The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (20 page)

Surprise would not aid the Union cause. Whatever his general orders, there was little mystery about Sherman’s ultimate pathway to Atlanta. Sherman was initially dependent on the railroads, and four of them in Georgia ran into the city of some twenty thousand—the young and growing transportation and industrial hub of what was left of the Confederacy in the west. As Sherman put it, “I’ve been fighting Atlanta all this time. It’s done more to keep up the war than any—well, Richmond,
perhaps. All the guns and wagons we’ve captured along the way—all marked Atlanta.” Atlanta was the great rail center of the South, one of its few munitions manufacturing sites, and a gateway to the Atlantic and Gulf port Southern cities. Sherman himself had written Grant at the outset, “Should Johnston fall behind the Chattahoochee, I will feint to the right, but go to the left and act against Atlanta or its eastern communications, according to developed facts.”
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In addition to the perils of bad weather, mud, rough terrain, and the advantages that usually accrue to defenders, Sherman had to contend with a seasoned army led by an array of highly competent Confederate officers under General Joe Johnston, who had more than sixty thousand troops at his disposal and was adept in Fabian tactics of defense, bleeding an invader without committing to decisive battle. Johnston’s subordinate generals—Leonidas Polk, John Bell Hood, Benjamin F. Cheatam, William J. Hardee, and Patrick R. Cleburne (perhaps the best division commander of the entire war on either side)—were more experienced than even Sherman’s solid high command.
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In theory, as Johnston backtracked, his supply lines would shorten and he could galvanize an alarmed population. A fortified Atlanta might withstand for a while a besieging Sherman’s army, while Johnston’s intact mobile forces could maneuver around the Union rear to relieve the pressure. In contrast, as Sherman advanced on and around Atlanta, his circular lines lengthened. The growing need to station troops as occupation forces would further erode his strength. Or, as Sherman put his need to garrison conquered territory, “I am fully aware that these detachments weaken me in the exact proportion our enemy has gained strength by picking up his detachments.”
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Sherman ultimately had to obtain his food and forage from faraway federal supply depots at Nashville, Tennessee. These in turn were further distant from an advance base at Chattanooga across the border. To Sherman’s way of thinking, he probably could not stop Confederates to his rear from attacking his rail lines of support. But he could at least have on hand so many engineers, and so much extra track and timber, that he could rebuild infrastructure as quickly as enemy raiders might destroy it. Of all commanders on both sides of the war, no one matched Sherman’s attention to repair and logistical details, as he pored over maps of Georgia and calibrated his army’s anticipated progress with the necessary supplies. It was no accident that he set out into Georgia with forty thousand mules and horses and nearly six thousand ambulances and
wagons and was confident that he could operate away from rail lines for days—and later weeks—at a time.
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On May 7, Sherman moved his large army toward Dalton, Georgia, Johnston’s base of operations. From May 7 to September 2, he headed ever so slowly southward—often at a snail’s pace that would on average result in only a mile’s southward progress per day over some four months. Yet for all his maneuvering and flanking, Sherman still headed southward and never retreated or ceased movement once the campaign started. His idea of advance was that three Union armies would descend from diverse directions and from the outset threaten Johnston with encirclement. There had initially been some Union fear of a preemptive Confederate attack from Dalton into Tennessee. Indeed, by late spring, Johnston had reequipped and reorganized the Army of Tennessee into an effective force who believed they might fight outside Georgia. But the South lacked sustained logistical support for any extended march far from its supplies. As Johnston knew, he could not afford to be cut off and trapped to the north, leaving Atlanta exposed.

As Sherman’s three-pronged advance neared Dalton, Johnston felt his base was increasingly untenable. Even though he had occupied and fortified it for six months, within a week, Johnston simply abandoned his headquarters without a fight and drew back to Resaca. This was a critical move. At the very beginning of their long duel, Johnston had established that he did not quite know how to handle the unpredictable and highly mobile Sherman. Huge armies, dependent on rail, plowing into enemy territory were not supposed to outflank and outmaneuver so easily home-state defenders.
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Next, on May 13, Sherman’s forces scrambled in vain to cut off any remnants of Johnston’s army as it streamed into Resaca, in what would be the first pitched fighting of some fifteen or so running engagements to come. Now the awkward tripartite nature of Sherman’s command, the dense vegetation and landscape, and Confederate skill combined to allow Johnston’s forces to marshal successful defenses outside Resaca. There the main fighting raged between May 13 and 15. If the incautious Northerners had bumbled into the Confederate entrenchments when they assumed Johnston was still in headlong retreat, they next overreacted, and finally proved too timid in failing to pursue and cut off the retreating Confederates.

Apparently the normally aggressive Sherman was convinced that the two huge armies were still locked in a stalemate. In fact the Southerners were evacuating Resaca and vulnerable to encircling pursuit. Sherman’s generals knew that a Confederate ambush and pitched battle were planned in the near future. Yet the where and when of the assault spooked them, and so they allowed Johnston to escape once again. In any case, Sherman uncharacteristically blamed General McPherson for a tardy pursuit: “Such an opportunity does not occur twice in a single life, but at the critical moment McPherson seems to have been a little cautious.” Sherman would sometimes fault both McPherson and Thomas for not turning their flanking movements into encirclements and destroying rather than forcing back Johnston, and later Hood. He whined not so much out of self-aggrandizement, but rather from frustration that it was nearly impossible for his generals to realize his constant rapid-fire ideas in the short time he seemed to demand.
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By the evening of May 15, the outnumbered and entrenched Confederates had inflicted more losses than they had suffered (about four thousand Union casualties to roughly three thousand Confederate). Yet Johnston could afford them far less. While the ratios were favorable to the South, Sherman’s casualties were easily made up by reinforcements that steadily poured into his army.

If Sherman missed opportunities to trap the exposed right flank of Johnston’s army, he soon skillfully crossed the Oostanaula River, a strategic victory in itself. That gambit ensured that the Confederates had either to retreat even farther southward, or to risk having a Union army between them and their supplies. It mattered little that Johnston might claim he was preventing reinforcements being sent to Grant while drawing Sherman further from his Tennessee supplies, given that a huge—and growing—Union army was heading toward Atlanta while the Confederates either could not or would not stop it. The immediate danger to the South was now not the loss of Richmond, but of Atlanta.
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After Resaca, Johnston still neither counterattacked nor headed west into Alabama to get to the rear of Sherman’s army. Both Sherman and Johnston believed that the slow Union descent into Georgia would soon validate their own respective strategies. Johnston took comfort that just as Grant neared but did not take Richmond, so, too, Sherman’s approach to Atlanta would end in a costly stalemate outside the city. But by late May, events would confirm the wisdom of Sherman’s strategy of advance
and make Johnston’s explanations for withdrawal seem like special pleading—especially his claims that by merely slowing Sherman, he would tip the balance of the November election in favor of the pliable McClellan. In fact, the more Sherman was faulted for missing opportunities to destroy Johnston’s army, the more his own forces neared Atlanta with few losses—and the more his own troops rallied to their Uncle Billy as an iconic figure. There was simply not enough land between Sherman and Atlanta to ensure, at the present rate of advance, that he would not get there before the critical November election. In sum, Sherman was avoiding the decisive battle he could probably win, while Johnston was being pushed to force an engagement that he would surely lose. Johnston’s tragedy was that he knew how to stall a general like Grant, but not one like Sherman.
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Johnston chose next to delay Sherman at Adairsville on May 17. At least three Union divisions formed up to meet him in a set battle. But Johnston soon discovered the terrain too expansive to allow his outnumbered troops an adequate defensive line. So once again, he withdrew. Where and when, those in a now worried Atlanta wondered, would it all stop?

Johnston choose to make his next stand at Cassville, a few miles to the south, purportedly for the long-hoped-for big battle that would trap Sherman deep in hostile territory. Even after two weeks of fighting, Johnston had access to more than seventy thousand troops in his general vicinity. On May 19, in the initial stages of fighting, Confederate troops inflicted heavy casualties on Sherman’s forces. But in fear of being outflanked once again, the gun-shy Johnston broke off the battle, retreated across the Etowah River, and headed for the next line of defense at the Chattahoochee River.

Each time Johnston felt that he had drawn in and trapped one of Sherman’s three armies, he soon began to fear that at least two others were at his flank or rear. While his forces neared Atlanta, Sherman’s field of maneuver was widening around his encircled enemy. The tripartite nature of Sherman’s army, especially its wide flanks and improving communication between the wings, made it almost impossible for a numerically inferior Johnston to achieve some Cannae-like encirclement.
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At first, the Southern government and public had forgiven Johnston for the withdrawals from Dalton and Resaca. Georgians assumed such withdrawals were needed preliminaries for the long-promised decisive battle and victory to come. The army itself was at first not at all demoralized
by such tactical retreats. Sherman, after all, was still closer to Tennessee than to Atlanta. But after Johnston had promised to hold the line at Adairsville, and after achieving some initial success at Cassville, Johnston still had allowed Sherman in less than a month to halve the distance to Atlanta. Sherman was a mere fifty miles away from the city, and he still had more than five months of the campaigning season before the November election. When would he be trapped and destroyed deep in Southern territory?

For the next month, there ensued a predictable pattern of constant skirmishing in a huge theater without a single pitched battle of the sort that might decide the campaign. Sherman kept seeking to encircle Johnston and force his withdrawal, without in turn being pressured to storm fixed positions. Johnston wanted to keep contact with the invaders and wear them out as their supply lines lengthened and he pushed them into the wilderness of Georgia, shielding Atlanta. The closer Johnston was pushed back to Atlanta, and the more Sherman had to quit the rail lines and live off the land, in theory the better Johnston’s chances became. Yet in a long series of battles in late May and June, the hoped-for decisive victory never quite came. Comparisons with Grant and Lee to the east no longer quite held. Grant was already outside Richmond and finding it nearly impossible to take the city; Sherman was still distant from Atlanta but making steady progress in a fashion that did not suggest he, too, would soon stall.
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The next of these bloody encounters came at New Hope Church on May 25, when Joseph Hooker’s 20th Corps was ordered by Sherman to charge Johnston’s lines, apparently on the mistaken assumption they were retreating rather than fixed and entrenched. Hooker, who was renowned for his audacious thrusts, was beaten back with severe losses. In two days, the Northerners atypically suffered ten times as many casualties as had Johnston’s men. Yet it was Johnston, not Sherman, who retreated from New Hope Church.

On May 27 the two armies met at Pickett’s Mill. Once again the Union army was defeated with severe losses. Johnston inflicted 1,600 casualties to his own losses of 500. Yet once more he, not Sherman, was forced to backpedal. On May 28, in yet another set battle at Dallas, Georgia, the overconfident Confederates under General Hardee foolishly emulated what the Federals had done at New Hope Church—and lost between 1,000 and 1,500 men in unnecessary charges against dug-in Union positions.
Neither tactical retreat nor brief head-on assaults seemed to deter Sherman. The pressure on Johnston to find a magical remedy only increased, especially as Lee seemed to have figured out how to protect Richmond and bleed Grant white.

If neither side had been able to break the other’s army in the first month of fighting, the landscape of battle nevertheless had still inched southward. Meanwhile, to the east, Grant had lost forty thousand soldiers, stalling in the Wilderness and again at Spotsylvania. Now Grant was to nearly ruin his army at Cold Harbor. News of the carnage perhaps emboldened Johnston to lure Sherman into Grant-like head-on charges.

As Sherman far away plodded southward, far closer to Washington the North once again failed in the Shenandoah Valley and at the James River in Virginia. The spreading gloom at the end of May inspired John C. Frémont to run on an independent Radical Democracy Party ticket. He had hopes of forcing the Republicans to dump Lincoln and run a stronger abolitionist. The only chance of good news was the slog in the Georgia woods.
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After weeks of retreats, finally the natural advantages of interior lines of supply, along with friendly populations and the traditional desperation of the invaded, began to help Johnston. As Grant stymied at Cold Harbor—sixty thousand casualties in the Army of the Potomac since Grant began on May 1—and Lincoln was renominated at the Republican convention, both armies in Georgia maneuvered for position during the first part of June. They met again on July 9, launching a near-monthlong series of running battles around Marietta. Sherman initially failed again to outflank Johnston’s entrenched lines. The Confederates were bolstered by the good highland ground of Kennesaw Mountain that gave them ideal defensive terrain, perhaps enough at last to stop Sherman altogether. Although Sherman was unable to get around Johnston and cut him off from the railroad, on June 22, John Bell Hood made an attack on entrenched federal lines at Kolb’s Farm. Hood’s corps was stopped cold, suffering fifteen hundred casualties and forcing Johnston once again to readjust his lines southward.
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