Grant threw his full support behind the plan, having employed similar tactics in the Vicksburg campaign. At the time, Sherman still had supply lines, but when he later decided to cut those communications, the plan of “taking whatever” was already in place. To further assist him, Sherman gathered census tables for every county in the state of Georgia, listing local population figures and farming acreage.
On May 5, as Grant was crossing the Rappahannock, Sherman’s “great campaign” was launched with his lead army moving out toward Atlanta. Sherman proved himself to be the brilliant tactician Grant had partnered with in the West. Instead of direct assaults on well-entrenched positions, Sherman continually flanked Johnston’s army, threatening his rear and forcing him to slowly but steadily drop back toward Atlanta. Bloody engagements took place along the way, but by successively turning Johnston out of his positions, Sherman generally avoided direct assaults and casualties were kept to a minimum.
On the other side, Johnston was second only to Lee as a tactician and avoided being drawn out into costly assaults with his smaller army. When Sherman got in his rear or threatened his flanks, he steadily fell back to strongly fortified defensive positions.
The cat-and-mouse pursuit continued through Georgia, much to the chagrin of Southern editors and politicians who craved a bloody, Lee-style open engagement. But Johnston had other ideas. The longer he retreated to well-fortified positions, the more he knew his detachments could thrive even as Sherman was forced to expend his peak strength on detachments to repair and guard railroads and supplies. Bemused by “the newspapers of the South,” which criticized Johnston, Sherman praised Johnston’s tactics, all the while fulminating over the lack of a “grand battle,” which he knew his armies would win.
As news of “bloody and desperate battles” between Grant and Lee in the Wilderness reached Sherman, he continued his relentless pursuit, resolved to give Johnston’s army no rest or hope of linking up with Lee to attack Grant. With Thomas’s army in the center as his “column of direction,” Schofield on the left, and McPherson on the right, Sherman moved inexorably toward Atlanta. He encountered elements of Johnston’s army along the way, but drove him steadily from strong positions at Dalton, Resaca, Cassville, Allatoona, and Dallas. Fighting was continuous, with poor visibility among trees and bushes. Daily casualties numbered in the dozens and sometimes the hundreds. All along the way, Sherman’s soldiers killed farm animals, ransacked houses, and put unoccupied buildings to the torch. For Georgia’s terrified citizens, the unimpeded course of Sherman’s army did more psychological damage than a pitched battle.
Observing the effects of destruction on civilian morale, Sherman confided in a letter to his wife that “all the people retire before us, and desolation is behind. To realize what war is one should follow our tracks.”
4
In all, Sherman would absorb 5,393 casualties in the month of May—a significant number to be sure, but nothing like the destruction taking place at the same time in Virginia, sometimes on a daily basis. Employing his own calculus of war, Sherman observed: “I always estimated my force about double his, and could afford to lose two to one without disturbing our relative proportion.”
5
As a rule Sherman was determined to avoid tactical offenses against fortified positions. The exception came on June 14, when Johnston’s army was spread among three hills—Kennesaw, Pine Mountain, and Lost Mountain. The positions were well fortified with fresh lines of parapets and heavy infantry. But in Sherman’s view, Johnston had finally made a mistake by spreading his lines too thin. Sherman had been to Kennesaw in 1844 on a survey mission and knew the terrain well. After careful study he determined that Johnston was vulnerable to a concentrated assault in the gap between Kennesaw and Pine Mountain.
On June 27 Sherman determined to advance on Johnston at Kennesaw, “the key to the whole country.” Johnston was indeed spread thin but was so well entrenched that he stayed in place, forcing Sherman to attack his fortified lines. At 9:00 a.m. the Union troops moved forward to assault with supporting artillery and musketry all along a ten-mile line. McPherson’s Fifteenth Corps was assigned to feint a major assault at the base of Little Kennesaw, while the main attack was shouldered by two divisions of Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland.
Sherman underestimated Johnston’s defense and battle savvy. General William J. Hardee’s well-entrenched Confederates were not fooled by Union feints and with well-placed fields of fire for artillery and musketry waited patiently for the main assault. To further defend themselves, the rebels had concealed artillery pieces that were deliberately kept silent in earlier exchanges.
The main attacking columns fell under a murderous artillery barrage. The fire was so intense that troop discipline broke down and the attacking divisions lost their concentrated focus. In place of companies and regiments, isolated groups of men swarmed the hill in a desperate attempt to scale the ridge and mount the summit. When it became obvious that the summit would not be gained, the attack turned into a pell-mell retreat. Officers and flag bearers were murderously mowed down as vengeful rebels shouted “Chickamauga” and “Come on.”
6
By 11:30, the assault was over. The rout was complete. That night regimental bands played patriotic music to soothe the bloodied soldiers and inspire their confidence. Two days later, under a flag of truce, Federal soldiers gathered their badly bloated dead comrades for burial and chatted idly with Confederates. Soldiers who days earlier were pitched in a murderous rage shared newspapers and whiskey, traded for coffee, and even shared autographs.
But all knew it could not last. Though momentarily stunned and concerned that some of his troops were openly complaining of suicidal assaults, Sherman was not through with Johnston by a long shot. Even as Kennesaw was lost, Schofield’s Army of the Ohio succeeded in gaining ground on Johnston’s left, threatening his rear. By July 2 McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee was marching toward the Chattahoochee River. Once again Johnston was blocked as Sherman contemplated a flanking movement, and once again he escaped to the Chattahoochee on July 3. Sensing blood, Sherman commanded an all-out pursuit of Johnston’s retreating army but could not catch him before he once again ensconced his army behind murderous entrenchments on the west bank of the Chattahoochee. This time Sherman did not assault, but rather returned to his flanking movements, forcing Johnston to withdraw ever closer to Atlanta.
An important, if largely overlooked, episode in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign occurred in early July at two mill sites located near Johnston’s fortified army at Roswell. In his memoirs, Sherman later noted innocently: “I ordered Garrard’s division of cavalry up the [Chattahoochee] river eighteen miles, to secure possession of the factories at Roswell, as well as to hold an important bridge and ford at that place.”
7
Contained within the Roswell “possession,” though, was a frightful story, seldom told in the North or the South.
8
In fact, Sherman took possession of not one but two small factory towns, Sweetwater or Factory Town and Roswell. Both of these mill towns produced cotton yarn for Confederate uniforms and were operated primarily by women serving in the place of the men who had been conscripted into the army.
As Sherman’s army swooped in to destroy the mills, Sherman issued, and then repeated, a remarkable accompanying order to a stunned General Kenner Garrard on July 7:
I repeat my orders that you arrest all people, male and female, connected with those factories, no matter what the clamor, and let them foot it, under guard, to Marietta, whence I will send them by cars to the North. Destroy and make some disposition of all mills save small flouring mills manifestly for local use, but all sawmills, and factories dispose of effectually, and useful laborers excused by reason of the skills as manufacturers from conscription, are as much prisoners as if armed.
Sherman closed the order with the observation:
The poor women will make a howl. Let them take along their children and clothing, providing they have the means of hauling or you can spare them. We will retain them until they reach a country where they can live in peace and security.“
9
Later, in explaining his actions to General Halleck, Sherman remarked, “They were tainted with treason.... I will send all the owners, agents, and employees up to Indiana to get rid of them there. I take it a neutral is no better than one of our own citizens engaged in supplying a hostile army.” For Sherman, in fact, there were no “neutrals” in the Confederacy, and what he did or did not do was his decision to make. He could deport civilians or ignore them, but either way he deemed all white Southerners guilty traitors. There were no innocents, not one.
Sherman’s orders were duly carried out. After the mills were destroyed the female workers were arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to be deported with their children to the North under Federal guard. Sweetwater would never be rebuilt. In fact, the women never made it north but wound up in a Female Military Prison constructed just for them in Louisville, Kentucky, where they remained with their children until the end of the war.
10
The charge Sherman invoked to justify the mass arrests and trials was “treason.” The justification for this removal, in Lieber’s terminology, was “military necessity.” Since the factories lay near the river site where Sherman intended to cross his army, and since the presence of one thousand women around a Union army was certain to be a “distraction,” Sherman felt comfortable with the orders he issued. For the sake of his army, the “traitors” were to be deported from their homes and country for the “crime” of laboring in factories left vacant by their soldier husbands and fathers. It was an evolving logic that would grow ever darker through his Southern campaigns and into the campaigns of Indian extermination in the 1870s and 1880s (when he replaced Grant as commander of American armies). In Sherman’s view, his coercive actions were not “punitive” or brutally intimidating but strategic and merciful—a favor to the stranded women and an act that helped to end the war sooner.
In responding to the removal, one Confederate writer complained: “It is hardly conceivable that an officer wearing a United Sates commission of Major General should have so far forgotten the commonest dictates of decency and humanity, (Christianity apart), as to drive four hundred penniless girls hundreds of miles away from their homes and friends.”
11
The
Milledgeville
(GA)
Confederate Union’s
assault on Sherman was reprinted in the
New York Commercial Advertiser
(never a friend of Sherman’s), but the forced removal attracted little attention in the North, and where it was noticed, provoked little commentary. A correspondent for the
New York Tribune
observed simply:
The refugees from the Sweetwater Factory and from Roswell are going North by train as fast as transportation can be afforded. Meanwhile, Major Tompkins, of General Sherman’s staff, who is charged with the care of these multitudes of homeless people, is looking after their comfort.
12
When it became clear that the “refugees” or “prisoners” were not being moved to Indiana after all, but to Louisville, the
Tribune
cited military necessity, but then went on to concede the brutality of it all: “Only think of it! Four hundred weeping and terrified Ellens, Susans, and Maggies transported, in the springless and seatless Army wagons, away from their lovers and brothers of the sunny south, and all for the offense of weaving tent-cloth and spinning stocking yarn! However, I leave the whole business to be adjudged according to its merits by your readers.”
13
All understood the severity of the measure, but none wanted to make “judgments.”
A patient commander, Johnston continued his deliberate retreat, waiting for Sherman to make a fatal mistake that would allow him to go on a rapid counteroffensive. But much to the dismay of Johnston in particular and the South in general, Sherman did not slip. On July 17 Johnston was relieved of command by a frustrated Davis and replaced by the feisty Texan John Bell Hood.
Lee was not pleased. In a telegram to President Davis, he noted simply: “Hood is a bold fighter. I am doubtful as to other qualities necessary.” In a follow-up message, Lee made clear his preference for William J. Hardee, should Davis persist in his conviction that Johnston had to be relieved.
14
A war reporter for the
Richmond Daily Whig
(already critical of Davis) agreed with Lee, adding a prescient observation of his own:
General John B. Hood’s promotion to the command of the army in Georgia excites much surprise. Few are willing to believe that the appointment is permanent. As a division commander, Hood was eminently successful, but his successes were not achieved without the assistance of the Texas brigade.... Other division commanders have been as successful as Hood, and as the commander of a corps, Hardee is surely entitled, both by seniority and greater experience, to the promotion.
15
Grant and Sherman both agreed with Lee, as have subsequent military historians. But by then, the moral continuum was beyond proportionality and prudent calculation. President Davis misjudged Johnston’s strategy, which was correct for the situation. The Confederacy wanted action, however, and Atlanta’s civilians were getting nervous at the prospect of a Federal siege.
Once he learned of the command change from the Confederate press, Sherman sought out more information on his new adversary and did what any general would do; he checked Hood’s West Point connections. General McPherson, a classmate, remembered him as “a born fighter, a perfect animal organism without knowledge of fear.” General Schofield also briefed Sherman, who “learned that he was bold even to rashness, and courageous in the extreme; I inferred that the change of commanders meant ‘fight.’ ”
16
And “fight” was precisely what Sherman’s superior army wanted.