Shrouds of Glory Page 9

  Re-inforcements now appearing

  Victory is nigh.

  Hold the fort, for I am coming

  Jesus signals still!

  Wave the answer back to heaven

  By thy grace we will.

  Having his own tune to march by, Hood, at 4 A.M. next morning, put his columns on the long haul again, plodding through a cold hard rain just ahead of Sherman’s legions. Crossing over the old battlefields of the previous May, they passed by still fresh graveyards, the bleached bones of horses, and the wrecks of shattered wagons and “saw acres of timber killed by minnie balls.”

  “As we were coming along today in the piney woods,” Sam Foster wrote in his diary, “we passed an old man who had been to mill. Sitting on his horse by the side of the road waiting for us to pass. This was at 1 o’clock P.M. and he said he had been there nearly all day. He said he didn’t know that there were so many men in the whole world.”

  5

  If You Want It, Come and Take It

  As the battle of Allatoona was getting under way, Jefferson Davis, on his way back to Richmond, stopped over in Augusta, Georgia, to meet with Beauregard, who was hurrying in the opposite direction to join the Army of Tennessee. Davis used the occasion to make a speech on a Sunday evening, in which he reiterated plans for Hood to “march into Tennessee” and “give the peace party of the North a [movement] no puny editorial can give.” The calamity of losing Atlanta might have rendered the president’s words a little hollow, except for one thing: all wasn’t going as well as might be expected for Lincoln and the Republicans.

  Certainly, much air was let out of the Democratic balloon by the capture of Atlanta—they had barely disbanded their convention when word came of it—but there were still plenty of Northern skeptics and malcontents who believed Lincoln was pursuing a war of chaos and needless bloodletting. In his acceptance speech as presidential nominee, George McClellan proclaimed he was for peace “without the effusion of another drop of blood,” prompting George Templeton Strong, one of the great doomsayers of his time, to moan, “The great experiment in democracy may be destined to fail a century sooner than I expected. . . .” What McClellan actually indicated in his speech was that, while he would not require the Southerners to abolish slavery as a condition to end the war, he would require them to rejoin the Union. But that position immediately alienated the former commanding general from a huge segment of his own party who wanted peace now, at any price, and in newspapers and speaking stumps all over the North, McClellan was denounced as a sell-out artist and worse. Lincoln, on the other hand, still had his feet held to the fire by radicals in his own party who protested he was not doing enough to emancipate slaves and win the war, and thus both candidates became, in some measure, victims of the political schizophrenia that was sweeping the federal states. Naturally, the newspapers, ever anxious to stir up trouble, were having a field day with these controversies.

  Meantime, the Confederates down in Richmond and elsewhere had all eyes and ears desperately bent toward these goings on, and every report that echoed southward through the mists of war was hashed and stewed and served up as further evidence that the Union was in confusion and peace was near at hand. But they still needed that one great victory to push them over the line, and it was hoped that John Bell Hood might give it to them.

  Sherman, meanwhile, had no time for any such political speculations; he was engaged in an all-out effort to stop Hood’s enterprising destruction of his railways northward. At first the red-haired commander registered pleasure at the ability of his engineers to repair the damage Hood was doing. The breakup of tracks from Big Shanty to Allatoona, for example, required some thirty-five thousand new crossties, six miles of iron, and ten thousand men to put them right, but within a week Union trains were running along them once more. Sherman liked to tell the apocryphal story of “a group of rebels, lying in the shade of a tree, one hot day, overlooking [the Union] camps about Big Shanty.” One of the soldiers remarks, “The Yanks will have to git up and git now,” because Wheeler’s cavalry had blown up a tunnel down the road, and their rations were cut off. “Oh, hell,” says another, “don’t you know that old Sherman carries a duplicate tunnel along?”

  In fact, Sherman was getting nervous and cross—as it was his habit to do—about the prospect of defending fifty to a hundred miles of track against Hood’s entire army. “We will lose a thousand men each month, and will gain no result,” he groused to Grant. “It will be a physical impossibility to protect the roads, now that Hood, Forrest, Wheeler, and the whole batch of devils, are turned loose without home or habitation.” He went on to make yet another plea for his great excursion to the sea. “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl! We have on hand over eight thousand head of cattle and three million rations of bread, but no corn. We can find plenty of forage in the interior of the State.”

  The same day he wired that to Grant, Sherman wired Thomas in Nashville that he wanted to destroy the Chattanooga-Atlanta railroad himself, to ruin it for the Confederates and “to make for the sea-coast.” “We cannot defend this long line of road,” Sherman told his second in command.

  The following morning, Monday, October 10, Hood’s army simply vanished from Sherman’s sight, disappeared into the rugged mountainous forests around Rome, Georgia. Confused by Hood’s maneuvering, Sherman fired off a message to Slocum back in Atlanta to watch out, for Hood might be doubling back on him. Furthermore, he complained to Corse, now occupying his originally intended position at Rome, “I can not guess [Hood’s] movements as I could those of Johnston, who was a sensible man, and only did sensible things.” Then Sherman anxiously renewed appeal to Grant by wire, reiterating his desire to get moving toward the ocean.

  “Answer quick,” Sherman pleaded, “as I know we will not have the telegraph long.” Whatever Grant’s response was, Sherman never got it. As he had feared, Hood’s cavalry wasted no time cutting the wires and chopping down the telegraph poles that Sherman’s men had so painstakingly constructed behind them all the way from Chattanooga to Atlanta—his only link with army headquarters in the North.

  While they might have vanished from Sherman’s anxious eyes, the Confederate army had certainly not vanished from the face of the earth; in fact, it had marched lightning fast around to the west of Rome through a gap in the mountainous forests that led to the Chattooga River Valley, and the next day reappeared at Resaca, some fifteen miles north, where Hood demanded the surrender of the Union garrison in the manner of Sam French at Allatoona, with the exception that Hood threatened, “No prisoners will be taken.” The commanding officer at Resaca was one Colonel Clark R. Weaver, who, after looking things over, responded thus:

  Headquarters Second Brigade, Third Division

  Fifteenth Corps, Resaca, Georgia, October 12th, 1864

  To General J. B. Hood:

  Your communication of this date just received. In reply, I have to state that I am somewhat surprized at the concluding paragraph, to the effect that, if the place is carried, no prisoners will be taken. In my opinion I can hold this post. If you want it, come and take it.

  I am, general, very respectfully, your most obedient servant,

  Clark R. Weaver, Commanding Officer

  It seems nowhere recorded what Hood’s personal reaction was to this audacious rebuke, but his response was to march his army off and leave Colonel Weaver and his people alone. In fact, Hood had other fish to fry, namely, the Union garrison at Dalton, Georgia, where the whole unpleasant business had begun six months before. It was Hood’s intention to wreck Sherman’s railroad all the way back from Resaca through Dalton to Tunnel Hill, which was just south of Chattanooga. His long-term intentions, however, were less clear.

  A couple of days earlier, on October 9, the same Sunday that Sherman was telegraphing Grant about not being able to hold his railroads and going on his march and making Georgia howl, General Beauregard finally caught up with Hood’s army at a little mountain spa called Cave Springs, near the Alaba
ma line. The forty-six-year-old Louisianan was himself a man of grandiose plans. Having graduated second in his West Point class, Beauregard had been breveted for gallantry in the Mexican War, served as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, and was a former commander in chief of the Army of Tennessee. Through much of the war, Beauregard had proposed to Richmond an assortment of complex and daring schemes for the Army of Tennessee to execute, but all had been shot down by Davis and his advisors as too difficult or too risky. Now he was charged with the supervision of a kindred spirit in Hood, whose strategy at this late date was born, by necessity, of desperation.

  Hood revealed to Beauregard his intention to move quickly to wreck the northern stretch of rail line all the way back up to Chattanooga, and then, he said, he meant to fall back to Jacksonville, just across the Alabama line near Gadsden, where he had already sent his excess wagons and artillery. There, it was presumed, Hood would offer Sherman battle if the federal commander came after him; if Sherman went off in some other direction, Beauregard understood that Hood would follow him and fight him wherever he could. Nothing, apparently, was discussed about Hood marching his army up to Nashville.

  Meantime, Hood’s troops trudged up toward Dalton, past the grim reminders of their previous visit there. Sam Watkins, the young Tennessean with the ascerbic tongue, remembered the journey this way: “We passed all those glorious battlefields . . . frequently coming across the skull of some poor fellow sitting on top of a stump, grinning a ghastly smile; also the bones of horses along the road and fences burned and destroyed, and occasionally the charred remains of a once fine dwelling house. Citizens came out and seemed glad to see us, and would divide their onions, garlic and leek with us. The soldiers were in good spirits, but it was the spirit of innocence and peace, not war and victory.”

  If that was the way his men felt, Hood did not see it. He was dead set on what he had come to Dalton to do, and about noon on October 13 he sent another of his threatening notes to Colonel Lewis Johnson, commander of the twelve hundred or so blue-clad soldiers inside the garrison. At first, Johnson, like Corse and Weaver before him, declined to surrender—and for reasons other than simple allegiance to duty. Most of Johnson’s command consisted of the 44th Colored Troops—probably the same that Sherman had made reference to in his testy correspondence to Hood when he wrote, “We have no ‘negro allies’ in this army. . . . There are a few guarding Chattanooga, which General Steedman sent at one time to drive Wheeler out of Dalton.” Apparently, Sherman had assumed that the 44th Colored had been removed back to Tennessee, but he was mistaken, and now these unfortunate men were slowly and steadily being surrounded by division after division of Hood’s army.

  Although some zealous field commanders had organized black units early in the war, the U.S. government—amid a great deal of criticism—had officially introduced blacks into the Union army only after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862. At that time, the war was going badly for the North, and enlistments had dropped to a trickle. Subsequently, some one hundred eighty thousand blacks were inducted into the army—some by enlistment, others by conscription—the majority of them refugees from the Southern states. As more and more slaves fled the Southern plantations, they sought refuge in the North or in Union-occupied cities of the South, like Nashville. With no home or money, many became idle and were soon rounded up by the authorities and sent into the army. They were not particularly welcomed by the white soldiers and officers and for a time even received lower pay than whites. Furthermore, substantial numbers of the Colored Troops complained that they were put to menial tasks as laborers, teamsters, cooks, and even servants. Sometimes whole black regiments were set to work cleaning the camps of white troops. Sherman himself, who detested the notion of colored soldiers, replied when once asked if Negroes were not as good as whites to stop a bullet, “Yes, but a sandbag is better.” But by the last years of the war it had been figured out that black units would fight like the white ones, and more and more they were being employed in the front lines. By the end of the war, some thirty-seven thousand U.S. Colored Troops had perished in the conflict, and a dozen had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  The Army of Tennessee had rarely encountered black enemy soldiers, but when they did, they were inclined to treat them roughly. Official Confederate policy toward the Colored Troops was ambiguous. Nathan Bedford Forrest had devised his own way of dealing with them, which, at its best, involved treating them not as prisoners of war but as runaway slaves, unless they could prove otherwise. At worst, Forrest had been accused (in a still controversial affair) of massacring five hundred colored troops at Fort Pillow near Memphis not six months before. The best the blacks could probably hope for was to be put to hard labor on some Confederate project, rather than being housed away in a prison camp like Andersonville—which, on second glance, was probably not such a bad alternative. In any event, after several hours of debate, Johnson ran out a white flag and gave up his garrison without a battle. Later, in his official report, he stated as one of his reasons that “the division of Cleburne, which was in the immediate rear of the rebel general [Hood] . . . was over anxious” to fight.

  There was serious irony in this. Not nine months earlier, Patrick Ronayne Cleburne himself, in the misty mountain chill right there at Dalton, had made public one of the most controversial memoranda of the war: his proposal for freeing slaves and their families if they would join the Confederate army. It was a proposition that, while not entirely unheard of, was extraordinary coming from such a high-ranking official as a major general in the army, and it was to cause Cleburne trouble and possibly cost his life before the war was out.

  What Cleburne had postulated was, on its face, simple mathematical logic. The North had many more times the manpower of the South to draw from. And even if Confederates killed federals at the rate of two to one, they would still run out of soldiers before the thing was done. Cleburne reasoned the whole business out in a lawyerly document of nearly forty thousand words and, after securing signatures of endorsement by a dozen or so fellow officers, made a formal presentation before General Joe Johnston and the entire command staff on the night of January 2 in the guarded back room of a house in the town of Dalton.

  Cleburne’s premise was that any slave who agreed to remain true to the Confederacy would be granted freedom. This, he argued, could be expected to produce the following results: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would be nullified, and those in the North whose main purpose in continuing the war was to eliminate slavery would be left without a cause; it would give the Confederacy the enormous resources of nearly four million slaves, swelling the armies, as well as boosting other military and quasimilitary purposes; it would incline England and France—basically opposed to slavery but desperately in need of Confederate cotton to run their mills—to side with the South and send their powerful navies to break up the Union blockade.

  “The President of the United States,” Cleburne declared, “announced that he already has in training an army of 100,000 negroes as good as any troops, and every . . . new slice of territory he wrests from us will add to this force.” He went on to argue, much as he had told his serenading soldiers a few weeks earlier when the army marched out from Palmetto, that “subjugation” by the North would be far worse for the Southerners than losing their slaves. Subjugation must be prevented at any cost, Cleburne pleaded, speaking from the height of personal experience as an Irishman.

  For a moment after he had finished, the room was frozen in stunned silence, and then a commotion began as several of the dozen or so generals present began denouncing the idea as “monstrous” and “revolting,” among other things. Some were supportive and still others, including Johnston himself, were noncommittal. However, Johnston later refused to submit the proposal to the War Department, claiming it was more a political question than a military one. Nevertheless, a copy soon found its way into the hands of Jefferson Davis—mailed to him by General W. H. T. Walker, perh
aps vindictively since he was opposed to it. Within a short time Cleburne got his answer from Richmond. The Confederate government ordered his document and all his opinions about it suppressed on grounds that it was too controversial and would lead to dissension in the South. Moreover, his audacious suggestion, it was later speculated, probably cost him promotion to corps command, and thus he remained exposed to fire as a division commander until his end.

  And so once again at Dalton—scene of his original “crime”—Cleburne, with his “over anxious” division straining to lash out at Colonel Johnson’s regiment of Colored Troops, must surely have been struck with an Irishman’s sense of irony at the scene. And had he lived long enough to see it—which he did not—he could only have wondered at the mockery of it all when President Davis himself, just before the end of the war, finally got around to recommending just what he had proposed.

  Knowing none of this, Sam Watkins, the keen observer, remembered that he and his comrades were simply glad to be back at Dalton, “not that we cared anything about it, but we just wanted to take a farewell look at the old place.” He also recorded that as soon as the garrison was surrendered, the 44th U.S. Colored Troops were marched out and immediately put to work ripping up the railroad tracks toward Tunnel Hill.

  For the next day or so, practically everyone joined in the destruction of the railroad tracks. “It is getting to be fun for the men,” Sam Foster wrote. “They are just making a frolic of it.” They had learned their work well from federal soldiers, who produced something called “Sherman’s neckties” out of the Confederacy’s steel rails by roasting them over the ripped-up crossties until they were red hot, then bending them double around trees or telegraph poles. The Southerners described their version of the handiwork as “Old Mrs. Lincoln’s hairpins.” As Hood rode through his divisions, he jubilantly declared that the Union army had been “flanked out of Atlanta,” and, recorded Foster, “The whole army are in high spirits . . . we begin to believe that Jeff Davis and Hood made a ten strike when they planned this thing.” By the time they had finished, twenty-five miles of track from Tunnel Hill to Resaca had been demolished.