The Battle of Atlanta

A TALK TO OLD COMRADES

Address to Sixteenth Army CorpsDelivered at the National Encampment, G. A. RWashington, D. C., October, 1902By Major-General Grenville M. Dodge

Comrades of the Sixteenth Army Corps:

The Sixteenth Army Corps was organized December 18th, 1862, and formed into two wings. General A. J. Smith commanded the right wing, and General G. M. Dodge the left wing of the Corps. The left wing was organized with the Corps, the right wing a year or more afterwards. The Corps, as a body, was never together, though it probably took part in more widely separated fields than any other Corps in the Army of the Tennessee. The right wing, under General Smith, was in the Vicksburg campaign, and after that it went to the Department of the Gulf, and was with General Banks in his movement up Red River, and saved that Army from defeat; of this there is no doubt. After that, it was sent after Forrest, and it was the only command that I know of that caught and whipped him. The left wing overtook General Forrest at Town Creek, in 1863, in its march to Decatur in the rear of Bragg's Army, but he did not stay long enough for us to get a good fight out of him.

From the campaign after Forrest, General Smith's command was sent to the Department of the Missouri to drive out Price. There I found them, in December, 1864, when I took command of that Department, in a deplorable condition, – without clothing, shoes, or camp equipage. Under an order from General Grant, I sent them to Nashville, with all the force in my department, some twenty thousand men all told, to help General Thomas, and I sent them everything they needed to clothe and equip them. You all remember how you were frozen in on the Mississippi, and had to take the cars. One of the pleasantest recollections of my life is that I received a letter from General Smith, thanking me for appreciating their condition, and having in Nashville when they arrived, everything they needed. He said that it was the first time they had been treated decently, and they were thankful they had fallen into the hands of some one who appreciated them.

At the Battle of Nashville it was General Smith, with the right wing of the Sixteenth Corps, and the troops of the Department of the Missouri, that turned the left flank of Hood's Army, and was practically in his rear when stopped; and I have heard many officers who were there say that if he had been let alone he would have captured or destroyed that wing of the Army. Thus ended the eventful career of the right wing, and its fortunes were cast with the Army of the Cumberland in its chase after Hood.

The left wing was organized from the troops I commanded in the District of Corinth, and had in it the old Second Division of the Army of the Tennessee that Grant organized at Cairo, that fought at Belmont, Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and the two Corinths. It had on its banners, "First at Donelson." I took command right after the Battle of Corinth, where it had been censured by Rosecrans and praised by Grant for the part it took in the Battle of Corinth. General Grant held us at Corinth as a protection to his communications while the campaign against Vicksburg was going on. In a letter to me he said he had left us there to protect that flank, for he knew that if Bragg endeavored to break that line we would stay; so you see he still had faith in his old Division. From Corinth we marched with Sherman in his celebrated trip from Memphis to Chattanooga. We wintered on the line, and rebuilt the Nashville and Decatur Road, and in his Memoirs General Grant, after describing the condition of the Army, and the necessity for rebuilding the railway from Nashville to Decatur, speaks thus of the work of the Sixteenth Army Corps:

General Dodge had no tools to work with except those of the pioneer – axes, picks, and spades. With these he was enabled to intrench his men, and protect them against surprise from small parties of the enemy, and, as he had no base of supplies until the road could be completed back to Nashville, the first matter to consider, after protecting his men, was the getting in of food and forage from the surrounding country. He had his men and teams bring in all the grain they could find, or all they needed, and all the cattle for beef, and such other food as could be found. Millers were detailed from the ranks to run the mills along the line of the army. Where they were not near enough to the troops for protection they were taken down and moved up to the line of the road. Blacksmith shops, with all the iron and steel found in them, were used up in like manner. Blacksmiths were detailed and set to work making the tools necessary in railroad and bridge building. Axemen were at work getting out timber for bridges, and cutting fuel for locomotives and cars. Thus every branch of railroad building, making tools to work with, and supplying the workmen with food, was all going on at once, and without the aid of a mechanic or workman except what the command itself furnished. General Dodge had the work assigned to him finished within forty days after receiving his orders. The number of bridges to rebuild was 182, many of them over deep and wide chasms. The length of road repaired was 102 miles.

I only quote a small part of what General Grant says in this connection, to show you that while the Sixteenth Corps had its share of fighting, and praise for it, still it was a Corps that Grant called upon in an emergency, and when he wanted great deeds done; and proves not only what they could turn their hands to when necessary, but is also a sample of what our great army was made of.

In the spring of 1864 we became a part of the great Army in the Atlanta campaign. When we arrived at Chattanooga, on the 5th of May, I called at General Sherman's headquarters. General McPherson, our Army Commander, was there. Sherman said to him: "You had better send Dodge to take Ship's Gap." "Why, General," replied McPherson, "that is thirty miles away, and Dodge's troops are not yet unloaded, and he has no transportation with him." Sherman said: "Let him try it, and have the transportation follow." We struck out, and that night at midnight Sprague's Brigade of the Fourth Division of the Sixteenth Corps had gained the Gap. The enemy appeared the next morning. This opened the way through Snake Creek Gap, planting us in the rear of Johnston's Army, and forcing him to abandon his impregnable position at Dalton.

Our battles in the Atlanta campaign were those of the Army of the Tennessee. The left wing received continual commendation until the great battle of the 22d, when it happened to be in the rear of our Army, and received and defeated the celebrated movement of Hood to our rear. Sprague's Brigade fought all day at Decatur, and saved our trains. In the battle of the 22d of July we had only five thousand men in line, but met and repulsed three Divisions of Hardee's Corps, and McPherson, who stood on our right and witnessed the fight, watching the charge of Fuller and Mersey, and the breaking of two of the enemy's columns, spoke of us in the highest terms, and five minutes later was dead. Our Army, who knew and loved him, never could reconcile ourselves to his great loss.

The Battle of Atlanta was one of the few battles of the war where the attack on the Sixteenth Army Corps caught it on the march in the rear of the Army, without intrenchments or protection of any kind, both sides fighting in the open.

In his address describing the battle of the 22d of July, General Strong, of General McPherson's staff, says:

General McPherson and myself, accompanied only by our orderlies, rode out and took position on the right of Dodge's line, and witnessed the desperate assaults of Hood's army. General McPherson's admiration for the steadiness and bravery of the Sixteenth Corps was unbounded. Had the Sixteenth Corps given way the rebel army would have been in the rear of the Seventeenth and Fifteenth Corps, and would have swept like an avalanche over our supply-trains, and the position of the Army of the Tennessee would have been very critical.

General Frank P. Blair pays this tribute to the fighting of the Sixteenth Army Corps, in his official report of the Battle of Atlanta:

I started to go back to my command, and witnessed the fearful assault made on the Sixteenth Army Corps, and its prompt and gallant repulse by that command. It was a most fortunate circumstance for the whole army that the Sixteenth Army Corps occupied the position I have attempted to describe at the moment of attack; and, although it does not belong to me to report upon the bearing and conduct of the officers and men of that Corps, still I cannot withhold my expression of admiration for the manner in which this command met and repulsed the repeated and persistent attacks of the enemy. The attack upon our flank and rear was made by the whole of Hardee's corps.

Under General Howard, a part of the left wing took part in the battle of the 28th of July. On August 19th I was given a Confederate leave, when that beau-ideal of a soldier, my old schoolmate and comrade, General T. E. G. Ransom, took command of the Corps. The right wing knew him, for he was with you in the Red River campaign. He died on a stretcher in command of the Corps in the chase after Hood. The old Second Division had its innings with General Corse, at Altoona, where the fighting has been immortalized in verse and song. My fortunes took me away to the command of the Army and Department of the Missouri, and the two Divisions of the left wing were merged one into the Fifteenth and the other into the Seventeenth Corps, and, so far as the campaigns were concerned, the Corps fought in two units, the right and left wings, and each was a Corps command.

The grave of that remarkable soldier, General A. J. Smith, whose distinguished services were so often recognized by Generals Grant and Sherman, has not a stone to designate it. The Society of the Army of the Tennessee is aiding in raising the funds to commemorate his memory and deeds by erecting a monument in his home in St. Louis.

The Sixteenth Army Corps had great opportunities in the campaigns it took part in, and never failed to make the most of them. They went cheerfully to any work assigned to them. They have left in the war records a history that they may well be proud of, and every work they have undertaken has received the strong commendation of their superior officers.

GENERAL GRANT

Remarks at Army of Potomac ReunionNiagara Falls, N. Y

When you consider that it is now thirty-three years after the war, that the Government has published every report, letter and order that was of any moment, you will agree with me that it is difficult to interest an Army audience in talking about another Army, and I shall not detain you long on that subject. There are, however, some incidents of General Grant's first visit to your Army, his return to ours, and the planning of the grand campaign that was to end the war, that may interest you.

In December, 1863, after the Battle of Chattanooga, the Army of the Tennessee camped along the railway from Columbia, Tenn., to Decatur and Huntsville, Ala. After the Battle of Chattanooga General Grant returned to Nashville and called there to meet him several Corps Commanders of the Army of the Tennessee, and General Sheridan of the Army of the Cumberland. If I remember rightly, there were present Generals Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Granger, Logan, Rawlins, and myself. All of us of the Army of the Tennessee were a hard-looking crowd. None of us had seen Nashville or any base of supplies since we had marched from the Mississippi River to Chattanooga, and we had been hard at work building railways and foraging. We arrived in Nashville late in the afternoon, and General Sherman took us to General Grant's headquarters. General Grant suggested that we should call upon the Military Governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, and pay our respects to him. We, of course, followed General Grant, and were introduced to Governor Johnson. I remember that our uniforms were greatly worn, one or two of us wearing blouses with Army overcoats, and he looked at us with a very quizzical eye, until General Grant said to excuse us that he had not given us time since we reached the city to change our suits; but Grant knew we had no others. Governor Johnson was then a very radical man, and was very emphatic in informing us that while he was Military Governor of Tennessee no rebel would receive much consideration from him, and brought his fist down on a piano in the room with such force that the sound from it startled us all, and we left there with the idea that rebels in Tennessee had better get out; but we soon found that his words were much stronger than his acts, for I hardly ever got my hands on rebel stock or supplies that I did not find Johnson trying to pull them off.

After our visit, General Sherman suggested that we should all go to the theater that evening, and under his lead we went to the principal opera house to hear the play of Hamlet. We were all strangers in Nashville; even General Grant was not well known. We paid our way in and found the theater crowded with soldiers going to and returning from veteran furloughs. General Sherman, who you all know was a great lover of the theater, sat alongside of me and soon commenced criticising the play, earnestly protesting that it was being murdered. I had to check him several times and tell him unless he kept quiet the soldiers in the audience would recognize him and there would be a scene. We had entered late, and there soon came on the scene where Hamlet soliloquizes over the skull of Yorick. The audience was perfectly still, endeavoring to comprehend the actor's words, when a soldier far back in the audience rose up and in a clear voice called out, as the actor held up the skull, "Say, pard, what is it, Yank or Reb?" The house appreciated the point and was instantly in an uproar, and General Grant said we had better leave, so we went quietly out, no one discovering Grant's or Sherman's presence. Sherman immediately suggested that we should find an oyster-house and get something to eat, and General Rawlins was put forward as guide and spokesman. He led us to a very inviting place. We went in and found there was but one large table in the place. There was one man sitting at it, and Rawlins, in his modest way, without informing the man who his party was, asked him if he would change to a smaller table and let us have that one. The man said the table was good enough for him and kept on eating, and Rawlins backed out into the street again. Sherman said if we depended on Rawlins we would get nothing to eat, and said he would see what could be done. He hailed a man who pointed out another saloon kept by a woman, and to this Sherman took us, and she served us what we then considered a very nice oyster stew. As we sat around the table, we talked more than we ate, and by the time we had half finished our supper the woman came in and asked for the pay and said we must leave, as under the military rules her house must close at 12 midnight and it was then a few minutes after that hour; so out we got and took our way to Grant's headquarters, where we bunked down the best we could during the night. Some of the staff heard of our evening's adventure and gave the news to the press, and the next morning before breakfast all the parties were present to apologize to Grant that they did not recognize him, as we were out of our own jurisdiction and in that of the Army of the Cumberland; but Grant in his modest way satisfied them that he had no complaint. However, there poured in on him for all of us complimentary tickets and invitations to almost everything in Nashville.

After breakfast we all assembled in a large room at headquarters to hear what General Grant had to say to us. He took up with us the plan for a winter campaign. He proposed himself to take about 30,000 of the troops concentrated at Chattanooga and transport them by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, and there take with him the troops of General Canby and go thence to Mobile and attack that place. General Sherman was to go to Memphis, gather up all the forces along the Mississippi River, including the troops at Vicksburg and Natchez, together with the Seventeenth Corps, and march from Vicksburg to Meridian and thence join Grant at Mobile. I was to take the Sixteenth Corps, which was then located on the line of the Nashville and Decatur road, together with about 10,000 cavalry that General William Sooy Smith had concentrated near Nashville, and sweep down through Alabama, Northern Mississippi, and Western Tennessee, attacking any forces of the enemy that might be met, and destroying all the railroads and provisions that had been stored in that country, this with a view of making it difficult for any of the confederate armies to again occupy the territory, so as to enable Sherman and Grant, when the spring and summer campaign came on, to utilize all the Union troops that had been occupying that country. After the plans were all made and all the arrangements agreed upon, General Grant reported them to Washington, but President Lincoln objected because he was afraid, if we took so many troops from Chattanooga, that Longstreet, who was occupying Eastern Tennessee with his Army, would return to Chattanooga or Middle Tennessee and undo all we had accomplished in the Battle of Chattanooga. Grant had no fear of this, but he made up his mind to go immediately to East Tennessee and take the forces there under General Foster, attack and defeat Longstreet, and then come back and carry out his plans. He found after reaching Knoxville that General Foster's forces could not be used, so he abandoned the campaign, only sending Sherman to Vicksburg, who marched out to Meridian and returned, while the 7,000 cavalry under General William Sooy Smith, who was to join Sherman overland, moved south, fighting and driving the enemy until he reached West Point, where he met a superior force of the enemy and returned to Memphis.

In March, 1864, General Grant was called to Washington to be given his commission as Lieutenant-General of the Army and command of all the forces. On his return to Nashville, on March 17th, we were again called to meet him. General Grant told us of his visit to Washington, his reception by the President, and all the courtesies that had been paid him. He told us that he accepted the commission of Lieutenant-General and Commander of all the Armies on condition that his plans should not be interfered with at Washington and that he should have the command of the staff departments of the armies. Those departments had always considered themselves independent of the Commander in the field; in fact, in the beginning of the war the officers of Commissary Quarter-Master and Ordnance Departments declined to obey the orders of the commanders they were serving under, except upon the order of their chief in Washington. General Grant settled this. A Commissary of Subsistence declined to carry out one of his orders, and General Grant said to him that while he could not force him to obey the order, he could relieve him and put in his place one of the line officers who would obey all orders. This officer reported this to Washington and it changed their orders so that they were ordered to obey the orders of the officer in the field and to report their orders to their chiefs in Washington. General Grant said that President Lincoln said in reply to his request for the command of the staff departments that he could not give him that legally; but, he said, "There is no one but myself that can interfere with your orders; and you can rest assured that I will not do it." We were all anxious to hear of his visit to the Army of the Potomac, and his opinion of it, and Sherman soon got him to talking about it. He said it was the finest Army he had ever seen; far superior to any of ours in equipment, supplies, and transportation. He said, however, that the officers he talked with considered he would have a much more difficult problem on his hands than he had had in the West, and he said to Sherman that some officer who both of them knew, but whose name I have forgotten, told him, "You have not faced Bobby Lee yet;" and as he said it, I could see that twinkle in Grant's eye that we often saw there when he meant mischief. Grant, after discussing the Army of the Potomac and having nothing but praise for it, informed us that he should make his headquarters with that Army and leave Sherman to command the Armies of the West, also informing us that he proposed to take several of us East with him. Sherman protested strongly against this, and it was finally compromised by his taking Sheridan and leaving the rest of us with Sherman. During the two or three days we were with Grant he outlined in a general way his plan of campaign that every Army should move as early as possible in the spring, all on the same day against the enemy, so that Lee and Johnston could not detach any of their commands to reinforce the others. He said, "I will try to keep Lee from sending any force to Johnston, but," he said to Sherman, "if he does, I will send you two men where he sends one." He also informed us of the necessity of closing the war with this campaign.

Our visit with Grant ended, he took Sherman as far as Cincinnati with him, to talk over and complete their plans, while we returned to our commands to fit them out for the campaign. General Sherman has since pointed out to me in the Burnett House, at Cincinnati, the room they occupied the night before they parted, and where over their maps the final orders were given him and final arrangements made that inaugurated the two great campaigns of Richmond and Petersburg in the East, and Atlanta in the West. After the Atlanta campaign I paid General Grant a visit at City Point. I reached his headquarters in October, and spent two weeks with him, and saw the Armies of the James and the Potomac. Evenings we would sit around his camp-fire, and in his genial, comprehensive way, he told us of his campaign and the great battles you had fought, and brought out fully to me what a great Army you were. I asked him what he claimed for the Battle of the Wilderness. There had been great discussion, as you know, about it, and Grant, with the same twinkle of the eye that I had seen at Nashville, said, "I only claim that after that battle, (and I took the initiative on the march towards Richmond,) that the Army of the Potomac was no longer afraid of Bobby Lee." He had not forgotten his talk with us at Nashville.

Now you have had Grant's opinion of your great Army, and as my toast is the Army of the Tennessee, I will close by giving you General Grant's description of that Army when called upon to respond to the same toast at one of our reunions. He said, "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."

USE OF BLOCK-HOUSES DURING THE CIVIL WAR

To the Editor of the Army and Navy Journal:

I was greatly interested in the communication of Captain Joubert Reitz, published in your journal March 21, 1903, giving a description of the block-house system inaugurated by General Kitchener in the Transvaal War. It was a continuous line of block-houses connected by barbed wire, to prevent the Boers crossing the railway lines, and virtually corralling their forces in certain districts until want of food forced them to surrender. Captain Reitz asserts that the block-house system did more to end the war than the whole British Army.

In the Civil War our block-house system was just as effective, but in another direction. We used it for the purpose of protecting our lines of communication, not as a trocha, or a line connected with wire fencing and other obstructions, as used by the British and by the Spaniards in the Cuban War. The British built theirs of bags filled with earth. The Spaniards erected neat structures of two stories, built of concrete, with wooden roofs and openings for two lines of fire, one above the other. These were erected not more than half a mile apart. In the Civil War our block-houses were usually erected of logs, one and two stories high. The face of the upper story had an angle of forty-five degrees to the face of the first story, thus concentrating a direct fire upon an enemy approaching from any point of the compass. The first block-houses in the West that I know of were built by my command in July and August, 1862, when it rebuilt the Mobile & Ohio Railroad from Columbus to Humbolt. There were many important bridges on this line, and we built block-houses at the most important ones, and stockades at the others.