The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 2 of 2

On the fifth of May, 1864, at precisely the same time when Grant moved into the Wilderness, Sherman set out on his march to Atlanta. With the true instinct of a fighting commander, he had stripped himself and his army of all encumbering baggage and other superfluities. He had no tent, even for himself. And he boasted in after years that he changed his underclothes only once between Chattanooga and Atlanta. He required all his officers, high and low, except General Thomas, whose health was impaired, to follow his own example of unencumbered movement.

The distance from Chattanooga to Atlanta, as the crow flies, is almost exactly a hundred miles. Johnston's position at Dalton was about fifteen miles southeast of Chattanooga. The country is a hilly and broken one, traversed by many streams which afford good defensive positions to a retiring army, as do also the various gaps among the hills which must be crossed by an army advancing offensively. Johnston was strongly fortified at Dalton and Sherman, not venturing to assail him in his works there, sent McPherson to make a détour, and strike the Confederate lines of communication at Resaca, ten miles or so farther south.

There McPherson found Johnston's men behind earthworks, and wisely or unwisely shrank from attacking them in their defenses. If he could have carried the works at Resaca Johnston's position would have been one of extremest danger from which he could escape only by fighting on all sides at once, and forcing his way through opposing lines, strongly posted and well fortified. But in McPherson's judgment an attack at that point with such force as he had with him was unadvisable. He therefore refrained from attack, and fell back to a secure position in the hills to await the approach of reinforcements. Sherman promptly moved to McPherson's position, only to find that Johnston had also retired from Dalton to Resaca, and had concentrated his entire army there in a strong defensive position.

Even with all his army present Sherman, himself, hesitated to attack Johnston in his works – a fact which seems a sufficient answer to that criticism of McPherson which has been freely exploited in writings concerning this campaign.

Sherman, however, had so greatly the advantage of Johnston in numbers that he could afford to send large detachments against the Confederate general's communications, while still holding a threatening position of his own in front. This he did with consummate skill, forcing Johnston with his small army to retreat southward following the railroad, and destroying as he went.

Johnston left Resaca on the night of the fifteenth of May, and on the nineteenth took position at Cassville, where he seemed to offer battle to his enemy. But after some sharp skirmishing the Confederate general retreated again during the night of the twentieth to a point south of the Etowah river and to Alatoona.

After a few days of rest and reprovisioning, Sherman moved again, not directly against his antagonist, but by the flank, so as to threaten Marietta and Atlanta itself, which lies only a few miles south of Marietta. By this movement Sherman hoped to force Johnston to abandon his strong position at Alatoona Pass, where he securely held the railroad over which Sherman had need to bring his supplies in any further advance that he might make southward.

Promptly recognizing the purpose of this movement, Johnston marched westward to assail his enemy in flank. The two armies met at New Hope Church, a point a few miles west of Marietta, and a few miles northwest of Atlanta. Here for six days there was continuous and very bloody fighting, both armies doing their work in a fashion that rivaled even that of the contending forces in Virginia.

By virtue of his superior numbers, Sherman was able to make strong detachments to assail the communications and the flanks of Johnston's army, and thus to compel him to fall back again to a strong defensive position on the railroad above Marietta, on Kenesaw, Lost and Pine Mountains.

Against this position Sherman advanced with caution, strongly entrenching himself in its front. There the fighting was continuous and costly of human life on both sides. There it was that General Leonidas Polk, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, who had been educated at West Point for the military service, but who had afterwards risen to the highest place of honor in his church as a Bishop, and had at the outbreak of the war entered the Confederate service in which he had risen to the rank of major general, was instantly killed by a cannon shot which Sherman himself had directed to be fired into a group of Confederate officers of whom he caught sight on a hill. This was on June 14.

If he had had anything like Sherman's force with which to contest Sherman's advance, Johnston's position at this time would have been one of peculiar strength and opportunity. But his line was ten miles long, and the ground was so broken that the reinforcement of one part of it by another was peculiarly difficult, while, on the other hand, Sherman's assailing position was geographically such that he might concentrate forces at will and without observation against any point in Johnston's line which he might select for assault.

Without further following the details of this struggle it is enough to say that day by day Johnston slowly retired toward Atlanta, obstinately fighting at every point and baffling all the efforts of his brilliant assailant to break through his lines, or to take him by surprise in the rear of either of his flanks.

On the morning of the twenty-seventh of June Sherman determined to end this struggle by a tremendous assault upon his enemy's entrenchments. At two points a mile apart he hurled his columns against them with all the fury that it was possible to infuse into the minds and the conduct of veteran soldiers. At the same time he ordered all other troops on all other parts of the line to maintain an incessant fire by way of preventing the removal of troops from the unassailed parts of Johnston's lines, for the reinforcement of those defending the points of special attack.

It was Sherman's hope to break through Johnston's lines, cut his army in twain, hold one half of it in position by stubborn fighting and crush the other half by a desperate rush. This plan was baffled only by the desperate courage and splendid obstinacy of the fighting on the Confederate side. The Federal columns advanced to the charge with all the determination that is possible even to the best of veteran troops. The Confederates resisted with a like determination, mowing down their adversaries by a withering fire from behind the breastworks, and so far depleting their strength as to render it impossible for them to force their way over or through the resisting lines. A very few of Sherman's men succeeded in reaching the Confederate works, and these were promptly shot down or made prisoners. Sherman's loss in this attempt was more than 2,500 men, while the Confederate loss was less than one third as great.

Thus defeated in his attempt to push his way to Atlanta, while holding on to his communications in rear, Sherman now determined upon a desperate move which violated all the traditions of war and all the teachings of the books on strategy, but which both Lee and Grant had boldly adopted and with success, on other and most notable occasions. Loading his wagons with ten days' supplies of food and ammunition he decided to abandon his communications altogether, move independently of them, and trust to the fortunes of war for a success which might justify the daring of his endeavor. He had tried and failed to force Johnston back to Atlanta. He now determined to maneuver him into such retreat and in the course of his maneuvering boldly to take the risk of the destruction or the capture of his own army.

His plan was to swing his entire army – foot loose from its communications – around Johnston's flank, and to strike the railroad in the Confederate general's rear, between Marietta and Atlanta. If he could succeed in doing this, he would easily compel Johnston to make a hasty retreat upon the defenses of Atlanta. But should he fail in doing it he would have on his hands an army in the field, destitute alike of provisions and ammunition so soon at least, as the supplies it carried with it should be consumed. In that event he must surrender to a foe vastly inferior to himself in numbers, for no army can long live without food and no army can fight after its ammunition is expended.

Thus Sherman undertook to accomplish certain great military operations within ten days' time, with the certainty present to his mind that should he fail he must fail disastrously, sacrifice all the achievement which he had set out to gain, and possibly even surrender an army that outnumbered its adversary far more than two to one.

Following the same plan which Grant was following in Virginia but by reverse process, Sherman on the night of July second made a movement by his right flank southward, withdrawing first the troops on his left, and passing them to the right, in rear of troops still holding the lines.

Johnston was quick to penetrate Sherman's purpose, and by way of defeating it he promptly abandoned his position, and fell back to the Chattahoochee river, which closely flanks Atlanta on the northwest. Sherman had hoped that Johnston would attempt the immediate crossing of that stream, and he therefore hurried forward his strongest divisions, in the hope of catching his enemy in the act, and assailing him at a disadvantage. But Johnston was too wily for that. He had prepared for himself in advance a line of fortifications along the Chattahoochee, which Sherman has described as one of the strongest pieces of field fortifications he ever saw.

Here Johnston briefly paused while Sherman prepared to turn his position by crossing the river both above and below. The works, however, gave Johnston the opportunity he desired to make his crossing unmolested, and with his little handful of men after his brilliant and sturdily fighting retreat, before an army heavily outnumbering his own Johnston retired to the defenses of Atlanta.

Then on the seventeenth of July came a change of commanders on the Confederate side which did more than anything else that happened or could have happened during the campaign, to help forward Sherman's success. Angrily and with insulting comment, the Confederate authorities removed Johnston from command and ordered him to turn over his authority to General John B. Hood.

In a subordinate position Hood had demonstrated a vigorous fighting capacity. He had not before commanded an army, and in the opinion of those who had directed his operations, he was a man peculiarly unfit to command an army. General Longstreet once said of him, "Hood is one of the best division commanders I ever knew. He would fight anybody anywhere, at any time. But he has no more discretion than any pugnacious schoolboy might be expected to manifest."

Hood's proceedings at and after Atlanta certainly justified this judgment of a great general who had had full opportunity to observe his conduct and estimate his capacities. For surely at no point in the war was a situation more blunderingly or more bravely handled than was that at Atlanta under Hood. If that general had had any discretion at all he must have seen that it was the one function of his army to delay, embarrass and prevent Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea. Yet no sooner was that march undertaken than Hood abandoned all effort to check it, left Sherman free to do as he might, and himself marched northward upon a wild-goose chase of campaigning in pursuit of the pot of gold at the farther end of the rainbow. With all that we shall deal hereafter.

Hood's reckless impetuosity promptly manifested itself. Abandoning all of Johnston's precautions, and quitting his defenses, Hood hurled column after column upon the enemy on the twentieth of July and succeeding days, only to have them broken to pieces in a mad endeavor to accomplish the impossible. He inflicted heavy losses upon Sherman's army, to be sure, but his madness entailed upon his own force losses which it could far less well afford. There is no doubt whatever that his impetuosity, which some critics have characterized as foolhardiness, greatly aided Sherman in his purpose of capturing Atlanta.

Beaten in these insane ventures Hood was slowly forced back upon the inner defenses of the town, but he had not yet learned his lesson. As late as the twenty-second of the month he again moved out of his fortifications and assailed Sherman with a vigor which would have been praiseworthy had he possessed a force adequate to his undertaking. Seven times he pushed his men forward to the assault, and seven times he was bloodily repulsed. It was gallant fighting that he did, but fighting ill directed and foolishly undertaken. To paraphrase the familiar quotation, it was magnificent, but it was not war. So far as the facts are ascertainable, it appears that Hood's losses greatly exceeded those which he inflicted upon his enemy, a very serious circumstance in view of the fact of his greatly inferior numbers.

On the twenty-seventh of July Sherman again moved by his right flank in the attempt to cut the railroad lines south of Atlanta. On the twenty-eighth Hood assailed him violently, and a severe action occurred involving heavy losses on both sides. Thus far in the campaign, according to the official reports, the Confederates had lost 8,841 men, and the Federals 9,917.

The campaign had been accompanied by various and extensive cavalry raids, chiefly on the part of the Federal troops. On one of these raids the Federal General Stoneman was captured with 700 of his men, while General McCook, who was to have met and coöoperated with him, lost the greater part of his force as prisoners.

Continuing his southward movements by the right flank Sherman at last succeeded in placing his army south of Atlanta, where a deal of hard fighting occurred.

The position thus taken up by the Federals rendered it imperative that Hood should either assail and crush his foe or make such escape as he could from Atlanta. His efforts to crush his foe had failed too conspicuously for even so venturesome a commander to renew them, and accordingly on the night of September first Hood destroyed all that he could of government property, and withdrew to a strong position eastward of the town. Sherman immediately occupied Atlanta, and quickly made an impregnable fortress of it.

His army now lay fortified almost in the center of what remained of the Confederacy. A pause for reorganization, recuperation and the bringing in of supplies was all that remained to him before he should undertake that march to the sea by which Grant had ordered him again to cut the Confederacy in twain. He expected to make that march in daily and hourly conflict with Hood's forces. But as we shall see hereafter, when the story of that matter is told, he made the march in fact, with no opposition at all, beyond that of some handfuls of cavalry, for the reason that Hood, after the surrender of Atlanta, had gone rainbow chasing northward into Tennessee.

CHAPTER L

The Bay Fight at Mobile

In the meanwhile another important blow had been struck in pursuance of Grant's comprehensive plan of destroying the Confederate capacity of resistance.

The reader will doubtless remember that when Farragut captured New Orleans in April, 1862, he desired at once to move against Mobile in the hope and confident expectation of capturing and closing all those Confederate ports upon which, as blockade running centers, the Southerners relied for the export of their cotton, and the import of arms, ammunition and clothing. From this purpose Farragut was diverted by the peremptory orders of civilians in the navy department at Washington, and it was not until more than two years later that he was permitted to act upon a plan which common sense had dictated from the beginning. In the meanwhile the Confederates, with that energy and ceaseless determination which characterized all their activities, had been daily and hourly rendering the capture of their ports more and more difficult. At Mobile they had strengthened the fortifications and mounted destructively heavy guns in their casemates and upon their parapets. They had strewn the harbor thick with torpedoes of every kind then known to the military science of destruction. When at last in August, 1864, Farragut was permitted to undertake that enterprise against Mobile which would have been easy and nearly bloodless, if he had been allowed to undertake it two years and three months earlier, he had before him one of the most difficult tasks that was set for any naval commander in this war to accomplish.

Early on the morning of August fifth, Farragut put his fleet in motion to enter Mobile bay. The entrance is a narrow one and was obstructed by every device that engineering ingenuity could place in the pathway of an invading fleet. The only passageway into the harbor lay between Fort Morgan on Mobile Point, and Fort Gaines on Dauphin Island, three miles away. Two miles of this narrow passageway had been completely obstructed by the driving of innumerable piles into the sands, thus forming a fence through which the stoutest ship could not force its way. From the end of this pile fence eastward toward Fort Morgan there extended a quadruple line of destructive torpedoes. The only open way into the harbor was a narrow passage left for the use of blockade runners, directly under the guns of Fort Morgan.

Inside the bay there was a Confederate fleet of considerable strength, including one ironclad ram, and many heavily armed wooden gunboats. The bay was also thickly strewn with mines and torpedoes, the exact location of which was known of course to the Confederate officers, but entirely unknown to Farragut and his captains.

On the fourth of August a strong land force under General Gordon Granger succeeded in making a landing on Dauphin Island. This gave to Farragut the support he had desired from the land side. His time had at last come, and with four ironclad monitors, seven wooden vessels, all heavily armed, and a fleet of gunboats he advanced toward the mouth of the bay, a little after daylight on the morning of August 5, 1864.

During almost half an hour before Farragut's ships were in a position from which they could render their own fire effective, the fire from the Confederate forts and still more from the Confederate fleet that lay just inside the entrance line, played havoc with the wooden ships of Farragut's squadron. His flagship, the Hartford, had her mainmast shot away and many of her crew destroyed. Still Farragut pushed onward without a moment's hesitation at any point until he brought his ships into a position from which they could effectively return the Confederate fire. The heavier metal of his guns quickly and disastrously told upon the Confederate defenses. But these continued to belch out destruction in spite of any crippling that had been done to them, and for a time the fleet suffered terribly.

In order that he might see everything that occurred and direct the conflict with full knowledge of all its details, Farragut mounted to the rigging of his flagship, and a quartermaster lashed him to the spars in order that he might not fall to the deck, in the event of his receiving a wound.

One of Farragut's monitors, the Tecumseh, was quickly destroyed in an attempt to pass over the line of torpedoes in order to engage the Confederate ram, Tennessee, at close quarters. The Monitor encountered one of the torpedoes, and its explosion sent her to the bottom so suddenly that her commander and most of her crew perished with her.

The Brooklyn had been set to lead the advance with Farragut's flagship following immediately in her wake. The Brooklyn was provided with an apparatus for removing torpedoes in advance of her, but the apparatus was by no means a perfect one, and when the commander of that ship discovered the presence of torpedoes almost immediately under his bows, he stopped his vessel and began to back her. The whole fleet was now under a terrific fire, and the maintenance of its order was of the most vital importance. Farragut saw in a moment that the backing of the Brooklyn must result not only in halting the entire line under a destructive fire, but in throwing it into hopeless confusion. It was then that he gave his celebrated order, "Go on, damn the torpedo!" But as the Brooklyn still hesitated, Farragut immediately pushed the Hartford past that vessel, and himself took the lead of the line with his flagship, "damning the torpedoes."

Having crippled the forts and forced his way past the entrance into the harbor, Farragut ordered all his gunboats which had been lashed to the wooden vessels to cut loose, and assail the enemy's fleet. This they did with vigor and promptitude, capturing or destroying nearly all of the Confederate vessels.

There still remained, however, the Confederate ram, Tennessee, a powerful ironclad ship, commanded by a gallant captain, and manned by a desperately determined crew. Seeing what had happened, the commander of the Tennessee instantly tripped his anchors, and steamed at full speed into the midst of the Federal fleet, firing as he went, and with the great steel nose of his ship ramming every vessel that came in his way. Farragut's fleet in the meanwhile poured all the fire possible upon the ironclad monster to no effect, and many of them stove in their bows in a futile effort to sink her by collision. Then the monitors assailed her and so far crippled her, after a brief struggle, that she surrendered.

The story of this great battle at the mouth of Mobile Bay has been splendidly told in verse by Henry Howard Brownell in his poem entitled, "The Bay Fight." Mr. Brownell had written a poem called "The River Fight" in celebration of Farragut's struggle for the defenses of New Orleans two years before. Farragut had written to the poet, expressing his appreciation of his tribute, and at Brownell's request that he might accompany the great sea fighter in his next battle, Farragut had taken him with him on the Hartford as a witness to the struggle at the mouth of Mobile Bay.

The battle there had been a desperate one, costly in life and in ships, but it had accomplished its purpose. Farragut had passed the forts after crippling them so badly that they surrendered a few days later. He had destroyed the Confederate fleet and was now completely master of the entrance to a harbor which he had permanently sealed against the world. By reason of shoal water in the bay, he found it impossible to steam up to the city and take possession of it. But at any rate he had destroyed it for all useful purposes as a Confederate port. Its capture from the land side was now certain, whenever any one of the Federal generals in the field should see fit to move against it in adequate force. In the meanwhile its nominal defense served henceforth only to occupy troops whose presence was badly needed by Lee in his great contest with Grant in Virginia.

CHAPTER LI

The Mine Explosion at Petersburg

General Grant was a man of skill and genius in the game of war. But until the summer of 1864 he had never played that game against another great master of it. He had baffled and beaten Albert Sydney Johnston, whose reputation as a commander of great skill rests rather upon the anticipation of his comrades in the old army at the outbreak of the war, than upon any demonstration of such skill made by himself. Grant had held his own and more against Beauregard in the tremendous second day's struggle at Shiloh. He had overcome great natural obstacles in his effort to take Vicksburg and he had received there the surrender of Pemberton, – a general who had never before commanded an army in the field, or in any other way manifested a capacity for command. Grant had also met Bragg at Chattanooga and beaten him. But none of these antagonists had been comparable with Lee as a great master of strategy and command.

When Grant found himself defeated at Cold Harbor, as he has himself described his situation, he had been baffled in both the purposes with which he had undertaken his campaign. He had not crushed Lee's army, nor had he succeeded in cutting it off from its base in the fortifications of Richmond. He had said at Spottsylvania that he would "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." The summer was still young when he found himself at Cold Harbor unable to do further fighting upon that line. He had crippled his enemy, it is true, but he had lost more than three men to that enemy's one, and that enemy still lay between him and Richmond in a mood of resoluteness and defiance. There was no way open to him by which, with any show of sanity, to assail Lee further in the field. It was then that he decided upon a campaign on other lines than those which he had chosen at the beginning of the summer.