Southern Storm (64 page)

Before that, however, Sherman wanted to finish with Savannah. “I will try and see Admiral Dahlgren and General Foster before demanding the surrender of Savannah, which I do not propose to make till my batteries are able to open,” he said. Sherman closed each missive with the confident assertion: “I regard Savannah as already gained.”

Leaving the dispatches for delivery with Lieutenant Fisher, Sherman and Howard returned to their yawl to be rowed back to Fort McAllister. Once ashore, they were guided again to the Middleton house, where, said Brigadier General Hazen, they “shared my blankets, spread upon the floor.”

It had been a very long day.

An anticlimactic footnote to this tumultuous day was provided by Brigadier General Kilpatrick, who, following his brief conference with Brigadier General Hazen, took his troopers south to the mouth of the Medway River in St. Catherines Sound. There, at Kilkenny Bluff, he spotted some Federal warships on patrol. According to a soldier with the party, “Signals, shots and fires failed to attract any response from them. A six-oared boat was soon found, and when the tide set out [Captain Lewellyn G.]…Estes, with seven volunteers (six at the oars and one at the helm) started for the ship. They beat a cavalry march for speed, too. In about an hour we received signals that they were there and in communication with Uncle Sam’s jolly sailors.”

Estes carried a copy of Howard’s dispatch already delivered by Captain Duncan. In a message to Sherman time-dated 1:30
P.M
., Kilpatrick made a case for setting up the army’s supply base in the St. Catherines area, a suggestion that became moot once Fort McAllister fell. Howard’s note was forwarded to Major General Foster by the USS
Fernandina,
while the unidentified contact vessel remained in touch
with the shore. Even though nothing would come of this exchange, it did demonstrate that Sherman had more options than connecting with the fleet via Ossabaw Sound.

The happy cavalrymen at Kilkenny Bluff entertained some of the boat’s crew the next day. “The officers and sailors wanted to ride our horses, and we thoroughly enjoyed seeing them do so,” said a Michigan trooper. “When they left us many of them were sore and lame from the tumbles they had received while riding.”

W
EDNESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
14, 1864

Major General Sherman had been sleeping one, maybe two hours when he became aware that there was someone in the room asking for him. Sherman called the stranger over and rubbed the exhaustion from his face while the messenger explained that a staff officer from Major General Foster was waiting with a boat at Fort McAllister. Foster wished very much to see him, but he was incapacitated by an old war wound, so could not come ashore. Could Sherman come to him? “I was extremely weary from the incessant labor of the day and night before,” recalled Sherman, “but got up, and again walked down the sandy road to McAllister, where I found a boat awaiting us.”

The man who greeted him aboard the revenue cutter
Nemaha
had a very mixed war record. He was the kind of officer who stood out while acting as a subordinate, but when promoted to top command fell prey to excessive cautions and concerns. “He may have been a lion in his day,” observed a soldier who had served under him, “but his day is past.” Thus far Major General John G. Foster had fumbled his two military missions connected with Sherman’s March. The expeditionary force he had dispatched under Brigadier General John P. Hatch to cut the Charleston-Savannah railroad at Grahamville had been repulsed at Honey Hill. A follow-up effort (also led by Hatch) against the railway farther north had been stopped short of the goal, though within extreme cannon range, allowing Foster to claim that his guns now “commanded” the passage. Foster’s hope was that Sherman would be too preoccupied with resupplying his army, capturing Savannah, and moving to the next phase of his campaign to take him to task for his failures.

An officer with Foster’s staff recalled Sherman as “the most American looking man I ever saw, tall and lank, not very erect, with hair like a thatch, which he rubs up with his hands, a rusty beard trimmed close, a wrinkled face, sharp, prominent red nose, small, bright eyes, coarse red hands, black felt hat slouched over the eyes…, brown field officer’s coat with high collar and no shoulder-straps, muddy trousers and one spur.”

By Sherman’s account the meeting was amicable. Foster, after providing the most up-to-date intelligence he had regarding Savannah’s defenses, indicated that troops under his command were “strongly intrenched, near Broad River, within cannon-range of the railroad.” The officer hastened to assure Sherman that the warehouses at Port Royal contained “ample supplies…awaiting your orders.” For his part, Sherman told Foster about the capture of Fort McAllister, indicated his army’s positions, and was, according to Foster, “perfectly sure of capturing Savannah.” Sherman’s shopping list included bread, sugar, coffee, and heavy-caliber siege guns. Foster added that twenty tons of mail were at Port Royal awaiting delivery to his men.

From the moment he arrived before Savannah, until just a few hours prior to meeting with Foster, Sherman had been obsessed with taking Fort McAllister. With that accomplished, he immediately segued to a new all-consuming focus: capturing Savannah. The rough plan he shared with Foster would have the bulk of Sherman’s force blocking all western approaches to the city, while one division would be detached to cut off Hardee’s escape route north to Charleston. The staff officer present recollected the strategizing in more colorful terms. Sherman, he wrote the same day of the meeting, “says the city is his sure game and stretches out his arm and claws his bony fingers in the air to illustrate how he had his grip on it.”

Sherman’s problem now was logistical. Capturing Fort McAllister was a step—albeit an important one—toward setting up the supply pipeline. The Ogeechee River still needed to be swept clear of torpedoes, and obstructions had to be removed, plus a flotilla of shallow-draft craft was necessary to carry the goods as far as King’s Bridge, where Sherman expected to establish his distribution hub. Getting the navy’s help was, as Sherman put it, “indispensable.” He agreed to journey with Foster into Ossabaw Sound in the hope of meeting
the commander of the blockading squadron, Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren.

The fifty-five-year-old naval officer was on station outside Savannah, supervising the placement of buoys to guide an attack in which he was planning to use his ironclads. At 8:00
A.M
., after being informed that communications had been opened with Sherman, he made the decision to steam down to Ossabaw Sound in his flagship, the USS
Harvest Moon.
Not long after reaching the sound, he spotted Major General Foster’s steamer and learned that Sherman was aboard. “Anchored immediately,” Dahlgren wrote in his diary, “and in a few minutes the steamer came alongside, and I jumped aboard, walked into the cabin, and met General Sherman.” The rear admiral, quite Sherman’s equal when it came to self-confidence and vanity, added: “He had left his army to see me.”

“I was not personally acquainted with him at the time,” reflected Sherman, “but he was so extremely kind and courteous that I was at once attracted to him.” Dahlgren had come to his sea command through his brilliance at a Washington desk job as director of naval ordnance development and manufacture, a position that placed him in regular contact with President Lincoln, who took a personal interest in furthering his career. His appointment to take command of the South Atlantic Squadron had been over the objections of the secretary of the navy, backed by many serving admirals who felt that Dahlgren had not earned his spurs. Like his predecessor, Dahlgren had been unable to conquer Charleston from the sea, so it is not improbable that he saw a partnership with Sherman to capture Savannah as beneficial to his record of achievement.

According to Sherman, “There was nothing in his power, he said, which he would not do to assist us, to make our campaign absolutely successful.” The rear admiral could not have been more cordial, even when Sherman touched a traditional rivalry by commenting that his “division had just walked into McAllister…, but that no ships could have taken it, so powerfully was it fortified toward the water.”

Dahlgren ordered a list complied of shallow-draft vessels capable of reaching King’s Bridge, then offered to personally oversee the clearing of the waterway. He and Sherman discussed the possibility of a joint action against some of the Rebel river redoubts, with Dahlgren promising to undertake preliminary surveys of the enemy’s defenses. The
rear admiral happily agreed to transport Sherman to Fort McAllister, freeing Major General Foster to return to Port Royal to begin opening the floodgates of supplies, ordnance, and mail.

Sherman spent the night aboard the
Harvest Moon,
where he was joined in the evening by his dedicated aide and faithful chronicler, Major Henry Hitchcock, who had found his way from headquarters to Cheves’ Rice Mill to Fort McAllister to the flagship. It took but a short time for Hitchcock to conclude “that navy officers are luxurious rascals compared to us dwellers in tents.”

It was during these visits with Foster and Dahlgren that Sherman was handed a note from Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, addressed from near Petersburg, Virginia, on December 3. The message had been written before any word had been received regarding the fate of Sherman or his forces. “Not liking to rejoice before the victory is assured I abstain from congratulating you and those under your command until the bottom has been struck,” said Grant. There followed a short summary of events in Virginia and elsewhere, along with a troubling assessment of Thomas’s lackluster performance in Tennessee. The man appointed by Sherman to hold the line against Hood had forted up in Nashville after ceding much of the territory to the south without a fight. “Part of the falling back was undoubtedly necessary,” Grant grumbled, “and all of it may have been; it did not look so, however, to me.” Of Sherman’s yet-to-be-revealed accomplishments, Grant expressed a sentiment sure to please its recipient: “I have never had a fear of the result.”

With the dawn word of McAllister’s fall spread afresh along the Union siege lines outside Savannah. “News came about 10 o’clock of the capture of Fort McAllister,” recorded a Michigan diarist. “Sherman had been on board the fleet…. Our communication is opened with the north again. We gave 3 hearty cheers.” Major James A. Connolly noted in his journal that the soldiers in Brigadier General Absalom Baird’s division (Fourteenth Corps) “have been cheering and yelling like Indians all day. Everybody feeling jolly—bands playing, batteries all firing, flags all flying, and everybody voting everybody else in this army a hero.” “Now we are knocking at the gates of Savannah,” crowed an Iowa boy. “We are going in before long too, for we have
the means and Sherman will not be long in putting the same into requisition.”

At the captured fort, a detail of prisoners headed by McAllister’s engineering chief were clearing the minefield. “They would make a mark around the torpedo with their fingers, then dig it out,” related one of the Yankee guards, “and when they were on the ground they looked like camp kettles.” When General Beauregard later learned of this incident, he applied to Brigadier General John H. Winder, commissary general of prisons, for a like number of Federals “to be employed in retaliation.” According to Beauregard, “Gen. Winder answered, that under his instructions from the Confederate War Department he could not comply; also, that in his belief, prisoners could not rightfully be so employed.”

Before McAllister was taken, the men may have grumbled about their condition, but it was always with a sense of resigned acceptance. Now that the door to the army warehouses was open, resignation was replaced with impatience. “We will soon have rations again,” proclaimed a New Yorker, “and what we wish for fully is letters from home.” The capture of McAllister, added a hopeful member of the 105th Ohio, “must soon end our season of scarcity of rations which now reigns to such an extent as to make anything welcome that is possibly eatable.” “Our food line should now be open again,” contributed a Wisconsin comrade. “We now have too little to live on…. We have only a small amount of rice and an ounce of meat per day.”

Still, not everyone was thinking about mail or their stomachs. An Ohio soldier found time today to enjoy his surroundings. “Almost every tree is draped with Spanish Moss,” he wrote in his journal. “It is long & sways to & fro in the breeze. Live oaks look green & splendid.” A few members of the 22nd Wisconsin were celebrating their good fortune this day: “We captured a yawl boat—it had in it 5 chickens, one gobbler and one good blanket.” Another captured boat was the object of a turf war between the infantry and engineers. Acting on orders from Major General Slocum, Colonel George P. Buell with a detail from the 58th Indiana Pontoniers came aboard the captured tender
Resolute
, intending to tow it to the mainland to repair the engines. Buell’s deputy was met at the gangplank by Colonel William
Hawley, who claimed possession for the 3rd Wisconsin. After a bit of verbal tussle, Slocum’s orders trumped Hawley’s claim, so the captured craft was hauled to the mainland.

Brigadier General Kilpatrick’s headquarters this day were located in historic Midway Church, Liberty County, some fifteen miles southwest of Fort McAllister. He and his riders had arrived here yesterday, having had no problem dispersing the two Confederate militia units assigned to the region, the 29th Battalion Georgia Cavalry (Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hood commanding), and members of the Remount Detachment of the Liberty Independent Troop. Muttered one frustrated Rebel: “If Hood’s Battalion ever fired a shot at a Yankee in Liberty County, I have never been able to find out where it was.”

One bold detachment from the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry raced nearly thirty miles along the Savannah and Gulf Railroad with orders to destroy the bridge at the Altamaha River. However, this time the militia had managed to concentrate on the opposite bank in sufficient strength, so the 120 or so Union troopers had to content themselves with wrecking the approaches on their side.