The Battle of Atlanta

The Society of the Army of the Tennessee is endeavoring to perpetuate its history and memories by erecting here in this capital of our great nation monuments to the memory of its dead commanders which will place before the world not only their deeds, but the great events in which our Army took so important a part. First came General McPherson, as he was the first to fall, in the great Battle of Atlanta. He fell just after watching the attack in the rear on the Sixteenth Army Corps, which held the key to the situation. He was a dear friend of mine; and the last words he spoke were in praise of the fighting of that Corps. General Sherman, in reporting his death, spoke of him as follows:

General McPherson fell in battle, booted and spurred, as the gallant and heroic gentleman should wish. Not his the loss, but the country's, and the army will mourn his death and cherish his memory as that of one who, though comparatively young, had risen by his merit and ability to the command of one of the best armies which the nation had called into existence to vindicate her honor and integrity. History tells of but few who so blended the grace and the gentleness of the friend with the dignity, courage, faith and manliness of the soldier. His public enemies, even the men who directed the fatal shot, never spoke or wrote of him without expressions of marked respect. Those whom he commanded loved him even to idolatry, and I, his associate and commander, fail in words adequate to express my opinion of his great worth.

General McPherson was so dear to our old Army that the great victory at the Battle of Atlanta was never spoken of by our Army except to express our great grief at the loss of our commander. His faith in what he could accomplish with our Army was unbounded. He spoke of us on July 4, 1863, as follows:

With tireless energy, with sleepless vigilance, by night and by day, with battery and with rifle-pits, with trench and mine, you made your sure approaches, until, overcome by fatigue and driven to despair in the attempt to oppose your irresistible progress, the whole garrison of over 30,000 men, with all their arms and munitions of war, have, on this, the anniversary of our National Independence, surrendered to the invincible troops of the Army of the Tennessee. The achievements of this hour will give a new meaning to this memorable day, and Vicksburg will brighten the glow of the patriot's heart which kindles at the mention of Bunker Hill and Yorktown. This is indeed an auspicious day for you. The God of Battle is with you. The dawn of a conquered peace is breaking upon you. The plaudits of an admiring world will hail you wherever you go, and it will be an ennobling heritage, surpassing all riches, to have been of the Army of the Tennessee on the Fourth of July, 1863.

Next we erected the statue, facing Pennsylvania Avenue, of General John A. Rawlins, who, above all, represented the organization and spirit of our great Army, and who shared its fortunes from beginning to end as Chief of Staff of its first and greatest commander. In 1873, upon the death of General Rawlins, General John A. Logan spoke of him thus:

But there is one whose tongue is now still in death whose name I cannot forbear to mention; one who, though gone from our midst, is with us in memory: for who can forget John A. Rawlins? Faithful in every duty, true in every trust, though dead he is not forgotten; though gone forever, yet he will ever live in affectionate remembrance in the hearts of all who knew him. His name is woven in indelible colors in the history of our country, and is linked with a fame that is undying.

General Rawlins, in giving a history of the Army of the Tennessee, paid this tribute to it:

In no army did the soldier enjoy greater liberty, consistent with military discipline, than in the Army of the Tennessee, and in none were his rights and his life more carefully guarded.

The subordination of the Army of the Tennessee to the policies and acts of the Government affecting the institution of slavery in the prosecution of the war, is worthy of the highest commendation. It had no policy of its own to propose, but went forth, as expressed by the legislative branch of the Government, to do battle in no spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of the States in rebellion; but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several States unimpaired.

The Army of the Tennessee did great deeds in all the departments of the States' service, and individually and collectively illustrated in a peculiar manner the qualities of noble American character which gained success in the field, preserved its fruits by subsequent statesmanship, and by exalted virtue crowned victory with the attributes of peace and justice.

In April, 1900, we unveiled the beautiful and life-like monument to General John A. Logan, that brilliant, magnetic soldier, our comrade from Cairo to Louisville. Of him, at the unveiling, President McKinley spoke as follows:

Logan's career was unique. His distinction does not rest upon his military achievements alone. His services in the Legislature of his own State, in the National House of Representatives, and in the Senate of the United States, would have given him an equally conspicuous place in the annals of the country. He was great in the forum and in the field.

He came out of the war with the highest military honors of the volunteer soldier. Brilliant in battle and strong in military council, his was also the true American spirit, for when the war was ended he was quick and eager to return to the peaceful pursuits of civil life.

General Logan's love and devotion to us only ended with his life, and at one of our reunions he characterized our work thus:

The Army of the Tennessee was not limited in its scope; the theater of its operations and the extent of its marches, comprehending within their bounds an area greater than Greece and Macedonia in their palmiest days, and greater than most of the leading kingdoms of Europe at the present day, reached from the Missouri River on the north nearly to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and from the Red River of Louisiana to the Atlantic Ocean.

The friendship and loyalty of Sherman to Grant was the first great cause of the success of both, and for the harmony that existed in the Army of the Tennessee. Sherman fell under the command of Grant at Paducah, in the spring of 1862, holding a small command. He was the ideal soldier, as he dropped from a Department and Army commander to that of a post, and later a Division, without a murmur. Sherman's first words to Grant, on February 15, 1862, were these:

I should like to hear from you, and will do everything in my power to hurry forward to you reinforcements and supplies, and if I could be of service myself would gladly come without making any question of rank with you or General Smith, whose commissions are of the same date.

On the same date he wrote again:

Command me in any way. I feel anxious about you, as I know the great facilities they [the enemy] have of concentration, by means of the river and railroads, but have faith in you.

The monument to our old commander, General Sherman, is nearly complete. It is upon these grounds we expect to unveil it next October, and, as President of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, and as President of the Commission which has in charge the erection of the monument, I give you a cordial invitation to be present. You will receive due notice, and proper arrangements will be made for the occasion, and you will meet here your comrades of the Armies of the Cumberland, the Potomac, and the Ohio, who have already signified their intention of being present to honor the memory of our old commander.

And now, my comrades, it is with the greatest satisfaction that I say to you that after seven years' continued effort, this year we obtained an appropriation from Congress of $250,000 to be used in the erection of a monument upon these grounds to General U. S. Grant, (and the model for it will soon be selected,) to this modest, charitable, and just soldier and statesman. The whole world has given its tribute. From those whom we fought and defeated have come the most gallant words of praise and touching sympathy. President Lincoln, above all others, recognized his power and ability when he handed him his commission and gave him command of all the Armies, and assured him that he should not in any way interfere with him, – armed him with all the powers of the President, with carte blanche to use them as he saw fit. Grant made his answer at Appomattox, bringing peace to our nation and gratitude to the conquered. General Grant was a man of few words, and when called upon to speak of the Army of the Tennessee, paid it this tribute:

As an Army, the Army of the Tennessee never sustained a single defeat during four years of war. Every fortification which it assailed surrendered. Every force arrayed against it was either defeated, captured, or destroyed. No officer was ever assigned to the command of that Army who had afterwards to be relieved from it, or to be reduced to another command. Such a history is not accident.

And now, my comrades, one of our number who has left us by an assassin's hand, whose heart, words and acts were ever for us, who from a Major in our Army became the best-loved President of our nation, Comrade William McKinley, at one of our gatherings paid this tribute to you:

It is recorded that in eighteen months' service the Army of the Tennessee captured 80,000 men, with flags and arms, including 600 guns – a greater force than was engaged on either side in the terrible battle of Chickamauga. From the fields of triumph in the Mississippi Valley it turned its footsteps towards the eastern seaboard, brought relief to the forces at Chattanooga and Nashville, pursued that peerless campaign from Atlanta to the seaboard under the leadership of the glorious Sherman, and planted the banners of final victory on the parapets of Fort McAllister.

It is said that the old Army of the Tennessee never lost a battle and never surrendered a flag. Its Corps badges – "forty rounds" of the Fifteenth Corps; the fleeting arrow of the Seventeenth Corps; the disc, from which four bullets have been cut, of the Sixteenth Corps – are all significant of the awful business of cruel war, all of them suggestive of the missiles of death.

It gave the Federal Army Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan; McPherson, Howard, Blair, Logan, Hazen, John E. Smith, C. F. Smith, Halleck, Rawlins, Prentiss, Wallace, Porter, Force, Leggett, Noyes, Hickenlooper, C. C. Walcutt, and your distinguished President, who flamed out the very incarnation of soldierly valor before the eyes of the American people; all have a secure place in history and a secure one in the hearts of their countrymen.

On this anniversary, as my closing words to you, two verses of General John Tilson's tribute are most appropriate:

Ho! comrades of the brave old band, we gather here once more,With smiling eye and clasping hand, to fight our battles o'er.To quaff from out the brimming cup of old-time memory,And bright relight the pathway of our old Tennessee.As myriad sparks of war's romance our meetings warm inspire;The heady fight, the anxious march, the jolly bivouac fire;The days of doubt, of hope, of care, of danger, and of glee;Oh, what a world of racy thought illumines Tennessee!Our roster thins; as years pass on we drop off one by one;Ere long, too soon, to yearly call, there will be answer – none;Then as along the record page these mourning columns creep,The whisper comes to closer still our living friendships keep.Another thought we forward cast to that not distant day,When left of all our gallant band will be one veteran gray,And here's to him who meets alone – wherever he may be,The last, the lone survivor of the grand old Tennessee.

THE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST

Address to the Army of the South-Westat National Encampment, G. A. RWashington, D. COctober, 1902

My connection with the United States forces west of the Mississippi River commenced at the beginning of the war, when I took my Regiment, the Fourth Iowa, to St. Louis, and fell under the command of Fremont. I took part in the campaigns of that Department until after the Battle of Pea Ridge, when I left the command and went to the Army of the Tennessee. After the Atlanta campaign, in November, 1864, I returned to Missouri as commander of that Department and Army.

Of the transactions of the troops south of Missouri I have very little knowledge; but I know that the troops which served west of the Mississippi never had credit for the amount of work, hardships and exposures they endured. Owing to the fact of there having been fought there but two great battles, Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, and two minor ones, what they did was swallowed up in the great events that occurred east of the Mississippi. Even Pope's campaign opening up a portion of the Mississippi is hardly ever spoken of.

The Battle of Wilson's Creek, the first signal contest west of the Mississippi, was fought before my command reached St. Louis. The history of that battle, and the credit that is due to the commander of that Army, General Lyon, and his men, are well known. There participated in the battle many officers who were afterwards greatly distinguished; among them Schofield, Sturgis, Hunter, and others. It was the first battle that called attention to the West, and to the troops west of the Mississippi. That battle was lost because a portion of the command did not comprehend and fulfill General Lyon's orders. This mistake would have been overcome if it had not been for the loss in the battle of its commander, General Lyon. But the fighting of the troops and the boldness of the movement immediately attracted the attention of the country, and held it until after the battle of Pea Ridge.

The Army of the Southwest, which General Curtis commanded, and which traveled three hundred miles from its base without water or rail communication, and lived off a barren country, and which fought that decisive Battle of Pea Ridge and cleared the country until nearly the end of the war of any organized force of the enemy, had more marching and endured more suffering than the great Armies I was connected with east of the Mississippi, and its three days' fighting at Pea Ridge compared favorably with any of our battles, when the numbers engaged are considered.

Then again, at the end of the war, the sufferings of the troops that I took onto the plains in the Indian campaigns in the winters of 1864-5, 1865-6, were far beyond any of the sufferings of any of our Armies during the Civil War. Their exposures through the cold weather, and the brutalities and butcheries of the Indians, which it was impossible for them to avenge or retaliate, were beyond description.

Our early campaign in Missouri was without previous experience. It was simply one soldier standing up against another in battle, and we had to learn all the tricks of camp life, and from experience how to take care of our soldiers.

There were a great many funny incidents in the Pea Ridge campaign. The Southwestern Army was organized at Rolla, Missouri, of which post I was in command. My quartermaster was Captain Philip H. Sheridan, and my commissary, Captain M. P. Small. No one who knew or saw Sheridan then thought of the great position he was to occupy in our Army, but when he took hold of that Army and stripped it and fed it, three hundred miles away from rail or water communication, we all knew that his was a master-mind. When he came to me at Rolla, the first order he gave was to take away about three-quarters of our transportation. I think we had about two wagons to the company, and he brought us down to about four to a regiment. You can all appreciate the rebellion I had on my hands when I undertook to enforce his order. I know he stood by and watched to see what I was going to do. Every Regiment and Command entered a protest, and said some very unkind things of him, denouncing him as a regular officer who had no mercy upon a volunteer; but I had then had experience enough to appreciate our necessities, and started in by stripping my own Regiment, and then enforcing the orders upon the others. We were not long on that march before they appreciated the foresight of Sheridan. He had great energy and great resources. He had to run all the mills along our line of march; he had to forage in every direction, and the punishment that he gave to some of the people to make them tell where their horses, forage and sweet potatoes were hidden would astonish those of our people who have been so horrified at the mild persuasions used for similar purposes in the Philippines.

To show you how little we knew of war on our first march, in January, 1862, from Rolla to Springfield, Missouri, all the reports we had obtained were that Price and his Army were in Springfield. The troops of our Army were divided into two commands, those under Siegel, composed of two Divisions, commanded by Osterhaus and Asboth, mostly Germans, and two Divisions of Americans commanded by Colonel Jeff C. Davis and Colonel E. A. Carr. I commanded a Brigade on the extreme left in Carr's Division, and, in accordance with instructions, put out a company in front of me as skirmishers. It was dark, and impossible for us to see much, and the first thing I knew I had lost my skirmishers, and was in great distress until about daylight in the morning, when, while Siegel's guns and our own were booming away at Springfield, my company came back mounted on Confederate horses and mules – old hacks that the enemy had left behind them – and brought us news that there was no enemy in Springfield, and had not been for two or three days.

As we marched along towards Pea Ridge through the country, Price's Army faced us with a rear guard only, his main body keeping a long distance ahead of us. At every stream they would halt our advance, and move out a couple of pieces of their artillery, and put out a strong skirmish-line, which would force our Army into line, thinking we were going to have a battle. My Brigade led the advance most of the time on that march, and as soon as they would line up the officers would have the boys strip. They would throw down their chickens, sweet potatoes, and everything they had gathered, and by the time they had gone forward, and the enemy had run, the Thirty-sixth Illinois, or some other Regiment, would come up and gobble what they had left. About the third time we lined up I discovered that every boy was hanging on to his chickens, sweet potatoes, and provender, and when I gave orders to the Colonels to have them throw them aside, the boys made answer: "No you don't, Colonel! You can't fool us any more; we have fed those Thirty-sixth Illinois fellows as long as we propose to."

At Pea Ridge we were surrounded by Van Dorn, who placed Price's two Divisions in our rear, and he himself on our right flank with McCullough and McIntosh's Divisions. The great Pea Ridge divided his Army, so it was impossible for one part to support the other. His Army was twice as large as that of Curtis, and the fact that it was divided enabled Curtis to whip his Army in detail, so that Van Dorn's Army was virtually whipped before Curtis got his entire force into the field, Siegel only coming into battle after Van Dorn's Arkansas force had left for the South, Jeff C. Davis's Division having killed its two Division commanders, and Van Dorn had given Price orders to get out the best way he could, which forced him to retreat to the east towards White River.

After the Pea Ridge campaign the Battle of Prairie Grove was fought, under the command of General F. C. Herring, who was Lieutenant-Colonel of the Ninth Iowa Infantry in the Battle of Pea Ridge. As it was not in my command I have no knowledge of the detail of it; but from the reports it evidently was a sharp fight.

In the spring of 1865 Jeff C. Thompson and his command surrendered to me on the Arkansas line. His command consisted of six thousand men, but he found he could not gather them, and claimed that not half of his command was present. When I asked him how it was possible to get them all together, he suggested that I should send them rations. I therefore loaded two steamers from St. Louis, and sent them around by the White River, and Thompson issued his celebrated order bringing the men all in, and there was gathered about twice the number he had present when he surrendered to my forces. When asked for his transportation he said that he would show it to me, and out of the rivers and bayous he run down about one hundred canoes and flats, as the transportation he had to move his army with. It was at this time that he made that celebrated speech. When his soldiers came in without bringing their guns, as he had instructed them to do, bringing along old shot-guns and muskets that were of no use, he said if they were not satisfied with the generosity of this Government they should emigrate to Mexico, and he denounced more than half of them as being soldiers whom he had never seen, stating that they had stayed in the brush and along the river-banks in Arkansas until the moss had grown upon their heads and backs. From this speech of his came the celebrated saying of "moss-backs."

A part of my Corps fought under that gallant General, A. J. Smith, in the Banks campaign up the Red River, and there is no doubt but that his generalship and the fighting of the two Divisions of the Sixteenth Corps saved that Army from a great defeat. The commander of one of his Divisions, General T. E. G. Ransom, was a school-mate of mine, and afterwards came to me in the Atlanta campaign and commanded a Division under me in the Sixteenth Corps.

When I look at the history of all of the operations west of the Mississippi River, and see their results, it is a great gratification to me to know that all the campaigns, except possibly the one of Banks, were victories for our side.

When I returned to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in November, 1864, I found all the Indian tribes on the plains at war, occupying all the lines of communication through to the Pacific, and there was a great demand from the people upon the Government that those lines should be opened. General Grant sent a dispatch, asking if a campaign upon the plains could be made in the winter. Having spent eight or ten years of my life upon the plains before the war, I answered that it could, if the troops were properly fed and clothed. His answer to that was to place all the plains and Indian tribes within my command, instructing me to make an immediate campaign against them, and I had, therefore, to move the troops that were at Leavenworth, Fort Riley, and other points, onto the plains in mid-winter, and I think it was the Eleventh Kansas that had thirteen men frozen to death on the march to Fort Kearney. Those troops on that winter march up and down those stage- and telegraph-lines, in forty days opened them up, repaired the telegraph, and had the stages running. Then came the longer campaign of the next summer and next fall, where General Cole's command suffered so much, and also where General Conner fought the Battle of Tongue River. I remember of the Indians capturing a company of Michigan troops that were guarding a train that was going to Fort Halleck, loaded with rations and bacon. They tied some of the soldiers to the wheels of the wagons, piled the bacon around the wagons, and burned them up. A band of this party of Indians was captured by a battalion of Pawnees, who were far north of them and got on their trail and surrounded the band that had committed these atrocities. The chief of them, an old man, came forward and spoke to Major North, who commanded the Pawnees, and holding his hand up to his mouth he said that he was full of white men up to here, and was ready to die. The Indians virtually cleaned out the white people along the stage-lines they captured. I took from them a great many of their prisoners in the fall of 1865, when they came into Laramie to make peace, and the stories of the suffering of the women were such that it would be impossible to relate them.

In connection with this campaign on the plains, it is a singular fact that nearly three thousand Confederates took part. When I took command at St. Louis I found the prisons full of Confederate prisoners. The war was then virtually at its end, and they were very anxious to be relieved from prison life, and as we needed forces on the plains, I obtained authority from the War Department to organize what was known as the United States Volunteers, and filled the regiments with these Confederate soldiers, placing over them as officers, men and officers selected from our own command, and thus organized a very effective force, which did excellent service on the plains, three-quarters of which remained in that country after the war was over.