Authors: Noah Andre Trudeau
Six days earlier, at Buckhead Creek, his officers had tried to halt the trailing refugees by preventing them from using the military bridge before it was dismantled. Buckhead Creek had not been enough of a
barrier to discourage many, and since then the problem, as Davis saw it, had only worsened. Any sympathetic consideration of their plight was lost on a man imbued with an urgent sense of military necessity and raised in a society that dehumanized its African-American members.
The bridging of the Ebenezer and Lockner creeks offered Davis a better opportunity than had Buckhead Creek to free his infantry columns from the freed slaves’ clinging embrace. Even as the trestle bridge over Ebenezer Creek was being finished on December 8, Davis positioned provost units at the entryway with orders to turn back any unauthorized blacks. When Brigadier General Absalom Baird’s aide, Major James Connolly, learned of this he was livid. “I…knew [this] must result in all these negroes being recaptured or perhaps brutally shot down by the rebel cavalry to-morrow morning,” he fumed. “The idea of five or six hundred black women, children and old men being thus returned to slavery by such an infernal copperhead as Jeff. C. Davis was entirely too much for my Democracy;…and I told his staff officers what I thought of such an inhuman, barbarous proceeding in language which may possibly result in a reprimand from his serene Highness,…but I don’t care a fig.” Connolly stormed off, his conscience assuaged, but Davis’s orders remained unchanged.
Human nature being what it is, orders to prevent the blacks crossing at Ebenezer Creek were not entirely effective. “Some hid in the wagons and passed by the officers,” noted an Indiana teamster, but a majority were halted. “As soon as the army was across, the planks were taken up,” reported a member of the 2nd Minnesota. To keep anyone from clambering over the bridge skeleton, what was left was burned. “It was really pitiful to see them and they are afraid of the Rebels and begged hard to get over,” related a Hoosier. “Some of them swam the river but the women and children could not get over.”
Just as at Buckhead Creek, resourceful individuals began to organize their own crossing. “The Negro men constructed a raft by tying ropes to each end, [and] would pull it back & forth loaded with families of negro women & children,” scrawled a Minnesota diarist. “They would ‘bress the lord’ as soon as they was over.” “The raft would carry only half a dozen and sunk a foot under water then,” added another Minnesotan. “One young fellow slightly deformed crossing with his wife, she stumbled and fell off the raft going to her neck in the water,
her husband caught her and dragged her on board again…. They came on shore, she dripping and smiling, and he remarking that he would rather lose his own life than that sweet darling should be drowned.” Tragically, if those who did get over Ebenezer Creek thought that the worst was behind them, they hadn’t reckoned with the cold determination of Davis’s officers.
A short way down the Augusta Road was Lockner Creek, where Federal engineers had laid a pontoon bridge. Here mounted infantry from the 16th Illinois constituted the rear guard, under the command of Captain Charles D. Kerr. “As soon as we were over the creek, orders were given to the engineers to take up the pontoons, and not let a negro across,” he admitted afterward. “The order was obeyed to the letter.” Weary blacks who had made it from Ebenezer watched in horror as a second crossing was denied them. “Rushing to the water’s brink, they raised their hands and implored from the corps commander the protection they had been promised,” said Kerr. Once the pontoons had been secured, the rear guard moved off, the men closing their ears to the plaintive wails that gradually faded out behind them.
Later, when this day’s events became widely known and infamous, more lurid details would be added to the story, none of which came from eyewitnesses. Sadly, what had happened was bad enough. Given the determination they had already demonstrated, it is beyond doubt that some number of the blacks did make it across both creeks to remain with the column. It is also tragically probable that a number drowned in the attempt, while others either slipped away or allowed themselves to be rounded up by Wheeler’s troopers. In his official report, the Confederate cavalryman noted only that “a great many negroes were left in our hands, whom we sent back to their owners.” That some were shot or physically abused by their captors is not out of the question; it is even more likely that most of those so corralled were returned to face whatever retribution their owners thought to inflict.
There was never any argument that Brevet Major General Davis was exceeding Sherman’s guidelines, as there is no evidence that the General ever voiced any disapproval of his subordinate’s action. Davis was not ever compelled to account for what he did that December day. Whether or not this action was a factor, Congress eventually declined to confirm Davis’s promotion, so he ended the war holding just a “temporary” rank of major general.
Even as this humanitarian tragedy was playing out at the tail end of the Fourteenth Corps column, its leading elements were making contact with another piece of Savannah’s outpost line. It happened near or on the plantation of a Dr. Cuyler, at a natural choke point where the wagon road meandered between two swamps. Here the Confederates had built a small earthwork manned with artillerists. The Rebels, reported an Ohio soldier, “opened upon us in a lively manner, and for a time we were at a standstill.”
While regiments branched away from the column to splash into the swamp to engage the enemy skirmishers, Battery I of the 2nd Illinois Light Artillery came forward to challenge the enemy tubes. Its young commander, Lieutenant Albert L. Coe, acting with what one soldier called “his usual rashness,” galloped ahead of his men. “Sitting there on his horse, fearless of danger, looking for a good position for the battery,” related an onlooker, “a solid shot came whirling along and tore his right shoulder off.” “He was literally torn to pieces,” related a gunner, “and had only time to say, ‘My God, boys, I am killed.’” Once it became clear that the Confederates weren’t going to obligingly clear out, the decision was made to hold station until morning.
Right Wing
The soldiers in Brigadier General William B. Hazen’s division, Fifteenth Corps, awoke this morning to find that the Confederates defending the Canoochee River crossing had departed during the night. After sending a brigade to secure the stream’s opposite bank, Hazen ordered up his pontoniers, who had a bridge ready for traffic by late morning. Even as his main body deployed on the other side, Hazen set his leading brigade, Colonel John M. Oliver’s, marching hard for King’s Bridge, an important crossing point of the Ogeechee River.
Oliver’s force was organized for speed, so the men passed over the Savannah and Gulf Railroad tracks without stopping. Not so the brigade coming behind them, which, after reaching the right-of-way at 3:00
P.M
., immediately stopped to wreck it. The “order was for every man to take hold of a railroad tie;” recollected an Ohioan, “then at the command we turned the railroad upside down…. We threw rails of pine in the track then set the whole mass on fire.” An incident here
reminded the soldiers that injury could happen at any time and in any fashion. “While this was being done, one man in Company E[, 47th Ohio,] was struck in the bowels by a tie, some of the spikes coming out.” The brigade racing to King’s Bridge arrived there to find that much of the sizable structure was ablaze. After dropping off a regiment to guard what remained, the rest of the brigade marched east to take out its frustrations by destroying the “magnificent…railroad bridge across the Ogeechee…500 yards long.” North of this activity, the troops of Brigadier General John M. Corse’s division began to exploit their lodgment across the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal. Two brigades probed forward, hoping to gain control of a strategic intersection with the Darien Road, possession of which would speed up communication with Hazen’s men away toward King’s Bridge. The only problem was that the Confederates had anticipated this move, with another of their detached works barring the route.
According to one of Corse’s regimental commanders, the leading Union elements “soon encountered the enemy’s pickets and a brisk skirmish ensued.” The Rebel voltigeurs were steadily pressed back into the defensive work, which one Federal officer described as “breastworks hastily constructed of logs and rails, though in some places dirt had been thrown up.” “The rebels open fire from a mask[ed] battery,” wrote an Illinoisan. “Battery H, 1st Missouri [Light Artillery] replies with vigor and dismounts a rebel cannon.” It was a remarkable display of shooting, considering that the Yankee artillerymen had to set up in a dense woods and had “to fire altogether by the sound of [the enemy]…guns.” Companies from the 81st Ohio and 66th Illinois, in widely spaced skirmishing order, darted ahead to overrun the position, whose defenders had lost heart once their cannon had been knocked out. Pursuit lasted until the Federals reached a wrecked bridge over a branch of the Little Ogeechee River, where they halted to wait for orders.
While the troops were resting here, they heard the whistle of a railroad train. Some of the soldiers caught sight of an engine pulling cars moving slowly southward on the Savannah and Gulf tracks, not more than a mile distant. The Missouri gunners hastily set up for a shot, but by the time they fired, the train was at extreme range, so no hits were registered.
The train conductor may have thought he had left his troubles
behind him, but his luck was definitely spent. A short while earlier, after the barricade had been overrun, Brigadier General Hazen released his mobile unit, the 7th Illinois Mounted Infantry, for a dash to the south and east. This put the troopers ahead of the train, so when they heard it coming, a few quick-thinking members of the regiment managed to pry up one rail. This was enough to alert the railroad engineer to his danger; he stopped and reversed, hoping to back into Savannah. “The Brigade was too far away to prevent him by its [gun]fire,” said a soldier in the 81st Ohio, “and he would have succeeded, but for the thoughtfulness of a soldier who happened to find a citizen’s mule team near a road crossing. He drove the wagon on the track and shot the mules, forcing a complete blockade. By the time the train reached this, re-enforcements came up and the train was a prize. Colonel [Robert N.] Adams made prisoners of the male passengers, gallantly released the ladies unconditionally, and burned the cars.” Among the haul of male citizens was Richard R. Cuyler, president of the Central of Georgia Railroad.
For days the Seventeenth Corps had been marching without serious incident along the Central of Georgia, wreaking havoc on President Cuyler’s charge. Resistance was token for the most part, but today the iron rails unerringly led Major General Frank Blair’s men into Savannah’s outpost line for a fight and a deadly discovery.
This on a day that began on a positive note. “Strong sea breeze in our faces,” wrote an optimistic Illinois diarist. At first, the Rebel videttes manning small barricades were content to fire a shot or two before scampering rearward. That all changed after about five miles, when the Federals encountered another of those Confederate outpost forts. “We found the enemy in position behind an earth-work at the end of a causeway leading through a swamp, the swamp extending around on both their flanks,” reported Major General Joseph A. Mower, commanding the First Division. Mower followed the standard playbook, ordering one brigade “to engage the enemy in front,” while two more waded into the swamp to flank the enemy’s right.
The result was no different from any of the other outpost line encounters this day. Once the flanking force made its presence known,
the Rebels pulled back. The soggy Yankees closed on the road behind the barricade, re-formed their lines, then continued the advance toward Savannah. Behind them, however, a defensive weapon was making its murderous debut in this campaign.
From the very first days after Sherman commenced his grand movement into Georgia, Confederate president Jefferson Davis had reminded his subordinates that their arsenal included what he termed “subterra shells,” also known as torpedoes (in modern times called land mines). Several munitions officers familiar with the workings of these devices were assigned to Savannah to oversee the weapon’s deployment. It was on the causeway fronting the Rebel earthwork that Sherman’s soldiers blundered into one of several minefields that had been seeded at selected points along the city’s outpost perimeter.
Sherman, closely monitoring the movement of the Seventeenth Corps, arrived on the scene not long after the barricade had been captured. His habit of yielding right-of-way to combat units on the march paid an unexpected dividend as he and his headquarters party approached the position via an adjacent clearing rather than using the roadway. “Rode into the field,” noted Major Hitchcock, “when we saw by a group of men in the road on our right that something was the matter.” Sherman spurred forward to find himself joining “a group of men standing around a handsome young officer whose foot had been blown to pieces by a torpedo planted in the road.”
The weapon came in a number of shapes and sizes. A passing artilleryman described one kind: “These torpedoes were 8 inches in diameter and had three wire prongs which stuck up above the surface of the earth just enough so that the pressure of a man’s foot was sufficient to explode the torpedo.” Similar versions were observed by Major Hitchcock, who found them “13 in. long x 7 in. diameter, and at one end were fitted on two brass nuts on which were screwed some sort of friction tube…[with] a sort of nipple projecting from the fuse-hole…. They would hold four or five lbs. powder and explode with terrible effect.”
The victim in this case was a member of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, which provided a forward screen for much of the Seventeenth Corps. “He was waiting for a surgeon to amputate his leg,” continued Sherman, “and told me that he was riding along with the rest of his brigade-
staff of the Seventeenth Corps when a torpedo trodden on by his horse had exploded, killing the horse and literally blowing off all the flesh from one of his legs.” “Poor fellow lay on the ground, covered all but his face with a blanket, only pale, but without a groan or complaint,” added Hitchcock. Even as they were contemplating the fallen officer, a squad of Confederate prisoners with armed escort reached them.