I
It happened this way. While Sherman's and Hood's cavalry had gone off on futile raids into each other's rear during the first half of August, the Union infantry had continued to probe unsuccessfully toward the railroad south of Atlanta. When all but one blue corps suddenly disappeared on August 26, Hood jubilantly concluded that Sherman had retreated. But celebrations by Atlantans proved premature. Sherman had withdrawn nearly all of his army from the trenches, all right, but they were marching south to slice across the roads and railroads far beyond Confederate defenses. As the Democrats met in Chicago to declare the war a failure, northern soldiers 700 miles away were making "Sherman neckties" out of the last open railroad into Atlanta by heating the rails over a bonfire of ties and twisting the iron around trees.
Hood woke up to the truth a day too late. On August 30 he sent two corps against the enemy at Jonesborough twenty miles south of Atlanta. They found the Yankees too strong and were repulsed with heavy loss. Next day Sherman counterattacked and mauled the rebels. To avoid being cut off and trapped, Hood evacuated Atlanta on September 1 after destroying everything of military value in it. Next day the bluecoats marched in with bands blaring Union songs and raised the American flag over city hall. Sherman sent a jaunty wire to Washington: "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won."
The impact of this event cannot be exaggerated. Cannons boomed 100-gun salutes in northern cities. Newspapers that had bedeviled Sherman for years now praised him as the greatest general since Napoleon. In retrospect the victory at Mobile Bay suddenly took on new importance as the first blow of a lethal one-two punch. "Sherman and Far-ragut," exulted Secretary of State Seward, "have knocked the bottom out of the Chicago platform." The Richmond Examiner reflected glumly that "the disaster at Atlanta" came "in the very nick of time" to "save the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin. . . . [It] obscures the prospect of peace, late so bright. It will also diffuse gloom over the South."1 Gloom became a plentiful commodity indeed. "Never until now did I feel hopeless," wrote a North Carolinian," but since God seems to have forsaken us I despair." The South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Ches-nut saw doom approaching. "Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me, forever," she wrote. "We are going to be wiped off the earth."2
Far to the north George B. McClellan digested the news of Atlanta as he wrote his letter accepting the Democratic nomination. If he endorsed the platform, or said nothing about it, he would by implication commit himself to an armistice and negotiations. McClellan felt great pressure from the party's peace faction to do just that. "Do not listen to your Eastern friends," Vallandigham implored him, "who, in an evil hour, may advise you to insinuate even a little war into your letter of acceptance. . . . If anything implying war is presented, two hundred thousand men in the West will withhold their support."3 Early drafts of McClellan's letter would have satisfied Vallandigham: they endorsed an armistice qualified only by a proviso calling for renewal of the war if negotiations failed to produce reunion.
But McClellan's "Eastern friends"—War Democrats including the banker August Belmont, chairman of the Democratic National Committee—convinced him that if once stopped, the war could not be started again; an armistice without conditions would mean surrender of the Union. After Atlanta such a proposal would stultify his candidacy. So
1. Seward quoted in Lloyd Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet (New York, 1932), 409; Richmond Examiner, Sept. 5, 1864.
2. Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the UnitedStates Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 119; Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 648, 645.
3. Vallandigham to McClellan, Sept. 4, 1864, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.
McClellan's letter released on September 8 repudiated the "four years of failure" plank. "I could not look in the faces of gallant comrades of the army and navy . . . and tell them that their labor and the sacrifice of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain," he wrote. No, when "our present adversaries are ready for peace, on the basis of the Union," negotiations could begin in "a spirit of conciliation and compromise. . . . The Union is the one condition of peace—we ask no more."4
Peace Democrats fumed that McClellan had betrayed them. They held hurried meetings to consider nominating another candidate. But nobody seemed to want this dubious honor, and the revolt subsided. Most Peace Democrats including Vallandigham eventually returned to the fold—though they campaigned mainly for the party and its platform rather than for McClellan.
A similar process occurred in the Republican party. The news from Atlanta dissolved the movement for a new convention to replace Lincoln. The president was now a victorious leader instead of a discredited loser. Only John C. Frémont's splinter candidacy stood in the way of a united party. Behind the scenes, radicals negotiated Frémont's withdrawal on September 22 in return for Montgomery Blair's resignation from the cabinet. Though some radicals remained less than enthusiastic about Lincoln, they went to work with a will. The Democrats' Janus face toward the war presented Republicans with an easy target. "Neither you nor I," said a party orator, "nor the Democrats themselves, can tell whether they have a peace platform or a war platform. . . . Upon the whole it is both peace and war, that is peace with the rebels but war against their own government."5
4. For an analysis of the successive drafts of McClellan's acceptance letter, see Charles R. Wilson, "McClellan's Changing Views on the Peace Plank of 1864," AHR, 38 (1933), 498–505. Drafts of McClellan's letter are in the McClellan Papers, Library of Congress, and in the Samuel L. M. Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library. The first three drafts expressed "cordial concurrence" with the platform's call for a "cessation of hostilities" and declared that "we have fought enough to satisfy the military honor of the two sections." Two letters from powerful War Democrats that helped persuade McClellan to drop such phrases from the final version are August Belmont to McClellan, Sept. 3, 1864, and S. L. M. Barlow to McClellan, Sept. 3, McClellan Papers.
5. Robert Schenck, quoted in William Frank Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954), 139.
After a slow start in the Shenandoah Valley, Phil Sheridan soon gave Republicans more cheering news. Mindful of Grant's injunction to follow Jubal Early "to the death," Sheridan was also aware of the long record of Union disasters in the Valley. Therefore his Army of the Shenandoah sparred carefully with Early's rebels for six weeks without driving them any farther south than Winchester. Intelligence reports of the reinforcement of Early by four divisions from Lee (in fact he had received only two) added to Sheridan's unwonted caution. Taking advantage of this weakening of the Petersburg defenses, Grant in late August had cut the railroad linking the city to the blockade-running port of Wilmington. Forced to lengthen his lines and protect wagon trains hauling supplies around this break, Lee recalled one division from the Valley. Learning of this from Rebecca Wright, a Quaker schoolteacher and Union sympathizer in Winchester, Sheridan decided to strike. On September 19 his 37,000 bluecoats attacked the 15,000 Confederates at Winchester. The wagon train of one Union corps tangled up the troops of another and almost halted the assault before it began. But with much energy and profanity Sheridan straightened out the jam, got his troops into line, and led them forward in an irresistible wave. Northern cavalry with their rapid-firing carbines played a conspicuous role; two divisions of horsemen even thundered down on Early's left in an old-fashioned saber charge and captured the bulk of the 2,000 rebels who surrendered. "We have just sent them whirling through Winchester," wired Sheridan's chief of staff in a phrase that looked good in the newspapers, "and we are after them to-morrow."6
Having lost one-fourth of his army, Early retreated twenty miles to a strong defensive position on Fisher's Hill just south of Strasburg. Sheridan indeed came "after them tomorrow." On September 22 two corps made a feint against Early's entrenched line while a third—mostly West Virginians and Ohioans who had fought through this rugged terrain for three years—worked their way up mountain paths to hit the Confederate left end-on. Bursting out of thick woods with the setting sun at their backs, they crumbled the surprised southern flank like a dry leaf. The Federals again sent Early "whirling" southward some sixty miles to a pass in the Blue Ridge where the rebels holed up to lick their wounds.
"Sheridan has knocked down gold and G. B. McClellan together," wrote a New York Republican. "The former is below 200 [for the first
6. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 2, p. 124.
time since May], and the latter is nowhere."7 Grant weighed in with renewed attacks on both ends of Lee's line south and north of the James River. Though failing to score a breakthrough, Union forces advanced another two miles southwest of Petersburg and captured an important fort only six miles from Richmond. Panic gripped the Confederate capital as provost guards rounded up every able-bodied male under fifty they could find—including two indignant cabinet members—to put them into the trenches.8 But Lee's veterans stopped the Yankees before they reached these inner defenses. Northern newspapers nevertheless puffed this action into a great victory—pale though it was in comparison with Sheridan's triumphs.
Having followed Early almost to the death, Sheridan proceeded to carry out the second part of Grant's instructions: to turn "the Shenandoah Valley [into] a barren waste . . . so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them."9 Besides serving as an avenue for invasion of the North, the Valley had supplied much of the food for Confederate armies in Virginia. Destroying its crops would put an end to both functions. Sheridan was the man for this job. "The people must be left nothing," he said, "but their eyes to weep with over the war." Union horsemen swept up the Valley like a plague of locusts. By October 7, Sheridan could report that they had "destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements; over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep." But this was just the beginning. By the time he was through, Sheridan promised, "the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have little in it for man or beast."10
This was playing for keeps. Northern barnburners made little distinction between rebel farmers and those who claimed to be loyal to the Union. The grain and fodder of both would go to the Confederates if not seized or destroyed, or it would be consumed by the guerrillas who swarmed around the army's flanks and rear and tried to sting it to death.
7. Strong, Diary, 494. At the same time gold rose to 3,000 against the Confederate dollar.
8. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 295–96.
9. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 2, p. 202; Vol. 40, pt. 3, p. 223.
10. Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York, 1978), 18; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 1, pp. 30–31.
Partisans cut the throat of one of Sheridan's aides, shot his medical inspector, and murdered another popular officer after he had surrendered. Enraged by these incidents, bluecoated arsonists took it out on civilians whom they believed to be sheltering these "bushwhackers." One Union officer claimed that Sheridan's swath of destruction had finally "purified" the Valley of partisan bands: "As our boys expressed it, 'we burned out the hornets.' "11
It was a hard war and would soon become even harder, down in Georgia and South Carolina. Meanwhile the rebels decided that they could not give up the Shenandoah Valley without another fight. Lee reinforced Early with an infantry division and a cavalry brigade, which caused Sheridan to postpone the planned return of the 6th Corps to the Petersburg front. Leaving his army camped near Cedar Creek fifteen miles south of Winchester, Sheridan entrained for Washington on October 16 for a strategy conference to decide what to do next. While he was gone, Early borrowed a leaf from the book of his mentor Stonewall Jackson and decided to make a surprise attack. On the night of October 18–19 four Confederate divisions silently moved into position for a dawn assault on the two left-flank Union divisions. The surprise was complete. The rudely awakened bluecoats fell back on the next two divisions, communicating their panic and causing the whole Army of the Shenandoah to retreat in a rout four miles down the Valley after losing 1,300 prisoners and eighteen guns.
Early believed he had won a great victory. So did his hungry soldiers, who broke ranks to forage in the Union camps. But it was only ten o'clock in the morning. The Union cavalry and the 6th Corps, which had not been routed, remained intact with remnants of four broken divisions scattered behind them. And Sheridan was coming. He had returned to Winchester the previous evening. Puzzled at breakfast by the ominous rumbling of artillery off to the south, he saddled up and began his ride into legend. As Sheridan approached the battlefield, stragglers recognized him and began to cheer. "God damn you, don't cheer me!" he shouted at them. "If you love your country, come up to the front! . . . There's lots of fight in you men yet! Come up, God damn you! Come up!" By dozens and then hundreds they followed him. Sheridan's performance this day was the most notable example of personal battlefield leadership in the war. A veteran of the 6th Corps
11. Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1953), 286.
recalled: "Such a scene as his presence and such emotion as it awoke cannot be realized but once in a century."12
While across the way Early seemed mesmerized by his victory, Sheridan reorganized his army during the hazy autumn afternoon and sent it forward in a counterattack. With cavalry slashing in from the flanks and infantry rolling ahead like ocean surf, the Yankees sent Early's gray-backs reeling back over the morning's battleground. Driving the rebels across Cedar Creek, bluecoats captured a thousand prisoners along with the eighteen guns they lost in the morning and twenty-three more for good measure. Early's army virtually disintegrated as it fled southward in the gathering darkness with blue cavalry picking off most of its wagon train. Within a few hours Sheridan had converted the battle of Cedar Creek from a humiliating defeat into one of the more decisive Union victories of the war.
To follow it up, Grant tried another double swipe at both ends of Lee's line at Petersburg and Richmond. Though unsuccessful, this forced Lee to lengthen his defenses further, until they now stretched 35 miles from a point east of Richmond to another one southwest of Petersburg. This line was so thin, Lee informed Davis, that, unless he could get more troops, "I fear a great calamity will befall us."13
Northerners were beginning to think so too. Scenting victory and wanting to be part of it, many three-year veterans who had mustered out in the spring re-enlisted in the fall. They helped fill enlistment quotas and relieved the pressure of the draft, which proceeded with unexpected smoothness. They also helped restore the Army of the Potomac's tone, which had all but disappeared during the summer under the weight of conscripts, substitutes, and bounty-jumpers.
Republican politicians knew how to use this scent of victory to their advantage. One of their best campaign documents was a poem, "Sheridan's Ride," written by Thomas B. Read after the battle of Cedar Creek. Recited aloud in the meter of a galloping horse (from Winchester to the battlefield), it seldom failed to rouse crowds at political rallies to roars of patriotic fervor:
Up from the South, at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay . . .
12. Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Pocket Books ed., New York, 1967), 374; Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, 314.
13. Clifford Dowdey, ed., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York, 1961), 868.
But there is a road from Winchester town,
A good, broad highway leading down. . . .
Still sprang from these swift hoofs, thundering south,
The dust like smoke from the cannon's mouth,
Or the trail of a comet, sweeping faster and faster,
Foreboding to traitors the doom of disaster. . . .