Southern Storm (31 page)

Taking in the big picture, the writers for the
Richmond Whig,
noting that Macon had been bypassed and that Hood’s army was left unchallenged to operate in the Union rear, decided “that
SHERMAN’S
march looks more like a retreat than an advance; more like a defensive than an aggressive movement.” President Jefferson Davis wasn’t quite as complacent. In a telegraph sent to Savannah he insisted that “every effort must be made to obstruct the route on which [Sherman]…is moving, and all other available means must be employed to delay his march, as well as to enable our forces to concentrate as to reduce him to want of the necessary supplies.”

Delay was very much on the mind of Major General Oliver O. Howard, commanding the Right Wing, in receipt of Sherman’s orders to get marching along the railroad toward Sandersville. It was becoming increasingly evident that the route following the railway was effectively barricaded at the Oconee River Bridge. Howard decided to flank the roadblock on both sides, sending Osterhaus (Fifteenth Corps) on a southern swing via Ball’s Ferry, while Blair (Seventeenth Corps) would jog north to a crossing place shown on the Federal maps as Jackson’s Ferry.

Meantime pressure would be maintained on the bridge itself, lest the enemy get wise to the other actions. Just to hedge his bets, the Right Wing commander sent his brother and aide, Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Howard, to Sherman with the warning that he “might have to ask him to threaten the enemy from the north,” if it proved impossible to get over the Oconee. By the end of the day Major General Howard had his aides packing up the headquarters preparatory to moving closer to the river.

On the Confederate side of the Oconee River Bridge, relations between Major General Wayne (Georgia state troops) and Major Hartridge (C.S. Provisional Army) continued to deteriorate. The tone had been set on November 23, when Hartridge had hectored Wayne into remaining here. Today, each kept the telegraph operator busy with messages to Savannah.

Wayne began by reporting his belief that he was facing Kilpatrick’s cavalry division of “3,000 men,” then wondered if he and his men would ever “get out of this pickle.” When daylight arrived, the enemy began shelling his bridge defenses. Wayne reported the attack and requested 1,000 reinforcements. By day’s end, the militia officer believed he now had “more than Kilpatrick’s division in front of me,” and he passed along disturbing intelligence suggesting that the enemy was in his rear.

Hartridge ridiculed Wayne’s strength estimates, guessing that they were confronted by no “more than 800 men.” “My men are in good spirits,” he later asserted, “but I cannot depend much on the militia.” The Confederate Army major’s tone throughout was truculent, Wayne’s more resigned. Then, at about 8:15
P.M
., the enemy across the Oconee suddenly lashed at them with “heavy volleys of small arms.” It wasn’t an assault, however, but covering fire for a bold party that set fire “to the far end of the trestle on this side.” After that things became ominously quiet.

Thus far in the campaign, Sherman’s columns had been able to navigate the central Georgia road system with a good measure of success. Large-scale maps, prepared and distributed by Captain Poe at the beginning of the operation, provided a general orientation and direction. These charts were supplemented almost daily by scouting reports and tracings of regional guides taken from Georgia county courthouses and other governmental offices. This process had served the Union officers well, but the accuracy of the county maps was a function of local government, and sometimes they were out of date. Usually it was only a minor inconvenience, the matter of a few extra miles to be marched by a column. Today, however, Major General Howard found his entire operational plan thrown into disarray because of incorrect map information.

Howard had decided to bypass the Oconee River Bridge on either side, with the Seventeenth Corps swinging north to use a crossing identified as Jackson’s Ferry. The problem, as he learned this day, was that Jackson’s Ferry had not operated in a long time, and the road to it was in terrible shape. Men might make it, but not men with wagons.

The Fourth Division commander, Brigadier General Giles A. Smith,
the first to recognize this setback, voiced his suspicions late on the afternoon of November 23. His immediate superior, Major General Frank Blair, refused to accept this negative assessment, citing “positive information from citizens” as his source. It took additional probes of the area before Blair finally agreed with Smith’s reiterated declaration, sent at midday, that “there is no Jackson’s Ferry, nor any practical crossing for ten or fifteen miles above” the Oconee River Bridge. The bad news took several more hours to work its way up the chain of command.

The vacuum at the top of the Confederate leadership ended on November 24. In Savannah, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee stepped off the train arriving from the south to once more take personal charge of affairs along the coast. As soon as he learned that President Davis was sending another brass heavyweight, General Braxton Bragg, to Augusta, Hardee opted to remain in Savannah to concentrate on its defense. Told of the fighting taking place at the Oconee River Bridge and Ball’s Ferry, he determined to visit there at once.

Back to the west, the city of Macon was further heartened this morning by the arrival of General P. G. T. Beauregard. After descending from the train, he went into what he later termed “a long and important conference with Generals [Howell] Cobb and [Richard] Taylor.” Based on the information in hand, Beauregard reasoned that Sherman was probably following “the most direct route to Port Royal[, South Carolina].” Like all his colleagues, Beauregard saw little profit in harrying the rear of Sherman’s columns and so concentrated on putting all his available force in front. He approved Hardee’s plan to transfer the Georgia militia then in Macon to the Atlantic coast, although this time they would move south and east, alternately marching and riding. Beauregard, also deciding that Lieutenant General Taylor could be more helpful to Hardee in Savannah, ordered him there.

Finally, the overall commander once more nudged the distant General Hood to do something: “Sherman’s movement is progressing rapidly toward [the] Atlantic coast, doubtless to re-enforce Grant. It is essential you should take [the] offensive and crush the enemy’s force in Middle Tennessee soon as practicable.”

Another opportunity to seriously upset Sherman’s timetable was
playing out not forty miles to the east, at the Oconee River, but there is no evidence that anyone in authority recognized it as such. The influx of “pinch-hitting” generals necessitated by Beauregard’s absence meant that there was no continuity of command, a problem exacerbated by first Hardee’s and then Richard Taylor’s self-limiting definition of their responsibilities. With each concentrating on Macon’s defensive zone, neither felt compelled to act in the wider arena.

Hardee’s abrupt departure created a void that put Wheeler on his own hook. The cavalry officer acted according to character by marching toward the guns; in this case, moving to place his force in front of Sherman’s columns. This led his command off on a march twenty miles south of the Oconee River Bridge to a ford near Dublin. What might have been accomplished by assailing the rear of the Right Wing while its front was pressed against the river was not even a theoretical possibility, since the critical tool for such a plan—Wheeler’s cavalry—was no longer on the scene.

This lack of focus on the part of the Confederate commanders in central Georgia was a boon to Sherman’s operation; a factor he never considered in his planning, but which in many ways was key to his continuing success.

It was late afternoon before Major General Oliver O. Howard learned that there was no fordable crossing at Jackson’s Ferry, or at any other spot within two days’ march north of the Oconee River Bridge. That left Ball’s Ferry to the south as the Right Wing’s only option; it was to Howard’s credit that he acted swiftly to reroute Blair’s Seventeenth Corps there to join Osterhaus and the Fifteenth Corps. As Howard reported to Sherman, “I will be obliged to cross everything in the vicinity of Ball’s Ferry.” One problem though—the enemy held the east bank, and had been improving his defenses for twenty-four hours. The fate of the Right Wing of Sherman’s grand movement now depended on finding a way across the Oconee River.

Tracking Sherman’s movements was a constant challenge for Confederate authorities, but there were two organizations outside the military that were equipped and motivated to monitor the enemy’s
progress—the Georgia Railroad (running between Atlanta and Augusta) and the Central of Georgia Railroad (connecting Macon with Savannah). It was in their interests to know where the enemy was and his likely course, in order to assess damage and protect rolling stock by getting it out of harm’s way. With an audacity that would be unthinkable in a later age, trains were kept running, as much to move passengers and cargo as to pinpoint the changing boundaries of the enemy’s penetration. Information gleaned by the railroad agents and from passengers formed much of the intelligence that crackled along the telegraph network to distant centers like Richmond.

The November 24 issue of the
Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel
carried a wealth of information from both railroads. According to “an intelligent gentleman who arrived last night by the passenger train up the Georgia [Rail]road,” the paper’s editors learned that the Federal Left Wing had turned south off the rail line at the Oconee River, that rumors of many Union troops in Greensboro were wildly exaggerated, and that the track remained open to Greensboro and Athens. “A gentleman who arrived last night from Savannah” supplied details from the Central of Georgia. He not only reported the fight at the Oconee River Bridge but confirmed the capture of Milledgeville.

The two Georgia railroads continued to observe and report on Sherman’s progress, even as those actions were inexorably grinding up the tracks and infrastructure that represented the very lifeblood of those companies.

In his later years, Major General Oliver O. Howard would shake his head at the emerging story of Sherman’s campaign as one unbroken lark. The Left Wing, under Slocum, he explained, “had enjoyed a fine march, having had but little resistance. The stories of the mock Legislature at the State capital, of the luxurious supplies enjoyed all along, and of the constant fun and pranks of ‘Sherman’s bummers,’ rather belonged to that route than ours.” Howard’s case had merit this day as the Left Wing crossed the Oconee at Milledgeville to begin marching south and east, with only some bad stretches of road and poor traffic control to delay the movement.

The Yankee boys of the Twentieth Corps awoke to a “dense, penetrating fog” that was slow to burn off. “The roads are frozen and the air
frosty,” complained a New York soldier. The Third Division, which had been camped along the Oconee River’s west bank, had to use a covered bridge, which provided much amusement. One soldier said that “a continuous medley of cheers and yells broke from the troops as they traversed the long passage while brigade followed brigade debouching from the exit and making away into the woods.”

At this point in the operation the supply gathering system was operating with few hitches. “Each regiment had its detail for foraging, duly authorized and supplied with passes, two or three from each company, which would start off on roads to right and left of the road on which the reserve of the regiment and the teams were to move,” explained a Connecticut soldier. “The boys would separate in parties of four or five upon each road, and visiting farm-houses would thoroughly ransack the place and get not only all the rations and forage which were needed but teams, horses, and mules to draw them to the road on which the main line of march was made, and there transferred to the regimental wagons and issued by proper authorities…. Besides the authorized foraging for general supplies, there was a great deal of individual foraging done.” Recorded a Wisconsin diarist of this day’s pickings: “We had pancakes and honey, potatoes and pork for supper.”

By the time the tail end of the Third Division moved out, the narrow roads had been thoroughly churned by the two divisions moving ahead of it. This slowed the wagon train to a crawl, forcing the soldiers to keep pushing them along until well into the night to cover the assigned distance. This resulted in one of the more striking scenes of the march, as a long stretch of road was illuminated after sunset by parallel pyres of pine fence rails running along the shoulders of the lane. It was, recorded a Massachusetts soldier, “a grand scene;…two walls of fire…extending as far as the eye could reach, with here and there burning cotton gins and out buildings, and the heavens above, and all before, around and behind them, light as day with the flames of the burning pitch.”

Behind the Twentieth came the Fourteenth Corps, two divisions moving on a parallel route several miles to the left, a third holding station in Milledgeville. Orders for the First and Second divisions to march came as an unpleasant surprise for some soldiers. When the members of the 17th New York “saw no signs of moving we commenced cooking Thanksgiving dinner,” recollected one of them. “Just as we had
it nearly started orders came to move, and as we could not carry a half-cooked dinner we had to throw it away.”

Images of women ran like a red thread through the skein of today’s events, from the mysterious, to rebellious, to forlorn. According to Brigadier General William P. Carlin, just as his division was marching over the Oconee River “a woman on horseback crossed at the same time with a pass from General Sherman, from which circumstances it was understood that she was a spy for him.” For some of the units marching behind Carlin’s division the women they encountered were subtly and unsubtly defiant. The ladies watching the Fourteenth Corps pass through Milledgeville “were quite numerous but they were very rebellious,” reminisced an Ohio boy. “One of them covered her face as the stars and stripes were carry by.” “In passing through Milledgeville a woman threw a large stone from a two story window at Pvt. John Cooper, Co. I, barely missing him,” reported a member of the 104th Illinois, who was silent on the fate of the rock chucker. Another female gave vent to the tremendous strain of the past days. East of the capital, as a column including the 113th Ohio was passing a residence, “a soldier asked a woman if supper was ready,” said a Buckeye. “She burst into tears and replied that she had not a morsel of food in the house.”