in order to destroy the bridge. “We tore up the track to the bridge and a detail was sent to fire it and the bridge but the Rebs had a Gun Boat laying in the river and they shelled us so we abandoned it,” reported an Indiana soldier. Actually, corrected an Ohio comrade, it was so dark when the arsonists reached the span that no one was “certain what was firing on them.” It could have been a gunboat; equally, it could have been a battery on the South Carolina side. Whichever it was, the Hoosier avowed that the Rebels “made it ‘red hot’ for us.”

Having cleared the Rebel outpost blocking the way at Monteith Swamp, the Twentieth Corps bypassed the station to press toward Savannah’s principal line of defense. The trick now was to recognize the difference between the lightly held outer works and the firmly held main position, then knowing when to stop. A soldier in the 129th Illinois who was part of this process recollected slogging “through thick underbrush and thorns in the pines, without a single shot being fired at us by rebel infantry. We could not explain this any other way than that the enemy’s intention was to get us within easy range, and then pepper away at us to kill as many as possible…. We advanced until a swamp prevented all further progress, from the other side of which the enemy stationed there now opened on us. The enemy, being secure behind the swamps, answered three or four times to our shots, but all balls went overhead.” The officer commanding a Connecticut regiment in the same predicament sent for something to eat once the line had stopped advancing, “for he ‘knows it will be a week before we will get out of this d——d swamp.’”