Southern Storm (11 page)

T
UESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
15, 1864

Midnight–Noon

Left Wing

T
he camps of the Twentieth Corps began stirring well before sunrise, some as early as 3:00
A.M
. Starting around 5:00
A.M
., corps officers began the complicated task of herding their roughly 13,700 men into marching order along the Decatur Road. A New Jersey quartermaster marveled at the process of “waiting and working to get order out of chaos, organizing and arranging the confused array of troops, trains, artillery, ambulances and other impedimenta that had there massed.”

A gunner in one of the four batteries accompanying the corps encountered a group of happy soldiers. “They had just been paid off and were playing chuckaluck,” he remembered. The cannoneers were grumpy, for some had just learned that they could not store their knapsacks on the artillery wagons but would have to carry them. The “boys make up faces about it,” commented the gunner. The mood was more solemn in the ranks of the First Brigade, Second Division. A soldier in the 5th Ohio, injured on November 14, died this morning. There was only time for an abbreviated graveside service and a hasty burial on the divisional campgrounds.

Tuesday, November 15, 1864

The First Division began marching around 7:00
A.M
. The order for today’s movement was the First followed by the Second and Third. Their route took them through an area that had been the scene of intense fighting in July. “Here we saw low breastworks that were made while the battle was raging, broken trees, empty ammunition boxes, parts of soldiers’ equipment, canteens, and haversacks scattered in all directions,” recalled a New York soldier.

The old battlefield also represented a good vantage point for viewing Atlanta. A New York infantryman was one of many this day who paused here and turned his gaze toward the Gate City. “I beheld a column of black smoke ascending to the sky,” he wrote. “Then another column of smoke arose, and another, and another, until it seemed that they all merged together and the whole city was in flames.” For the New Jersey quartermaster it was a “fearful sight.” The heavy smoke hid most of what was happening from view, “but the crackling of the flames and crack of falling walls and buildings told the worst was going on.” Recollected an Indiana boy, “as we left I had to think about Sodom and Gomorrah.”

The newspaperman present for the
New York Herald
noted that the
three divisions of the Twentieth Corps, “with a [supply] train of more than six hundred wagons,” occupied “when stretched out on the march, nearly eight miles of road.” While the advance started out at about 7:00
A.M
., the trailing division and the wagons would not begin their march until nearly noon.

Atlanta

With the logistical tails of the two wings still in the process of leaving town and an entire army corps arriving, Atlanta was heavily congested this morning. A Fourteenth Corps staff officer who rode in at 9:00
A.M
. “found every street so crowded with troops and wagons that it was almost impossible to get along on horseback.” Somehow Captain Poe and his detachments continued their work amidst the bustle and hurry. The first part of today’s program involved finishing the job already begun “battering down the walls, throwing down smokestacks, breaking up furnace arches, knocking steam machinery to pieces and punching all boilers full of holes.” It was the second part of the program that most worried Poe, when fire would be set to the heaps of debris left after the wrecking was completed. The chief engineer knew from experience that once the soldiers saw his men setting controlled blazes, there would be little to stop them from undertaking their own uncontrolled retribution.

Matters were already out of hand in places. Near the camp of the 58th Indiana, a regiment specializing in bridge building, pontoon drills were interrupted by the torching of a nearby cluster of wood-frame hospitals. According to the regimental chaplain, “First, there was a hammering and banging within, as the kindling was being prepared; and soon flames began to rise from the numerous small buildings. The lumber used in the construction of the houses was pine, hence the flames spread rapidly.” Instead of indignation or anger, the good chaplain felt only detached resignation. “A notion has possessed the army that Atlanta is to be burned, but I suppose the wish is father to the thought.”

Destruction was also on William Tecumseh Sherman’s mind this morning, though he was contemplating the kinds justified by the rules of war. His orders to Poe had been explicit; the only structures in
Atlanta liable for destruction were those “which could be converted to hostile uses.” Poring over his maps this morning, Sherman realized that the route planned for the Left Wing bypassed a pair of important bridges at the Oconee River. That would not do. Off to Major General Henry Slocum went instructions to detach a sufficient force to wreck them once he reached the town of Madison.

Perhaps responding to the dour mask Major Hitchcock had sported since they had departed from Marietta, Sherman took pains at breakfast to explain why Atlanta was paying such a terrible price. By his reckoning, the great amount of munitions and material that was either produced in the city or shipped from it made Atlanta second only to Richmond as a strategic target. “We have been fighting Atlanta all the time, in the past: have been capturing guns, wagons, etc., etc., marked ‘Atlanta’ and made here, all the time: and now since they have been doing so much to destroy us and our Government we have to destroy them, at least enough to prevent any more of that,” Sherman said.

Right Wing

The powerful Right Wing—consisting of the approximately 15,900-man Fifteenth Corps, the 11,700-strong Seventeenth Corps, and some 5,100 cavalry—roused early to begin moving at daylight. The Fifteenth Corps marched in sequential order; the First Division followed by the Second and the Third.
*
The Seventeenth Corps advanced Third, Fourth, First.
^†
Since the Confederates had been always most concerned about a quick Yankee thrust toward Macon, they had posted much of their available cavalry and militia to meet just such a contingency. So, unlike the Left Wing, which passed without incident through a widely dispersed line of enemy scouts this day, the soldiers and troopers of the Right Wing had people shooting at them almost immediately.

Pressing rapidly southward in conjunction with the right flank of the Fifteenth Corps, Kilpatrick’s cavalry overran a Confederate out
post at East Point even before the enemy realized what was happening. A young rider in the 10th Ohio Cavalry recorded it as an “Exciting time,” boasting that they “ran into the Rebel Pickets, drove them into their camp, took their camp, Equipage, several prisoners and part of their wagon train.” The officer commanding the brigade later counted eight POWs captured.

Spirits were generally high among the foot soldiers. “We were cheery and marching quite rapidly,” said an Ohio infantryman in the Fifteenth Corps, “and the boys struck up the anthem, John Brown’s soul goes marching on, and other National airs.” “Started early this morning for the Southern coast, somewhere, and we don’t care, so long as Sherman is leading us,” exulted an Iowan in the Seventeenth Corps. Rather than Sherman, a Missouri man put his reliance “on our strength and the Providence of God.”

There were problems small and large. In the ranks of the 31st Iowa the worry was over soldier James Martin, who had broken out with a fever soon after the movement got under way and who was clearly showing signs of the measles. The regiment’s options were to leave him to the tender mercies of the Southerners or carry him along. The ailing soldier was put into a wagon as the column tramped southward.
*
In the Seventeenth Corps Brigadier General Manning F. Force was fuming. Yesterday his division commander had insisted on issuing whiskey to the soldiers. Today there were several so inebriated in one company that they could not stay in ranks. Force, determined to make an example of the unit commander, hastily composed an order reprimanding him to be read at evening camp.

Bigger problems confronted the commanders of the trailing divisions. Although the head of each corps was marching well, delays farther back along the line were considerably slowing down the supply vehicles. “It took some time for this large body of troops to move out with its great wagon train,” declared a brigadier in the Fifteenth Corps. “We…made slow progress,” added a Minnesota soldier, “ten minutes’ march and twenty minutes’ standstill, weight on left leg and head under wing.” In an effort to get things moving, a company of the 1st
Missouri Engineers was taken off road repair duties and assigned to assist the wagon teams.

It was late in the morning when the leading Fifteenth Corps elements encountered and dispersed a Confederate outpost near an unapologetically named station stop on the Macon and Western Railroad. “We found some Rebel pickets at Rough and Ready, who fled precipitately on the approach of our advance,” crowed a soldier in the 100th Indiana. Frantic outriders carried word of the Yankee progress to one of the most experienced Confederate units posted in the area.

Organized throughout Kentucky in the first flush of Southern nationhood in 1861, the Rebel brigade from the Bluegrass State had seen action in some of the west’s fiercest battles, including those of the Atlanta Campaign. Once it became clear that the unbreakable Federal grip on their home state meant they could not go home, men took to calling these Kentucky soldiers the “Orphan” Brigade. In September the Kentucky infantrymen were pulled out of the Army of Tennessee, put on horses largely confiscated from captured Federal raiders, and appended as “mounted infantry” to the defensive area south of Atlanta.

For acting major John Weller, the reassignment had provided a welcome interlude after numbingly endless periods of marching and fighting. As an added benefit, Weller had gotten to know the Stubbs family, whose house fell within his defensive zone. The young lady of the house was such a special attraction that each day Weller tried to time his inspection tours to arrive at the Stubbses’ place around 10:00
A.M
. Then, “if she was in good voice,” Miss Stubbs “would sing the sweet songs of the day and chat so entertainingly, that, somehow, dinner would be announced before I was aware of the flight of time.” Today, Weller had just assured the young lady’s worried father that there would be plenty of warning should the Yankees move out of Atlanta when he was called to the front gate, where one of his troopers was waiting. “Cap.,” the courier said excitedly, “they are fighting at headquarters!” With a hasty good-bye to the Stubbs family, Weller rode off toward Atlanta.

Noon–Midnight

If word of Sherman’s march reached the Georgia capital of Milledgeville this day, there was nothing on the state legislative docket to show it. A reporter present for the
Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel
filed this report:

The authorities in charge of the Confederate prison compound Camp Lawton, outside Millen, began the process of thinning out its population. According to an Illinois POW, “Nearly one thousand sick and wounded leave here to-day for Savannah to be exchanged.” For those left behind, conditions remained grim. An Ohio prisoner drafted as a butcher recalled that he and his comrades “slaughtered thirty-five head of cattle per day; the animals were small and very lean, averaging about 350 pounds each; this, after deducting rations for the officers and guards, left about one-fourth of a pound per man, per diem, including the bone.”