September 2, 1864—Union troops under General William Tecumseh Sherman entered Atlanta after a four-month campaign starting in Chattanooga, Tenn., marked mostly by flank movements, punctuated by a few slugfests that did little to halt his inexorable progress into the heart of the Confederacy.Now, as Northern sentiment swung decisively in favor of Abraham Lincoln in the upcoming Presidential election and away from a negotiated peace, this major Confederate commercial center and railroad depot trembled at what lay in store from a general who, only four years before, had warned cherished Southern friends that they were risking disorder and calamity by choosing secession.
They would have trembled even more if they knew only half of what he was planning for them.
In one typical comment, Sherman told Professor David Boyd of the Louisiana State Seminary in December 1860: “You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!”
If you play word association with a Southerner, he’ll probably come up with “fire” if you prompt him with “General Sherman.” In fact, on the night of September 1, 1864, fires were what Atlantans would have seen in the distance.
The thing is, that same night Sherman experienced the same thing, some twenty miles to the north of the city. Around midnight, the normally restless general, after hearing “sounds of shells exploding, and other sound like that of musketry,” went to the home of a farmer, who told him it sounded like a battle. The same noises came four hours later.
It wasn’t until the next day that Sherman learned it was what he suspected: that Confederate commander John Bell Hood, deciding that saving the city was a lost cause, had evacuated, blowing up munitions to keep them out of the hands of the enemy.
It was an incredible conflagration: Hood’s ammunition trains, consisting of seven locomotives and 81 loaded cars, all set ablaze, red-hot fragments from exploding missiles shooting right and left, making the earth tremble, near-by houses rock, window glass shatter, and plaster and loose bricks fall. Every building for a quarter mile within the vicinity was torn to pieces or pockmarked with shell fragments.
This was the blaze that everyone remembers from Gone With the Wind.
Everyone in the area around the blaze was warned to leave. That might have been the only time that the one-armed general took care throughout the just-ended two-month siege of the city.
In his Memoirs, Sherman summarized his reaction to Jefferson Davis’ decision to substitute, for the defense of the city of 20,000, Hood for Joseph E. Johnston—a wily general who yielded territory while seizing advantageous high ground that would keep his losses to a minimum—in this manner:
“I immediately inquired of General Schofield, who was his classmate at West Point, about Hood, as to his general character, etc., and learned that he was bold even to rashness, and courageous in the extreme; I inferred that the change of commanders meant ‘fight'….This was just what we wanted, viz., to fight in open ground, on any thing like equal terms, instead of being forced to run up against prepared intrenchments.”
Three times between early July and the start of September, Hood attacked. Each time, he was repulsed with losses he could not sustain.
The end for Atlanta came at the Battle of Jonesboro, an action precipitated by Sherman’s decision to cut Hood's supply lines—the Macon & Western and the Atlanta & West Point Railroads. In particular, historian Shelby Foote points to Sherman’s “grand left wheel around Atlanta,” a maneuver in which he threw all but one of his seven corps in one concentrated movement and tore out the railroad so it could not be used again.
“I have Atlanta as certainly as if it were in my hand,” Sherman told General George Thomas. Hood’s subordinate, William Hardee, didn’t stand a chance—and, this time, Hood knew it, and sensibly left him evacuate. Jonesboro had been bad enough as it was, with Hood losing nearly twice as many men (2,000) as Sherman (1,150).
Orders from Ulysses Grant had been for Sherman to wreck Hood’s army, then take Atlanta. Sherman got the priorities backward, and even after the city was taken left it to Thomas to pursue Hood later in the year in a battle of annihilation in Tennessee.
The red-haired, fierce-eyed Northern commander was mulling over a course radically different from his stated orders when he was visited by a delegation of civilians headed by Atlanta Mayor James M. Calhoun. “The fortunes of war have placed the city of Atlanta in your hands,” Calhoun said. “As mayor of the city I ask protection for noncombatants and private property.”
A few weeks later, the civilian delegation had its answer: Nothing doing.
The enormity of Sherman’s plans for the city was underscored for me in Winston Groom’s review last Friday in The Wall Street Journal of two new histories of this epic campaign.
Groom mentioned a letter that Sherman wrote to one of Lincoln’s Cabinet members, in which the general proposed that the properties of all Southerners be forcibly repopulated—and this sent a chill down my spine as soon as I read it—“as the British had done in Northern Ireland.”
If Atlantans thought that Hood's blaze was something awful to behold, they would not believe the one set by Sherman’s army as it left in November for Savannah. Ahead lay “the March to the Sea.” The destruction of the South by the first modern man of war lay at hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment