The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (140 page)

Schofield was more generous in his estimate of the defeated army’s fighting qualities, especially as he had observed them during the long-odds Battle of Nashville, where fewer than 25,000 graybacks held out for two days against better than 50,000 bluecoats massed for the most part of their flank. “I doubt if any soldiers in the world ever needed so much cumulative evidence to convince them they were beaten,” he declared. This was not to say they weren’t thoroughly convinced in the end. They were indeed, and they showed it through both stages of the long retreat: first, as one said, while “making tracks for the Tennessee River at a quickstep known to Confederate tactics as ‘double distance on half rations,’ ” and then on the follow-up march beyond, after Hood decided his troops were no more in condition for a stand on the Tennessee than they had been when they crossed the Duck the week before. By way of reinforcing this assessment, Thomas would list in his report a total of 13,189 prisoners and 72 pieces of artillery captured on and off the field of battle in the course of the forty days between Hood’s setting out, November 20, and his own calling of an end to the campaign, December 29. Moreover, weary as they were from their 120-mile trek over icy roads in the past two weeks, the butternut marchers themselves agreed that the better part of valor, at least for now, would be to find some place of refuge farther south, if any such existed. “Aint we in a hell of a fix?” one ragged Tennessean groaned as he picked himself up, slathered with mud from a fall on the slippery pike. “Aint we in a hell of a fix: a one-eyed President, a one-legged general, and a one-horse Confederacy!”

Their goal, they learned as they slogged west across North Alabama toward the Mississippi line, was Tupelo. There, just thirty months ago this week, Braxton Bragg had taken over from Beauregard after the retreat from Corinth, and there he had given them the name
they made famous, the Army of Tennessee, first in Kentucky, then back again in Middle and East Tennessee and Georgia. Bragg’s tenure had ended soon after Missionary Ridge, and so would Hood’s after Nashville, a comparable rout; there was little doubt of that, either in or out of the army. “The citizens seemed to shrink and hide from us as we approached them,” a soldier would recall, and the reaction of his comrades was shown in a song they sang as they trudged into Mississippi and the New Year. The tune was the banjo-twanging “Yellow Rose of Texas,” but the words had been changed to match their regret, if not their scorn, for the quality of leadership that had cost them Pat Cleburne and so many others they had loved and followed down the years.

5

Back at City Point after breaking off his intended western trip, Grant had the familiar hundred-gun victory salute fired twice in celebration of the Nashville triumph. “You have the congratulations of the public for the energy with which you are pushing Hood,” he wired Thomas on December 22, adding: “If you succeed in destroying Hood’s army, there will be but one army left to the so-called Confederacy capable of doing us harm. I will take care of that and try to draw the sting from it, so that in the spring we shall have easy sailing.” He sounded happy. One week later, however, on learning that Hood’s fugitives had crossed the Tennessee and Thomas had ordered his erstwhile pursuers into winter quarters to “recuperate for the spring campaign,” Grant’s petulance returned. “I have no idea of keeping idle troops in any place,” he telegraphed Halleck, who passed the word to Thomas on the last day of the year: “General Grant does not intend that your army shall go into winter quarters. It must be ready for active operations in the field.”

Grant’s fear, throughout the two weeks leading up to the thunderous two-day conflict out in Tennessee, had been that Old Tom’s balkiness would allow the rebels to prolong the war by scoring a central breakthrough all the way to the Ohio, thereby disrupting the combinations he had devised for their destruction. Yet this fear had
no sooner been dispelled, along with the smoke from the mid-December battle, than another took its place; namely, that this same “sluggishness,” as he called it during the two weeks following the clash at the gates of Nashville, would delay the over-all victory which now at last seemed practically within his grasp, not only because of the drubbing given Hood, whose survival hung in the balance until he crossed the Tennessee River, but also because of other successes registered elsewhere, at the same time, along and behind the butternut line stretching west from the Atlantic. A sizeable budget of good news reached City Point while Thomas was failing to overtake his defeated adversary, and every item in it only served to whet Grant’s appetite for more. That had always been his way, but it was even more the case now that he saw the end he had worked so hard for in plain view, just up the road.

Chief among these simultaneous achievements was the occupation of Savannah, eleven days after Sherman’s arrival before it at the end of his march from Atlanta. Having stormed and taken Fort McAllister on December 13, which enabled the waiting supply ships to steam up the Ogeechee, he proceeded with a leisurely investment — or near investment — of the city just over a dozen miles away. Within four days he had progressed so far with his preparations that he thought it only fair to give the defenders a chance to avoid bloodshed by surrendering. He was “prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison,” he said in a message sent across the lines; “but should I be forced to resort to assault, or to the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army, burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war.” The rebel commander replied in kind, declining to surrender, and in closing dealt in measured terms with Sherman’s closing threat. “I have hitherto conducted the military operations intrusted to my direction in strict accordance with the rules of civilized warfare, and I should deeply regret the adoption of any course by you that may force me to deviate from them in the future. I have the honor to be, very respectively, your obedient servant,
W. J. Hardee
, Lieutenant General.”

Hardee, with barely 15,000 regulars and militia — two thirds of them lodged in the city’s defenses, the rest posted rearward across the Savannah River to cover his only escape route, still menaced by Foster near Honey Hill — had appealed to Richmond for reinforcements to help him resist the 60,000 newly arrived bluecoats closing in from the east and south. Davis conferred with Lee at Petersburg, then replied on December 17 — the day of Sherman’s threat to unleash his burning veterans on Savannah when it fell — that none were available; he could only advise the Georgian to “provide for the safety of your communications and make the dispositions needful for the preservation of your
army.” This authorized the evacuation Beauregard had been urging from his headquarters in Charleston, a hundred miles up the coast. With a bridgeless river at his back and no pontoons on hand, that seemed about as difficult as staying to fight against six-to-one odds, but Old Reliable found the answer in the employment of some thirty 80-foot rice flats, lashed together endwise, then planked over to provide a three-section island-hopping span from the Georgia to the Carolina bank. It was finished too late for use on the night of December 19, as intended, so a circular was issued for the withdrawal to begin soon after dark next evening — by coincidence, the fourth anniversary of South Carolina’s secession from the Union — preceded by daylong fire from all the guns, which would not only discourage enemy interference but would also reduce the amount of surplus ammunition to be destroyed, along with the unmovable heavy pieces, when the cannoneers fell back. Wagons and caissons would cross the river first, together with the light artillery, and the men themselves would follow, filing silently out of their trenches after moonset. “Though compelled to evacuate the city, there is no part of my military life to which I look back with so much satisfaction,” Hardee was to say. And the fact was he had cause for pride. The operation went as planned from start to finish, despite some mixups and much sadness, especially for long-time members of the garrison, who thus were obliged to turn their backs on what had been their home for the past three years. “The constant tread of the troops and the rumblings of the artillery as they poured over those long floating bridges was a sad sound,” one retreater would presently recall, “and by the glare of the large fires at the east of the bridge it seemed like an immense funeral procession stealing out of the city in the dead of night.”

Sherman was not there for the formal occupation next morning, having gone up the coast to confer with Foster about bringing in more troops from Hilton Head to block the road to Charleston; the road over which, as it developed, Hardee marched to safety while the conference was in progress. When the Ohioan returned the following day, December 22 — chagrined if not abashed by the escape of 10,000 rebels he had thought were his for the taking — he found his army in possession of Savannah and quartermaster details busy tallying the spoils. These were considerable, including more than 200 heavy guns and something over 30,000 bales of cotton, negotiable on the world market at the highest prices ever known. Most of the guns had been spiked, but the rich haul of cotton was intact, not only because there had been no time or means to remove it, but also because, as Hardee explained to his superiors, it was “distributed throughout the city in cellars, garrets and warehouses, where it could not have been burnt without destroying the city.” A U.S. Treasury agent was already on hand from Hilton Head, reckoning up the profit to the government,
and when the red-haired commander bristled at him, as was his custom when he encountered money men, the agent turned his wrath aside with a suggestion that the general send a message, first by ship to Fort Monroe and then by wire to the White House, announcing the fall of Savannah as a Christmas present for Lincoln. “The President particularly enjoys such pleasantry,” he pointed out. Sherman considered this a capital notion, and at once got off the following telegram, composed before the tally was complete.

He was, as usual, in high spirits after a colorful exploit — and this, which reached its climax with the taking of Savannah and would afterwards find its anthem in the rollicksome “Marching Through Georgia,” had been the most colorful of all. Partly because of that scarehead aspect, lurid in its reproduction in the memory of participants, as well as in the imagination of watchers on the home front, the march achieved a significance beyond its considerable military value, and though the risk had turned out slight (103 killed, 428 wounded, 278 captured or otherwise missing: barely more, in all, than one percent of the force involved) even Sherman was somewhat awed in retrospect. “Like a man who has walked a narrow plank,” he wrote his wife, “I look back and wonder if I really did it.” In effect, after seven months of grinding combat at close quarters, he and his bummers had broken out of the apparent stalemate, East and West, to inject a new spirit of exuberance into the war. You could see the feeling reflected in the northern papers brought to headquarters by the navy, first up the Ogeechee, then the Savannah. “Tecumseh the Great,” editors called him now, who had formerly judged him insane, and there was a report of a bill introduced in Congress to promote him to lieutenant general so that he and Grant could divide control of the armies of the Union. His reaction to this was similar to his reaction four months ago, at the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago, when there was talk of nominating him for President. “Some fool seems to have used my name,” he wrote Halleck from his position in front of besieged Atlanta. “If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House … I would say the penitentiary, thank you.” So it was now in regard to this latest proposal to elevate him. “I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant,” he informed his senator brother. “I want him to hold what he has earned and got. I have all
the rank I want.” As if to emphasize this conviction, he presently remarked to a prying inquirer, in a tone at once jocular and forthright: “Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk. And now, sir, we stand by each other always.”