Never Call Retreat (60 page)
People needed to be touched with fire, and Mr. Davis' logic was clear but cold. At Macon, he assured a crowd that "if one-half the men now absent without leave will return to duty, we can defeat the enemy." By occupying Atlanta, Sherman had thrust his army into a trap, and the trap could be sprang: "Sherman cannot keep up his long line of communication, and retreat, sooner or later, he must. And when that day comes, the fate that befell the army of the French Empire in its retreat from Moscow will be re-enacted. Our cavalry and our people will harass and destroy his army as did the Cossacks that of Napoleon, and the Yankee general, like him, will escape with only a bodyguard. . . . Let us with one arm and one effort endeavor to crush Sherman."
2
When U. S. Grant heard about this he remarked that "Mr. Davis has not made it quite plain who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat," but-he read the accounts of Mr. Davis' speeches attentively, for with a remarkable lack of discretion they contained broad hints on strategic planning. At Augusta and at Columbia the President declared that General Hood would strike a powerful blow far in the Federal rear if the people supported him properly: "If but a half, nay, one fourth, of the men to whom the service has a right will give him their strength, I see no chance for Sherman to escape from a defeat or a disgraceful retreat." The military plans were being made, Hood would engage in a vigorous counteroffensive, he would gain thousands of recruits in Tennessee, and "it is in the power of the Confederacy to plant our banners on the banks of the Ohio." Materially, the Confederacy was stronger than ever before: "Once we had no arms, and could receive no soldiers but those who came to us armed. Now we have arms for all, and are begging for men to bear them."
Appealing for a rebirth of the war spirit, Mr. Davis remained what he had always been, faithful to the defiant war-cry he had given the first Confederate Congress: "All we ask is to be let alone." What he said now was bounded by those limits. The Confederate program had not been changed by four years of war. Mr. Davis addressed himself to men who had much to lose and who were beset by malignant foes in a changing world. "Ours is not a revolution," he insisted. "We are not engaged in a Quixotic fight for the rights of man; our struggle is for inherited rights; and who would surrender them?" It was idle to talk about making a compromise peace, because the Northern President demanded outright submission: "If you will acknowledge your crime, lay down your arms, emancipate your slaves and turn over your leaders— as they call your humble servant—to be punished, then you will have permission to vote, together with your Negroes, upon the terms upon which Mr. Lincoln will be graciously pleased to allow you to live as a part of the nation over which he presides."
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This was eloquent, if planter-aristocrats were the only people who mattered, but by now Mr. Davis was facing enemies who had bowels of iron. General Sherman saw things just as he did; he knew that before long he would have to move and that when he moved he must risk everything. Before he moved, Sherman wanted to neutralize Atlanta, and on September 8 he announced that "the city of Atlanta, being exclusively required for warlike purposes, will at once be evacuated by all except the armies of the United States." The civilian inhabitants, in short, must get out, and the most Sherman would do was arrange a ten-day truce with General Hood so that the refugees could be transported across the Confederate lines. Accepting the truce, Hood protested that "the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war," and the mayor of Atlanta, James M. Calhoun, pointed out that sick, aged and helpless people would have to be moved and that their suffering would be "appalling and heart-rending." Sherman agreed that this was probably true but insisted that the orders must stand, "because my orders are not designed to meet the humanities of the case but to prepare for the future struggles. . . . War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war." The appeal failed, and the exodus took place.
4
Sherman knew that while he stayed in Atlanta his position was potentially dangerous; he was deep in a hostile country, bad things could happen if he made any mistakes, and he told a friend, "I've got my wedge pretty deep, and must look out that I don't get my fingers pinched." However, he did not propose to withdraw the wedge. He was in the Georgia uplands, with pines and sandy fields and mountains all about him, but he was beginning to scent a salt breeze from the sea, two hundred and twenty airline miles off to the southeast, and while he was exiling the civilians he was thinking about a march to the coast. This, he believed, was the road to final victory, and he assured Grant that the Confederates "may stand the fall of Richmond but not of Georgia." Yet he could not just get up and go. He needed a fixed objective and a solution to the supply problem, because "otherwise I would risk our whole army by getting too far from Atlanta." He urged Grant to seize and provision a seacoast base, possibly Savannah; then Sherman could "sweep the whole state of Georgia," and if he did that while Grant was taking care of Lee, "I think Uncle Abe will give us a twenty days leave of absence to see the young folks."
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Before he could do these attractive things Sherman had to attend to General Hood. Hood's army had by no means been put out of action. It still contained 34,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, and if Hood felt that it had lost its fighting capacity by standing on the defensive in trenches no Federal soldier could ever be found to agree with him. Hood had all of his old aggressive energy, and a few weeks after he evacuated Atlanta he marched north and west to strike Sherman where he was vulnerable, along the railroad line that led back to Chattanooga. Sherman could do no more than leave Slocum's corps to hold Atlanta and take everybody else north to fight Hood, and for the better part of a month the two armies maneuvered and sparred up and down the north Georgia country, going at one time almost up to the Tennessee line.
Hood was never strong enough to strike effectively, but he was so elusive that Sherman could not make him stand and fight. Exasperated beyond endurance to find that six weeks after the fall of Atlanta he was still campaigning over ground he had covered early in the summer, Sherman at last came to a radical conclusion. He would cut loose from everything. If Hood wanted that railroad he could have it, and Atlanta along with it: both would be thoroughly wrecked, and Sherman would not need either because he was going to go to the Atlantic. He would send enough men back to Tennessee to keep Hood from doing anything too destructive in the Federal rear, and then he would ignore the army that had been his stated objective when the campaign began, marching directly away from it and heading for salt water.
6
In a sense, Hood provoked him into this action; in another sense he made the action easier. Late in October he drew off into northern Alabama, preparing to make the strike into Tennessee that President Davis had hinted at so broadly in his excellent speeches, working on the theory that, if he marched on Nashville, Sherman would be compelled to come north to meet him. Sherman simply sent George Thomas back to Tennessee, telling him to take part of his Army of the Cumberland and reinforce it with levies that would be made available after he got north of the Tennessee River; meanwhile, Sherman would organize 60,000 men for a march to the coast.
Thomas obeyed, unprotesting but slightly unhappy. He was the Rock, the man who could not be beaten, and so now he must go back to handle Hood's veterans while Sherman marched to glory against Georgia militia. Thomas may have reflected that he himself had been the first man to think about the march to the sea. He was supposed to be a stolid defensive fighter, and yet he had a way of seeing the sharp offensive blows ahead of other people. He had wanted to march into east Tennessee two years earlier, while Rosecrans was cautiously approaching Murfreesboro, and before the Georgia campaign even began it was Thomas who proposed a hard smash at Resaca and Joe Johnston's rear; and immediately after the fall of Atlanta he had suggested that while Sherman held the city and looked after Hood, Thomas' army be sent off on a march to the sea.
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Now he had to go back to Nashville and stand the hammering while somebody else made the big march. He went back, uncomplaining, while Sherman sought final approval from Grant.
This he got. But Grant could not spare the force to take Savannah and establish a base there; he could only send supplies and transports down to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to stand by and provision Savannah after Sherman took it, and he warned that "your movements therefore will be independent of mine, at least until the fall of Richmond takes place." Sherman himself had doubts, and while Grant was making up his mind Sherman wrote to his brother that "Mobile or Savannah should be taken before I venture further." But he believed that the rich Georgia farm country could support his army, he believed he would be strong enough to break his way into Savannah once the march was made, and he had Grant's full confidence. (Grant told Secretary Stanton, who was most skeptical about the whole performance, "Such an army as Sherman has—and with such a commander —is hard to corner or capture.") It was settled at last, and early in November Grant sent Sherman his final word: "I say, then, go as you propose."
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The point of all of this was that Sherman's campaign could not be made—could not be tried, or even thought of rationally—except against a foe who was in the process of collapse. To abandon communications and march 60,000 men some three hundred miles through enemy territory, with nothing ahead except the prospect of storming a fortified city to keep the 60,000 from starvation, was an idea that was wholly insane from a military standpoint: except that the enemy had become powerless. The walls of Jericho were coming down, falling before the sound of the trumpets that would never call retreat, and Grant and Sherman knew it. They acted accordingly.
Probably Jefferson Davis knew it, too. On November 7, the day before the Northern election—the last day on which there was a light of hope in the Southern sky—Mr. Davis sent a message to the Congress voicing the grimmest of resolves: "There are no vital points on the preservation of which the continued existence of the Confederacy depends. There is no military success of the enemy which can accomplish its destruction. Not the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor of all combined, can save the enemy from the constant and exhaustive drain of blood and treasure which must continue until he shall discover that no peace is attainable unless based on the recognition of our indefeasible rights."
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This was magnificent, but it was a rallying-cry from the last ditch; and it was also an evocation of the very revolution which Mr. Davis had always disavowed. A Confederacy that abandoned its cities and no longer relied on any fixed bases would survive (if it survived at all) only by guerrilla warfare, counting military coup in terms of crossroads ambushes and the shooting of traitors, living in the desperate hope that the victors would eventually be poisoned by hatred and terror. This had nothing to do with the nation created at Montgomery, which prized its legitimacy above all else, and that the President should even take a step in this direction hinted at dreadful stress and tension.
The step was more easily taken, perhaps, because Mr. Davis' government had already dabbled in various revolutionary stratagems. Early in the spring it had set up in Canada a sort of conspiratorial headquarters, under the direction of
Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, who had been James Buchanan's Secretary of the Interior, and Clement C. Clay, Jr., of Alabama. From this place there had come an elaborate plan to organize a midwestern revolution with the aid of native Copperheads, and at one point a date was set for a general uprising to carry Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio out of the Union. The uprising never took place, largely, when all was said and done, because the Copperheads wanted to vote against their government but had no intention of taking arms against it. There was also a plan to seize U.S.S.
Michigan,
the one warship on the Great Lakes, and lay Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo under contribution. This plot resulted in nothing better than the temporary capture of a side-wheel excursion steamer on Lake Erie; and a plan to harry the northern border brought a raid on the Vermont town of St. Albans which wound up simply as a well-publicized bank robbery. One set of conspirators tried to burn the city of New York by planting fire bombs in hotel bedrooms, but their bombs were ineffective and neither New York nor the separate hotels were burned. Although nothing ever quite worked the Richmond government showed that it was at least ready to fight in most unorthodox ways if it had to.
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Warfare in its more orthodox forms offered the thinnest hope, as autumn passed. During the summer it had been believed that Grant's campaign in Virginia was a bloody failure, and optimism in Richmond had run high; but now, with the Northern election killing all hope for a peace administration in Washington, it began to be clear that Grant had not failed at all and optimism turned into bleak pessimism. Grant had a firm grip on the army that defended Richmond; Lee was pinned in his lines, growing weaker month by month, his task always growing harder. During summer and fall the Federals had tried to edge past his flanks without much success, although the lines had been considerably extended; they had been repulsed at Ream's Station and Hatcher's Run, and they had been unable to exploit gains made at Globe Tavern and Fort Harrison— but they were still there, playing a game in which they had all of the advantages. Early in September, Lee pointed out that "we have no troops disposable to meet movements of the enemy or strike when opportunity presents without taking them from the trenches and exposing some important point";