Shrouds of Glory
Praise for Shrouds of Glory:
“Groom brings to his task the idiosyncratic sensibility of a fiction writer. Thus he is able, within the conventions of history writing, to infuse his storytelling with energy, surprise, freshness and power. . . . Reminiscent of Evan S. Connell’s masterpiece Son of the Morning Star . . . In the way it leaves the reader breathless with amazement and awe, the violent fifty-page center of Groom’s book calls to mind the massacres that open and close Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 movie The Wild Bunch. . . . In Shrouds of Glory, Groom has done true justice to those who fought there, in all their human complexity.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Mr. Groom follows in the footsteps of Shelby Foote. . . . Mr. Groom has, in fact, produced a fine synthesis of one of the most important, if overshadowed, military campaigns in American history.”
—Greg Pierce, The Washington Times
“[Groom] puts his novelist’s eye to searching out the telling detail and the colorful anecdote. The pages turn.”
—Stephen W. Sears, People
“[Groom] sharpens the drama of the conflict. . . . He peoples his history with vivid characters. . . . [Shrouds of Glory] explains why no child growing up in the South at a certain time could have resisted playing with his ancestor’s rusty sword.”
—Ben Brown, USA Today
“A thoroughly researched military history free of the usual vices of thoroughly researched military histories. The pace is quick. The descriptions are vivid and accurate. . . . Groom’s ability to make these remorselessly grim events readable is an accomplishment. His contribution to the literature of the Civil War, by bringing out the neglected counterstrategy to the march to the sea, is important.”
—Doug Thompson, Arkansas Democrat Gazette
“A well-written narrative . . . Groom’s accounts of the slaughter of Hood’s men at Franklin and their overrunning at Nashville by the Union forces of George Thomas convey the horror of Civil War battlefields without sacrificing narrative clarity. An excellent introduction to a complex campaign.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A vivid history . . . Highly readable and intensely evocative, a fine addition to the growing body of literature about the western war, once largely a forgotten footnote to the ‘real’ action in the East.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Also by Winston Groom
Better Times Than These
As Summers Die
Only
Conversations with the Enemy (with Duncan Spencer)
Forrest Gump
Gone the Sun
Gumpisms
Gump & Co.
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl
The Crimson Tide
A Storm in Flanders
Shrouds of Glory
From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War
Winston Groom
Copyright © 1995 by Winston Groom
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
All maps are reprinted from William R. Scaife, Hood’s Campaign for Tennessee: The March to Oblivion, copyright © 1986 by William R. Scaife.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Groom, Winston, 1944–
Shrouds of glory: Atlanta to Nashville: the last great campaign of the Civil War / Winston Groom.
ISBN 0-8021-4061-0 (pbk.)
1. Atlanta Campaign, 1864. 2. Nashville (Tenn.), Battle of, 1864. 3. Georgia—History—Civil War, 1861-1865. 4. Tennessee—History—Civil War, 1861-1865. I. Title. E476.7.G76 1995 973’36—dc20 94-37242
DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
04 05 06 07 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my great-grandfather, Fremont Sterling Thrower 56th Alabama Cavalry, Confederate States Army
“I buried death in the shroud of glory.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Organization of the Infantry, Confederate Army of Tennessee
Before the Battle of Franklin
Organization of the Infantry, U.S. Army of the Tennessee
Before the Battle of Franklin
Contents
Preface
1. A Midsummer’s Change
2. I Will Go On While I Can
3. Crazy Like a Fox
4. This Army Is Going to Do Something Wrong
5. If You Want It, Come and Take It
6. They Must Be Killed
7. To Conquer the Peace
8. Go On As You Propose
9. It Is Almost Worth Dying
10. The Best Move Come to Naught
11. Franklin, Tennessee
12. Seeing the Elephant
13. An Indescribable Fury
14. All Those Dead Heroes
15. Nashville, Tennessee
16. Like a Lot of Beasts
17. Didn’t I Tell You We Could Lick ’Em?
18. A River of Fire
19. Black Care Was the Outrider
Bibliographical Note on Sources
Index
Preface
Several years ago, while rummaging through the attic of my parents’ home, I came across an old metal strongbox. Inside it was a sheaf of ancient papers, letters and documents, and as I sifted through them beneath the dim overhead light, the clues to a mystery were revealed to me.
My great-grandfather was Fremont Sterling Thrower, who was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1845 and lived on until 1925. My father knew him well as a boy. He had become a judge and walked with a cane, the result of a leg wound received during the Civil War. As a child I played with his rusty cavalry sword, which today hangs on my wall. What we understood was that at the age of seventeen he had left Springhill College and joined the Confederate army, but the details of his service were clouded in time, and it was not until I found the box of papers that I knew for sure what his role in that conflict had been.
The most revealing document was his application for a State of Alabama pension for former Confederate soldiers, which had at last been approved by the federal government. My great-grandfather had enlisted as a private in what later became the 56th Alabama Cavalry regiment and had fought Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s army for nearly three years as it slowly ground down the Confederate forces in the western theater.
The Confederate Cavalry commander was “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, and under him, my relative and his friends battled all through the arduous Atlanta campaign in the army of General John Bell Hood. Just before Hood entered Tennessee in his disastrous attempt to pull off an impossible mission, Great-grandfather Thrower and his outfit were assigned to “follow and harass” Sherman, who had decided to march to Savannah and “the sea.”
At Savannah he was shot in the knee, but he remained with the army until the final surrender.
Among the contents of the box was a faded handwritten letter that reads:
To Whom it may concern:
This is to certify that I was a member of Co. B, 56th Ala. Regt. and also associated daily with Mr. Fremont Thrower, who has recently deceased, left behind him an unblemished character and record as a gallant C
onfederate soldier throughout the War from 1862 to 1865, being faithful to duty at all times under the trying ordeal under which we were subjected. My old comrade never flickered in the balance, but promptly came to the front at every call & gallantly withstood the shot and shells of the enemy—almost daily, we were subjected to.
It affords me much pleasure to state of the gallantry exhibited by my comrade in arms—and of the bravery & heroism displayed by the Confederate soldiers who composed the “little band of brothers” of the Southland, who fought the world, from 1861 to 1865.
Respectfully,
J. B. Marshall, 1917 4th Ave, B’ham.
The only survivor of Co. B, 56th Ala. Regt.
19th Feby, 1925.
All this got me to thinking. Here was a man born a hundred years before me, who had not only fought in that long-ago conflict but lived on to touch my own father, who, in turn, touched me. More than a quarter century ago I became interested in Civil War history and have made a study of it ever since, but for the first time the notion came to me to write about it.
I have been principally a novelist for many years, and books like Forrest Gump are certainly a far cry from historical accounts. Though my great-grandfather did not accompany Hood’s army into Tennessee, the documents show he did serve with it throughout the Atlanta campaign and on up to the Tennessee border, which is the concern of the first third of this book. But this story, of course, is not about him. It is about the last big Confederate campaign of the Civil War—the trek of the Army of Tennessee from Atlanta to Nashville—which has been reported in various accounts over the years, but which seemed to me to call for a new telling.
I hope that with the novelist’s perspective I have been able to shed some new light on this subject. I have not employed the academic historian’s device of footnotes, for which I respectfully beg forgiveness, but, like a number of Civil War writers far more eminent than myself, I feel footnotes are sometimes intrusive. Let me hasten to add, however, that I have been scrupulous in researching everything presented as fact in this book and at no time let the temptation to write “the better story” overcome my duty to recorded historical material.
In this regard, I owe a great debt to a number of people and institutions that have made the writing of this book possible. Foremost among them is the State of Alabama interlibrary loan system. This remarkable service allowed me to order scores of books, microfilms, documents, and other research material from all over America through my local library, thus saving many weeks or months of travel time. In the same interest, the library I used most was that in the city of Foley, Alabama, and to all those persons, staff and volunteers, who over the years gave me kind and uncomplaining assistance in obtaining research materials, I owe a profound debt of gratitude.
As well, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Universities of South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina State, and others provided splendid and cheerful help. To Dr. Kit Carter of the University of Alabama history department go my special thanks, for reading the manuscript and rendering invaluable suggestions and criticisms. Mrs. James Jones of Sagaponak, New York, was lovely enough to lend me her late husband’s early edition of the entire Official Records. Additional thanks go to Edwin Morgan, who gave good, sound reading assistance, Kenneth Whitespunner, who lent valuable old books, and especially my fine friend “Skip” Jones, who suffered through my complaints with a new computer system, then organized the whole project for me. Finally, to Anne-Clinton Groom, my lovely wife and chief executive officer of this enterprise, who was present at the creation and tirelessly engineered the details of research and development.
And, of course, I owe more than I can say to the people at Atlantic Monthly Press, not only for agreeing to publish this book, but for their tireless efforts to do it right. Colin Dickerman, my editor, is a man of great patience, tact, and intellect and shaped the project from the start. The copy editor, Jill Mason, saved me from myself more than once and is possibly the best line copy editor I have ever known. Diane Cook did a great job locating photographs and maps. And finally, Morgan Entrekin, publisher, editor, and longtime friend, has been there since the start.
To all of these, I thank you again.
Point Clear, Alabama
November 11, 1994
1
A Midsummer’s Change
In the midnight mists on a red clay hill in northwest Georgia on May 11, 1864, a bizarre, almost Druid-like ceremony took place. There, in a candlelit tent, a man was baptized. It was unusual for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that at that moment in the hills and valleys around them, more than one hundred fifty thousand armed men slept fitfully, awaiting the dawn that would open the final and perhaps bitterest campaign of the American Civil War.
The man doing the baptizing was Leonidas Polk, the fifty-eightyear-old Episcopal bishop of the state of Louisiana, who also served his Lord as an infantry corps commander in the Army of Tennessee, the main Confederate battle force in the western theater of the war. The candidate for confirmation into the church was also a lieutenant general, John Bell Hood, a gigantic young Kentuckian who, at thirty-three, was among the second generation of Confederate leaders to bear the weight of the national madness that had already cost more than half a million dead and nearly wrecked the fabric of American society. Using a horse water bucket and a tin washpan, Bishop-General Polk began to administer the solemn rites to his fellow general. When it proved awkward for Hood to kneel because of the horrible mutilations inflicted on him at Gettysburg, where his arm was mangled, and at Chickamauga, where just ten months earlier his leg was amputated at the hip, Bishop-General Polk gently suggested to the youthful and still handsome general that he remain in his chair. But struggling for his crutches, Hood declared that if he could not kneel, he could at least stand and, with the blue battle-light still flashing in his eyes, got to his feet to be received into the church.
Why Hood wished to be baptized at this odd juncture is not recorded. It might have been the wave of revivalism that had recently swept the Confederate winter quarters in those cold hills near the Tennessee border. Or it could have had something to do with Hood’s volatile love affair with a beautiful young socialite from South Carolina and the embarrassment of being unable to take communion with her in her church. Then again, it may have been some premonition or omen Hood had seen or felt, warning him of his destiny and telling him to get right with his God. In any event, within two months, grave changes were in store for the participants in this midnight baptismal rite. General Polk would be dead, blown nearly in half by a Union cannonball, and Hood, the young Christian soldier, would be poised to march the Army of Tennessee and, indeed, the Southern Confederacy itself, into the battles of Atlanta and Nashville and on into oblivion.
In spite of a disheartening string of military reversals during 1863, the Confederacy was not yet washed up, as some supposed. To be sure, its losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Robert E. Lee’s bitter and bloody Forty Days retreat through Virginia to the Richmond-Petersburg salient were crippling. And now, with William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union army bracing to rattle the gates of Atlanta, a darkness was spreading across the South that foretold of “miserable anxiety.”
But in the North, many did not see it that way at all. In fact, many Northerners actually feared they were losing the war and wished to be rid of it.
In those grim days of spring and summer, a maelstrom of public and political discontent swirled over much of the United States. There were threats of a renewal of the vicious draft riots of the previous summer that left hundreds dead in New York. The price of gold had soared to an incredible $250 an ounce, reflecting an ominous lack of public confidence in the U.S. government. From the Midwest wafted unsettling rumors of something called the Order of American Knights, alleged to be a pro-Southern quarter-million-man clandestine group promising to overthrow the government. Many were so weary of the war and the mounting casualty lists and a wallowing economy it seemed nearly p
lausible that the South could succeed in freeing itself from the Union politically where it had so far failed militarily. Horace Greeley, the sanguinary editor of the New York Tribune, wrote that nine-tenths of all Americans were “anxious for peace—peace on almost any terms—and utterly sick of human slaughter and devastation.” Predicting that President Abraham Lincoln would be defeated in the elections that fall, Greeley railed, “We must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.” Not that the newspaperman wished to capitulate the Union and give up—in fact, he was calling for a sterner leader than Lincoln—but his articles summed up much of the mood of the North.
Lincoln himself was dodging fire not only from the opposition Democrats but also from prominent members of his own Republican party. At a cabinet meeting August 23, 1864, Lincoln wrote forlornly: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.” The despondent president had each cabinet member sign the back of the note as a witness, and he put it away for future use, if necessary.
For their part, the Democrats nominated as president former general in chief George B. (“Little Mac”) McClellan, who had been fired by Lincoln not once but twice for getting whipped by Robert E. Lee. McClellan had expressed himself as being against the abolition of slavery and was considered to be a man who would treat with the South for peace. In fact, Lincoln had drafted a confidential document, in his “own peculiar style,” so he said, proposing that a “peace commission” be appointed to see if the Confederates would agree to a restoration of the Union, with or without slavery—and this after issuing his Emancipation Proclamation. Though nothing came of the peace commission, its very concept surely indicated the depths of the government’s despair over the course of the war.