Never Call Retreat, page 37
A chaplain in Longstreet's corps, riding with the officers who followed the commanding general, turned to Colonel C. S. Venable, of Lee's staff, and asked: "Does it not make the general proud to see how these men love him?"
Venable shook his head.
"Not proud. It awes him."13
CHAPTERSIX
Act of Faith
1. The Last Barrier
DESIGNEDTO BE IDENTICAL, the two campaigns quickly became very different.
In Virginia it finally seemed that there was just one unending battle, measuring from the Rapidan to the Appomattox in one dimension and from May to April in another. In Georgia there were many separate battles, along with sieges and skirmishes and constant raids, tied together by prodigious marching to make at last a campaign that went all across the Confederacy. Utterly dissimilar, the two campaigns nevertheless ran parallel. They took the war to its climax and then to its end, and to this day no one is quite sure what either one cost or what the two together bought.
Grant was one sort of soldier and Sherman was another; equally important, Lee was a different sort than Johnston. Each campaign was the result of a grim collaboration between enemies, taking its shape from the man who lost quite as much as from the man who won; which is to say that Grant-plus-Lee gives one total and Sherman-plus-Johnston gives another. Four concepts of strategy were at work, and not just two.
Grant and Sherman were on the offensive, but they instinctively interpreted the offensive task in different ways. Grant always thought in terms of the opposing army, and Sherman thought geographically. If one man wanted to come to grips with the enemy's soldiers, the other wanted to possess the enemy's land, cities and farms and rivers and hills. One man would drive his foe and the other would be more likely to go around him; curiously enough, Grant saw the human beings beyond the rival army as people who would someday be his fellow citizens again, and Sherman saw them as the ultimate targets of his military wrath and would reach past the opposing army to get at them.
Lee and Johnston also saw their roles differently. Lee was offensive-minded even when he was on the defensive; he was born to make the attack, and his idea of the way to parry a blow was to strike before the blow could be delivered. Any Federal general who began a "forward to Richmond" campaign was apt to learn, before much time had passed, that his chief concern had suddenly become the defense of Washington. Given the slightest opening—a pause between attacks, a breathing spell during which his antagonist waited for supplies or reinforcements—Lee would seize the initiative. He wanted to use his army rather than protect it, and he thought about victory rather than about the fear that victory might cost more than he could afford to pay.
Johnston was more passive; in an odd way, more courtly, as if the formalities that came down from seventeenth-century warfare had not yet been eradicated from the military art. The defensive seemed to fit him. He made war like an overmatched fencer, moving rapidly to meet every thrust and shift, always conscious that his opponent was the stronger, delaying his own riposte until some of that strength had been spent. At times it seemed that he fought for points rather than to draw blood, but he was pugnacious enough; he would let his counterstroke wait until his opponent had finished his maneuver. Like Lee, Johnston had the complete affection and confidence of his soldiers, and this thought sustained him when he reflected that the administration disliked him. With mingled pride and bitterness, he told a friend this spring that "if this army thought of me & felt toward me as some of our high civil functionaries do it would be necessary for me to leave the military service, but thank heaven it is my true friend."
Richmond had been impatient all winter, urging him to take the offensive and fretting because he did not. He believed he was not nearly strong enough—when May came he had about 55,000 men, and Sherman had nearly twice that many—and he thought the administration could have reinforced him if it had tried: there were plenty of idle troops in the deep South, he said, but Richmond would not send them to him. As spring came he feared that "Grant's arrival on the Potomac will turn the eyes of our authorities too strongly in that direction to let them see in this." Doubting that the Confederacy ever had the power to invade the North successfully, he still felt that it had one advantage; its soldiers believed they were defending their homes, and so had higher morale than their foes. (One reason he wanted to delay action as long as possible was the fact that the term of service of Sherman's veteran regiments would expire in May and June. Johnston did not think many of these men would re-enlist.) He was not enthusiastic about some of his general officers, among whom jealousies and rivalries remained from the Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns, and he told a friend: "If I were President I'd distribute the generals of this army over the Confederacy."1
He was at least satisfied with the generals who commanded his two army corps. One was Hardee, stolid, unspectacular, and reliable, who had been given temporary command of the army after Bragg's removal but who refused to keep it because he thought the place belonged to Johnston. The other was a transfer from Lee's army, John B. Hood, one of the most famous combat commanders in all the Confederacy.
Johnston was glad to get Hood, although physically the man was almost a wreck—at thirty-two years of age—with one arm permanently disabled by a Gettysburg wound and one leg gone entirely from a wound at Chickamauga. Hood clumped about on crutches, when he rode he had to be strapped in the saddle, and the stump of his amputated thigh gave him much pain; but he remained the perfect picture of a warrior. He still had the long, tawny beard everyone recognized, and the sad drowsy eyes that had an uncanny way of lighting up when he rode into battle, and he was obviously an asset for any army. Not until much later did Johnston learn that Hood bore a watching brief for the administration. Hood kept sending confidential letters to the President, the Secretary of War, and General Bragg, and these letters steadily and methodically undercut Johnston's own reports. Hood assured Richmond that Johnston's army was in better shape than Johnston said, and had better prospects, and Mr. Davis' dark suspicion that Johnston was more defensive-minded than he needed to be got constant confirmation.2
Later on this would lead to catastrophe, but for the moment all was serene. When Joe Wheeler's cavalry sent back word on May 5 that the huge Federal host was advancing, Johnston and his army were ready.
Sherman was leading three armies: one army, to all practical purposes, broken into three operating units, but technically three separate armies. Largest was the sturdy Army of the Cumberland, under Thomas, 60,000 men, veterans of everything since Shiloh, devoted to Pap Thomas and full of self-confidence. Next came the Army of the Tennessee, once Grant's and later Sherman's, led now by a curly-haired young major general who was a particular favorite of these two soldiers, James B. McPherson; in this army were 30,000 men, with more to join up later. Finally there was the Army of the Ohio, really no more than an army corps but denominated an army for administrative reasons; it contained slightly more than 17,000 men and was commanded by John M. Schofield, who had held the prickly Missouri command until Rosecrans was sent there in the shake-up that followed Chickamauga. Altogether, Sherman had about 112,000 men present for duty, although he reported that his effective marching strength would be around 100,000. Of this total, perhaps 15,000 were cavalry.8
These men were full of bounce, and Johnston's belief that they would refuse to re-enlist was wrong. In Thomas' army alone, seventy-one regiments—more than 30,000 men in all —had signed up for another three-year hitch; a larger number than the entire Army of the Potomac could show. The proportion was about the same in the other armies. In one of McPherson's corps it was proudly reported that every regiment from Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin and nearly all of those from Illinois and Iowa had re-enlisted. These westerners thought that they were winning and they wanted to be around for the finish.4
Now Sherman was taking them down to attack Joe Johnston, his drum beats echoing those that took the far-off Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan; and this one time, at the start of the campaign, Sherman tried for a battle of annihilation and a quick ending to everything.
It looked like a bad place to try to make a finish fight. Johnston had his men arrayed in front of Dalton, Georgia, a junction point on the railroad to Atlanta, thirty miles southeast of Chattanooga. West of Dalton, extending several miles to the north and south of the town, there was a craggy mountain called Rocky Face Ridge, coming almost to a knife-edge at its crest, with its western wall almost perpendicular. The main approach from Chattanooga came down through an opening near the northern end of this ridge, a gap with the ominous name of Buzzard Roost, held by Hood's corps. This position was so tough and had been fortified with such care that Sherman (always a man for the picturesque word or phrase) called it "the terrible door of death." A few miles to the south there was a narrower opening, Dug Gap, where the prospects were even worse. A stronger defensive position could hardly have been invented, and Confederate Pat Cleburne was conservative when he said that if Sherman tried to fight his way through here Johnston could hold him off for months, perhaps even until winter, killing numerous Yankees the while.
Sherman believed he knew what to do about this. Thirteen miles south of Dalton the railroad that came up from Atlanta ran through a town called Resaca, and a few miles west of Resaca was the opening of a long shallow valley, Snake Creek Gap, which angled off to the northwest toward the old Chickamauga battlefield. Snake Creek Gap thus was an avenue leading straight to Joe Johnston's lifeline, and by some flaw in Confederate arrangements—Cleburne blamed disobedience of orders by the cavalry—the gap had been left unprotected. So Sherman planned to have Thomas and Schofield press ostentatiously against Rocky Face Ridge while McPherson slipped in through Snake Creek Gap to break the railroad at Resaca. Johnston would have to make a disastrous retreat; attacked in front and in rear, and cut off from supplies, his army might well have to surrender or disperse.
It was a good plan, and as a matter of fact George Thomas had worked it out, and had asked permission to execute it, away back in February. In the general reshuffling of Federal command arrangements his proposal had been lost to view; now Sherman was reviving it, and he might have won the war with it if his insight and his luck had been a little better.
Believing that McPherson would move faster than Thomas, Sherman used Thomas for the holding operation and McPherson for the stroke at the rear, and his orders to McPherson were a little too mild: McPherson was to break the railroad at Resaca and then dig in at the mouth of the gap and prepare to smite the Rebels when they took off in flight. In other words, Sherman was using his most powerful unit for a feint that a smaller force could have made, and was striking his main blow with much less than his full strength; and, arranging things so, he gave the commander of his striking force orders that had a fatally defensive overtone. In addition, the situation at Resaca was not at all as Sherman had supposed it would be. Added together, these factors brought frustration.
The armies moved as ordered. Schofield and Thomas demonstrated around the terrible door of death, at considerable cost in casualties, and McPherson moved down Snake Creek Gap, came out at Resaca on May 9—and found the place strongly held by Confederate infantry and artillery. He advanced tentatively, drew a heavy fire, considered that if he moved on to break the railroad he would expose himself to a ruinous flank attack, and went back to the mouth of the gap, dug in, and awaited developments. Sherman ruefully said later that McPherson had had the sort of opportunity that a soldier gets only once in a lifetime—he could have walked right through Resaca, he said, overstating the case slightly—but he confessed that McPherson was entirely justified in what he did by the orders he had received.5 So McPherson stayed there, and both armies regrouped at Resaca, Johnston moving down east of Rocky Face Ridge and Sherman coming down in McPherson's trail—and the big trap was not sprung.
One reason for McPherson's trouble was the fact that a thousand miles to the west General Banks had got entangled along the Red River in a campaign he could neither break off nor win. His projected advance against Mobile—the "main feature" of the whole western operation, according to Sherman—was neither made nor threatened, and Richmond ordered Bishop Polk to come to Johnston's aid with an army corps that should have been fully occupied in southern Alabama. As a result, a division of 5000 of Polk's soldiers under Brigadier General James Cantey got to Resaca on May 7. If Thomas and his 60,000 Cumberlands had come down through Snake Creek Gap they could have shouldered this force out of the way and Johnston would have been caught, but Cantey was just strong enough to make McPherson wait.6
Beginning on May 13 there was sharp fighting at Resaca, and after three days of it Sherman had lost 6800 men and Johnston's position remained intact. Johnston had lost nearly as many men, but Bishop Polk had come into camp with another division, Loring's, and his army was stronger than it had been when the campaign began. Sherman had clearly been foiled in his effort to destroy the force that opposed him.'7
Then the campaign began to fall into the pattern that it followed all the way to Atlanta.
Keeping most of his army in front of Johnston at Resaca, Sherman sent infantry and cavalry on a long swing beyond his right, striking south to hit the railroad in Johnston's rear. Heavily outnumbered, Johnston could do nothing but shift his own army to meet this threat. He evacuated Resaca, ordering things so deftly that the Federals confessed he left behind not so much as a solitary wagon or a disabled cannon, and he marched down across the Oostenaula River and halted at Adairsville, fifteen miles to the south. Again Sherman skirmished in his front and sent out a flanking column beyond the Confederate left, and again Johnston quickly shifted his army to meet him, going ten miles south to Cassville, where he posted his troops north and north-east of the town.
Sherman's advance elements came out, a long spray of skirmishers in their front, there was a hard rear-guard action, and Johnston rode forward to study the situation. He realized, presently, that a good half of the Federal army was off to the west, at a town called Kingston—beginning, apparently, another of those flanking maneuvers—and it struck him that he had a fine chance to crush the half that was in his immediate front. Posting Hardee's corps off to the left, to guard against the Federals at Kingston, he ordered Hood and Polk to make the attack.
First and last, Hood complained that Johnston would rather retreat than fight, and he lodged these complaints in the highest quarters. But now, on May 19, when Johnston ordered a fight, Hood found reasons why a fight should not be made. He advanced a mile or so, reported that Federal troops were menacing his right and rear—a delusion, for there were no Federals in that vicinity—and took up a defensive position. Johnston then pulled back to a ridge south of Cassville and, after dark, Hood and Polk—who had not been especially co-operative when Bragg tried to go on the offensive—went to Johnston and told him he must retreat, arguing that they could not hold their ground next day because the Federals held a strong position and had artillery posted so that it could blast the whole Confederate line. Johnston thought they were wrong, and when he was able to get in touch with Hardee he found that Hardee thought so too; still, he did not see how he could attack if two of his three corps commanders were convinced that they were going to be defeated, and so, reluctantly, he ordered another retreat. This time he took his army south of the Etowah River and posted it around Allatoona Pass, where the Atlanta railroad passed through a defile in a forbidding rocky ridge.8
This was no place for a frontal attack, and Sherman did not dream of making one. He relied again on the flanking operation, this one on a large scale. Twenty-five miles south and slightly east of his headquarters at Kingston there was a little nowhere of a place called Dallas, notable because it was the center for a modest network of country roads and also because it was a dozen miles behind Johnston's position at Allatoona Pass. If Sherman could reach Dallas quickly he might get behind Johnston and cut him off from Atlanta, and so he sent McPherson off on a wide arc, marching for Dallas, and brought Thomas and Schofield down farther eastward, where they could keep Johnston from breaking into the Federal rear.
Johnston recognized the move and marched his men over to meet it, and on May 25 the armies began a round of vicious engagements near Dallas, the Federals trying to brush past the Confederate left and failing. The roads were bad, the country was inexpressibly dreary with scattered farms making lonely clearings in the spiky forests, there was heavy rain, and the soldiers floundered into a series of battles with homespun names like New Hope Church, Pumpkin Vine Creek, and Pickett's Mills. By the Chickamauga standard these were not large battles; mostly they were fought by divisions or brigades, each fight isolated from the others but all developing a singular characteristic—it was almost impossible to win one of them, in the ordinary sense, because no attack could really succeed. The smallest knoll or ravine or stand of dense underbrush could become a place where determined men might hold on as long as they had ammunition, and even when the fighting stopped the battle lines were so close together that the shooting would flare up savagely if either side tried to move.
It was here that the soldiers learned the value of entrenchments. Sherman called it "a big Indian war," and said that in this wooded country an enterprising foe could, in a remarkably short time, make an almost impassable barrier of felled trees and earth parapets; the Confederates used spade and ax so fast, he said, that they could build new works as fast as he could dislodge them from the old ones, they were always protected by these barricades, and they were so obscured by branches and underbrush that "we cannot see them until we receive a sudden and deadly fire."9
