Southern Storm (7 page)

On November 9 everything threatened to unravel when a small newspaper, the
Indianapolis Journal,
printed a brief but remarkably accurate summary of Sherman’s intentions. The story was picked up and amplified the next day by other papers, including the
New York Times.
The leaks came from officers Sherman had sent up to Thomas in Chattanooga. While Grant and officials in Washington fumed and threatened all sorts of arrests, Sherman (remarkably calm considering the nature of the disruption) proposed to counter information with disinformation. He suggested that the War Department release false intelligence such as “Sherman’s army has been much re-enforced,…and he will soon move by several columns in circuit, so as to catch Hood’s army,” or “Sherman’s destination is not Charleston, but Selma.”
The suggestions were ignored, and the incident passed without seriously impeding the operation.

While his men began actively preparing for the grand movement, Sherman telegraphically held Thomas’s hand. “I hope we shall be ready for him,” Thomas had wired on November 2. The next day Sherman advised Henry Halleck in Washington, “I…feel no uneasiness as to Tennessee.” Even though his preparations for the Georgia march had passed a point of no return, Sherman assured Halleck that he could still intervene in Tennessee if a crisis loomed. Nonetheless, he was not seriously considering canceling the operation. “I propose to adhere as nearly as possible to my original plan,” Sherman told Halleck, knowing he would tell Lincoln.

Thomas was still hedging his bets, reporting the troop repositioning he was doing, but offering few clues into his state of mind. “I have made great exertions to prevent stampeding,” he confided to Sherman on November 3, “and so far have succeeded measurably well, but I find it hard work.” His messages over the next few days continued in this vein. On November 11, Sherman gave Halleck his nearly final assurances. “I have balanced all the figures well,” Sherman said, “and am satisfied that General Thomas has in Tennessee a force sufficient for all probabilities.” Sherman’s continued solicitation toward Thomas’s concerns paid its dividends on the morning of November 12 when Thomas wired Sherman: “I have no fear that Beauregard [i.e., Hood] can do us any harm now.”

This message reached Sherman at Cartersville, Georgia. The army commander was resting on the porch of a nondescript wood house, watching with intense interest as one of his signal corps technicians hooked a portable telegraph key to some wires and tapped out a call for messages from Chattanooga. After several minutes of counter-pointed clicking, Sherman was handed the paper with Thomas’s message. Recalled Sherman: “I answered simply: ‘Dispatch received—all right.’ About that instant of time, some of our men burnt a bridge, which severed the telegraph-wire, and all communication with the rear ceased thenceforth.”

There were no more chances for anyone to call him back. Sherman was now entirely on his own and on his way. “Free and glorious I felt when the magic telegraph was cut!” he exclaimed.

The Plan—–Precedents and Orders

The basic template for Sherman’s March had been forged in February 1864, when he led a force of 20,000 men on a raid due east from Vicksburg to Meridian, Mississippi, a one-way distance of some 133 miles. “The expedition is one of celerity,” Sherman announced to his men, and to facilitate rapid movement he divided his force into two wings. Sherman also employed some calculated misdirection prior to setting out, designed to leave the impression that his objective was Mobile, Alabama. As the two wings moved along parallel roads, Sherman saw how hard it was for the enemy to concentrate against him, since any effort to oppose one wing could be undone through the flanking threat posed by the other.

Sherman made it a point to limit the number of wagons accompanying his columns, so his men lived off the country and did well. Once at the transportation hub of Meridian, his soldiers wrecked everything of possible value to the Confederacy. “I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work as well done,” Sherman reported. Special attention was given to tearing up the railroad lines with specific instructions provided in special field orders. “The enemy cannot use these roads to our prejudice in the coming campaign,” Sherman bragged in his report. There were also directives meant to limit the damage done to civilian buildings, though enforcement was not strict. “When the provisions, forage, horses, mules, wagons, &c. are used by our enemy it is clearly our duty and right to take them,” Sherman argued, “because otherwise they might be used against us.” He concluded that the “government of the United States has…any and all rights which they choose to enforce the war.”

Another facet of this operation was the presence of sizable numbers of slave refugees. Sherman’s columns penetrated a region not previously visited by Union raiders, so at this first appearance of the blue columns roughly five to eight thousand African-Americans stopped what they were doing to tag along to Vicksburg and freedom, some afoot, some on horseback, others riding in oxcarts. Sherman’s orders and practices provided no support for these noncombatants. When the war was over, the nation could look to the issues regarding blacks; until
then they only interfered with his military operations aimed at bringing about that end. Keeping them out of the way would be much on Sherman’s mind as he planned his grand movement into Georgia.

The operation Sherman now conceived was the Meridian Expedition squared, perhaps even cubed. More men were involved, the distances greater, and the risks higher, since, unlike in the February raid, which returned to home base, Sherman had no intention of coming back, and this time there was no supply depot waiting for him. After much mulling he boiled the essential elements down into nine instructions, which were codified in Special Field Orders No. 120, issued at Kingston, Georgia, on November 9.

Sherman’s selection of generals Howard and Slocum to command the respective wings was a key decision, for upon their shoulders would rest much of the responsibility for managing day-to-day affairs. Both were West Point graduates, an accomplishment that ranked high in the way Sherman judged his officers. While he agreed that politically appointed generals could be capable, inspirational, and even courageous, he also believed that their dual nature meant they could never be focused completely on the military job. Sherman viewed the political generals as men who “looked to personal fame and glory as auxiliary and secondary to their political ambition, and not as professional soldiers.” Sherman described Howard and Slocum as “both comparatively young men,
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but educated and experienced officers, fully competent to their command.” Each had served in the east in the early part of the war, and both had blemishes on their records.

Wounded twice in the right arm at Fair Oaks, Virginia, in June 1862 (resulting in the loss of the limb), the Maine-born Oliver Otis Howard recovered sufficiently to take charge of a corps at the battle of
Chancellorsville in May 1863. It was Howard’s command that broke, exposing the vulnerable right flank of the Union army, and suffering a staggering 41 percent casualties. Two months later, at Gettysburg, Howard’s corps was again manhandled. Fate thrust him into overall command of Union forces on the field for much of the first day’s fight, and although he demonstrated generally ineffectual leadership, the U.S. victory that followed under Major General George Gordon Meade brought Howard an official congressional commendation.

When Howard’s corps was transferred to the west in the fall of 1863, he went along to take part in operations around Chattanooga, where his performance was unexceptional. Assigned to command a different corps during Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, Howard managed to be in the right place at the right time when the job of taking over the multicorps Army of the Tennessee came open. Selected by Sherman as much to eliminate unwanted candidates as for his own leadership qualities, Howard got through the campaign without any significant gaffes. A lean, brown-haired, earnest man, Howard was smart, personally courageous, and dedicated to his work. He was also so outwardly religious in his demeanor that some of his troops took to calling him “Old Prayer Book.”

Sherman’s other selection, Henry W. Slocum, was a New Yorker with a similar résumé (he led corps at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg), though without Howard’s stumblings. A cautious, conservative officer loath to take risks (his reluctance to order his troops to Gettysburg on the first day led one staff officer to derisively pronounce his last name in two drawn-out syllables), Slocum could also nurse a grudge. He sat out much of the Atlanta Campaign in a backwater post because he refused to serve with the officer to whom he was assigned. When that individual resigned Sherman’s service over Howard’s promotion to lead the Army of the Tennessee, Slocum was recalled to command a corps, which he did in a competent fashion.

Sherman desired men in charge of his two wings who were capable, not easily panicked, and without any overriding ambition or imagination. As he made clear in a similar context, he “needed commanders who were purely and technically soldiers, men who would obey orders and execute them promptly and on time.” Howard and Slocum fit the bill and so were slotted into these key positions.

The wing formation, already road-tested during the Meridian Campaign, offered Sherman great flexibility in deployment and kept his force compact enough to be mutually supportive as it advanced, at least in theory. Also, spread out to this degree, the march order created a roughly sixty-mile-wide zone covered by the wings in their advance, providing units operating away from the main columns (principally foragers) with some degree of security.

Sherman’s experience with cavalry, especially during the Atlanta Campaign, was not the kind to inspire much confidence. Time and again the mounted arm had failed to carry out its assignments, and on several occasions it suffered serious, even catastrophic defeats. So Sherman, on the verge of undertaking the greatest mobile operation of the Civil War, assigned the bulk of his most active arm to Thomas in the north, holding back just one division to provide security for the march.

The man he picked to command his cavalry, H. Judson Kilpatrick, was the kind perhaps most imagined (and reviled) by the longsuffering infantry—a flamboyant, boisterous, and pugnacious Irish-American whose deeds rarely matched his words. The officer Sherman was leaving behind in Tennessee to refit and remount most of his cavalry (after forwarding the best horses to Kilpatrick) had enough spunk to question the choice. “I know [that] Kilpatrick is a hell of a damned fool,” Sherman answered, “but I want just that sort of a man to command my cavalry on this expedition.” Grading Kilpatrick’s performance during the Atlanta Campaign, Sherman gave him high marks for his drive and intensity. Given the disasters that had befallen the others Sherman had entrusted with the responsibility, perhaps he also believed that Kilpatrick possessed the one prerequisite for a successful cavalry officer: luck.

When it came to recollecting the grand march into Georgia, Sherman and his men invariably understated the relative size and vulnerability of the five wagon trains (one for each infantry column plus one for the cavalry) that trailed the marchers. Massachusetts captain Daniel Oakey was typical when he wrote that transportation was “reduced to a minimum, and fast marching was to be the order of the day.” The image that emerged from this campaign was that the Federal columns advanced into the Georgia heartland with few wagons.

In fact, the aggregate number of wagons on hand was 2,520, or roughly 40 wagons per thousand men. In contrast, when the 120,000-man Army of the Potomac had set off to confront General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia earlier that year, the Federals marched with 4,300 wagons, or about 35 per thousand. The wagon allotment on the Georgia march was less than Sherman had allowed during the Atlanta Campaign (52 wagons per thousand men), but he was still taking along a lot of wheeled vehicles. The fact that each column had its own wagon train meant that there would be no efficiencies that might have been gained from consolidation into one or two trains. It should also be noted that these calculations do not take into account the pack mules used by the various units, nor does it allow for extra vehicles appropriated on the way.

Providing security for these multiple trains loomed large in the planning of each day’s march. It was not unusual for an entire division to be tasked with protecting the wagons, assisting in their movement, or guarding the rear of the train near the tail of the column. Thus on any given day most if not all of four infantry divisions out of thirteen total would be assigned to wagon train security, movement, and maintenance. It was a significant allocation of resources for an undertaking that would become celebrated in popular memory for having hardly existed.