You Cannot Refine It

INDIAN SUMMER HAD COME TO VIRGINIA while Northerners were going to the polls, muting with its smoky haze the vivid yellow vivid scarlet flare of maples and dogwoods on the Peninsula and down along the sunlit reaches of the James, where close to a hundred thousand blue-clad soldiers, in camps and trenches curving past the mouth of the Appomattox, celebrated or shook their heads at the news that they and more than half the men back home had voted to sustain a war that lacked only a winter of being four years old. Across the way, in the rebel works, the reaction was less mixed — and less intense. Partly this was because of distractions, including hunger and the likelihood of being hoisted by a mine or overrun; partly it proceeded from a sense of contrast between the present molelike state of existence and the old free-swinging foot cavalry days when the Army of Northern Virginia ranged the region from which it took its name but now would range no more.

“We thought we had before seen men with the marks of hard service upon them,” an artillery major was to write, recalling his impression of the scarecrow infantry his battalion had been ordered to support on arriving from beyond the river back in June, “but the appearance of this division made us realize for the first time what our comrades in the hottest Petersburg lines were undergoing. We were shocked at the condition, the complexion, the expression of the men … even the field officers. Indeed, we could scarcely realize that the unwashed, uncombed, unfed, and almost unclad creatures were officers of rank and reputation in the army.” Thus he had reacted and reflected in early summer. Now in November he knew that he too looked like that, if not more so, with an added five hard months of wear and tear.

Richmond and Petersburg, semi-beleaguered at opposite ends of the line, were barely twenty crow-flight miles apart, but the intrenchments covering and connecting them had stretched by now to nearly twice that length. From White Oak Swamp on the far left, due east of the capital, these outer works (as distinguished from the ‘inner’ works, two miles in their rear) ran nine miles south, in a shielding curve, to Chaffin’s Bluff on the James; there they crossed and continued for four gun-studded miles along the river’s dominant right bank to a westward loop where the Howlett Line — Beauregard’s cork in Butler’s bottle — began its five-mile run across Bermuda Neck to the Appomattox, then jogged another four miles south, up the left bank of that stream, to connect with the trenches covering Petersburg at such close range that its citizens had grown adept at dodging Yankee shells. The first four miles of these trans-Appomattox installations — disfigured about midway by the red yawn of the Crater — defined the limits of the original blue assault as far south as the Jerusalem Plank Road, where both sides had thrown up imposing and opposing fortifications. Officially dubbed Forts Sedgwick and Mahone, but known respectively by their occupants as Fort Hell and Fort Damnation, these were designed to serve as south-flank anchors, back in June, for the two systems winding northward out of sight. Since that time, however, as a result of Grant’s four all-out pendulum strikes (staged one a month, July through October, and costing him some 25,000 casualties, all told, as compared to Lee’s 10,000) the gray line had been extended nine miles to the west and southwest, covering the Boydton Plank Road down to Hatcher’s Run. All these segments brought the Confederate total to thirty-five miles of earthworks, not including cavalry extensions reaching up to the Chickahominy on the left and down past Burgess Mill to Gravelly Run on the right. Lee’s basic problem, with only about half as many troops as he opposed, was that his line was not only longer, it was also more continuous than Grant’s, who, having no national capital or indispensable railroad junction close in his rear, had less to fear from a breakthrough at any given point.

Another problem was food; or rather the lack of it. Badly as Lee needed men — and the need was so stringent he could not give his Jewish soldiers a day out of the trenches for Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur — he saw no way of feeding substantial reinforcements even if they had been available, which they were not. As it was, he barely managed to sustain the troops on hand by reducing their daily ration to a pint of cornmeal, baked into pones when there was time, and an ounce or two of bacon. Moreover, with the Shenandoah Valley put to the torch and only two rail lines open to Georgia and the Carolinas — the Southside out of Petersburg, the Danville out of Richmond — there was little hope that the fare could be improved, despite the fact that the trench-bound men were losing weight and strength at an alarming rate. They looked fit enough, to a casual eye, but would “pant and grow faint” at the slightest exertion, a staffer noted. “General, I’m hongry,” some would reply when Lee rode out and asked them how they were. All through this grim time, a veteran would say, “I thanked God I had a backbone for my stomach to lean up against.”

Others remarked that the quality of such food as they received was even lower than its quantity; which was low indeed. The meal was unbolted, generally with much of the cob ground in, and alive with weevils. But the bacon remained longest in their memories and nightmares. Nassau bacon, it was called, though one memorialist was to testify that “Nausea with a capital would have been better. It came through the blockade, and we believed it was made from the hog of the tropics and cured in the brine of the ocean. More likely it was discarded ship’s pork, or ‘salt junk.’… It was a peculiarly scaly color, spotted like a half-well case of smallpox, full of rancid odor, and utterly devoid of grease. When hung up it would double its length. It could not be eaten raw, and imparted a stinking smell when boiled. It had one redeeming quality: elasticity. You could put a piece in your mouth and chew it for a long time, and the longer you chewed it the bigger it got. Then, by a desperate effort, you would gulp it down. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Nor was the outer man, in his butternut rags, any better served than the inner. Shoes, for example, had always been a scarce requisition item, and now that the once bounteous yield of well-shod Union corpses had diminished as a dividend of battle, the shortage was acute. Even so, and with cold weather coming on, many soldiers preferred going barefoot to wearing the “pitiable specimens” of footgear issued by the government as a substitute for shoes. “Generally made of green, or at best half-cured leather,” one who suffered from them later wrote, “they soon took to roaming. After a week’s wear, the heel would be on one side, at an angle to the foot, and the vamp in turn would try to do duty as a sole.… While hot and dry, they would shrink like parchment, and when wet they just slopped all over your feet.”

Crippling as this was, other shortages cramped the army’s style still more. Chief among these, despite the sacrifice of most of the South’s stills, was the scarcity of copper, indispensable in the manufacture of percussion caps, without which not a shot could be fired. Riflemen in the critical outer pits were limited to eighteen caps a day, while their Federal counterparts across the way complained of bruised shoulders from being required to expend no less than a hundred rounds in the same span. Other metals not only were less rare, they also could be salvaged from incoming projectiles, much as boots and overcoats had been scavenged from incoming infantry, back in the days of mobile warfare. “As an inducement to collecting scrap iron for our cannon foundries,” a line officer would recall, “furloughs were offered, a day for so many pounds collected. Thus, gathering fragments of shells became an active industry among the troops. So keen was their quest that sometimes they would start toward the point where a mortar shell fell, even before it exploded.” Similarly, the loose dirt of the parapets was periodically sifted for spent lead, but only under cover of darkness, when snipers were inactive. Twice each day, an hour before dawn and half an hour before dusk, every regiment mounted the fire step along its portion of the trenches and remained there, on the alert, until full daylight spread or night came down. Between times, round the clock, half the men kept watch, while the other half slept or rested on their arms, ready to assist in repelling an attack whenever their on-duty comrades sounded the alarm.

Outnumbered and outgunned, ill-clad, ill-shod, and invariably hungry, running after fragments of shell as they once had run after rabbits — except that now they were not in direct pursuit of food, for there was none at the scene of the chase, but rather of the chance to win a day out of the trenches, on the roam where a few mouthfuls could be scrounged from roadside gardens (“They stole more from us than the Yankees did; poor things,” a farmwife was to say long afterwards) — Lee’s veterans fought less by now for a cause than they did for a tradition. And if, in the past six months, this had become a tradition not so much of victory as of undefeat, it had nonetheless been strengthened by the recent overland campaign and now was being sustained by the current stalemate, which was all that Grant’s hundred thousand casualties had earned him in this latest On-to-Richmond effort, launched in May. Mainly, though, Lee’s veterans fought for Lee, or at any rate for the pride they felt when they watched him ride among them. He had “a fearless look of self-possession, without a trace of arrogance,” a Tarheel captain noted, and though a fellow Virginian observed that “he had aged somewhat in appearance,” it was also evident that he “had rather gained than lost in physical vigor, from the severe life he had led. His hair had grown gray, but his face had the ruddy hue of health and his eyes were as clear and bright as ever.”

Partly this appearance of well-being derived from the extended spell of golden weather, which continued through November into December; Lee had always been responsive to climatic fluctuations, good and bad, even before the onset of what doctors called his rheumatism. A staff cavalryman, however, looking back on this hale, autumnal time — when the general, as he said, “seldom, if ever, exhibited the least trace of anxiety, but was firm, hopeful, and encouraged those around him in the belief that he was still confident of success” — believed he saw deeper into the matter. “It must have been the sense of having done his whole duty, and expended upon the cause every energy of his being, which enabled him to meet the approaching catastrophe with a calmness which seemed to those around him almost sublime.”

Perceptive as this was by hindsight, there were other, more evident causes for the confidence he displayed. One was the return of Longstreet in mid-October, on the day of Early’s defeat at Cedar Creek. His right arm partly paralyzed by the effects of his Wilderness wound, Old Peter had learned to write with his left hand, and he gladly accepted full responsibility for the defense of that part of the line above the James, where he soon demonstrated that he had lost none of his cool, hard-handed skill in conducting a battle. Lee’s wisdom in leaving the fighting there to his “old war horse” was confirmed within eight days of the Georgian’s return to duty; no northside drive on Richmond was ever so easily shattered, at such low cost to the defenders, as the one that made up part of Grant’s fourth and final pendulum strike, October 27. What was more, the confidence this inspired was enlarged by Hill’s and Hampton’s canny resistance along Hatcher’s Run, where three Federal corps were turned back in confusion the following day, after suffering even heavier losses than had been inflicted on the other two corps, at the far end of the line.

Small wonder, then, that Lee gave an impression of vigor and well-being as he rode north or south, through the flare and haze of Indian Summer, to inspect his nearly forty miles of unbroken line from the Chickahominy down past Burgess Mill. Even Grant, who was slow to learn negative lessons, had apparently been convinced by this latest failure that he would never take the Confederate capital by storm, and this estimate was strengthened in mid-November by the recall of Kershaw’s division from Early to join Longstreet, whose reunited First Corps now occupied all the defenses north of the Appomattox, including those across Bermuda Neck. A. P. Hill’s Third Corps held the Petersburg intrenchments, supported by Hampton’s cavalry on the right, and a new Fourth Corps was improvised by combining the divisions of Hoke and Bushrod Johnson (but only on paper; Hoke remained north and Johnson south of the James) to provide a command for Richard Anderson, commensurate with his rank, after Old Peter’s return. With Dick Ewell in charge of the reserves in Richmond, on call for manning the city’s inner works, Lee felt that his army was not only back under his immediate control — aside, that is, from Early’s three Second Corps divisions, still licking their wounds out on the near rim of the Shenandoah Valley — but also, in the light of its performance against four all-out assaults in as many months by twice its numbers, that it had recovered a considerable measure of the responsive, agile quality that made it like a rapier in his hand.

Still, for all its delicate balance and true temper, the rapier had become an exclusively defensive weapon, swift in parry and effective in occasional riposte, but not employed for months now to deliver a bold, original thrust or slash, as in the days when Lee’s aggressive use of it, whether to pink or maim, had dazzled admirers all over the world. Moreover, he knew that in time, without proper care or refurbishment, the fine-honed instrument would wear out (or the fencer would, which came to the same thing) under the constant hammering of the Union broadsword, any one of whose strokes would end the duel if his arm wearied and let it past. “Without some increase of strength,” he had warned Seddon more than two months ago, “I cannot see how we can escape the natural military consequences of the enemy’s numerical superiority.” Nothing much had come of this, nor of a follow-up protest to Bragg one month later: “I get no additions. The men coming in do not supply the vacancies caused by sickness, desertions, and other casualties.” Now in November he appealed to the President himself. “Grant will get every man he can.… Unless we obtain a reasonable approximation to his force I fear a great calamity will befall us.”

Nothing came of that either; Davis could only reply, as he had done to similar pleas from Hood, “No other resource remains.” And now that Lincoln’s reëlection had dashed Confederate hopes for an early end to the war by negotiation, Lee saw clearly enough that all his skilled resistance had really gained him, north and south of the James, was time — time with which, lacking substantial reinforcements, he could do little except continue to resist; until time ran out, as it finally must, and broke the vicious, tightening circle. His belief that Grant was at last convinced of the folly involved in prolonging a series of bungled attempts to overrun him was encouraged, if not confirmed, when November drew to a close without a major assault having been launched against any part of his works from start to finish, the first such month since the siege began. But he also knew this did not mean there would be a let-up in Grant’s efforts to accomplish by attrition what he had failed to achieve by overwhelming force. Expecting renewed strikes at his overworked supply lines, west and south of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee told Davis in early December: “All we want to resist them is men.”

Subsequently, looking back on his close association as the general’s aide, a staff colonel declared that the two- or three-week span from late November into December was “the most anxious period of Grant’s entire military career.” Although Horace Porter, who made the statement, had not shared his chief’s times of trial out West — after Donelson, when Halleck tried to sack him: after Shiloh, when Sherman persuaded him not to quit the service in dejection: after Vicksburg, when he spent a fretful month watching his army be dismembered, while he hobbled about on crutches from his New Orleans horseback fall — the young West Pointer had practical as well as psychological grounds for his contention that this latest tribulation was the hardest. Those previous afflictions of the spirit had followed significant battlefield successes, two of them even resulting in rebel surrenders, whereas this one came at a time when the best Grant could claim, at any rate for the army under his hand, was a stalemate achieved at a cost in casualties roughly twice as great as the number he inflicted. Victory was a future, not a present thing, as in two of those other three cases, and its nearness — within his reach, as he believed, but not within his grasp, as Lee had shown — was one source of his frustration. Another, which raised this reaction to the pitch of true anxiety, was a growing apprehension that things might go dreadfully awry in Tennessee (or, what was worse, Kentucky) on the very eve of triumph in Virginia. He had never been one to take counsel of his fears, but there were plenty of veteran officers around — including Porter, who had served on McClellan’s staff — to remind him that Little Mac once had stood about where he was standing now, close enough to hear the tocsin clang in Richmond, and yet had wound up confronting a Maryland invasion fifty miles northwest of his own capital, which lay more than a hundred miles in rear of Harrison’s Landing, just across the way from City Point.

First there was the unavoidable admission that the headlong approach, which by now had cost Meade and Butler some 36,000 casualties between them — 11,000 in the initial June assault, plus 25,000 since — provided no quick solution to the Petersburg dilemma. That came hard for Grant, who seldom acknowledged failure, especially in large-scale undertakings, and in fact declined to do so now; except tacitly, by desisting. Hancock did it for him, though, in a ceremony staged at his headquarters on November 26, when he bid farewell to the once-proud II Corps. Ostensibly, he was returning to Washington under War Department orders to recruit and organize a new I Corps of reënlisted veterans for service in the spring. Nothing was to come of that, however. Nor was there much validity in the claim that he was leaving because of his unhealed Gettysburg wound. The real damage was to his soldier’s pride, which had suffered cruelly in the series of dispiriting reverses he and his troops had undergone in the course of the past five months, north of the James and south of the Appomattox. His departure was a measure of the extent to which Grant’s breakthrough concept had broken down in the fire of Lee’s resistance, and it was clear that the men of the three divisions Hancock left behind would need a great deal of rest and recuperation before they were fit for any such use by his successor, Major General A. A. Humphreys, a fellow Pennsylvanian and West Pointer, who had served as Meade’s chief of staff for the past year and was fifty-four years old.

Sharpest of the stings involved in the stalling of Grant’s offensive was the fact that he could almost never get his orders carried out as he intended; Baldy Smith had been the first, after the passage of the James, but he was by no means the last offender in this regard. “Three different times has Richmond or Petersburg been virutally in his hands,” a military visitor wrote home about this time, “and by some inexcusable neglect or slowness each time his plans were ruined and the opportunity lost. How Grant stands it I do not see.” Moreover, there seemed to be no cure for this condition: not even the removal of Baldy and Burnside, along with such lesser lights as Ledlie and Ferrero. These, after all, were only four among the many — including Butler, who could not be dealt with in that fashion, though he was at times, because of his lofty rank and large command, a greater trial than all the rest combined.

Just now, for example, he was at work on a plan for cracking Wilmington’s seaward defenses, obviously a top-priority assignment, not only because it would close the South’s last major port and thus increase Lee’s problem of subsistence, but also because it would divert attention, as well as possible rebel reinforcements, away from Sherman’s destination on the Georgia coast, 250 miles below. Yet Butler kept delaying the start of the movement, which he was to make with two of his divisions and the support of David Porter’s fleet, by thinking up ways to ensure that the amphibious assault would be brief and successful, without too great a cost in ships and men. His latest notion was to pack an expendable ocean-going steamer with 350 tons of powder and run it under the walls of Fort Fisher, which would be reduced to rubble by the timed explosion, leaving the attackers little to do but move in and take over when the smoke cleared. Grant liked the plan and approved it, though he did not like or approve of the delays. He kept prodding the cock-eyed general, urging him to be off before the Carolinians got word of what was in store for them; but Butler, still “as visionary as an opium eater in council,” refused to be hurried, insisting that a close attention to details provided the only guarantee of success. Then on November 27 — the day after Hancock’s farewell ceremony — an enemy agent came close to solving Grant’s problem by removing the former Bay State politician not only from his command but from the earth.

Butler and Porter were conferring aboard the former’s headquarters steamer Greyhound, a short distance up the James from Bermuda Landing, “when suddenly an explosion forward startled us, and in a moment large volumes of smoke poured out of the engine room.” So Porter later described the mishap, which fortunately was no worse because the explosion set off no others and the flames were soon extinguished, but he marveled at an ingenuity rivaling his companion’s in such matters. What was thought at first to have been a boiler accident turned out to have been caused by a “coal torpedo,” a blackened piece of cast iron, machined to resemble a lump of coal and loaded with ten pounds of powder, which the rebel agent had somehow placed in the steamer’s bunker and a stoker had shoveled into the furnace. “In devices for blowing up vessels the Confederates were far ahead of us, putting Yankee ingenuity to shame,” the admiral declared.

Three days later, on the last day of November, Grant learned that part of the Wilmington garrison was being withdrawn to intercept Sherman at Augusta, Georgia, on the theory that he would pass that way en route to Charleston. Not only was this no immediate threat to Sherman, whose true destination was almost a hundred miles farther down the coast, it also simplified Butler’s task by reducing, at least for the present, the resistance he would encounter when he struck Wilmington’s defenses. Informed of this, the Massachusetts general replied that he was delighted; he would proceed as soon as his floating bomb was ready for use, a further delay having been required by his notion of altering the steamer’s lines to make her resemble a blockade runner, which he figured would cause the rebel cannoneers to cheer her, rather than shoot at her, right up to the moment she blew. Grant could see the humor in this, but he was losing patience. Aware that the Confederates would soon have the choice of returning to Wilmington or ganging up on Sherman, he told Butler on December 4 to start for North Carolina at once, “with or without your powder boat.” But that did not work either. For ten more days the squint-eyed Butler, unruffled by his superior’s apprehensions or his own near brush with death aboard the Greyhound, continued to balk and tinker before he got his two divisions onto transports at Hampton Roads and headed down the coast.

Grant’s concern for Sherman’s welfare, even his survival, off on his own and due to pop up any day now, more than four hundred miles down the seaboard — a ready target for whatever combination of forces the rebels were able to throw in that direction — was real enough, but it was by no means as grievous a source of anxiety as were several others, over which — at least in theory, since he was in direct communication with the subordinates in charge — he could exercise some measure of control. For one thing, as he had told Stanton at the outset, seeking to reassure the Secretary as to the degree of risk involved in cutting loose from Atlanta for the march through Georgia to the coast, “Such an army as Sherman has (and with such a commander) is hard to corner or capture.” For another, his over-all design for the Confederacy’s defeat by strangulation did not hinge on the outcome of the current maneuver by his red-haired friend, whose success could shorten but whose defeat would not lengthen the war by so much as a day. Besides, his reliance on Sherman and Sherman’s army — once his own — was unmatched by any such feeling of confidence in George Thomas and the scratch collection of recruits, dismounted cavalrymen, and culled veterans Old Tom had been attempting to put together in Middle Tennessee ever since Sherman set out for the sea, leaving Hood and Hood’s hard-hitting army alive in his rear, poised for a strike at the critical Union center.

There was the rub. The Rock of Chickamauga was superb on the defensive, and at Chattanooga he had shown what he could do in an assault on a fixed position. But how would Old Slow Trot perform in a fluid situation requiring him to deal with an enemy in motion around his flank? So far the signs were unpromising, and that was the chief source of Grant’s anxiety: that Hood would bypass Nashville, where Thomas was intrenched, and cross the Cumberland River unmolested, perhaps on a march all the way to the Ohio. If that happened, all Grant’s well-laid plans might come undone in a sudden reversal of the tide of war. Even the siege of Richmond might have to be lifted, in order to furnish troops for the protection of Kentucky, and Sherman’s march through Georgia might as well have occurred in a vacuum, ending as it would in nothing more than a long ride north aboard transports, then west by rail to resume the contest with his old adversary in a region two hundred miles in rear of the one through which he had fought his way in May and June.

Lincoln saw it, too, and abandoned for the time, at least by proxy, his hands-off policy with regard to military operations. “The President feels solicitous about the disposition of General Thomas to lay in fortifications for an indefinite period,” Stanton wired on December 2. “This looks like the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country. The President wishes you to consider the matter.”

Grant did consider the matter and stepped up the pressure, warning Thomas that he would “suffer incalculable injury … if Hood is not speedily disposed of. Put forth therefore every possible exertion to gain this end,” he told him, but with no more success than he was having at the same time in getting Butler on the go for Wilmington. Stanton returned to the charge, protesting that the Virginian seemed “unwilling to attack because it is hazardous — as if war was anything but hazardous,” he sneered — which drew from Grant the admission that, for all of Thomas’s reputed bulldog qualities, “I fear he is too cautious to take the initiative.” All the same, he tried again, this time with a direct order: “Attack Hood at once and wait no longer.… There is great danger of delay resulting in a campaign back to the Ohio River.” This was clear enough, but it only caused the Tennessee commander to shift his ground under prodding from the rear. He had been on the verge of launching an all-out attack, he replied, but “a terrible storm of freezing rain has come on today, which will make it impossible for our men to fight to any advantage.”

Thwarted thus at every turn in his efforts to get Butler and Thomas moving, stalled on the outskirts of Richmond by a resistance so discouraging that it had just cost Meade the best of his corps commanders, deprived of any reliable information as to Sherman’s progress or misfortune in the Georgia hinterland, and harried as he was beginning to be by superiors who had been altogether forbearing up till now, Grant was determined to do what he personally could at City Point, through this “most anxious period,” if only by way of relieving the strain that came with finding how much there was that he could not do elsewhere. One thing he could do, despite his recent abandonment of headlong tactics against Petersburg’s intrenchments, was keep up the pressure on its overtaxed supply lines. That would not only add to Lee’s subsistence problem, in direct ratio to the degree of success achieved; it would also prevent the old fox from sending reinforcements to Tennessee or Georgia, as he had done the year before, in the absence of such pressure. Accordingly, Grant planned another strike at the Weldon Railroad, this time down near the Carolina line, its purpose being to lengthen the twenty-mile wagon haul the rebels now were obliged to make from Stony Creek, the terminus of the road since August, when Hancock wrecked it that far south. The assignment went to Warren, whose three divisions would be reinforced by one from Humphreys, and Gregg’s troopers would go along to screen the march.

First, though, Grant decided to lengthen the numerical odds against his adversary by returning Wright’s long-absent corps from the Shenandoah Valley, where all it had been doing for the past six weeks was assist Sheridan in the destruction being visited on that much-fought-over region, once the classic avenue for invasions that played on northern fears, but now not even a source of grain or cattle, practically all of which had been put to the torch or gone under the Union knife. Wright’s leading elements began unloading from transports at City Point on December 4; three days later Warren set out on his march to strike the Petersburg & Weldon at the crossing of the Meherrin River, twenty miles beyond Stony Creek.

When Lee discovered that Wright was en route from the Valley to rejoin Meade, he countered by ordering Early to send back two of his divisions, Gordon’s and Ramseur’s, the latter now under its senior brigadier, John Pegram. Neither arrived in time to help fend off Warren’s threat to the railroad, which began on December 7, but the southern commander, gambling on his belief that Grant would attempt no more frontal assaults this year, risked pulling most of Hill’s corps out of the Petersburg works to undertake, along with Hampton’s cavalry, an interception of what he thought was a drive on Weldon. Next day, however, the weather turned intensely cold. Pelted by sleet, the butternut marchers shivered in their rags, and many fell out of the slow-moving column after slogging barefoot over miles of frozen ground. When those who managed to keep going reached the railroad below Stony Creek, December 9, they found sixteen miles of track ripped up, piles of ties still smoking, heat-twisted rails warm to the touch, and the Federals gone, turned back by home-guard batteries at Hicksford, firing at them from just beyond the Meherrin, as well as by the miserable weather and the near exhaustion of their three-day rations. Hampton overtook and slashed at the flanks of the blue column trudging north, but only managed to kill or capture about a hundred stragglers; the rest got away into their own lines the following day. If there was some criticism of Hill for not having engaged the marauders before they escaped, there was also a feeling of relief that they had not inflicted heavier damage on the already crippled supply line, whose railhead now was forty miles south of Petersburg’s hungry defenders.

Winter came with mid-December vengeance, and though the advantage had to be weighed against the suffering of his thinly clad men in the trenches astride the James, Lee knew that the Federals too, for all their sturdy boots, snug overcoats, and rations that warmed them inside as well as out, would be restricted by ice and mud and frozen rain if they continued their efforts to move around his flanks. Moreover, the rough weather afforded him one last chance — however slight, in comparison with what Wright’s return brought Grant — to increase the number of troops he could post along his thirty-odd miles of line between White Oak Swamp and Hatcher’s Run. When he got word that a six-inch snow had clogged the roads in the upper Valley, he told Early to send the third of his divisions to Richmond in the wake of the other two (which had just arrived) but to remain out there himself, as district commander, with a force reduced to Wharton’s undersized infantry division and Rosser’s two slim cavalry brigades, in necessarily long-range observation of Sheridan’s continuing depredations. Presently the old Second Corps, down to a skeleton strength of fewer than 9000 effectives — the result of its six-month excursion down and up the Valley and its brief side trip to the outskirts of Washington and back — was again an integral, on-hand part of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Lee named Gordon acting corps commander, the first nonprofessional to occupy so high a post. This was an indication of what inroads attrition had made at the upper levels, as was the fact that two of the three divisions were similarly led by their senior brigadiers. Clement Evans, a former Georgia lawyer like his chief, succeeded Gordon, and Bryan Grimes, once a North Carolina planter, had taken over from the fallen Rodes. Only Pegram, a Virginia-born West Pointer, had seen military service before the war. And of the four, including the major general in charge of all three divisions, only Grimes had reached his middle thirties. He was thirty-six; Gordon and Pegram were thirty-two, and Evans was thirty-one.

Glad as Lee was at the reassembling of his army, however shrunken it might be at all its levels, he was also saddened by the knowledge that this had been accomplished at the price of abandoning hope of going over to the offensive. Not since Chancellorsville and the death of Jackson, close to twenty months ago, had he won the kind of brilliant, large-scale victory that brought him and his lean, caterwauling veterans the admiration of the world, and now that the Valley was irretrievably lost, along with Stonewall, his recall of the Second Corps to join the others huddled in the trenches around Petersburg and Richmond set the seal on his admission, however tacit, that the war, however much or little of it was left to fight, was for him and them no longer a pursuit of glory on the road to national independence, but rather a grim struggle for survival, which would take them down a quite different road to the same goal — if they could reach its end. Yet here was where a paradox came in. While Grant reacted to the prospect of ultimate victory by growing jumpy at the thought of having the prize snatched from him just as it seemed about to come within his grasp, Lee faced the ultimate prospect of defeat with “a fearless look of self-possession” and “a calmness which seemed to those around him almost sublime.”

Or perhaps there was no paradox in that. Perhaps the two reactions were quite natural, considering the two quite different kinds of strain imposed on these two quite different kinds of men. In some ways, since nothing worse could happen to him than what seemed foreordained, Lee’s was the easier role to play. Expectation braced him for the shocks: even the loss, before the month was out, of more than a tenth of the force he had been at such pains to assemble for Richmond’s protection in mid-December. Warned that Wilmington was about to be hit, three hundred miles down the coast, he was obliged to send Hoke’s division to its defense — a detachment that cost him the equivalent of a solid two thirds of all he had gained by the return of Early’s survivors from the Valley. His year-end strength, including 5358 reservists under Ewell, came to 57,134. Across the way, Meade had 83,846 and Butler 40,452: a total of 124,278 for Grant.

Outnumbered two to one, the gaps in their ranks only partly chinked with conscripts, the defenders saw clearly enough that time, which they were being told was on their side, could only lengthen the odds against survival. Good men had fallen and were falling every day, picked off by snipers or dropped by mortars in a roughly man-for-man exchange that worked to the considerable disadvantage of the smaller force, not only because its proportionate loss was twice as heavy on that basis, but also because the replacements being scraped from the bottom of the Confederate barrel did not “supply the vacancies,” as Lee had complained to Bragg three months before. Moreover, some who fell could scarcely have been replaced in the best of times: Rodes and Ramseur, for example, or John Gregg and Archibald Gracie, both of whom had won distinction at Chickamauga. Gregg was cut down at the head of his Texas brigade, in a skirmish east of Richmond in October, and Gracie was killed in early December by a shell that burst over a normally quiet stretch of Petersburg intrenchments while he was training a telescope on the works across the way. Such losses, suffered without the compensating stimulus of victory, came hard for the survivors, whose spirits drooped as their numbers dwindled. “Living cannot be called a fever here,” a butternut artillerist declared, “but rather a long catalepsy.” Desertions rose with the rising proportion of conscripts, many of them netted after years of avoiding the draft, and even the stalwarts who stood by their banners looked forward to furling them — whatever arrangements might have to be made to bring that end about.

“As we lay there watching the bright stars,” one veteran lieutenant was to say, “many a soldier asked himself the question: What is this all about? Why is it that 200,000 men of one blood and one tongue, believing as one man in the fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, should in the nineteenth century of the Christian era be thus armed with all the improved appliances of modern warfare and seeking one another’s lives? We could settle our differences by compromising, and all be at home in ten days.”

 2

Early morning, November 16; Sherman sat his horse on Bald Hill, where the worst of the fighting had raged in July, and looked down on the copse where McPherson had fallen, shot through the back while opposing the second of Hood’s three all-out sorties. “Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins,” he would recall, “the black smoke rising high in air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city. Away off in the distance, on the McDonough Road, was the rear of Howard’s column, the gun barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south, and right before us the XIV Corps [of Slocum’s column] marching steadily and rapidly, with a cheery look and swinging pace that made light of the thousand miles that lay between us and Richmond.”

Leading elements of both columns having stepped off the day before, east and southeast down the railroads, Atlanta had been set afire last night, partly by rear-guard arsonists, who stole away from, then rejoined their units passing through, and partly by design, in accordance with orders that nothing be left intact that might be of use to the rebs when they returned. In any case, the results were spectacular. “All the pictures and verbal descriptions of hell I have ever seen never gave me half so vivid an idea of it as did this flame-wrapped city tonight,” a staff major wrote in his journal after dodging sparks and debris from explosions as he picked his way through the streets. Dawn showed more than a third of the town in ashes, with smoke still rising thick and slow from the longer-lasting fires. While Sherman watched from his hilltop, a mile beyond the eastward bend of Hood’s abandoned fortifications, a band in the blue column below struck up the John Brown song, and presently the marchers joined in, roaring the words as they slogged along. “Never before or since have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit or in better harmony of time and place,” their red-haired commander was to say.

He twitched his horse’s head to the east and came down off the hill, trailed by his staff. “Uncle Billy,” a weathered veteran hailed him near the bottom, “I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond!” Sherman grinned and rode on, doubling the column. “Atlanta was soon lost behind the screen of trees, and became a thing of the past. Around it clings many a thought of desperate battle, of hope and fear, that now seem like the memory of a dream.… I have never seen the place since.”

Orders governing the expedition had been issued the week before, to afford all ranks plenty of time for study before moving out. They made no mention of route or destination, being mainly concerned with logistics and rules of conduct for the 62,000 participants, just over 5000 of whom were cavalry, under Kilpatrick, and just under 2000 were artillery, with 64 guns. Each of the four infantry corps — two in each of two “wings,” both of which were equipped with 900-foot collapsible pontoon bridges transported in special trains — would move by a separate road, where practicable, and be independent for supplies. “The army will forage liberally on the country during the march,” Sherman directed, though he specified that the foraging was to be done only by authorized personnel; “Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of inhabitants or commit any trespass.” He hoped to keep nonmilitary damage to a minimum, but he made it clear that if guerillas or other civilians attempted to interfere with his progress, say by damaging bridges or obstructing roads, “then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” Privately, he expanded this admonition and directed that word of it be spread wherever the army went, in hopes that it would be carried ahead by the rebel grapevine, if not by the rebel papers. “If the enemy burn forage and corn in our route,” he said, “houses, barns, and cotton gins must also be burned to keep them company.”

Every man carried forty rounds of small-arms ammunition on his person, and another 200 followed in the wagons, along with a twenty-day supply of hardtack and coffee. Only a five-day reserve of grain went along for the horses, but he figured that was enough to get them clear of the clean-picked region around Atlanta; “I knew that within that time we would reach a country well stocked with corn, which had been gathered and stored in cribs, seemingly for our use, by Governor Brown’s militia.” The same went for foodstuffs for the men. Pigs and turkeys squealed and gobbled in farmyards all along the 300 miles of unspoiled hinterland his veterans would traverse, and sweet potatoes were waiting to be roasted in the ashes of a thousand campfires every night of the three or four weeks he expected it would take him to reach Savannah, where the navy would be standing by with supply ships.

That the march was made in two divergent columns, each about 30,000 strong and with half the guns, served a triple purpose: first, to avoid the crowding and delays that would result from trying to move all four corps along a single route: second, to broaden not only the foraging area but also the swath of destruction, which thus would be twice as horrendous: and third, to confuse and mislead the enemy as to Sherman’s objective or objectives, on the Atlantic and on the way there. Howard’s right wing, made up of his two-corps Army of the Tennessee — Blair was back from his electioneering duties, but Major General Peter Osterhaus, Logan’s senior division commander, had charge of the XV Corps in the continued absence of his chief, who remained North after stumping for Lincoln — tramped south down the Macon & Western, as if bound for Macon, while Slocum’s left wing, containing the corps under Davis and Williams — formerly part of Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, now styled the Army of Georgia — followed the line of the Georgia Railroad, which ran due east to Augusta. By now, most likely, the Confederates must be rushing all available reserves to the defense of both population centers. At any rate that was what Sherman hoped they would do; for he intended to move through neither, but rather through Milledgeville, the state capital, which lay between them.

This began to be fairly obvious to the right-wing marchers on their second day out of Atlanta, when Howard veered southeast from Jonesboro, leaving Kilpatrick to keep up the feint down the railroad nearly to Forsyth, twenty miles short of Macon, where he too turned off to rejoin the infantry column beyond the bypassed town. Slocum continued eastward from Atlanta for three days, ripping up track as he went, and then on the fourth — by which time the two wings were close to fifty miles apart — turned south along the near bank of the Oconee River toward Milledgeville, some forty miles downstream. “God has put a ring in Sherman’s nose and is leading him to destruction,” a Richmond clergyman had remarked when the widespread march began. But now, as a result of conflicting reports by his adversaries, which in turn were the result of careful planning on his part, scarcely anyone but God and the farmers whose crops he was consuming as he progressed knew where he was.

If the march had its rigors, mainly proceeding from the great distance to be covered and the occasional hard work of bridging creeks and corduroying roads, it also had its attendant compensations derived from the fatness of the land and the skylark attitude of the men fanned out across it in two columns, foraging along a front that varied from thirty to sixty miles in width. “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned,” one of Howard’s veterans declared after swinging eastward on the second day out of Atlanta. “It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering, and promises to prove much richer yet.” Expectations were as high, and as amply rewarded, in the column to the north. Riding with Slocum past Stone Mountain that same day, Sherman pulled off on the side of the road to review the passing troops and found them unneglectful of such opportunities as had come their way. One marcher who drew his attention had a ham slung from his rifle, a jug of molasses cradled under one arm, and a big piece of honeycomb clutched in the other hand, from which he was eating as he slogged along. Catching the general’s eye, he quoted him sotto voce to a comrade as they swung past: “Forage liberally on the country.”

Sherman afterwards told how he “reproved the man, explaining that foraging must be limited to the regular parties properly detailed,” but he was not long in showing that despoilment had a place in his calculations, quite as much as it did in theirs. Four days later, after turning south toward Milledgeville just short of the Oconee, he came upon a well-stocked plantation which he happened to learn belonged to Major General Howell Cobb. A leading secessionist and one-time speaker of the U.S. House and Treasury Secretary under Buchanan, Cobb had been appointed by Joe Brown to command the state reserves in the present crisis; in which capacity — though it turned out there were no “reserves” for him to command — he had been exhorting his fellow Georgians to resist the blue invasion by the destruction of everything edible in its path. “Of course, we confiscated his property,” Sherman would recall, “and found it rich in corn, beans, peanuts, and sorghum molasses.… I sent back word to General Davis to explain whose plantation it was, and instructed him to spare nothing. That night huge bonfires consumed the fence rails, kept our soldiers warm, and the teamsters and men, as well as the slaves, carried off an immense quantity of corn and provisions of all sorts.”

His aim, he said, in thus enforcing “a devastation more or less relentless,” was to convince the planters roundabout “that it is in their interest not to impede our movements.” Simultaneously, however, this conclusion was discouraged by the activities of his foragers — “bummers,” they were called, and called themselves, although the term had been one of opprobrium at the start — who worked along the fringes of the march, sometimes as “regular parties properly detailed,” sometimes not. Isolated plantation owners, mostly wives and mothers whose sons and husbands were with Hood or Lee in Tennessee or Virginia, buried their silver and jewels on hearing of Sherman’s approach, and the search for these provided fun, as well as the possibility of profit, for the blue-clad visitors. Out would come the ramrods for a vigorous probing of lawns and flowerbeds. “It was comical to see a group of these red-bearded, barefooted, ragged veterans punching the unoffending earth in an apparently idiotic but certainly most energetic way,” an officer who observed them was to write. “A woman standing upon the porch of a house, watching their proceedings, instantly became an object of suspicion, and she was watched until some movement betrayed a place of concealment. Fresh earth thrown up, a bed of flowers just set out, the slightest indication of a change in appearance or position, all attracted the gaze of these military agriculturists. If they ‘struck a vein’ a spade was instantly put in requisition and the coveted wealth was speedily unearthed. It was all fair spoil of war, and the search made one of the excitements of the march.” Other diversions included the shooting of bloodhounds, hated for their use in tracking runaway slaves and convicts through the swamps. Sometimes, by way of a joke, the definition was expanded to cover less offensive breeds. For example, when a poodle’s mistress appealed for her lap dog to be spared, the soldier who had caught up the pet and was bearing it off to execution replied: “Madam, our orders are to kill every bloodhound.” “But this is not a bloodhound!” she protested, only to be told: “Well, madam, we cannot tell what it will grow into if we leave it behind.”

If there was a core of cruelty to such humor, it was precisely in such cruelty that the humor had its source. In time Sherman would concede that “many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence were committed by these parties of foragers.” He had also “heard of jewelry taken from women and the plunder of articles that never reached our commissary,” though he insisted that such depredations were “exceptional and incidental.” In any case, whatever factors contributed to the total, he would report at the end of the march across Georgia that the damage inflicted came to no less than $100,000,000: “at least twenty millions of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction. This may seem a hard species of warfare,” he declared, “but it brings the sad realities of war home to those who have been directly or indirectly instrumental in involving us in its attendant calamities.” Such, after all, was one of the main purposes of the expedition, and if, in its course, southern women had been subjected to certain discourtesies in their homes, there was a measure of justice in that as well, since they were among the fieriest proponents of a war that might have ended by now except for their insistence that it be fought to the last ditch. Many of the soldiers believed as much, at any rate. “You urge young men to the battlefield where men are being killed by the thousands, while you stay home and sing The Bonnie Blue Flag,” an Ohio colonel heard one of his troopers lecture a resentful housewife, “but you set up a howl when you see the Yankees down here getting your chickens. Many of your young men have told us they are tired of war, and would quit, but you women would shame them and drive them back.” This applied only to white women, of course. Black ones were far more sympathetic to the invaders, especially on visits to their roadside bivouacs at night. “And they didn’t charge us a cent,” one grateful infantryman recorded.

So far, except for skittery detachments of butternut cavalry, not so much opposing as observing Kilpatrick’s movement down the Macon & Western, neither Union column had encountered any organized resistance. One reason for this, in addition to their confusion as to Sherman’s whereabouts or goal, was that the Confederates had little or nothing with which to confront him except Wheeler’s 3500 scattered horsemen and an overload of brass. Within a week of his departure from Atlanta, both Hardee and Richard Taylor were at Macon, ordered there from Charleston and Selma by Beauregard — who himself was on the way from North Alabama — to confer with the Governor and his two chief military advisers, Howell Cobb and Major General G. W. Smith. Of these four high-ranking commanders, only the last brought any troops along, and all he had was 3000 Georgia militia summoned back into service by Brown to help meet the impending crisis. Learning that the blue infantry had left the railroad at Jonesboro, Hardee decided that Milledgeville, not Macon, was Howard’s intermediary objective on a march that would continue southeast, through Millen to Savannah, and that Slocum would most likely push on eastward, through Augusta, to reach Charleston. He therefore advised that the militia be shifted northward to stand in Slocum’s path, while he himself returned by rail to Savannah to prepare for its defense. Brown approving, the four makeshift brigades — so called, though none was much larger than a standard regiment — were ordered to set out at once, commanded by a militia brigadier named P. J. Phillips; Smith remained behind to make arrangements for supplies. That was on November 22, the day Sherman had one of Slocum’s divisions clean out Cobb’s plantation, ten miles north of Milledgeville, and that was how it came about that a brigade from one of Howard’s divisions, ten miles east of Macon, fought that afternoon the only sizeable infantry action of the campaign between Atlanta and the Atlantic.

Aside from the high rate of casualties on one side, in contrast to the low rate on the other, there was little to distinguish the engagement from other such exercises in futility, staged for the most part in the early, picture-book days of the war, when blue and gray were green alike. Howard had bypassed Macon the day before, quarter-circling it clockwise from the north, and today, while Brown and the four generals were conferring, had posted a rear guard beyond Griswoldville, nine miles out the Central Georgia Railroad, which he crossed at that point on his way toward the Oconee for a crossing about midway between Milledgeville and Dublin. This rear guard, a single brigade from the tail division of Osterhaus’s corps, had taken position along the crest of a hill one mile east of the station, its flanks protected by swampy ground and with open fields in front. So far, there had been no threat except from rebel troopers, who were easily kept off, but late that afternoon the 1500 defenders saw a heavy column of infantry moving toward them through the town. To their surprise, the marchers formed for attack and came straight at them across the stubble of the fields, displaying what one Federal called “more courage than discretion.” With accustomed ease, the XV Corps veterans leveled their rifles and blasted the attackers back, only to see them reassemble and come on again, in much the same style and with similar results. Three times they charged uphill in close formation, and three times they were blown rearward by heavy volleys from the breastworks on the crest; until at last they gave it up and limped away, back through Griswoldville, toward Macon. Whooping, the victors moved out into the field to gather up the booty. Soon, however, the cheers froze in their throats at the sight of what lay before them in the stubble. They saw for the first time, to their horror, that they had been fighting mostly old men and young boys, who lay about in attitudes of death and agony — more than 600 of them in all, as compared to their own loss of 62.

“I was never so affected at the sight of dead and wounded before,” an Illinois infantryman afterwards wrote home. “I hope we will never have to shoot at such men again. They knew nothing at all about fighting and I think their officers knew as little.” A comrade, reacting not only to this but also to the pillage he had seen and shared in, put his thoughts in stronger words. “There is no God in war,” he fumed. “It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

Slocum’s lead corps entered Milledgeville that same afternoon, twenty miles northeast of this scene of innocent valor, and the other arrived the following morning, accompanied by Sherman, who slept that night in the mansion vacated two days ago by Joe Brown, the fifth Confederate governor to be routed from his bed or desk by the approach of blue invaders. Unlike Nashville, Baton Rouge, Jackson, and Little Rock, all firmly in the Federal grip, the Georgia capital underwent only a temporary occupation; Slocum crossed the Oconee next morning, November 24, slogging eastward along the Central Georgia through Sandersville, toward Millen, while Howard took up a parallel route, some twenty miles to the south, toward Swainsboro. Brief as it was, the Milledgeville layover had been welcome, not only as a chance to get some rest after hiking the hundred miles from Atlanta, but also as a diversion from the workaday grind of converting more than sixty miles of railroad into a trail of twisted iron. Ebullient young officers, under the influence of what Sherman called “the spirit of mischief,” assembled in the abandoned Hall of Representatives, and there, after a rousing debate, repealed the ordinance of secession and appointed committees to call forthwith on Governor Brown and President Davis for the purpose of landing official kicks on their official rumps. While this parliamentary business was in progress, soldiers ransacked the State House and amused themselves by heaving out of its windows all the books and papers they could find. A New Englander on Osterhaus’s staff took private exception to such conduct, which seemed to him to go beyond a line that could not be crossed without a loss, if not of honor, then anyhow of due propriety. “I don’t object to stealing horses, mules, niggers, and all such little things,” he recorded in his journal, “but I will not engage in plundering and destroying public libraries.”

Sherman, wearing low-quarter shoes and only one spur — “a general without boots,” an admirer marveled — rode with Slocum, as before, except that Kilpatrick had been shifted from the right wing to provide cover for the flank that would be threatened if Richmond sent reinforcements from Virginia or the Carolinas. Apparently there were none of these; but there was something far more shocking, the red-haired Ohioan discovered when he came upon a division toiling across muddy fields because a young lieutenant had just had a foot blown off by an eight-inch shell that had been fuzed with matches and planted in the road. “This was not war, but murder,” Sherman later wrote, “and it made me very angry. I immediately ordered a lot of rebel prisoners to be brought from the provost guard, armed with picks and spades, and made them march in close order along the road, so as to explode their own torpedoes or to discover and dig them up. They begged hard, but I reiterated the order, and could hardly help laughing at their stepping so gingerly along the road, where it was supposed sunken torpedoes might explode at each step.”

There was no more trouble with torpedoes on the march after that; nor, indeed, from any other source. “No enemy opposed us,” Sherman noted, “and we could only occasionally hear the faint reverberation of a gun to our left rear, where we knew that Kilpatrick was skirmishing with Wheeler’s cavalry.” In point of fact, though the scheduled rate of march had been reduced from fifteen to ten miles a day, thus assuring an unhurried and therefore thorough job of destruction across a front that varied in width from thirty to fifty miles, there was so little for Howard’s wing to do that Blair’s corps was summoned north to get in on the demolition of the Central Georgia. Up ahead was Millen, an important railroad junction on the far side of the Ogeechee, where a branch line ran north to Augusta to connect in turn with Wilmington and Richmond; Sherman sent word for Kilpatrick to take the lead and try his hand at effecting a “most complete and perfect break” in the installations there. “Let it be more devilish than can be dreamed of,” he told the man he had called “a hell of a damned fool.” Meantime both infantry wings kept slogging eastward unmolested, twisting iron and burning as they went. He was pleased to see that his “general orders of devastation” were being heeded by the Georgians in his path. Evidently the grapevine was in operation; “The people did not destroy food, for they saw clearly that it would be ruin to themselves.”

At Millen, a hundred miles beyond Milledgeville and Macon, he paused for another one-day rest, two thirds of the way to his goal. Then he was off again, with his two now unequal wings on opposite banks of the Ogeechee, on the final lap of his march to the sea. It was early December now, and here on the left, beyond the river, marchers observed a change in the manner of the citizens whose crops they were despoiling; a change not so much in their attitude toward the invaders, as toward their neighbors across the Savannah River and toward the war itself. “All I ask is that when you get to South Carolina you will treat them the same way,” one farmer said, and was echoed by another: “Why don’t you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it.” Sherman was encouraged by such talk. At the outset he had retained the option of switching his objective — including a tangential sprint for Pensacola, down on the Gulf — in case he encountered serious resistance. But no such shift was even considered, since there had been no resistance worth the name, either from regulars or guerillas. “Pierce the shell of the Confederacy and it’s all hollow inside!” he exulted as he set out from Millen for Savannah, less than a hundred miles to the southeast.

One trouble there was, of increasing concern, despite his efforts to guard against it from the start. In the course of the march now approaching its end, an estimated 25,000 blacks of both sexes and all ages joined the various infantry columns at one time or another, and though at least three fourths of these turned back, either from weariness or homesickness, a considerable number managed to tag along, a growing encumbrance. Sherman tried to discourage this by explaining to their spokesmen — gray-haired preachers, for the most part — that he “wanted the slaves to remain where they were, and not load us down with useless mouths which would eat up the food needed for our fighting men.” They nodded agreement, but continued to throng in the wake of each blue column, preferring instant liberty to the promise of eventual freedom, once the war was over. Beyond the Ogeechee the problem became acute, or seemed about to, not only because the land was less fruitful toward the seaboard, but also because of reports that Bragg had reached Augusta with reinforcements; Sherman decided to rid himself, in one way or another, of what might prove a military embarrassment in the event of a clash on that congested flank. He had not followed Grant’s suggestion that he recruit able-bodied slaves as reinforcements, in part because he lacked missionary zeal and in part because he considered this a practice that would lead to future ills, both for the army and the country. “The South deserves all she has got from her injustice to the Negro,” he would presently tell Halleck, “but that is no reason why we should go to the other extreme.” In any case, he was determined to do what he could to disencumber his threatened left of these “useless mouths.”

At Ebenezer Creek, which lay between the Ogeechee and the Savannah, about two thirds of the way from Millen to the coast, he found his chance — or, more strictly speaking, had it found for him, and acted upon, by one of his chief lieutenants. Davis’s corps brought up the rear of Slocum’s wing, and as soon as the last of his infantry cleared the unfordable stream he had his engineers hurriedly take up the pontoon bridge, leaving the refugees who were tailing the column stranded on the opposite bank. Whatever glee Davis and his soldiers felt at the success of this stratagem, which accomplished in short order all that weeks of exhortation and admonition had failed to achieve, was changed to sudden dismay when they saw what followed, first across the way and then in Ebenezer Creek itself. Wailing to find their march toward freedom halted thus in midstride and themselves abandoned to the mercy of Confederate horsemen, who soon would be upon them, the Negroes hesitated briefly, impacted by the surge of pressure from the rear, then stampeded with a rush into the icy water, old and young alike, men and women and children, swimmers and nonswimmers, determined not to be left behind by the deliverers they supposed had come to lead them out of bondage. Many drowned, despite the efforts of the engineers, who, horrified by the sight of the disaster their action had brought on, waded into the muddy creek to rescue as many of the unfortunates as they could reach. “As soon as the character of the unthinking rush and panic was seen,” a Federal observer wrote, “all was done that could be done to save them from the water; but the loss of life was still great enough to prove that there were many ignorant, simple souls to whom it was literally preferable to die freemen rather than to live slaves.”

In far-off City Point and Washington, all this time, nothing was known except at second hand — and rebel hand, at that — of what had occurred between the western army’s high-spirited departure from Atlanta, three weeks back, and the tragic crossing of Ebenezer Creek, within thirty miles of Savannah. Mindful of its commander’s plan to alter his route if serious opposition loomed, Grant drew an analogy that was apt: “Sherman’s army is now somewhat in the condition of a ground-mole when he disappears under a lawn. You can here and there trace his track, but you are not quite certain where he will come out until you see his head.” The President used much the same metaphor when John Sherman came to the White House to ask if there was any news of his brother down in Georgia. Lincoln replied that there was no word of the general’s whereabouts or even his destination. “I know the hole he went in at, but I can’t tell you the hole he will come out of.”

In his December message that week he told Congress, “The most remarkable feature of the military operations of the year is General Sherman’s attempted march of three hundred miles directly through the insurgent region. It tends to show a great increase of our relative strength that our General-in-Chief should feel able to confront and hold in check every active force of the enemy, and yet to detach a well-appointed large army to move on such an expedition.” In the original draft, a sentence followed: “We must conclude that he feels our cause could, if need be, survive the loss of the whole detached force, while by the risk he takes a chance for the great advantages which would follow success.” But this was dropped from the delivered text, on the grounds that it might be thought to show a lack of concern for the lives of 60,000 soldiers being risked on a long-odds gamble, hundreds of miles from the possibility of assistance. No one who was near Lincoln during this critical period would have made that error: least of all a friend who attended a reception at which the Chief Executive stood shaking hands with guests as they arrived. He seemed preoccupied, strangely perfunctory in his greetings, and the friend, refusing to be shuttled along like the others, stood his ground until the tall, sad-faced man emerged from his abstracted mood with a smile of recognition. “How do you do? How do you do?” he said warmly. “Excuse me for not noting you. I was thinking of a man down South.”

Understandable as this was at that remove, events were soon to show that such concern had been unwarranted. By now Lincoln’s “man down South” was approaching the goal of his trans-Georgia expedition, and those who were with him exulted in the damage they had inflicted and avoided. From first to last, barely two percent of their number, including the wounded, were judged unfit for duty in the course of a nearly four-week march that saw more than two hundred miles of railroad “utterly abolished” and the Confederacy riven. “The destruction could hardly have been worse,” a veteran declared, “if Atlanta had been a volcano in eruption and the molten lava had flowed in a stream sixty miles wide and five times as long.” Mostly they were young men, even those of highest rank; the twenty commanders of armies, corps, and divisions averaged forty years of age, while the volunteers from civilian life outnumbered the West Pointers, twelve to eight. Close to half their 218 regiments were from Ohio and Illinois, and all but 33 of the rest were from other western states. Their exuberance undiminished by strain or combat — aside, that is, from some momentary sadness after Griswoldville — the marchers treated the whole campaign, one soldier commentator said, as “a vast holiday frolic” and livened their nights, when they might have been sleeping, with occasional sham battles in which the principal weapon was lighted pine knots, flung whirling through the darkness with an effect as gaudy as anything seen in contests whose losses ran into the thousands. Cheering, they closed down upon Savannah’s outer defenses on December 9 and 10.

Chief among these was Fort McAllister, a dozen miles to the south, on the right bank of the Ogeechee just above Ossabaw Sound. Sherman decided to reduce it first, thus clearing the way for the navy to steam upriver — if in fact the ships were waiting off the coast, as prearranged — before he moved against the city proper.

The navy was there all right, he discovered when he climbed to the roof of a rice mill, December 13, for a view of the fort and, beyond it, the blue waters of the sound; Howard had set up a signal station atop the mill to study the terrain and report on the progress of the attack by Brigadier General William Hazen’s division. This had been Sherman’s old Shiloh outfit, and concern for the survivors of those days — when Hazen, a thirty-year-old West Pointer, commanded an Ohio regiment — increased his impatience at finding the assault delayed far into the afternoon. However, while he waited and chafed, a lookout peering eastward spotted what Sherman later described as “a faint cloud of smoke and an object gliding, as it were, along the horizon above the tops of the sedge toward the sea, which little by little grew till it was pronounced to be the smokestack of a steamer.” Soon, as the ship drew closer, the watchers identified the U.S. flag at her peak and a signalman asking in wigwag from her deck: “Who are you?” “General Sherman,” the answer went back, and when this was followed by another question: “Is Fort McAllister taken?” Sherman replied: “Not yet, but it will be in a minute.”

And it was, very nearly within that span. Hazen’s division swarmed out of the woods, across flats that had been thickly sown with torpedoes, through the abatis, over the palisade, and into the fort itself, where, as Sherman watched from his distant perch on the rice mill roof, “the smoke cleared away and the parapets were blue with our men, who fired their muskets in the air and shouted so that we actually heard them, or felt that we did.” The attack had lasted barely fifteen minutes; Hazen lost 134 killed and wounded, many of them victims of exploding torpedoes, and inflicted 48 casualties on the 250-man garrison, the rest of whom were captured along with fifteen guns. “It’s my old division; I knew they’d do it!” Sherman crowed, and had an aide get off a message to Slocum at the far end of the line. “Dear General. Take a good big drink, a long breath, and then yell like the devil. The fort was carried at 4.30 p.m.”

That night the ship steamed in through Ossabaw Sound and up the Ogeechee River unopposed. Others followed, next day and the next, bringing 600,000 rations and, best of all — for, as Sherman said, “This prompt receipt of letters had an excellent effect, making us feel that home was near” — the mail that had been piling up for the troops ever since they left Atlanta, four weeks, to the day, before the fall of Fort McAllister.

There was also news, both good and bad, of recent developments in Virginia and Tennessee, as well as of an effort, less than thirty miles from Savannah, to break the railroad between there and Charleston. That had been two weeks ago, on the last day of November, and practically everything about the operation was unsatisfactory from the Union point of view. From his headquarters up the South Carolina coast at Hilton Head, Major General John G. Foster, successor to Quincy Gillmore as commander of the Department of the South, sent a 5500-man force inland to get astride the railroad near Grahamville Station and thus prevent the Confederates from opposing Sherman with reinforcements sent by rail, in advance of his arrival, from points along the seaboard between there and Richmond. As luck would have it — rebel luck, that is — G. W. Smith reached Savannah that same day with the Georgia militia; Joe Brown’s Pets had come roundabout through Albany and Thomasville after their savage treatment, eight days ago, by Howard’s rear guard east of Macon. Down to about 1400 effectives as a result of that and other mishaps, they were sent by Hardee to meet Foster’s threat to the Charleston & Savannah. Meet it they did, and with such élan, although the odds were as heavy against them here as they had been in their favor back at Griswoldville, that they not only wiped out the stain of that encounter, they also reversed the ratio of casualties suffered. Encountering the invaders at Honey Hill, three miles south of Grahamville, they took up a position confronting a swamp-bound causeway, flung them back, frustrated a flank attack by setting fire to a field of broomsedge, and finally drove them out of range of the railroad, much as had been done two years ago at nearby Pocotaligo, where a similar blue force attempted the same maneuver with no better luck. Smith’s loss was 8 killed, 42 wounded. The Federals lost 755, including 88 killed, 623 wounded, and 44 missing.

The newly arrived Westerners professed no great surprise at this defeat, having come to expect such ineptness from their allies in the paper-collar East, even against militia they themselves had trounced so roundly such a short time before. Besides, for all his success in keeping the railroad open northward, Hardee still had fewer than 15,000 inexperienced troops for the defense of Savannah against four times that number of hardened veterans. As for Sherman, he was far more interested in developments back in Middle Tennessee, where part of Thomas’s scratch command had already fought one battle, more or less against his wishes, and seemed about to have to fight another, despite his apparent reluctance to do anything but sit tight. In a two-week-old letter, delivered to his red-haired friend at Fort McAllister by the navy, Grant sounded rather put out by the Tennessee situation and the way Old Pap was meeting it, but he expressed no discontent with his own lack of progress around Petersburg and Richmond. In fact, he was looking forward to a shipboard holiday. “After all becomes quiet, and the roads become so bad up here that there is likely to be a week or two when nothing can be done, I will run down the coast to see you,” he wrote, adding the happy afterthought: “If you desire it, I will ask Mrs. Sherman to go with me.”

Perhaps in part because even those who had wives back home could expect no such reunion by special delivery, most of this had little interest for soldiers who had just completed what was being hailed as one of the great marches of all time. By and large, their feeling was that now that they had reached the East the war would soon be over; but even this they were willing to leave to Uncle Billy, knowing that he would use them to that end when the time was right. They were more concerned with their own letters, reading and rereading them while improving their investment of Savannah and waiting for the siege guns their commander had requisitioned to reduce not only the city’s defenses but also their own losses when the hour came for launching the assault. Except for coffee, which ran low at last, not even the delivery of those 600,000 rations provided much of a diversion. The fact was they had never eaten better than they had done for the past month, and Sherman even now was informing Grant that, after setting out from Atlanta with a herd of 5000 cattle and feeding beef to all who wanted it along the way, he had wound up on the coast with twice as many cows as when he started. For some time now a steady diet of sweet potatoes, corn, and pork had palled on northern palates. What they mainly looked forward to, throughout the final week of the march, was oysters, and now that they had reached salt water they had all of them they wanted. Just outside Savannah, over toward Ossabaw Sound, one soldier recorded a sample menu in a letter home: “Oyster soup, oysters on the half shell, roast goose, fried oysters, rice, raisins, and roast oysters.”

*  *  *

Hood at last issued orders for the march north from the Tennessee River on November 16, the day Sherman drew rein on Bald Hill, two hundred air-line miles to the southeast, for a farewell look at smouldering Atlanta. Now as before, however — although Forrest, the ostensible cause of the army’s marking time ever since it reached the northwest corner of Alabama in late October, had returned from his Johnsonville raid two days ago — there were further delays, occasioned by last-minute supply arrangements and a fierce storm that grew still worse throughout the next four days, converting the rain to sleet and the roads to hub-deep troughs of icy mud. But Hood would wait no longer. Just last week, in a message so characteristic that it was practically superfluous, he had told Jefferson Davis: “You may rely upon my striking the enemy whenever a suitable opportunity presents itself, and that I will spare no effort to make that opportunity.” On November 20, a Sunday, he set out, and by the following morning — three weeks, to the day, since his arrival in Tuscumbia, just across the river — the last of his troops filed out of Florence, bound for Nashville and, it might be, the Ohio.

Preceded by Forrest, whose 6000 horsemen swept the front and covered the right flank, the march was in three columns, a three-division corps of just over 10,000 men in each: Stewart by way of Lawrenceburg, Cheatham by way of Waynesboro, thirty miles to the west, and Lee by way of country roads between. All three would converge on Mount Pleasant, seventy miles away by the nearest route, and move together — 38,000 strong, including the three cavalry divisions and the artillery with 108 guns — to Columbia, twelve miles northeast on Duck River, whose crossings at that point were the objective in this first stage of the advance through Middle Tennessee. Hood’s purpose was to interpose his army between Thomas, who had been gathering troops at Nashville for the past month, and Schofield, posted eighty miles south at Pulaski with his own and Stanley’s corps, detached by Sherman before he set out from Atlanta. Schofield had roughly 30,000 of all arms, Thomas about the same number, and if Hood got between them, in control of the Duck crossings with a force superior to either, he could deal with them individually, in whatever order he chose, and thus score a crowning double victory that would give him the Tennessee capital, together with all its stores, and clear the way for his drive to the Ohio; which in turn — or so ran the dream unfolded for Beauregard, now departed — would provoke the recall of Sherman, at the end of his race through the Georgia vacuum to the sea, and perhaps free Hood to work the deliverance of Richmond by crossing the Cumberlands into Virginia to rejoin his beleaguered hero, R. E. Lee.

Despite the unseasonably bitter weather, which alternately froze the roads iron hard, with ankle-twisting ruts, or thawed them into quagmires that made every step a wrenching effort, the butternut veterans clocked good time on their march beyond the Tennessee line. Indeed, so successful was Forrest in driving Brigadier General Edward Hatch’s reinforced cavalry division “from one position to another,” thereby preventing any penetration of the screen, that Stewart’s corps reached Lawrenceburg, more than halfway to Columbia, before Schofield, twenty miles due east at Pulaski, even knew that Hood was not only on the way around his flank but was also not much farther by now than he himself was from Duck River, which he would have to cross if he was to avoid being cut off from Nashville and the other half of the army Thomas had spent the past month assembling for the defense of Middle Tennessee. That was on the night of November 22; Schofield began his withdrawal at first light next morning, prodding his five divisions, 62 guns, and 800 wagons northward up the turnpike. He knew he was involved in a race whose stakes were life or death, and thanks to a faster, somewhat shorter track he won it handily by getting his lead division to Columbia on the 24th, in time to keep the fast-riding rebel troopers from seizing either of the two bridges across the Duck. Moreover, he had his entire force dug in along the outskirts of the south-bank town, guns emplaced, when Hood’s infantry arrived from Mount Pleasant on the 26th and took up a position, that day and the next, confronting the newly erected breastworks anchored right and left on the river above and below.

Hood was not discouraged by this loss of a long-odds race in which some of his troops covered more than a hundred miles on inferior roads while Schofield’s did less than thirty-five on the turnpike. Nor was he provoked into launching a headlong assault, which in fact was no longer practicable — let alone judicious — by the morning of November 28, when he discovered that his one-time West Point roommate and mathematics coach had withdrawn in the night to the north bank, destroying the two bridges over the river now in his front. What Hood had in mind instead, his lieutenants found when they reported as ordered to his headquarters beside the Pulaski pike that afternoon, was a flanking movement similar to the one he had just attempted, except that this time the odds were by no means long and he once more enjoyed the confidence that came with employing the tactics he had so much admired in Virginia, back in the days when he had both of his legs and the vigorous use of both his arms. As he saw it, later describing the frame of mind that led to the formulation of his plan, “The situation presented an occasion for one of those interesting and beautiful moves upon the chessboard of war, to perform which I had often desired an opportunity.… I had beheld with admiration the noble deeds and grand results achieved by the immortal Jackson in similar maneuvers; I had seen his corps made equal to ten times its number by a sudden attack on the enemy’s rear, and I hoped in this instance to be able to profit by the teachings of my illustrious countryman.”

The plan itself was as simple as it was bold. James Wilson having joined Schofield beyond the Duck with another 4000 horsemen, Forrest would cross the river today, ten miles upstream at Huey’s Mill, and drive the blue cavalry northward, away from possible interference with Hood’s infantry, which would cross at dawn at Davis Ford, three miles above the town. Cheatham would lead, his corps being posted on the right, and Stewart would follow, reinforced by one of Lee’s divisions. Each would take along a single battery, for emergencies, and leave the rest of the guns behind — an even hundred, as it turned out — for use by Lee, who would demonstrate with them and his two remaining divisions in order to fix the Federals in position on the opposite bank of the river, while the bulk of the superior gray army moved around their left and into their rear at Spring Hill, a dozen miles up the turnpike from Columbia and about the same distance from Franklin, whose seizure would give the flankers control of the Harpeth River crossings, less than twenty miles from Nashville. In other words, another race would start at dawn, and this one too would be a matter of life or death for Schofield, though Hood did not intend for him to know — any more than he had known before — that a contest was in progress until it was at least half over; by which time, in contrast to the previous maneuver, there would be little he could do except look for a roundabout avenue of escape. At that point Hood would be free either to turn on his former roommate or, having eliminated him as a factor by holding the rail and turnpike bridges across the Harpeth, plunge straight ahead for the Tennessee capital without delay. He seemed to favor the latter course just now, for he spoke that night, soon after the council of war broke up and the participants went out into the falling snow to alert their commands for tomorrow’s march, of “calling for volunteers to storm the key of the works about the city.” Next morning, while Cheatham’s men were moving through the predawn darkness toward the pontoons thrown for them at Davis Ford the night before, he made this even more emphatic. “The enemy must give me a fight,” he told a friend — Chaplain-Doctor, later Bishop, Charles Quintard — “or I’ll be in Nashville before tomorrow night.”

Mindful of the failure of a similar maneuver four months ago, which brought on the lost Battle of Atlanta, he went along this time in person, as he had not done before, riding with Cheatham near the head of the flanking column to see for himself that his Jacksonian plan was carried out as he intended. The result, throughout the opening phase, was all he could have hoped for. Both the crossing and the march north beyond the river, parallel to the turnpike three miles west, were unimpeded, thanks to Schofield’s apparent lack of vigilance and to Forrest, whose three divisions clashed with Wilson’s two at Hurt’s Corner around midday, six miles out, and drove them headlong up the Lewisburg Pike toward Franklin; Forrest detached a brigade to keep up the pressure on the fleeing bluecoats and turned northwest with the rest of his troopers, as ordered, for a strike at Spring Hill in advance of the infantry. Moving up, Hood halted Stewart’s reinforced corps at Rutherford Creek — presumably to protect his rear in case Schofield took alarm and moved against him from Columbia, though the steady booming of Lee’s one hundred guns beyond the Duck gave assurance that the two Union corps were still in position on the north bank, unmindful of the fact that Hood had all his cavalry and all but two of his nine infantry divisions on their flank or in their rear. Elated, he told Cheatham, as he rode with him beyond the creek to within three miles of Spring Hill, to commit his lead division without delay, alongside Forrest’s horsemen, and follow with the other two as soon as they came up. Meantime, Hood himself rode back to check on Stewart, whose four divisions could also be committed if they were needed; which seemed unlikely.

By then it was just after 3 o’clock. Behind him, over toward the turnpike in the direction of Spring Hill, a spatter of gunfire presumably announced that Forrest even now was overriding such resistance as the blue garrison could offer, surprised as its few members must be, midway between Columbia and Franklin, to find a host of graybacks bearing down on the little country town a dozen miles in Schofield’s rear.

But that was by no means the case: mainly due to the vigilance of James Wilson. Though he lacked the time needed to whip Thomas’s defeat-prone horsemen into any shape for standing up even briefly to a superior force of veterans under the Wizard of the Saddle, the young Illinois-born West Pointer had not forgotten the primary cavalry assignment of furnishing his chief with information. In fact he had sent a warning the night before, when, impressed by Forrest’s aggressiveness, he notified headquarters that a heavy Confederate movement seemed to be in progress across the Duck, ten miles upstream. Schofield telegraphed word of this to Nashville, and Thomas promptly ordered a further withdrawal to Franklin. Accordingly, while Hood’s infantry was passing unobserved over Davis Ford, Schofield started his 800 wagons and most of his guns up the turnpike with a train guard of two divisions under David Stanley, who was told to drop one of them off at Rutherford Creek, to secure the crossing there, and proceed with the other to Spring Hill, which he would cover for the rest of the army, soon to follow. By midmorning Stanley had cleared the creek, about one third of the distance between Columbia and Spring Hill, and learning as he drew near the latter place that rebel troopers were approaching in strength — it was by now past 2 o’clock — he double-timed Brigadier General George Wagner’s division into position, just east of the town and the pike, in time to help the two-regiment garrison ward off an all-out mounted attack.

It was a near thing, and a bloody one as well, according to a Wisconsin infantryman who watched the charge get broken up, for the most part by artillery. “You could see a rebel’s head falling off his horse on one side and his body on the other, and the horse running and nickering and looking for its rider. Others you could see fall off with their feet caught in the stirrup, and the horse dragging and trampling them, dead or alive. Others, the horse would get shot and the rider tumble head over heels, or maybe get caught by the horse falling on him.”

Having repulsed the rebel troopers, who returned piecemeal to probe warily at his defenses, Stanley — Howard’s successor as IV Corps commander, thirty-six years old, an Ohio-born West Pointer and peacetime Indian fighter, chief of cavalry under Rosecrans during the last campaign in this region, back in the summer of ’63 — proceeded to align his force of just over 5000 for the protection of Spring Hill. Resolute as he was in making his preparations for defense, he was fortunate not to have his resolution strained by awareness that this might have to be attempted against twice that number of gray infantry now crossing Rutherford Creek with Cheatham, less than three miles southeast across the fields, and an even larger number close in their rear with Stewart. In any case, he parked the train between the turnpike and the railroad, west of town, and unlimbered his 34 guns in close support of Wagner’s three brigades, disposed along a convex line to the east, both flanks withdrawn to touch the pike above and below. Here, under cover of breastworks hastily improvised by dismantling snake-rail fences, they settled down to their task of keeping Schofield’s escape route open in their rear. Around 4 o’clock, half an hour before sundown, the first concerted assault struck their right, driving the flank brigade from its fence-rail works and back on its support, three batteries massed on the southern outskirts of the town for just such an emergency as was now upon them. These eighteen pieces roared and plowed the ranks of the attackers, who stumbled rearward in confusion, having no guns of their own. In the red light of the setting sun, when Stanley saw that their regimental flags bore the full-moon device of Cleburne’s division — by common consent, Federal and Confederate, the hardest-hitting in Hood’s army — he warned Wagner to brace his men for their return, probably with substantial reinforcements.

They did return, their number doubled by the arrival of another gray division; but little or nothing came of this menace in the end. After milling about in the twilight, apparently with the intention of launching a swamping assault, they paused for a time, as if bemused, and then — incredibly, for they presently were joined by still a third division — went into bivouac, more or less where they were, their cookfires twinkling in the frosty outer darkness, just beyond easy musket range of Spring Hill and the turnpike close in rear of the makeshift breastworks Stanley had feared were about to be rushed and overrun. Meantime Schofield put two more divisions in motion north, leaving one at Columbia to discourage Lee from crossing the Duck, and another at Rutherford Creek, where it had been posted that morning. By midnight the first two had cleared Spring Hill, subjected to nothing worse along the way than sporadic fire from the roadside and the loss of a few stragglers, although there was a clash with some late-roaming butternut troopers at Thompson Station, three miles up the pike. These were soon brushed aside, and the two divisions that followed close behind, from Rutherford Creek and Columbia, encountered even less trouble. As a result, Wagner’s division, which formerly had led the march but now brought up the rear, was able to follow the unmolested train and guns out of Spring Hill before dawn. By that time the lead division was at Franklin and had secured the crossings of the Harpeth, within twenty miles of heavily-fortified Nashville.

Just what had happened, out in the cookfire-twinkling darkness beyond the now abandoned Union breastworks east of Spring Hill and the turnpike, was not too hard to establish from such reports as were later made, both on and off the record. Why it happened was far more difficult to determine, though many tried in the course of the heated controversy that followed down the years. Still, whatever their persuasion as to a rightful distribution of the guilt — of which, in all conscience, there was enough to go around — a Texas lieutenant in Cleburne’s division, after noting that Hood, Cheatham, “and others in high places have said a good deal in trying to fix the blame for this disgraceful failure,” arrived at an assessment with which few could disagree: “The most charitable explanation is that the gods of war injected confusion into the heads of our leaders.”

After Cleburne’s 18-gun repulse he was joined by Bate, who came up on his left. Just as they were about to go forward together, shortly after sunset — Forrest had pulled back for lack of ammunition, the supply train having been left with Lee to disencumber the flanking column — an order came from Cheatham for the attack to be delayed until the third division arrived under Major General John C. Brown, who would give the signal to advance as soon as he got in position on Cleburne’s right. Brown came up about 5.30, but finding his own right overlapped by the blue defenders, informed Cheatham that any advance by him “must meet with inevitable disaster.” While he waited, obliging Cleburne and Bate to wait as well, Cheatham reported the problem to Hood, who authorized a suspension of the gunless night attack until Stewart arrived from Rutherford Creek. Stewart did not get there at all, however, having been misguided up a country road that paralleled the turnpike. Only his fourth division, detached from Stephen Lee, under Edward Johnson — Old Clubby, captured six months ago in the Spotsylvania Mule Shoe, had recently been exchanged and transferred West — was stopped in time to move into position on the left of Bate, adjoining the turnpike south of town. Stewart by then had received permission to put his other three divisions into bivouac where they were, two miles to the north and well back from the pike. By that time, practically everyone else — Cleburne and Bate and Brown and all their men, stalled on the verge of their twilight assault — had begun to bed down, too: including Hood, who had spent a long day strapped in the saddle, with considerable irritation to the stump of the leg he had lost at Chickamauga. He was close to exhaustion, and there still had been no report that Schofield had begun a rearward movement. In fact, Lee’s guns were still growling beyond Duck River, strong evidence that the Federals were still on its north bank, when Hood retired for the night. Before he did so, he told Cheatham (as Cheatham later testified) that he “had concluded to wait until the morning, and directed me to hold my command in readiness to attack at daylight.”

Not quite everyone was sleeping, he discovered when a barefoot private came to his farmhouse headquarters some time after midnight to report that he had seen Union infantry in motion on the turnpike in large numbers. Hood roused himself and told his adjutant to send Cheatham orders “to advance a line of skirmishers and confuse the enemy by firing into his columns.” Cheatham passed the word to Johnson, whose division was nearby, but when the Virginian reconnoitered westward, two miles south of Spring Hill, he found the road lying empty in the moonlight, with nothing moving on it in either direction. Most likely he had encountered a gap between segments of the blue army on the march; in any case, like Hood and Cheatham before him, he too returned to the warmth of his blankets while Schofield’s troops continued to slog north along the turnpike, just beyond earshot of the rebels sleeping eastward in the fields. Not all the marchers made it. “We were actually so close to the pike,” a butternut lieutenant later wrote, “that many Federal soldiers came out to our fires to light their pipes and were captured.” Not even all of these were gathered up, however. For example, two Confederates were munching cornbread beside a low fire when a man strolled up; “What troops are you?” he asked, and on being told, “Cleburne’s division,” turned and walked off in the darkness. “Say, wasn’t that a Yank? Let’s go get him,” one grayback said, only to have his companion reply: “Ah, let him go. If you’re looking for Yankees go down the pike and get all you want.”

Amid all this confusion, high and low, one thing at least was clear with the dawn of the last day in November. Schofield had gotten clean away, undeterred after darkness fell, except for a brief clash at Thompson Station with one of Forrest’s divisions which had managed to capture a meager supply of ammunition. If Hood was saddened by this Spring Hill fiasco — “The best move in my career as a soldier,” he said later, “I was thus destined to behold come to naught” — he was also furious, mainly with Cheatham, but also with almost everyone in sight, including the ragged, barefoot men themselves. In his anger he renewed the charge that Joe Johnston had spoiled them for use in the offensive. “The discovery that the army, after a forward march of 180 miles, was still, seemingly, unwilling to accept battle unless under the protection of breastworks, caused me to experience grave concern. In my inmost heart I questioned whether or not I would ever succeed in eradicating this evil.”

This he would say long afterward, not stopping then, any more than now, to consider what he asked of them in designing still another of those swift Jacksonian movements that had worked so well two years ago in Virginia; whereas the fact was, not even Lee’s army was “Lee’s army” any longer; let alone Hood’s. All the same, he believed he saw a corrective for the fault. If a flanking maneuver was beyond the army’s capacity, perhaps a headlong assault was not only within its means but might also provide a cure for its lamentable habit of flinching at Yankee breastworks and depending so much on its own. In any case he was determined now to give the thing a disciplinary try — and he said as much, years later, looking back. “I hereupon decided, before the enemy would be able to reach his stronghold at Nashville, to make that same afternoon another and final effort to overtake and rout him, and drive him into the Harpeth River at Franklin.”

 3

So he said, anticipating vengeance. But when the Army of Tennessee set out from its camps around Spring Hill that morning — three fourths of it, at any rate; Stephen Lee was marching from Columbia, a dozen miles to the south, with his other two divisions and the artillery and trains — its commander, nearly beside himself with rage at last night’s bungling, seemed “wrathy as a rattlesnake” to one of his subordinates, who were themselves engaged in a hot-tempered flurry of charges and countercharges as a result of Schofleld’s escape from the trap so carefully laid for his destruction. Down in the ranks, where mutual recrimination afforded less relief, the soldiers “felt chagrined and mortified,” one afterwards remarked, “at the occurrence of the preceding day.”

Yet this soon passed, at least as the dominant reaction, partly because of the weather, which had faired. “The weather was clear and beautiful,” another infantryman wrote; “the cool air was warmed by the bright sunshine, and our forces were in fine condition.” By way of added encouragement, the band from a Louisiana brigade, reported to be the army’s best, fell out beside the turnpike and cut loose with a few rollicking numbers to cheer the marchers tramping past. “Each man felt a pride in wiping out the stain,” the first soldier would recall, while the second added: “Their spirits were animated by encouraging orders from General Hood, who held out to them the prospect that at any moment he might call on them to deal the enemy a decisive blow.”

This was as he had done before, on the march north from Florence, and the spirit now was much as it had been then, when the promise was that the Federals were about to be outflanked. For the Tennesseans the campaign was literally a homecoming, but for all the army’s veterans it was a glad return to fields of anticipated glory, when they and the war were young and hopes were high. Once more patriot-volunteers of a Second American Revolution, many of them barefoot in the snow, as their forebears had been at Valley Forge, they were hailed along the way as returned deliverers, fulfillers of the faded dream that victory waited on the banks of the Ohio, which was once again their goal. Gladdest of all these scenes of welcome had been the march from Mount Pleasant to Columbia, a region of old families whose mansions lined the pike and whose place of worship — tiny, high-roofed St John’s Church, ivy-clad and Gothic, where Bishop-General Polk had preached and his Episcopal kinsmen had their graves amid flowers and shrubbery fresh and green in bleak November — had so impressed Pat Cleburne, for one, that he checked his horse in passing and remarked that it was “almost worth dying for, to be buried in such a beautiful spot.” Impromptu receptions and serenades greeted the returning heroes, and prayers of thanksgiving were offered in this and other churches along the way, especially in Pulaski and Columbia, where the Yankees had been thrown into retreat by the gray army’s passage round their flank. Spring Hill too had been delivered, though at a heavy cost in Confederate mortification, which soon was transmuted into determination that the bluecoats, having escaped their pursuers twice, would not manage it still a third time unscathed. Accordingly, the seven gray divisions stepped out smartly up the Franklin Turnpike, preceded by Forrest’s troopers. Hood was pleased, he later said, to find his army “metamorphosed, as it were, in one night.… The feeling existed which sometimes induces men who have long been wedded to but one policy to look beyond the sphere of their own convictions, and, at least, be willing to make trial of another course of action.” In other words, they now seemed ready to charge breastworks, if need be, and he was prepared to take them up on that.

Stewart led the march today, having overshot the mark the night before, and Cheatham followed, accompanied by Johnson’s division from Lee’s corps, which was three hours in the rear. A dozen miles to the north by 2 o’clock, the vanguard approached Winstead Hill, three miles short of Franklin. On its crest, astride the turnpike, a Union brigade was posted with a battery, apparently under instructions to delay the gray pursuit; but Hood, unwilling to waste time on a preliminary skirmish — perhaps designed by Schofield to give the rest of his army a chance to get away unharmed — swung Stewart’s three divisions to the right, along Henpeck Lane, and kept the other four marching straight on up the pike. To avoid being outflanked, the bluecoats limbered their guns and fell back out of sight beyond the rim of the slope up which the head of Cheatham’s column now was toiling. When the Tennesseans topped the rise they gave a roaring cheer at the sight of the Harpeth Valley spread before them, with the town of Franklin nestled in a northeastward bend of the river and the Federals intrenched in a bulging curve along its southern and western outskirts. Beyond the crest, on the forward slope of Winstead Hill, Hood turned off to the left of the road, and while his staff got busy setting up a command post, the one-legged general dismounted — painfully, as always, with the help of an orderly who passed him his crutches once he was afoot — and there, in the shade of an isolated linn tree, removed his binoculars from their case for a careful study of the position his adversary had chosen for making a stand.

Schofield had been there since dawn, nine hours ago, and by now had completed the organization of an all-round defense of his Franklin bridgehead, on the off chance that the Confederates would attempt to interfere with the crossing or the follow-up sprint for the Tennessee capital, eighteen miles away. He would have been well on his way there already, safely over the river and hard on the march up the Nashville Pike, except that when he arrived with his two lead divisions, under Jacob Cox and Brigadier General Thomas Ruger, he found that the turnpike bridge had been wrecked by the rising Harpeth and Thomas had failed to send the pontoons he had so urgently requested, two days ago at Columbia, after burning his own for lack of transportation. Placing Cox in charge, he told him to have the two XXIII Corps divisions dig in astride the Columbia Pike, his own on the left and Ruger’s on the right, half a mile south of the town in their rear, while awaiting the arrival of the three IV Corps divisions, still on the march from Rutherford Creek and Spring Hill. By the time Stanley got there with Thomas Wood’s and Brigadier General Nathan Kimball’s divisions, around midmorning, the engineers had floored the railroad bridge with planks ripped from nearby houses and the wagon train had started crossing. Schofield ordered Kimball to dig in on a line to the right of Ruger, extending the works northward so that they touched the river below as well as above the town, and passed Wood’s division, along with most of Stanley’s artillery, across the clattering, newly-planked railway span to take position on the high far bank of the Harpeth, overlooking Franklin and the fields lying south of the long curve of intrenchments thrown up by the other three divisions. That way, Wood could move fast to assist Wilson’s horsemen in dealing with rebel flankers on that side of the river, upstream or down, and Cox was braced for confronting a headlong assault, if that was what developed.

This last seemed highly unlikely, however, since Hood — with two of his nine divisions far in the rear, together with all but eight of his guns — had fewer than 30,000 troops on hand, including cavalry, while Schofield had well above that number — 34,000 of all arms — stoutly intrenched for the most part and supported by 60-odd guns, nearly all of them able to pound anything that tried to cross the two-mile-deep plain that lay between the bristling outskirts of Franklin and the foot of Winstead Hill. Moreover, that deadly stretch of ground was not only about as level as a tabletop, it was also unobstructed. Originally there had been a small grove of locusts in front of Ruger’s part of the line, but these had been felled for use as headlogs and abatis. Similarly, on the left, a thick-set hedge of Osage orange had been thinned to clear a field of fire for Cox, leaving only enough of the growth to provide a thorny palisade. There was one obstacle out front: two brigades from Wagner’s division, intrenched in an advance position, half a mile down and astride the Columbia Pike, with instructions to remain in observation there unless Hood, when he came up, “showed a disposition to advance in force,” in which case they were to retire within the lines and serve as a reserve for the three divisions now in their rear. Otherwise, one defender said, there was “not so much as a mullein stalk” to obstruct the aim of the infantry in the trenches or the cannoneers in emplacements they had selected and dug at their leisure, not yet knowing there could be little or no counterbattery fire, even if the rebels were so foolish as to provoke battle on a field so disadvantageous to them.

Wagner had arrived at noon with the last of the five divisions, weary from yesterday’s Spring Hill fight, the all-night vigil behind his fence-rail breastworks, and this morning’s hurried march as rear guard of the army. Leaving one brigade on Winstead Hill to serve as a lookout force, he put the other two in position as instructed, half a mile in front of the main line, and set them digging. While they dug, the rest of the troops, snug in their completed works, did what they could to make up for their loss of sleep on last night’s march. From across the river, at high-sited Fort Granger — a bastioned earthwork, constructed more than a year ago for the protection of the two critical bridges over the Harpeth — Schofield looked south, beyond the bulge of his semicircular line, and saw the brigade Wagner had left on lookout withdraw in good order down the hill and up the turnpike. He knew from this that the rebels must be close behind, for the brigade commander was Colonel Emerson Opdycke, a thirty-four-year-old Ohioan with a fiery reputation earned in most of the theater’s major battles, from Shiloh, where he had been a captain, to Resaca, where he had been badly wounded, back in May, but recovered in time to lead the charge up Kennesaw six weeks later. Sure enough, soon after Opdycke’s displacement, the first graybacks appeared on Winstead Hill. They gathered faster and began to flow, rather like lava, in heavy columns down the forward slope and around the east flank of the hill. Schofield watched with mounting excitement. It was now about 3 o’clock; all but the last of his 700 wagons had clattered across the railroad bridge and he had just issued orders for the rest of his men and guns to follow at 6 o’clock, shortly after dark, unless Hood attacked before sunset; which Schofield did not believe he would do, once he had seen what lay before him there along the northern margin of that naked plain.

He was mistaken. Three miles away, under the linn tree on the hillside to the south, Hood completed his study of the Federal dispositions, lowered his glasses, and announced to the subordinates who by now had clustered round him: “We will make the fight.”

When he explained what he meant by “make the fight” — an all-out frontal assault, within the hour — consternation followed hard upon doubt by his lieutenants that they had heard aright. They too had looked out over the proposed arena, and could scarcely believe their ears. Attack? here? headlong and practically gunless, against a foe not only superior in numbers but also intrenched on chosen ground and backed by the frown of more than sixty pieces of artillery? … For a time, only too aware of their commander’s repeated scornful charge that they invariably flinched at Yankee breastworks, they held their tongues. Then Ben Cheatham broke the silence. “I do not like the looks of this fight,” he said. “The enemy has an excellent position and is well fortified.” Leaning on his crutches, his blond beard glinting in the sunlight, Hood replied that he preferred to strike the Federals here, where they had had only a short time to organize their defenses, rather than at Nashville, “where they have been strengthening themselves for three years.”

Cheatham protested no more, having been reproached quite enough for one day. But Bedford Forrest — who was familiar with the region, including the location of usable fords over the Harpeth well this side of the enemy position, and who moreover had Hood’s respect for his aggressive instincts — spoke out in support of his fellow Tennessean’s assessment of the situation, though with a different application. He favored an attack, yet not a frontal one. “Give me one strong division of infantry with my cavalry,” he urged, “and within two hours I can flank the Federals from their works.” Hood afterwards reported that “the nature of the position was such as to render it inexpedient to attempt any further flanking movement.” Just now, however, he expressed doubt that, for all their apparent confidence, the bluecoats would “stand strong pressure from the front. The show of force they are making is a feint in order to hold me back from a more vigorous pursuit.”

This put an end to such unasked-for opposition as had been voiced. Hood’s fame had begun when he broke Fitz-John Porter’s center at Gaines Mill, back in Virginia thirty months ago, and he intended to do the same to Schofield here today. His final order, dismissing the informal council of war, was explicit as to how this was to be accomplished: “Drive the enemy from his position into the river at all hazards.”

Stewart, who had rounded Winstead Hill on the approach march, would attack on the right, up the railroad and the Lewisburg Pike, which ran northwest along the near bank of the Harpeth; Loring’s division was on that flank of the corps front, French’s on the other, over toward the Columbia Pike, and Major General Edward Walthall’s was posted astride the railroad in the center. Cleburne and Brown, of Cheatham’s corps, would advance due north up both sides of the Columbia Pike, Cleburne on the right, adjoining French, with Bate on Brown’s left, extending the line westward to the Carter’s Creek Pike, which ran northeast. All three turnpikes converged on the outskirts of Franklin, half a mile in rear of the southward bulge of the Union works; Hood assumed that this configuration would serve to compact the mass, like a hand clenched gradually into a fist, by the time the attackers reached and struck the main blue line. Johnson’s division remained in reserve behind the center, for rapid exploitation of any breakthrough right or left, and Forrest’s horsemen would go forward on the flanks, near the river in both directions. At 3.45, one hour before sundown, Stewart and Cheatham sent word that their lines were formed and they were ready.

Hood could see them in panorama from his command post, the two corps in an attack formation well over a mile in width, their star-crossed flags hanging limp in the windless air of this last day in November, which was also to be the last in the lives of many who were about to follow those tattered symbols across the fields now in their front: six divisions, twenty brigades, just over one hundred regiments, containing in all some 18,000 infantry, with another 3500 in the four reserve brigades. Promptly Hood’s order came down from Winstead Hill for them to go forward, and they did, stepping out as smartly as if they were passing in review; “a grand sight, such as would make a lifelong impression on the mind of any man who could see such a resistless, well-conducted charge,” a Federal officer discerned from his post near the blue center, just under two miles across the way. “For the moment we were spellbound with admiration, although we knew that in a few brief moments, as soon as they reached firing distance, all that orderly grandeur would be changed to bleeding, writhing confusion.”

It did not work out quite that way just yet. Opdycke, when he retired from the crest of Winstead Hill, had not stopped alongside the other two brigades of Wagner’s division, intrenched half a mile in front of the main works, but continued his withdrawal up the turnpike to the designated reserve position in rear of a one-story brick residence owned by a family named Carter, less than a hundred yards inside the lines. Wagner had set up headquarters in a grove of trees beside the pike and just beyond the house, anticipating the arrival of the rest of his troops as soon as the gray host, now gathering two miles to the south, showed what his orders termed “a disposition to advance.” Apparently he doubted that Hood would do so at all, after studying the field, or else he believed the preparations would take a lot more time than they actually did. In any case, the mass advance was well under way before the Ohio-born former Hoosier politician, whose view in that direction was blocked by the house and trees, even knew that it had begun. As a result, the two colonels left in charge out front not only delayed their withdrawal, they also chose to stand fast in their shallow works long enough to get off a couple of short-range volleys before retiring. This was to cost Wagner his command within the week, but it cost the men of those two brigades a great deal more today.

The gray line advanced steadily, preceded by scampering rabbits and whirring coveys of quail, flushed from the brush by the approach of close to 20,000 pairs of tramping feet. When they got within range, the outpost Federals gave them a rattling fusillade that served to check them for a moment; but not for long. Absorbing the shock, the men under Cleburne and Brown — old rivals, from the days when the latter’s division was under Cheatham — came on with a rush and a yell, directly against the front and around the flanks of the two unfortunate brigades, both of which gave way in a sudden bolt for the security of the intrenchments half a mile in their rear. Too late; “Let’s go into the works with them!” the attackers cried, and pressed the pursuit up the turnpike, clubbing and shooting the terrified bluecoats as they fled. “It seemed bullets never before hissed with such diabolical venom,” a Union captain was to say, recalling too that the cries of the wounded, left to the mercy of the screaming graybacks when they fell, “had a pathetic note of despair I had never heard before.” More than 700 were captured, hurt or unhurt, and the main-line defenders, dead ahead, were kept from firing at the pursuers by fear of hitting their comrades in the lead. A staff colonel observed, however, that there was little time for thought at this critical juncture. “The triumphant Confederates, now more like a wild, howling mob than an organized army, swept on to the very works, with hardly a check from any quarter. So fierce was the rush that a number of the fleeing soldiers — officers and men — dropped exhausted into the ditch, and lay there while the terrific contest raged over their heads.” Of these, the captain who had outrun the hissing bullets noted, “some were found [afterwards] with their thumbs chewed to a pulp. Their agony had been so great that they had stuck their thumbs in their mouths and bit on them to keep from bleating like calves.”

That was the kind of battle it was, first for one side, then the other, combining the grisliest features of Pickett’s Charge and Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. Because they had sprinted the last half mile, and had a shorter distance to cover in reaching the southward bulge of the enemy line, Cleburne’s and Brown’s divisions struck and penetrated the Federal works before the units on their left or right came up to add weight to the effort. In close pursuit of the two fugitive brigades, they not only broke through along the turnpike, they also widened the gap by knocking a regiment loose from the intrenchments on each side and seized four guns still loaded with canister, which they turned on the enemy but could not fire because the battery horses had bolted with the primers in the ammunition chests. Suddenly then it was too late; the blue reserves were upon them, advancing through the smoke with bayonets flashing, and they were too blown from their race up the pike, too confused by their abrupt success, to stand long under the pounding of most of the two dozen guns Cox and Ruger had posted along this part of the line. They yielded sullenly, under savage attack from Opdycke, who had brought his brigade on the run from north of the Carter house, and fell back to find cover in front of the works they had crossed when they broke through. There they stayed, exchanging point-blank fire with the bluecoats on the other side of the ditch.

Stewart by then had come up on the right, where French made contact with Cleburne, but the other two divisions were roughly handled in their attempt to get to grips with the Union left. Approaching a deep railroad cut near the northward bend of the Harpeth, they found it under plunging fire from the guns massed in Fort Granger, and when they changed front to move around this trap they were struck on the flank by other batteries masked on the east bank of the river. Forrest drove these last away by sending Jackson’s division across a nearby ford, but Wilson met this threat to Schofield’s rear by throwing the rebel troopers back on the crossing and holding them there, under pressure from three times their number. Walthall and Loring meantime had rounded the railway cut and clawed their way through the Osage hedge, only to find themselves confronting an intrenched brigade equipped with repeating rifles that seemed to one observer “to blaze out a continuous sheet of destruction.” Here the attackers had all they could do to hang on where they were, though some among them continued to try for a breakthrough: Brigadier General John Adams, for example, who was killed while attempting a mounted leap over the enemy works and whose body was found next morning alongside his horse, dead too, with its forefeet over the Federal palisade. Another of Loring’s three brigade commanders, Brigadier General T. M. Scott, was gravely wounded, as was Brigadier General William Quarles of Walthall’s division; both were out of the war for good, and in Quarles’s brigade, so heavy was the toll of successive commanders, there presently was no surviving officer above the rank of captain. French’s division, fighting near the center, also lost two of its three brigade leaders — Colonel William Witherspoon, killed outright, and Brigadier General Francis Cockrell, severely wounded — bringing Stewart’s loss to five of the nine brigade commanders in his corps, along with more than half of the colonels and majors who began the attack at the head of his nearly fifty regiments.

Cheatham’s losses were heavier still, though they were comparatively light in Bate’s division, which only had one of its three brigades engaged when it struck the enemy trenches at an angle; the other two drifted northward to mingle with Chalmers’ horsemen beyond the Carter’s Creek Pike, where they remained in observation, dodging long-range shots from guns on the Union right. Cleburne and Brown, however, still holding the works astride the Columbia Turnpike in the center, more than made up for any shortage of bloodshed on the Confederate left. The sun by now was behind the rim of Winstead Hill, and in point of fact, so far as its outcome was concerned, the battle was over: had been over, at least in that respect, ever since Opdycke’s furious counterassault stopped and shattered the initial penetration. All that remained was additional killing and maiming, which continued well into the night. “I never saw the dead lay near so thick. I saw them upon each other, dead and ghastly in the powder-dimmed starlight,” Opdycke would report. Brown himself was out of the action, badly crippled by a shell, and so were all four of his brigadiers, beginning with G. W. Gordon, who had been captured in the side yard of the Carter house just as the breakthrough was turned back. John C. Carter, who succeeded Brown in command of the division, was mortally wounded shortly afterwards (he would die within ten days) and States Rights Gist and Otho Strahl were killed in the close-quarters struggle that ensued. “Boys, this will be short but desperate,” Strahl had told his Tennesseans as they prepared to charge; which was half right. After the repulse he stood in the Federal ditch, passing loaded rifles up to the men on top, and when one of them asked if it might not be wise to withdraw, he replied: “Keep on firing.” Then he fell.

The resultant desperation, unrelieved by the saving grace of brevity, was quite as bad as he had predicted for Brown’s division, but the strain was even worse for the Arkansans, Mississippians, Alabamians, and Texans next in line, heightened as it was by dread uncertainty as to the fate of their commander. “I never saw men put in such a terrible position as Cleburne’s division was,” an opposing bluecoat was to say. “The wonder is that any of them escaped death or capture.” All too many of them did not; Hiram Granbury had been killed at the head of his Texas brigade in the first assault, and fourteen of the twenty regimental commanders were to fall before the conflict slacked and died away. Meantime a disheartening rumor spread through the ranks that Cleburne was missing — Irish Pat Cleburne, of whom it was said: “Men seemed to be afraid to be afraid where he was.” He had last been seen going forward in the attack, dismounted because two horses had been shot from under him in the course of the advance. “If we are to die, let us die like men,” he told a subordinate, speaking with the brogue that came on him at such times and thickened as the excitement rose. When his second horse was killed by a shot from a cannon, he went ahead on foot through the smoke and din, waving his cap. The hope of his veterans, who idolized him, was that he had been wounded for the third time in the war, or even captured; but this hope collapsed next morning, when his body was found beside the Columbia Pike just short of the enemy works. A single bullet had gone through his heart. His boots had been stolen, along with his sword and watch and everything else of value on him. He was buried first near Franklin, then in St John’s churchyard, whose beauty he had admired on the march to his last fight, and finally, years later, back in Arkansas on a ridge overlooking Helena, his home town. His epitaph, as well as that of his division, was pronounced by his old corps commander, William Hardee, who wrote when he learned of his death: “Where this division defended, no odds broke its line; where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught, save only once; and there is the grave of Cleburne.”

High on his hillside two miles to the south, Hood knew even less about the progress of the battle than did the troops involved in the moiling, flame-stabbed confusion down below; which was little indeed. He had seen Cleburne and Brown go storming into the Union center, hard on the heels of Wagner’s unfortunates, but what happened next was blanketed in smoke that hung heavy in the windless air and thickened as the firing mounted to a sustained crescendo. At 7 o’clock, an hour after full darkness cloaked the field, he committed his reserve division, and though Old Clubby’s men attacked with desperation, stumbling over Cheatham’s dead and wounded in the gloom, they only succeeded in adding Brigadier General Arthur Manigault’s name to the list of a dozen brigade and division commanders who had fallen in the past three hours, as well as nine more regimental commanders, bringing the total to fifty-four; roughly half the number present. Of the twelve generals lost to the army here today, six were dead or dying, one was captured, and three of the remaining five were out of the war for good, while the other two, Brown and Cockrell, would not return for months. Down in the ranks, moreover, this dreadful ratio was approximated; 6252 Confederate veterans were casualties, including 1750 killed in action — as many as had died on either side in the two days of Shiloh or under McClellan throughout the Seven Days: more than had died under Rosecrans at Stones River, under Burnside at Fredericksburg, or under Hood himself in any of his three Atlanta sorties: almost as many, indeed, as Grant had had killed outright when he assaulted at Cold Harbor with three times as many men. Hood had wrecked his army, top to bottom, and the army knew it; or soon would. In the judgment of a Tennessee private who survived the wrecking, he had done so in the manner of a clumsy blacksmith, thinking “he would strike while the iron was hot, and while it could be hammered into shape.… But he was like the fellow who took a piece of iron to the shop, intending to make him an ax. After working for some time, and failing, he concluded he would make him a wedge, and, failing in this, said: ‘I’ll make a skeow.’ So he heats the iron red-hot and drops it in the slack tub, and it went s-k-e-o-w, bubble, bubble, s-k-e-o-w, bust.”

Hood did not know this yet, however — and would not have been likely to admit it if he had; Howard’s word ‘indomitable’ still fit. He watched unseeing while the battle continued to rage with the same fury, even though all the combatants had to aim at now was the flash of each other’s weapons. “Time after time they came up to the very works,” a Union colonel afterwards said of the attackers, “but they never crossed them except as prisoners.” Around 9 o’clock the uproar slacked. “Don’t shoot, Yanks; for God Amighty’s sake, don’t shoot!” defenders heard pinned-down rebels implore from the smoky darkness just beyond their parapets. Within two more hours the contest sputtered into silence. Stephen Lee was up by then with his other two divisions and the army’s guns, and Hood ordered the attack renewed at daybreak, preceded this time by a hundred-round bombardment. The batteries opened at first light, as directed, then ceased fire when word came back that there was nothing in the works ahead but Federal dead and wounded. Schofield had departed in the night.

That was really all the northern commander had wanted from the outset: a chance to get away, if Hood would only let him. Soon after his arrival the previous morning, on finding the turnpike bridge washed out and no pontoons on hand, he wired Nashville for instructions, and was told to defend the Harpeth crossing unless such an effort would require him “to risk too much.” He responded: “I am satisfied that I have heretofore run too much risk in trying to hold Hood in check.… Possibly I may be able to hold him here, but do not expect to be able to do so long.” Thomas, busy gathering troops to man the capital defenses, then put a limit to his request, in hope that this would serve to stiffen his lieutenant’s resistance to the scarcely deterred advance of the rebel column up through Middle Tennessee. “Do you think you can hold Hood at Franklin for three days longer? Answer, giving your views,” he wired, and Schofield replied: “I do not believe I can.” In point of fact, both question and answer by then were academic. He had already ordered a nighttime withdrawal and Hood had just appeared on Winstead Hill. “I think he can effect a crossing tomorrow, in spite of all my efforts,” Schofield added, “and probably tonight, if he attempts it. A worse position than this for an inferior force can hardly be found.… I have no doubt Forrest will be in my rear tomorrow, or doing some greater mischief. It appears to me that I ought to take position at Brentwood at once.”

Nevertheless — having no choice — he stayed and fought, and won. His casualties totaled 2326, about one third the number he inflicted, and of these more than half were from Wagner’s division: just under a thousand killed or captured in the two-brigade rearward sprint up the pike and just over two hundred killed and wounded in the other brigade, when Opdycke saved the day with a counterassault that cost him five of his seven regimental commanders but netted him 394 prisoners and nine Confederate flags. Except for David Stanley, who took a bullet through the nape of his neck and had to be lugged off the field at the height of the melee, no Federal above the rank of colonel was on the list of casualties when Schofield evacuated Franklin between 11 o’clock and midnight, leaving his dead and his nonwalking wounded behind as he crossed the river and set fire to the planked-over bridge in his rear. The blue column reached Brentwood by daylight, halfway to Nashville, and by noon all five divisions were safe in the capital works, alongside the others Thomas had been assembling all this time.

Hood sent Forrest to snap at the heels of the retreating victors, but deferred pursuit by his infantry now in occupation of the field. “Today spent in burying the dead, caring for the wounded, and reorganizing the remains of our corps,” a diarist on Cheatham’s staff recorded. Never before had even these veterans looked on horror so compacted. In places, hard against the abandoned works, the slain lay in windrows, seven deep; so thick, indeed, that often there was no room for those on top to touch the ground. One of Strahl’s four successors was so tightly wedged by corpses, it was noted, that “when he at last received the fatal shot, he did not wholly fall, but was found stiffened in death and partly upright, seeming still to command the ghastly line of his comrades lying beneath the parapet.” Blue and gray, in a ratio of about one to five, the wounded soon filled all the houses in the town, as well as every room in the courthouse, schools, and churches. Meantime the burial details were at work, digging long shallow ditches into which the perforated ragdoll shapes were tossed and covered over with the spoil. Federals and Confederates were lodged in separate trenches, and the even greater disparity in their numbers — roughly one to eight — imparted a hollow sound to Hood’s congratulatory order, read at the head of what was left of each regiment that afternoon. “While we lament the fall of many gallant officers and brave men,” its final sentence ran, “we have shown to our countrymen that we can carry any position occupied by our enemy.”

Perhaps the battle did show that; perhaps it also settled in Hood’s mind, at last, the question of whether the Army of Tennessee would charge breastworks. But, if so, the demonstration had been made at so high a cost that, when it was over, the army was in no condition, either in body or in spirit, to repeat it. Paradoxically, in refuting the disparagement, the troops who fell confirmed it for the future. Nor was the horror limited to those who had been actively involved; Franklin’s citizens now knew, almost as well as did the few survivors among the men they had sent away three years ago, the suffering that ensued once the issue swung to war. This was especially true of the Carter family, an old man and his two daughters who took shelter in their cellar, just in rear of the initial breakthrough point, while the fighting raged outside and overhead. Emerging next morning from their night of terror, they found the body of their son and brother, Captain Tod Carter of Brown’s division, Cheatham’s corps, lying almost on the doorstep he had come home to when he died.

Nothing daunted — though his 7500 casualties over the past week, including more than 6000 the day before, had reduced his infantry strength to a scant 22,000 — Hood took up the march north that afternoon. Lee’s corps was in the lead, only one of its three divisions having been exposed to the Franklin holocaust, and Stewart and Cheatham followed in that order, so severely bled down at all levels that Brown’s division, for example, was under a colonel who had never commanded anything larger than a regiment, while several brigades in both these corps were led by officers with even less experience. Hood might have turned back and taken up a defensive position along Duck River, as Bragg had done two years ago under similar circumstances, or even along the Tennessee, which he had left ten days before. That would doubtless have been the most prudent course to follow, especially since one main purpose of the campaign — to provoke a countermarch by Sherman down in Georgia — had clearly failed already; the Ohioan was more than halfway to the Atlantic Ocean by now, and apparently had not given so much as a backward glance at the threat to Thomas, far in his rear. But it was not in the Kentucky-born Texan’s nature to take counsel of his fears, if indeed he felt them in the first place, and prudence was by no means an integral part of his makeup. His concern was with quite different factors. One was time, which was running out, and the other was honor. “In truth,” he said afterwards, “our army was in that condition which rendered it more judicious the men should face a decisive issue rather than retreat — in other words, rather than renounce the honor of their cause without having made a last and manful effort to lift up the sinking fortunes of the Confederacy. I therefore determined to move upon Nashville.”

Moving upon it was no great task; Forrest’s troopers by now had called a halt in sight of the Capitol tower and within plain view of the long curve of earthworks behind which Schofield had already taken shelter by the time the gray infantry forded the Harpeth. What Hood would do once he got there was a different matter, however, involving a choice between two highly unpromising alternatives. The first, to launch an immediate all-out assault, was rejected out of hand. No one wanted another Franklin, not even John Bell Hood, and Nashville — similarly cradled in the northward bend of a still wider river, with far stouter intrenchments ready-dug across its face — was Franklin magnified. Besides, after yesterday’s grim Confederate subtractions, Schofield alone had more troops than Hood could bring against the place, and Thomas most likely had as many more gathered inside it, raising the numerical odds against the attacker to two, maybe three, to one. Assault was out. Yet so, Hood saw, was the alternative of crossing the Cumberland above or below, as originally envisioned, for a march to the Ohio. This would land him in Thomas’s rear, true enough, but so would it put Thomas in Hood’s own rear, undiminished and able to summon reinforcements from all over the North, while Hood himself, under the circumstances which now obtained, would scarcely be able to add a single recruit to the rolls of his Franklin-ravaged command. “In the absence of the prestige of complete victory,” he later explained in answer to those who had urged the adoption of such a course, “I felt convinced that the Tennesseans and Kentuckians would not join our forces, since we had failed in the first instance to defeat the Federal army and capture Nashville.”

Having rejected the notion of retiring southward as an admission of defeat, and having decided to forgo his previous intention of assaulting or bypassing Nashville, which he saw now as an invitation to disaster, he then — either in ignorance or defiance of Napoleon’s definition of the passive defensive as “a form of deferred suicide” — settled on a plan that combined, simultaneously or in sequence, the worst features of all three of these dismissed or postponed alternatives. He would march to the outskirts of the Tennessee capital, intrench his army in direct confrontation with the outsized garrison lodged there, and await the inevitable attack, “which, if handsomely repulsed, might afford us an opportunity to follow up our advantage on the spot and enter the city on the heels of our enemy.” So he said, apparently remembering the ease with which his troops had followed Wagner’s into the Franklin works, but apparently not considering what had happened to them as soon as they achieved the penetration. In any case that was his plan, as he evolved it after the long march north and the frustrations he had encountered, first at Tuscumbia and Florence, where he waited three weeks before setting out, and then at Columbia, Spring Hill, and Franklin, where he not only failed to destroy a sizeable part of his opponent’s army, but also came close to destroying his own. Still the old dream held for Hood: perhaps because he had no other to fall back on. “Should [Thomas] attack me in position,” he subsequently reported, “I felt that I could defeat him and thus gain possession of Nashville with abundant supplies.… Having possession of the state, we should have gained largely in recruits and could at an early date have moved forward to the Ohio, which would have frustrated the plans of the enemy, as developed in his campaign toward the Atlantic coast.” There was that, and there was still the pressure of knowing that this might well be the last chance, either for him or for the Confederacy itself. What better way was there to go down, or out, than in a blaze of glory? He seemed to ask that, later adding: “The troops would, I believed, return better satisfied even after defeat if, in grasping at the last straw, they felt that a brave and vigorous effort had been made to save the country from disaster.”

So he went on, making camp that night at Brentwood, and pulled up in front of Nashville the following day, December 2. Lee took position astride the Franklin Pike, with Stewart and Cheatham respectively on his left and right, directly confronting the Union works, which extended northeast and northwest, as far as the eye could follow, from the bend of the river below to the bend above. Disposed along high ground in a ten-mile arc, some three miles from the marble Capitol in plain view on its hill in the heart of town, these required no more than a cursory look to confirm the claim that Nashville, along with Washington and Richmond, was among the three most heavily fortified cities in the land.

That was one part of Hood’s problem, and almost at once another became apparent. “The entire line of the army will curve forward from General Lee’s center,” he directed on arrival, “so that General Cheatham’s right may come as near the Cumberland as possible above Nashville, and General Stewart’s left as near the Cumberland as possible below Nashville. Each position will be strengthened as soon as taken, and extended as fast as strengthened.” But when the three corps settled in, plying spades and picks, it developed that the widest front they could cover with any measure of security was four miles — a good deal less than half the distance required if the line was to stretch to the near bank of the Cumberland in both directions; whereas in fact it did not reach the river in either direction, but left a vacancy of two miles beyond Cheatham’s outer flank and four beyond Stewart’s. Of the eight turnpikes converging spokelike on the capital hub to cross by the single bridge in its rear, four were covered and four remained uncovered, two on the left and two on the right, except by cavalry patrols. Both Confederate flanks thus were exposed to possible turning movements by the greatly superior force in the works ahead.

Hood had little fear of such a threat, however; at least for now. Familiar with his adversary’s ponderous manner and lethargic nature, not only over the past six months of confrontation, stalemate, and maneuver, but also from old army days before the war — one had been a lieutenant, the other a major in Sidney Johnston’s Texas-based 2d Cavalry — he counted on having as much time as he needed to prepare and improve his position in front of the Tennessee capital. Indeed, so confident was he of this, despite the long numerical odds, that he risked a further reduction of force, as great as the one he had suffered at Franklin, for the sake of a sideline operation which seemed to offer a chance to make up for the prize he had failed to grasp at Spring Hill, where a sizeable part of the blue host now confronting him slipped through his fingers. Now another isolated segment, though only about one fourth as large, had come within his reach — provided, that is, he was willing to do a little stretching; which he was. When Hood set out from Florence to outflank Schofield at Pulaski, ten days back, Thomas had pulled Granger’s 4000 troops out of the region below Athens, directly across the Tennessee River from Decatur, and combined them with Rousseau’s 5000 at Murfreesboro, thirty-odd miles down the Chattanooga & Nashville from his capital headquarters, in case the gray invasion column veered west to approach or bypass him from that direction. These 9000 bluecoats were still there, and Hood had a mind to gather them up, or at any rate smash the railroad between there and Nashville, before Thomas called them in. Accordingly, while still on the approach march, he detached Bate, whose division had suffered least of the seven engaged at Franklin, and sent him crosscountry, reinforced by a brigade from each of the other two corps, for a strike at Murfreesboro and its garrison. Forrest meantime, on Hood’s arrival at Nashville, would move down the Chattanooga Railroad with two of his divisions, breaking it up as he went, for a combined attack which he would direct by virtue of his rank.

Although the maneuver served its purpose of keeping Rousseau and Granger from reinforcing Thomas, it failed to achieve the larger design for bagging them entirely. Forrest left with Buford’s and Jackson’s divisions as soon as Hood came up, and after three days of reducing blockhouses, burning bridges, and wrecking several miles of track, combined with Bate on December 5, some ten miles north of the objective. Next day’s reconnaissance disclosed that Murfreesboro was almost as stoutly fortified as Nashville; Fortress Rosecrans, mounting 57 guns and enclosing 200 acres of the field where Bragg had come to grief two years ago this month, was practically unassailable; especially with 9000 defenders on hand to resist the 6500 graybacks moving against it, mounted and afoot. Forrest called a halt and decided instead to lure the garrison out for a fight in the open. In this he was partly successful the following day, December 7, when a 3500-man Union column staged a sally. He posted his infantry in the path of the attackers, with orders to stand firm while he brought his cavalry down on their flank. Everything went as planned, up to the critical moment when Bate’s division — spooked no doubt by remembrance of Franklin, where its performance had been less than standard, eight days back — gave way in a panic, unspringing the trap. Forrest rode among the rattled soldiers, appealing to them to stand and fight, then cursing them for refusing to do so. He stood in the stirrups, eyes blazing, face gone red with rage, and began to lay about him with the flat of his saber, whacking the backs of the fleeing troops; to small avail. Ignoring the Wizard as best they could, the retreaters scuttled rearward beyond his grasp, even when he seized a color-bearer’s flag, whose staff afforded a longer reach, and swung it bludgeonlike until at last, perceiving that this was equally ineffective, he flung it from him in disgust. “Right comical, if it hadn’t been so serious,” one veteran was to say.

Fortunately, the Federals did not press the issue, having just been recalled by Rousseau, and Bate was summoned back to Nashville two days later by Hood, who sent another brigade from Cheatham’s corps to replace the three that left. Down to about 4500 of all arms — half the number inside the works — Forrest had to be content with bristling to discourage sorties that might have swamped him. This he did with such success that within another two days he felt justified in sending Buford to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, ten miles northeast of Nashville, with instructions to picket a nearby stretch of the Cumberland and thereby prevent the arrival of reinforcements by that route. Next day, December 12, with the enemy still tightly buttoned up in Fortress Rosecrans, he had the infantry begin completing the destruction of the railroad back to La Vergne, just under twenty miles away. Thus, by the employment of barely half as many troops, Hood was able to prevent an additional 9000 effectives from joining the Nashville garrison: though whether this was wise or not, under the circumstances, was quite another matter. For one thing, even longer odds obtained in the vicinity of the Tennessee capital, where he remained in confrontation with Thomas, and for another, in the showdown battle which now was imminent, it seemed likely to cost him the use of two sorely-needed cavalry divisions, together with the help of their commander, whose talents would be missed.

Reduced as he was, by casualties and detachments, to a strength of less than 24,000 of all arms, it was no wonder one apprehensive infantryman remarked that the Confederate main line of resistance, which stretched and crooked for four miles under the frown of long-range Union guns in permanent fortifications, looked “more like the skirmish line of an investing army than of that army itself.” To make matters worse, there had not been time for the completion of such outlying installations as had been planned to strengthen the flanks of the position: particularly on the left, where three redoubts were under construction beyond the Hillsboro Pike, the western limit of Hood’s line, to blunt the force of an attack from that direction, whether end-on or oblique. Work on these began, but on the night of December 8, after a spell of deceptively mild weather, the mercury dropped to nearly twenty degrees below freezing and a cold rain quickly turned to sleet and fine-grained snow. By morning, all the trees wore glittering cut-glass armor, each twig sheathed in ice, and the earth was frozen iron hard, unpierceable even with a knife, let alone a shovel. Work stopped, perforce, and the soldiers huddled in unfinished trenches, shivering in their rags. For four days this continued. Then on the fifth — December 13, the winter solstice; Sherman had reached Savannah by now, completing his march across Georgia’s midriff, and would capture Fort McAllister before sundown — a thaw set in, relieving the rigid misery in which the besiegers had been locked, but bringing with it troubles of a different kind. The army floundered in Napoleon’s “fifth element,” unable to move forward, back, or sideways in a Sargasso Sea of mud; all transportation stalled, guns and wagons bellied axle deep, even on main-traveled roads, and no supplies arrived to relieve shortages that had developed during the four-day storm.

It was midway through this doleful immobilized span, with his men and horses frozen or stuck in their tracks by alternate ice and mud, that Hood apparently first became aware, in the fullest sense, of the peril to which he had exposed his troops when he took up his present position in point-blank confrontation with Thomas, whose army was not only superbly equipped and entrenched, but was also better than twice the size of his own. Earlier, when Forrest departed for Murfreesboro with the other two cavalry divisions, Chalmers had been obliged to send one of his two brigades to patrol the region between Cheatham’s right and the river, and when he reported that this reduced his strength too much for him to be able to perform that duty adequately on the left, where the distance was twice as great, Hood detached a brigade of infantry from Stewart and posted it beyond the Harding Pike, about midway between his western flank and the river below Nashville. This was not much help, really, for the unit chosen — Brigadier General Matthew Ector’s brigade of French’s division, now under its senior colonel while Ector recovered from the loss of a leg at Atlanta — was down to fewer than 700 effectives as a result of its heavy casualties at Franklin. Clearly enough, Chalmers’ horsemen had more than they could handle in both directions, especially the left, and Hood’s alarm was intensified when the ice storm halted work on the outlying redoubts he had ordered installed to provide at least a measure of security for that vulnerable flank.

On December 8, the day the freeze set in, he issued a circular order calling for “regular and frequent roll calls … as a preventive of straggling.” He used the term as a euphemism for desertion, which had become a growing problem. Of 296 dismounted troopers reassigned to the infantry, all but 42 protested the indignity by departing without leave: a loss that far outweighed the total of 164 recruits who had joined Hood since he entered Tennessee. All too conscious of the odds he faced, the crippled leader of a crippled army implored Beauregard to forward any stray units he could lay hands on, and even appealed to the War Department to order Kirby Smith to send “two or more divisions” from the Transmississippi. This was a forlorn hope if ever there was one, and Seddon was prompt to tell him so. Besides, even if all the reinforcements he requested had been started in his direction without delay, it was altogether unlikely that they could arrive — even from North Alabama, let alone elsewhere — in time to help him meet the crisis now at hand. Two days later, midway through the ice storm, a follow-up circular warned that it was “highly probable that we will fight a battle before the close of the present year.” Corps commanders were told to look to their defenses and line of retreat; Lee, who had the center, was cautioned to “select all good points in rear of his right and left flanks, and fortify them with strong self-supporting detached works, so that, should it become necessary to withdraw either of the corps now upon his flanks, the flank thus becoming the right or left flank of the army may be in condition to be easily defended.” Furthermore, so important did Hood consider resumption of work on the outlying strongholds, all three lieutenant generals were urged to supervise their construction in person, “not leaving them either to subordinate commanders or engineer officers.”

He did what he could, ice-bound as he was, and three days later, while the thaw converted the sleet to slush and the frozen earth to slime, word came that Thomas had crossed his cavalry from Edgefield, over the Cumberland, to Nashville. He was massing behind his works there, spies reported, for an all-out attack on the Confederate left, where dirty and fair weather had combined to prevent completion of the vital redoubts. Hood warned Stewart to “give Chalmers such assistance as you think necessary, keeping in communication.” Next day, December 14, with the roads beginning to dry a bit, corps commanders were able to begin complying with orders to “send all their wagons, except artillery, ordnance, and ambulances, to the vicinity of Brentwood,” five miles in their rear. At the same time, previous instructions regarding the hoarding of ammunition — in limited supply because of the transportation breakdown — still applied: “Not a cartridge of any kind will be burned until further orders, unless the enemy should advance upon us.”

 4

Thomas intended to do just that: advance: but he was determined not to do so, despite prods and threats from his Washington and City Point superiors, until he felt that his army was in condition to accomplish the annihilation Hood had been inviting ever since he took up his present position, in front of the Tennessee capital, two weeks back. Numerically, the blue force assembled to oppose him had reached that stage before the end of the first week; Thomas by then had gathered 71,842 soldiers under his command, “present for duty, equipped.” Of these, 9000 were at Murfreesboro and about the same number were garrison troops, two thirds of them posted at Nashville and the other third at such outlying points as Johnsonville and Chattanooga, whose complements had been stripped to skeleton proportions. The rest — some 54,000 of all arms — were available as a striking force, and that was the use their commander had in mind to make of them as soon as he judged the time was ripe. A. J. Smith’s 12,000 arrived by transport from Missouri while the battle raged at Franklin, and next morning Schofield marched in with his own 10,000 and Stanley’s 14,000 survivors, now under Wood. Steedman came by rail from Chattanooga, that day and the next, with 6000 more, including a number of veterans who had returned from re-enlistment furloughs too late to march with Sherman to the sea. Finally there was the cavalry, 12,000 strong, though more than a third lacked horses and the others were badly frazzled after a week of contesting Hood’s advance from Duck River to the Harpeth and beyond.

This necessity for resting and refitting his weary troopers, while trying to find mounts for the 4000 Wilson had had to leave behind when he rode out to join Schofield at Columbia, was the principal cause of delay, at least at the outset. In response to a pair of wires from Grant, December 2, urging him to “move out of Nashville with all your army and force the enemy to retire or fight upon ground of your own choosing,” Thomas stressed his need for “a cavalry force sufficient to contend with Forrest,” who had “at least 12,000” veteran horsemen. That was close to twice the Wizard’s actual strength, and roughly six times the number he left with Hood when he departed for Murfreesboro next morning; but Thomas accepted the estimate as a figure to be matched, or at any rate approximated, before he undertook Hood’s destruction. His main problem, even with all of Kentucky at his back, was the procurement of remounts, which were in short supply after more than three years of a war that had been about as hard on horses as it was on men, and broke them down at an even faster rate. Some measure of his difficulty was shown by the response George D. Prentice, the Union-loyal editor of the Louisville Courier, received when he complained to Military Governor Andrew Johnson about the use to which the army had put a $5000 investment he had made in cotton down in Nashville. The bales had been commandeered for installation as part of the capital fortifications; he wanted them back, he wrote Johnson, with something less expensive put in their place. But there was nothing the Vice President-elect could do for him in the matter, having himself just had a fine team of carriage horses seized for conversion to cavalry mounts. Others suffered similar deprivations, including a traveling circus, whose bareback riders were left poised in mid-air, so to speak, and the city’s streetcar line, which had to suspend operations throughout the crisis for lack of mules to draw its cars. All within reach, of whatever crowbait description, were sent across the Cumberland to Edgefield, where Wilson was reorganizing and getting his troopers in shape for their share in the deferred offensive against the rebels intrenched southward, in plain view from Capitol Hill and the high-sited forts that rimmed the city in that direction.

All this required time, however, and time was the one thing his superiors did not consider he, or they, could afford at the present critical juncture; especially Grant. Halleck kept warning Thomas that their chief was losing patience, but the Virginian’s files contained by then a sheaf of dispatches that made only too clear the City Point general’s feelings in that regard. “You will now suffer incalculable injury upon your railroads if Hood is not speedily disposed of. Put forth, therefore, every possible exertion.” “Hood should be attacked where he is. Time strengthens him, in all probability, as much as it does you.” “Attack Hood at once, and wait no longer for a remount of your cavalry. There is great danger of delay resulting in a campaign back to the Ohio River.” “Why not attack at once? By all means avoid the contingency of a foot race to see which, you or Hood, can beat to the Ohio.” Thus Grant fumed through the first week of the Tennessee stalemate. Thomas’s replies, over that same span — in which he spoke of his “crippled condition” and promised to move out, first, “in a few days,” then within “less than a week,” and finally by December 7, “if I can perfect my arrangements” — only goaded his chief into greater exasperation. Moreover, Halleck by now was warning that continued inaction might lead to his removal. Thomas replied that he regretted Grant’s “dissatisfaction at my delay in attacking the enemy. I feel conscious that I have done everything in my power.… If he should order me to be relieved I will submit without a murmur.” That was on December 9, and he closed with a weather report that seemed to him to rule out, at least for the present, any further talk of an advance. “A terrible storm of freezing rain has come on since daylight, which will render an attack impossible until it breaks.”

He also passed news of this to Grant. “I had nearly completed my preparations to attack the enemy tomorrow morning, but a terrible storm of freezing rain has come on today, which will make it impossible for our men to fight to any advantage. I am, therefore, compelled to wait for the storm to break and make the attempt immediately after.” And he added: “Major General Halleck informs me that you are very much dissatisfied with my delay in attacking. I can only say I have done all in my power to prepare, and if you should deem it necessary to relieve me I shall submit without a murmur.” Alas, the reply he received that night was, if anything, even more chill and grudging than the others. “I have as much confidence in your conducting a battle rightly as I have in any other officer,” Grant informed the Rock of Chickamauga, “but it has seemed to me that you have been slow, and I have had no explanation of affairs to convince me otherwise.… I telegraphed to suspend the order relieving you until we should hear further. I hope most sincerely that there will be no necessity for repeating the order, and that the facts will show that you have been right all the time.”

Thomas was hard put to comprehend how Grant, five hundred miles away in front of Richmond — stalemated himself, not for a week but for the past six months — could presume to say what was practicable for a conglomerate army, so hastily and recently assembled under a man who was a stranger to more than half its members. However, his chief of staff, Brigadier General William Whipple, an old-line West Pointer, had a theory that someone hereabouts was “using the wires to undermine his commander” in Washington or City Point or both. At first he suspected Andrew Johnson, but on being informed that the governor was too brusque and aboveboard for such tactics, he shifted to Schofield as a likelier candidate for the Judas role. Sure enough, a prowling staffer picked up at the telegraph office the original of a recent message from the New Yorker to Grant: “Many officers here are of the opinion that General Thomas is certainly slow in his movements.” Thomas read it with considerable surprise, then turned to James Steedman, who was with him at the time. “Steedman, can it be possible that Schofield would send such a telegram?” Steedman, whose share in the glory of Chickamauga had been second only to his chief’s, replied that he must surely be familiar with his own general’s writing. Thomas put on his glasses and examined the message carefully. “Yes, it is General Schofield’s handwriting,” he admitted, and asked, puzzled: “Why does he send such telegrams?” Steedman smiled at the Virginian’s guileless nature, uncorrupted by twenty-four years of exposure to army politics. “General Thomas,” he presently asked, “who is next in command to you in case of removal?” Thomas hung fire for a moment. “Oh, I see,” he said at last, and shook his head at what he saw.

In point of fact, there was more behind Grant’s exasperation, and a good deal more had come of it, than Thomas or anyone else in Tennessee had any way of knowing. Prodded by Stanton, who translated Lincoln’s trepidation into sneers at “the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country,” Grant said later, in confirmation of earlier testimony by his aide: “I was never so anxious during the war as at that time.” Indeed, under pressure of this anxiety, he lost his accustomed military balance. His fret, of course, was not only for Slow Trot Thomas, out in Nashville; it was also for Sherman, who had not yet emerged from his trans-Georgia tunnel, and for Butler, who continued to resist being hurried down the coast to Wilmington. Worst of all, he saw the possibility of the war being turned around just at the moment when he believed it was practically won. “If I had been in Hood’s place,” he afterwards declared, “I would have gone to Louisville and on north until I came to Chicago.” Taking counsel of his fears, he had told Halleck on December 8: “If Thomas has not struck yet, he ought to be ordered to hand over the command to Schofield.” Old Brains replied that if this was what Grant wanted he would have to issue orders to that effect. “The responsibility, however, will be yours, as no one here, so far as I am informed, wishes General Thomas’s removal.” Grant drew back: “I would not say relieve him until I hear further from him.” But there was no let-up in the telegraphic goading. “If you delay attack longer,” he wired the Virginian on December 11, three days into the ice storm, “the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a rebel army moving for the Ohio River, and you will be forced to act, accepting such weather as you find.… Delay no longer for weather or reinforcements.”

Thomas’s reply, delivered the following morning — “I will obey the order as promptly as possible, however much I may regret it, as the attack will have to be made under every disadvantage. The whole country is covered with a perfect sheet of ice and sleet, and it is with difficulty the troops are able to move about on level ground” — exhausted what little patience Grant had left. “As promptly as possible” was far from a commitment, and the rest of the message seemed to imply that the blame for any failure, when and if the attack was launched, could not properly be placed on a commander who had done his best to resist untimely orders. Grant reacted by concluding that the hour was at hand for a change in Middle Tennessee commanders.

As it happened, John A. Logan was visiting City Point headquarters at the time, on leave from his corps, which had reached the outskirts of Savannah two days ago; he was still celebrating the national election, which he had helped the Administration win, and he still was trying to digest the disappointment he felt at not having been appointed to succeed McPherson as permanent head of the Army of the Tennessee. George Thomas had been instrumental in keeping him from receiving that reward, so there was a certain poetic justice in what Grant now had in mind; which was to make Logan the Virginian’s own successor. He told him so next day, December 13, when he gave him a written order to that effect, along with verbal instructions to proceed at once by rail to Nashville, going by way of Washington and Louisville. If by the time he reached the latter place Thomas had attacked, Logan was to remain there and get in touch with Grant by telegraph. Otherwise he would proceed to Nashville and take over, as directed in the order.

Logan had no sooner left than Grant began to fret anew. Black Jack was unquestionably a fighter; indeed, that was why he had been chosen; plus, of course, the fact that he was handy at the time. But perhaps, as Sherman had indicated by passing him over for Howard after the Battle of Atlanta, he lacked other qualities indispensable in the commander of an army and a department; in which case personal supervision was required. That day, that night, and most of the day that followed — December 14; Ben Butler had finally departed for Wilmington and the powder-boat explosion he believed would abolish Fort Fisher — Grant pondered his way to a decision he reached by sundown. “I am unexpectedly called away,” he told Meade in a last-minute note, and got aboard a fast packet for Washington, where he expected to catch the first train west. Arriving next morning he read a telegram Thomas had sent Halleck the night before: “The ice having melted away today, the enemy will be attacked tomorrow morning.” Grant decided the best thing to do was suspend his journey and await the outcome, which he would learn from Logan at Louisville or Nashville, or from Thomas himself, before the day was over.

Accordingly, he checked into Willard’s to wait in comfort; but not for long. Presently there was word from Halleck that Old Slow Trot had advanced as promised, with conspicuous success, although the battle was still in progress. “Well, I guess we won’t go to Nashville,” Grant remarked, passing the message to an aide, and then composed for Thomas an order so characteristic that it scarcely needed a signature: “Push the enemy and give him no rest until he is entirely destroyed.… Do not stop for trains or supplies, but take them from the country as the enemy has done. Much is now expected.”

Much was expected. In downtown Nashville, five days ago, the Virginian had said more or less the same thing to his chief subordinates when they assembled in his quarters at the St Cloud Hotel on December 10, midway through the ice storm, to receive preliminary instructions for the attack they would launch as soon as the rebel-occupied hills to the south unfroze enough for climbing. Close to twenty miles of intricate Federal intrenchments stretched from bend to bend of the Cumberland, including seven that ran in a secondary line a mile behind the first-line right and center, manned by the 8000 garrison and service troops under Chief Quartermaster J. L. Donaldson, a fifty-year-old West Pointer who had been awarded the brevet rank of brigadier. When the jump-off came, these would move forward and take over the works in their front, simultaneously guarding against a counterstroke and freeing well over half the 54,000 combat soldiers now arrayed in a long arc, east to west, under Steedman, Schofield, Wood, A. J. Smith, and Wilson, for the assault and the pursuit that was to follow the dip-lodgment. First off, Steedman would feint against the enemy right, drawing Hood’s attention away from the main effort, which would then be made against his left by Smith and Wood in a grand left wheel, with Wilson’s troopers shielding the outer flank and Schofield’s two divisions waiting in reserve to be committed in either direction. Thus, with Donaldson’s and Steedman’s men employed on the defensive and the remaining 48,000 available for offensive use against barely half their number, Thomas had been able to plan something more than the usual massing of troops for a breakthrough at a single point. Instead, his line of battle would be of practically equal strength throughout its length as it swung forward gatelike, south and southeast, inexorably crunching whatever it encountered. In this way, once a thaw set in, the ponderous Virginian intended not only to defeat Hood, there on the ground where he stood, but also to destroy him in the process.

West Pointers all, except the battle-tested Steedman, the six lieutenants gave full approval to the plan, although Schofield expressed some disappointment at the comparatively minor role assigned his corps in the attack. He had nothing to say, however, regarding another matter that came up when Thomas told of the pressure being exerted on him to advance before he judged his cavalry was ready or the ground was fit for maneuver. Speaking first, as was customary for the junior at such councils, Wilson quickly protested any suggestion of a commitment until the ice had melted from the pikes and hillsides. “If I were occupying such an intrenched line as Hood’s with my dismounted cavalrymen, each armed with nothing more formidable than a basket of brickbats,” he declared, “I would agree to defeat the whole Confederate army if it should advance to the attack under such circumstances.” Four of the other five generals (Donaldson and Smith, fifty and forty-nine respectively, were older than their chief, while Steedman and Wood, at forty-seven and forty-one, were younger) were similarly outspoken on the subject of untimely haste, and Schofield, who was thirty-three, concurred at least to the extent of keeping silent. With that, the conference adjourned; whereupon Thomas, after asking Wilson to remain behind — ostensibly for further instructions, but actually to thank him for his exuberant support — confided sadly: “Wilson, the Washington authorities treat me as if I was a boy.” Thus, for the first and only time, the stolid Virginian, reported to be as ponderous of mind as he was of body, demonstrated some measure of the resentment he felt at being prodded and lectured by Grant and Halleck, neither of whom was within five hundred miles of the scene of the action they kept insisting was overdue. Having said as much, even if only in confidence to a subordinate barely three months past his twenty-seventh birthday, he seemed to experience a certain lift of spirits. “If they will just let me alone, I will show them what we can do. I am sure my plan of operations is correct, and that we shall lick the enemy if only he stays to receive our attack.”

There was little to fear on the last count, however, since the condition of the roads precluded a Confederate withdrawal quite as much as it did a Federal advance. Thomas received confirmation of this when, two days later — in partial compliance with Grant’s telegraphic order the day before: “Delay no longer for weather or reinforcements” — he had Wilson begin the movement of his troopers across the river from Edgefield. Rough-shod though they were for surer footing, a considerable number of horses slipped and fell on the icy bridge and cobbled streets, injuring their riders as well as themselves in the course of the crossing by the four divisions to take position in rear of A. J. Smith on the far right. “The Yankees brought their weather as well as their army with them,” Nashvillians were saying, watching men and mounts topple and thrash about on the sleety pavement, with much attendant damage to knees and dispositions. Thomas was watching, too, as the freeze continued into its fourth day. An aide told how the thick-set army commander, glumly stroking his gray-shot whiskers and brooding under his massive overhang of brow, “would sometimes sit by the window for an hour or more, not speaking a word, gazing steadily out upon the forbidding prospect, as if he were trying to will the storm away.”

He seemed to have succeeded the following day, December 13, when a warm rain began melting the sleet that rimed the hills and caked the hollows. Indeed, he seemed to have known he would succeed; for only last night he had passed out written orders for the attack, explaining that it would be launched as soon as a thaw provided footing for the troops. Each man was to be issued three days’ rations and sixty rounds of ammunition, while supply and ordnance wagons were to be fully loaded and double-teamed, ready to roll at a moment’s notice. Next morning the sun came out, glittering on what little ice remained, and even began to dry the roads a bit. At 3 o’clock that afternoon Thomas reassembled the corps commanders in his quarters and discussed with them the details of his plan. By way of revision, Steedman was told to convert his feint into a real attack, if he found reason to believe one would succeed, and Schofield was placated with assurance that his veterans were only being required to stay their hand for delivery of the knockout blow, which would be landed as soon as the enemy had been set up for the kill. Reveille would sound at 4 a.m. in all the camps, allowing time for the designated units to breakfast and be poised for the jump-off two hours later, at first light; “or as soon thereafter as practicable,” the orders read.

That night, having sent a wire to Halleck announcing tomorrow’s long-deferred attack, Thomas left a call at the St Cloud desk for 5 o’clock, and when it came — an hour before dawn, two hours before sunrise, December 15 — went down to the lobby, checked out, and after handing his packed suitcase to an orderly mounted his horse for the three-mile ride to the front: specifically to Lawrence Hill, a high salient jutting out from the left of Wood’s position in the center. This was to be the pivot for the “grand left wheel,” and it also would afford him a clear view of most of the field, including Montgomery Hill, a somewhat lower eminence directly opposite, where the rebels had established a matching salient less than half a mile away.

It would have afforded a view, that is, except for the fog that rose from the warming earth to hold back the dawn and obscure the sun when it came up beyond Steedman’s position, an hour past the time originally scheduled for the attack to open there. Still another hour went by before the first shots broke the cotton-wrapped stillness on the left; but Thomas did not fret at the delay. He was convinced there would be time enough, despite the brevity of mid-December daylight, to accomplish all he had in mind. Besides, he did not need to see the field to know it, having studied it carefully in the past from this same observation post, as well as on maps in the small-hours quiet of his room. Four of the eight main thoroughfares, radiating spokelike from the city in his rear, were open or scantly obstructed; the Lebanon and Murfreesboro turnpikes on the left, the Charlotte and Harding turnpikes on the right, were available for use by the superior blue force in moving out to strike the flanks of Hood’s four-mile line of intrenchments, which covered the other four main-traveled roads, the Nolensville Pike on his right, the Hillsboro Pike on his left, and the Franklin and Granny White pikes between, running nearly due south in his rear. If Thomas could sweep wide around the rebel flank to seize and hold the latter two, meantime pinning his adversary in position on the hills confronting the Union fortifications, he could then, with better than twice as many troops and something over three times as many guns, destroy him at his leisure. That was just what he intended to do, once the delays were overcome and the crunch got under way.

It seemed however, at least for a time, that there would be no end to the delays, caused first by the fog, which held up the advance on the left till 8 o’clock, two hours behind schedule, and then by the initial attack there, which stalled almost as soon as it got started. Cheatham’s corps, posted on Rains Hill, beside the Nolensville Pike, and on to a steep-banked railway cut beyond, held firm against repeated assaults by Steedman’s three brigades, each about the size of a Confederate division. Two were composed of Negro troops, the first to be committed offensively in the western theater since the bloody repulse at Port Hudson, nearly twenty months ago — and the outcome here was much the same, as it turned out. Crossing Brown’s Creek, whose banks were shoe-top deep in mud, they encountered the remnant of Granbury’s Texas brigade of Cleburne’s division, well dug in but numbering fewer than 500 survivors, and were badly cut up in a crossfire. They fell back “in a rather disorderly manner,” one regimental commander admitted; then came on again. This continued, with much the same result, for two hours. Thomas, watching from his command post now that the mist had thinned and drifted off in tendrils, was not discouraged by the failure to gain ground with what had been intended as a feint in any case. Steedman apparently had not drawn Hood’s reserves eastward to meet the threat, but at least he was keeping Cheatham occupied with only about an equal number of men — which helped to stretch the odds at the opposite end of the line, where the main effort was to be exerted. Hopefully, Thomas looked in that direction: only to find that, on the right as on the left, a snag had delayed the execution of his well-laid plan.

Beyond Wood’s right, in rear of Smith and beyond his right in turn, Wilson’s troopers awaited the signal to advance. A third of them, still without horses, would fight dismounted — supplementary infantry, so to speak — while the other 9000, armed to a man with the new seven-shot carbine repeater, comprised a highly mobile strike force. But Thomas no sooner ordered them forward, around 8.30, than the horsemen found both turnpikes blocked by one of Smith’s divisions, which he was unexpectedly shifting eastward, across their front, for a closer link with Wood. For more than an hour Wilson fumed and fretted, champing at the bit until at last the slow-trudging foot soldiers cleared his path and let him get on with his task of rimming the “grand wheel.” It was close to 10 o’clock by the time he moved out the Harding and Charlotte pikes to take position in Smith’s front and on his outer flank.

The last wisps of fog had burned away by then, and well in rear of the advancing columns, along and behind the lofty fortress-studded double curve of intrenchments, spectators crowded the hilltops for a panoramic view of the show about to open on the right. Three years ago, before the occupation that followed hard on the fall of Donelson to Grant, Nashville had had a population of less than 30,000. Now it had better than three times that many residents: “nearly all of whom” — despite this triplicate influx of outsiders — “were in sympathy with the Confederacy,” a Federal general observed. When he looked back and saw them clustered wherever the view was best, anticipating carnage, it crossed his mind that any applause that might come from those high-perched galleries was unlikely to be for him or the blue-clad men he rode among. “All the hills in our rear were black with human beings watching the battle, but silent. No army on the continent ever played on any field to so large and so sullen an audience.”

What followed was still preliminary, for a time at any rate. Wilson and Smith, with a combined strength of 24,000 sabers and bayonets in their seven divisions, had small trouble driving Rucker’s and Ector’s outpost brigades — respectively from Chalmers’ and French’s divisions, and containing fewer than 2000 men between them, mounted and afoot — down the two pikes and over Richland Creek, where they could offer little or no resistance to the massive wheeling movement soon in progress across their front. By noon, so smoothly did the maneuver work once it got under way, the two blue corps were beyond the Harding Pike, confronting the mile-long extension of Hood’s left down the Hillsboro Pike from the angle where his line bent sharply south in rear of Montgomery Hill. A low stone wall afforded cover for the division of graybacks crouched behind it on the east side of the road, and three unfinished redoubts bristled with guns on the side toward the Federals, who were massing to continue their advance across the remaining stretch of muddy, stump-pocked fields. Half the daylight had been used in getting set for the big push designed to bring on Hood’s destruction. Now the other half remained for its execution.

Moreover, Thomas had another 24,000 standing by under Wood and Schofield, whose five divisions made up the other half of his right-wing strike force, awaiting orders to double the weight of the mass about to be thrown against Hood’s left. These were the men who had stood fast at Franklin, and Wood, who had succeeded there to command of the army’s largest corps when Stanley took a bullet through the neck, wanted nothing so much as he did an opportunity to wipe out the stain that had marred his record ever since he complied with instructions to “close up on Reynolds” at Chickamauga, thereby creating the gap through which Longstreet’s troops had plunged. Still a brigadier, despite the mettle he had proved at Missionary Ridge and Lovejoy Station, he wanted above all a chance to show what he could do on his own. And here at Nashville he got it, just past noon, when word came down for him to execute his share of the grand wheel. All morning he had stood on Lawrence Hill, the pivotal center, obliged to contribute nothing more to the battle than long-range artillery fire, while Steedman and Wilson and Smith moved out, flags aflutter, on the left and on the right. Now that his turn had come, he was determined to make the most of it by storming the enemy works on Montgomery Hill, just opposite his command post.

This was by no means as difficult an undertaking as it appeared to be from where he stood. Five days ago, screened by the blinding fall of sleet, Hood had had Stewart withdraw his main line half a mile rearward, from the brow to the reverse slope of Montgomery Hill, leaving no more than a skeleton crew to man the works established on his arrival, two weeks back. Old Straight had only two full divisions on hand there anyhow, since one of French’s three brigades was Ector’s, on outpost duty two miles west, and another had been detached to guard the mouth of Duck River, lest Union gunboats penetrate the region in Hood’s rear. French himself, a victim of failing eyesight, had departed just that morning, leaving only his third brigade, under Brigadier General Claudius Sears, posted between Walthall’s division on the left and Loring’s on the right. Stewart thus had barely 4800 men in the path of the 48,000 earmarked by Thomas for the execution of his grand left wheel.

Shortly after 12.30 Loring’s pickets looked out from the all-but-abandoned trenches along the crest of the hill, midway between the two main lines of battle, and saw Wood’s infantry coming toward them, out of the intervening valley and up the hillside. “The sharp rattle of fifty-caliber rifles sound [ed] like a canebrake on fire,” one of the handful of defenders was to say. He and his fellows gave the advancing throng a couple of volleys, then scuttled rearward. Wood, peering intently from his command post on the far side of the valley, was impressed by what he saw. “When the grand array of troops began to move forward in unison,” he would write in his report, “the pageant was magnificently grand and imposing. Far as the eye could reach, the lines and masses of blue, over which the national emblem flaunted proudly, moved forward in such perfect order that the heart of the patriot might easily draw from it the happy presage of the coming glorious victory.” What pleased him most, apparently, was the progress made by the lead brigade of his old division, now under Brigadier General Samuel Beatty. Recalling its surge up the hillside in advance of all the rest, he waxed Homeric. “At the command, as sweeps the stiff gale over the ocean, driving every object before it, so swept the brigade up the wooded slope, over the enemy’s intrenchments; and the hill was won.”

What was won in fact was the crest of the hill and a line of empty trenches, not the new main line resistance, half a mile beyond, which held firm under the follow-up attack. Hood, having avoided being drawn off balance by the secondary effort against his right, saw clearly enough his adversary’s true over-all intention, and on hearing from Stewart that his portion of the line — the critical left, already menaced by masses of bluecoats, north and west — was “stretched to its utmost tension,” did what he could to reduce the lengthening odds in that direction. Stephen Lee, whose corps had scarcely fired a shot from its central position, was told to send Johnson’s division to bolster the left, and similar orders went to Cheatham, who was having little trouble containing Steedman’s effort on the right, to send Bate’s division there as well. Whether they would arrive in time was another matter; Wood’s assault had no sooner been launched against Stewart’s front than Smith and Wilson resumed their combined advance upon his flank. Hard on the heels of this, moreover, Thomas passed the word for Schofield to join in the attack, bringing the total right-wheel commitment to just under 50,000 of all arms. That was better than twice the number Hood had on hand in his entire command, and roughly ten times as many as Stewart would have in his depleted corps until reinforcements reached him.

One unit had arrived by then as a reinforcement, albeit a small one: Ector’s 700-man brigade, which came in from the west around 11 o’clock, after being driven back across Richland Creek by Smith and Wilson. Appealed to by the occupants of one of the redoubts short of the Hillsboro Pike, who urged them to join in its defense, the winded veterans replied: “It can’t be done. There’s a whole army in your front,” and kept going, taking position on the left of Walthall, whose three brigades were strung out behind the stone wall running south along the far side of the pike. Such words were far from encouraging to the troops in the three redoubts, each of which was built on rising ground and contained a four-gun battery, manned by fifty cannoneers and supported by about twice that number of infantry lodged in shallow trenches alongside the uncompleted breastworks. These miniature garrisons had been told to hold out “at all hazards,” and they were determined to do so, knowing they were all that stood between Hood’s unshored left flank and the Federals who soon were massing to the west and northwest after completing the first stage of their grand wheel. Between noon and 1 o’clock, while Wood’s attack exploded northward beyond the loom of Montgomery Hill, Wilson and Smith opened fire with their rifled batteries at a range of just under half a mile. The defenders replied as best they could with their dozen smoothbores, but hoarded their energy and ammunition for the close-up work that would follow when the dark blue mass, already in attack formation and biding its time through the bombardment, moved against them.

As it turned out, these three redoubts, numbered 3 and 4 and 5 — 1 and 2 lay northward, east of the pike, where Stewart’s line bent south — held up the next stage of the wheeling movement, here on the Federal right, even longer than fog had delayed the jump-off on the left. For close to an hour the Union gunners made things hot for the clustered graybacks, who could do little more than hug their shell-jarred works and wait their turn. This came around 1.30 when the iron rain let up and the multiwaved assault rolled within range of their 12-pounders. Flailed ragged along its near edge by double-shotted canister, the blue flood paused in front of Redoubts 3 and 4, but not for long in front of Redoubt 5, which was unsupported on its outer flank, three quarters of a mile beyond the end of Walthall’s line. Wilson’s rapid-firing troopers, charging dismounted — somewhat awkwardly, it was true, for no one had thought to tell them to leave their low-slung cavalry sabers behind — rushed past it on the left and right and swamped it from the rear. They had no sooner done so, though, than they received a high-angle salvo from Redoubt 4, next up the line, where Captain Charles Lumsden’s Alabama battery was supported by a hundred Alabama infantry. Lumsden, a V.M.I. graduate and one-time commandant of cadets at the University of Alabama, had already notified Stewart that he and his men, with a combined strength of 148, were likely to be swept away in short order, once the enemy pressed the issue. Old Straight’s reply: “Hold on as long as you can,” was followed to the letter. Firing front and flank with their brass Napoleons and rifles, the Alabamians held fast against the menace of a dozen regiments from Smith and four from Wilson. In the end, nearly three hours past the opening of the preliminary bombardment, the attackers came tumbling between the fuming guns, bayonets flashing, carbines a-clatter. “Take care of yourselves, boys!” Lumsden called out, and the survivors trotted back to the main line, half a mile rearward, prepared to join in its defense against the final stage of the blue assault.

Two of Johnson’s brigades had arrived by then from Lee’s corps in the center, and Old Clubby was on the way with the other two, while Bate hurried westward from the far right, sent by Cheatham on orders from Hood to help shore up the hard-pressed left. Even if both divisions arrived in time, however, they would do little to reduce the odds; Schofield had come up, across the way, and was taking position on Smith’s right to overlap Stewart’s extension of his line down the Hillsboro Pike. It was now past 3 o’clock. While the Federal batteries displaced forward, beyond fallen Redoubt 4, to try their hand at knocking down the stone fence Walthall’s men were crouched behind, Smith’s left division, commanded by Brigadier General John McArthur, advanced upon and captured Redoubt 3. Taken promptly under fire by Redoubt 2, across the pike, McArthur — a Scotch-born former blacksmith who had prospered as the proprietor of a Chicago ironworks and had served with bristly distinction in most of the western campaigns — stormed and took the companion work as well, turning its guns on nearby Redoubt 1, already under heavy pressure from two of Wood’s divisions.

If this went, all went: Stewart knew that, and so did Wood, who had ordered two six-gun batteries advanced to bring converging, almost point-blank fire to bear on the angle where Sears’s brigade was posted, hinge-like, between Walthall and Loring. Then at 4 o’clock, after a good half hour’s pounding by these dozen guns, Wood told Brigadier General Washington Elliott — Wagner’s replacement after Franklin — to assault the rebel salient with his division “at all costs.” At 4.30, angered by the delay, which Elliott claimed was needed to give Smith’s corps time to come up on his right, Wood passed the word for Kimball to make the strike instead. Kimball did so, promptly and with what his superior later called “the most exalted enthusiasm.” As his troops entered the works from the northeast, followed closely by the tardy Elliott’s, McArthur’s flank brigade came storming in from the west to assist in the reduction, together with the capture of four guns, four stands of colors, and “numerous prisoners.”

Mainly these last were laggards or members of the forlorn hope, left behind to cover the withdrawal of the main body of defenders. Stewart, foreseeing disaster — both on his left, which was considerably overlapped by Schofield, and in his center, where the hinge was about to buckle under pressure from Wood and Smith — had just ordered a pull-back to a new position shielding the vital Granny White Pike, a mile in rear of the line that now was crumbling along the Hillsboro Pike and the near slope of Montgomery Hill. Despite the panic in certain units, what followed between sunset at 4.45 and full darkness, one hour later, was not a rout. Johnson’s two advance brigades, posted in extension of Walthall’s left before the fall of Redoubt 4, came unglued when the Federals charged them, and Ector’s brigade was cut off from the rest of Stewart’s corps, northward beyond the gap their flight created. Elsewhere, though, Walthall’s and Loring’s veterans responded in good order to instructions for disengagement. Up in the critical angle, under assault from two directions, Sears managed to pull most of his men out, avoiding capture, but as they fell back he turned to study the lost post with his binoculars and was struck in the right leg by a well-aimed solid, perhaps from one of his abandoned guns. He fell heavily, then was hustled off to an aid station, where surgeons removed his mangled leg that night. Meantime Stewart, reinforced at last by Bate and Johnson’s other two brigades, got his two divisions realigned in a southward prolongation of Lee’s unshaken left, helped by the jubilant confusion of the Federals, who were about as disorganized by their sudden twilight victory as his own troops were by their defeat.

Hood was there, too, intent on shoring up this battered third of his army. He had lost 16 guns today, along with some 2200 soldiers, more than half of them made prisoner in the collapse of his left wing, the rest killed or wounded here and on the right, which had stood firm. Meeting Ector’s peripatetic brigade as it fell back from its second cut-off position, across the Hillsboro Pike from Redoubt 5, he spoke briefly to the men and led them nearly a mile eastward to a hill that loomed just short of the Granny White Pike. Four of the six regiments were one-time Texas cavalry outfits, long since dismounted for lack of horses and down to about a hundred men apiece.

“Texans,” he said, “I want you to hold this hill regardless of what transpires around you.”

They looked at the hill, then back at Hood, and nodded. “We’ll do it, General,” they told him.

*  *  *

Union and Confederate, the lines ran helter-skelter in the dusk. Still on Lawrence Hill, Thomas watched his army’s campfires blossom where rebel fires had burned the night before. Except for unexpected delays — caused first by the fog, then by Smith’s last-minute adjustment of his front, which held up the start of the grand wheel, and finally by the prolonged resistance of the flimsy enemy redoubts west of the Hillsboro Pike — he was convinced he would have achieved the Cannae he had planned for, and expected, until darkness caught up with the attackers before they could complete the massive turning movement he had designed to cut off Hood’s retreat. In any case, not being much given to dwelling on regrets, he perceived that the best course now was for all units to bivouac where they were, in preparation for taking up their unfinished work tomorrow, well rested from the day-long exertions that had put them where they were tonight, practically within reach of the only two unseized turnpikes leading south. Just how far they would have to go, before the battle was resumed, would depend on what progress Hood’s beaten troops could make on the muddy roads toward Franklin and the Harpeth — if, indeed, they were in any condition to move at all — before daylight and better than 50,000 Federals overtook them.

Returning to Nashville for a good night’s sleep in a proper bed, Thomas got off to Halleck at 9 o’clock a telegram that somehow managed to be at once both ponderous and exuberant. “I attacked the enemy’s left this morning and drove it from the river, below the city, very nearly to the Franklin Pike, a distance [of] about eight miles.… The troops behaved splendidly, all taking their share in assaulting and carrying the enemy’s breastworks. I shall attack the enemy again tomorrow, if he stands to fight, and, if he retreats during the night, will pursue him, throwing a heavy cavalry force in his rear, to destroy his trains, if possible.” A reply from Edwin Stanton himself, sent three hours later, hailed “the brilliant achievements of this day” as “the harbinger of a decisive victory that will crown you and your army with honor and do much toward closing the war. We shall give you a hundred guns in the morning.” From Grant there came two wires, sent fifteen minutes apart, between 11.30 and midnight. “Much is now expected,” the first ended, and the second had rather the nature of an afterthought — a brief correction of, if not quite an apology for, a lapse in manners. “I congratulate you and the army under your command for today’s operations, and feel a conviction that tomorrow will add more fruits to your victory.”

Closer at hand, there were those who did not share this conviction. Receiving after dark Thomas’s order, “which was in substance to pursue the retreating enemy next morning,” Schofield took alarm at the thought that such evident overconfidence, in addition to costing the army its half-won victory, might also expose it to defeat. He had supplied the crowning blow today, coming in hard around the crumpled rebel left at sunset, but he was by no means convinced that what had been delivered was a knockout punch, as his superior seemed to think. In fact he did not believe for a minute that Hood was in retreat. For all he knew, his former roommate was even then planning a first-light strike at one of the Union flanks: most likely his own, though both were more or less exposed. “He’ll hit you like hell, now, before you know it,” he had warned Sherman when Hood first took over, down around Atlanta five months ago, and it seemed to him, from the order just received, that Thomas needed reminding of that danger. Accordingly, he called for his horse and rode through the darkness to headquarters, back in Nashville, where he found the Virginian about to retire for the night. “You don’t know Hood,” he protested earnestly. “He’ll be right there, ready to fight you in the morning.”

Thomas knew Hood a good deal better than Schofield seemed to think; but even so this warning gave him pause. And having paused he acted in revision of his plans. Previously he had alerted his cavalry for a fast ride south at the first glimmer of the coming day, his purpose being to cut the retreating graybacks off, or anyhow bring them to a halt before they crossed the Harpeth, and thus expose them to slaughter without the protection of that river barrier, which might oblige the blue pursuers to fight a second Franklin, in reverse. Now instead he sent word for Wilson to “remain in your present position until it is satisfactorily known whether the enemy will fight or retreat.” That would help cover his right, where the troopers had drawn rein at nightfall, and by way of further insurance he had A. J. Smith send one of his three divisions to reinforce Schofield on that flank, in case Hood really was planning the dawn assault his one-time roommate feared. This done, Thomas at last turned in for the good night’s sleep he had prescribed for his whole army.

There was little or no rest, however, for the gray-clad troops across the way: not because they were on the march, as Thomas had presumed, but because they were digging — digging in. Schofield was right, at least in part: Hood had chosen to stay and fight, if only on the defensive. The crumpling of his left today, while the other two thirds of his army stood firm, had by no means convinced him that the enemy host, for all its heavy numerical advantage, was capable of driving him headlong from the field: whereas a Federal repulse, here at the capital gates, might still afford him an opening for the counterstroke on which his hopes were pinned. Moreover, the position he retired to, just under two miles south, was so much stronger than the first — especially in man-saving compactness, though it covered only two of the eight converging turnpikes — that the wonder was he had not occupied it at the outset, when he came within sight of Nashville, two weeks ago tomorrow.

Despite the confusion attending the sunset collapse of his defenses along the Hillsboro Pike and across Montgomery Hill, the nighttime withdrawal to this new line was accomplished in good order. Lee’s corps, which had scarcely been engaged today except for part of Johnson’s division, simply fell back two miles down the Franklin Pike to Overton Hill, east of the road, where the new right flank was anchored. The left was just over two miles away, beyond the Granny White Pike, and its main salient was the hill on which Hood had posted Ector’s brigade at twilight (Shy’s Hill, it would afterwards be called for young Lieutenant Colonel William Shy, who would die on its crown tomorrow at the head of his Tennessee regiment); Cheatham, whose losses had also been light today, occupied this critical height, his flank bent south around its western slope. In the center, disposed along a range of hills between the outer two, Stewart’s diminished corps took position and began to prepare for the resumption of the battle, as the others were doing on the right and left, by scraping out shallow trenches and using the spoil to pile up breastworks along that low range lying midway between Brentwood, less than four miles south, and the Nashville fortifications. Like Ector’s Texans, who by now had been joined by Bate’s division on its arrival from the right, they were determined to give Hood all he asked of them, though they had trouble understanding why he did so with two turnpikes leading unobstructed to the crossing of the Harpeth, barely a dozen miles in their rear.

Dawn found them settled in, weary from their all-night toil but confident, as one division commander said, that their improvised works were “impervious to ordinary shots.” Extraordinary shots presumably would have to be taken as they came, but at any rate Chalmers had combined his two brigades in Cheatham’s rear, where his troopers were in position to help fend off a repetition of yesterday’s overlapping assault upon that flank. Still, for all his determination not to be hustled into disorderly retreat, Hood knew the odds he faced and was quite aware of what they might portend. Accordingly, he ordered all wagons to proceed at first light to the Harpeth, clearing the narrow gorges in his rear, and soon afterwards, at 8 o’clock, sent warning notes to all three corps commanders, specifying that “should any disaster happen to us today,” Lee would hold fast on the Franklin Pike, until Stewart had moved down it, and Cheatham would take the Granny White Pike, his withdrawal covered by Chalmers. Minor adjustments were made in the line, which was only half as long as the one the day before, but most of the morning was spent in idle waiting by the graybacks for the shock that would come when Thomas resumed his effort to destroy them where they stood.

The slowness of the Federals in getting back to grips with their opponents was due to the scattered condition of the army when it bedded down the night before. On the right, Wilson and Schofield were in reasonable proximity to Cheatham on Shy’s Hill, and so presently, on the left, was Steedman in relation to Lee, whose skirmishers he encountered as he approached Overton Hill, east of the Franklin Pike, around midmorning. It was in the center, in particular the right center, that the worst delays occurred; Smith and Wood were at right angles to each other, and neither knew, when the day began, whether the rebels had pulled out in the night, or, if not, what position Hood had chosen for another stand. By the time they found out, and got their troops aligned for the confrontation, noon had come and action had opened on the left. This was as it had been the day before, except that at no stage of the planning was Steedman’s effort, reinforced by one of Wood’s divisions, intended as a feint. His orders called for the Confederates to be “vigorously pressed and unceasingly harrassed,” for if Hood’s right could be turned and “his line of retreat along the Franklin Pike and the valley leading to Brentwood commanded effectually,” Thomas would succeed today in bringing off the Cannae he had intended yesterday. The result, here on the Union left, was the bloodiest fighting of the two-day battle.

Two of Lee’s divisions, under Major Generals Henry Clayton and Carter Stevenson, not only had scarcely been engaged the day before, they had not even taken part in the assault at Franklin, and their conduct here today, astride the Franklin Pike and on the crest of Overton Hill, gave some notion of what Hood’s whole army might have accomplished at the gates of Nashville, just over two weeks later, if it had been spared the late-November holocaust that cost it 6000 of its best men, including Pat Cleburne and a dozen other brigade and division commanders. At full strength, both in numbers and morale, these five brigades — reinforced by a sixth from Johnson, whose division was on their left, adjoining Stewart’s corps in the center — stood off, between noon and 3 o’clock, a series of combined attacks by Wood and Steedman, whose persistence cost them dearly. Suffering little themselves, despite massed incoming artillery fire that Wood pronounced “uncommonly fine” and one defender said “was the most furious I ever witnessed,” they inflicted such heavy punishment on the attackers that finally, after three hours of surging up and stumbling down the muddy slopes of the hill on the far Confederate right, the blue flood receded. Steedman’s losses were especially cruel. One unit, the 13th U.S. Colored Infantry, suffered 221 casualties in all, the greatest regimental loss on either side. “After the repulse,” Wood later reported, “our soldiers, white and colored, lay indiscriminately near the enemy works at the outer edge of the abatis.”

When this attack first opened, threatening to turn his right and cut the Franklin Pike, Hood ordered Cheatham to send three of the four brigades from the division on his left — formerly Cleburne’s, now under its senior brigadier, James A. Smith — to reinforce the opposite flank. As it turned out, this was a serious mistake. Lee not only needed no help, but by the time Smith’s men reached him, around 3.30, the attack had been suspended. Worse, there wasn’t time enough for them to return to their former position below Shy’s Hill, which they had no sooner left than they were sorely missed. Stewart had been watching in both directions from his command post in the center, east of the Granny White Pike, and had seen trouble coming: not on the right, though the Overton Hill assault was even then approaching its climax, but on the left, where the situation was uncomfortably similar to the one he himself had faced the day before, when his had been the corps on that flank. “Should Bate fall back,” he said in a hastily-written 2 o’clock note to Walthall, whose division adjoined Bate’s on Cheatham’s right, “keep your left connected with him, falling back from your left toward right and forming a new flank line extending to hills in rear.”

There was more to this than a generally shared mistrust of Bate, whose three brigades had not done well in recent operations. All morning, though none of the five blue infantry divisions arrayed in a nearly semicircular line confronting Shy’s Hill from the north and west had so far come to grips with the defenders, Wilson, fighting with two divisions dismounted while the other two ranged wide, had been pressing Chalmers’ horsemen back on their supports. By noon, as a result, the Granny White Pike was firmly in Union possession to the south, no longer a possible rebel escape route, and Cheatham’s left was bent in the shape of a fishhook. Hood pulled Ector’s troops back from the crest of the hill to help Smith’s remaining brigade hold off Wilson’s attackers, whose repeaters gave them a firepower out of proportion to their already superior numbers. This caused Bate to have to extend his line still farther westward in taking over the works Ector’s men had occupied, and worst of all, now that the rapid-firing blue troopers had pushed within carbine range, this part of the line was taking close-up fire not only from its front and flank but also from its rear. “The Yankee bullets and shells were coming from all directions, passing one another in the air,” a butternut private would recall.

By 3 o’clock, when the blue attack finally sputtered out on the Confederate right, a good part of the night-built breastworks on Shy’s Hill had been flattened or knocked apart — small wonder; one of Schofield’s batteries, for example, pumped 560 rounds into the hill before the day was over — by well-aimed shots from artillery massed north and west and south. A cold rain had begun at midday, and the defenders could do little, under the fall of icy water and hot metal, but hug the earth and hope for a let-up that did not come, either of raindrops or of shells. It was more or less clear to everyone here, as it was to Stewart in the center, that the position now being pounded by close to a hundred guns could not be held much longer than it took the commanders of the three Union corps — one in its front, one on its flank, one in its rear — to stage the concerted push the situation called for.

Thomas, though he still declined to be hurried in his conduct of the battle — not even by a midday wire from the Commander in Chief, in which, after tendering “the nation’s thanks for your good work of yesterday,” Lincoln ended on a sterner note, as if on cue from Grant: “You made a magnificent beginning. A grand consummation is within your easy reach. Do not let it slip” — saw clearly enough what was called for, and was moving even now to bring it off. About the time the Overton Hill attack subsided he set out from his Franklin Pike command post and rode westward through the pelting rain in rear of the extension of Wood’s line, on beyond the Granny White Pike, where A. J. Smith had his two remaining divisions in position, and then around the southward curve of front to Schofield’s headquarters, due west of Shy’s Hill. Wilson was there, remonstrating against Schofield’s delay in giving the prearranged signal he and Smith had agreed would launch the converging assault by all three corps. The cavalryman had sent a series of couriers urging action for the past two hours, ever since he gained the rebel rear, and now at last — within an hour of sunset — had come in person to protest, although with small effect; Schofield wanted another division from Smith before advancing, on grounds that to attack high-sited intrenchments without a greater advantage in numbers than he now enjoyed would be to risk paying more in blood for the hill than it was worth. Thomas heard him out, then said dryly: “The battle must be fought, if men arekilled.” He looked across the northwest slope of the fuming hill, where it seemed to him that McArthur, adjusting his line for a closer take-off, was about to slip the leash. “General Smith is attacking without waiting for you,” he told Schofield. “Please advance your entire line.”

Here at last was a direct order; Schofield had no choice but to obey. He did so, in fact, so promptly that Wilson, riding happily south to rejoin his troopers in rear of the blue-clamped rebel left, did not get back in time to direct their share of the three-sided push that drove the defenders from Shy’s Hill. So sudden indeed was the gray collapse that Hood himself, watching from horseback in rear of his left center, said later that he could scarcely credit what he saw. “Our forces up to that moment had repulsed the Federals at every point, and were waving their colors in defiance, crying out to the enemy, ‘Come on, come on.’ ” With the crisis weathered on his right and sunset barely an hour away, he planned to withdraw after nightfall for a dawn assault on the Union right, which he believed was exposed to being turned and shattered. Alas, it was his own flank that was shattered as he watched. “I beheld for the first and only time” — he had not been on Missionary Ridge with Bragg, just over a year ago — “a Confederate army abandon the field in confusion.”

Old Straight had seen disaster coming two hours before, and it came as he had warned. Assailed by Smith and Schofield on both sides of the angle, all the while taking fire from Wilson’s dismounted horsemen in their rear, Bate’s three brigades gave back from their enfiladed works, fought briefly, and then for the most part fled, although some units — the Tennesseans under twenty-five-year-old William Shy, for instance, whose fall gave the lost hill its future name — resisted till they were overrun. By that time, the attack had widened and the panic had infected Stewart’s corps, along with the rest of Cheatham’s; “The breach once made, the lines lifted from either side as far as I could see,” Bate would report. All three of his brigade commanders were captured, and so was Edward Johnson when the break extended beyond the center, under pressure from Smith and Wood, and spread to his division on Lee’s left. Everywhere to the west of there, eastward across the rear of what had been the Confederate left and center, butternut veterans were in headlong flight for the Franklin Pike, the one remaining avenue of escape. They wanted to live: perhaps to fight another day, but certainly not here.

“It was more like a scene in a spectacular drama than a real incident in war,” a colonel on Thomas’s staff would note. “The hillside in front, still green, dotted with boys in blue swarming up the slope, the dark background of high hills beyond, the lowering clouds, the waving flags, the smoke rising slowly through the leafless treetops and drifting across the valleys, the wonderful outburst of musketry, the ecstatic cheers, the multitude racing for life down into the valley below — so exciting was it all that the lookers-on instinctively clapped their hands as at a brilliant and successful transformation scene; as indeed it was. For in those few moments an army was changed into a mob, and the whole structure of the rebellion in the Southwest, with all its possibilities, was utterly overthrown.”

But that was to overstate the case, if not in regard to the eventualities, then at any rate in regard to the present dissolution of Hood’s army. On Overton Hill, in the final moments before the opposite flank gave way, Stephen Lee observed that his troops were “in fine spirits and confident of success,” congratulating themselves on their recent repulse of Wood and Steedman. Then out of nowhere came the collapse, first of Cheatham’s corps, then Stewart’s, and the blue attack rolled eastward to engulf them; Johnson’s division wavered and broke, its commander taken, and Stevenson’s, next in line, seemed about to follow. East of the Franklin Pike, in rear of Clayton’s division, Lee spurred his horse westward, taking the fences on both sides of the turnpike, and drew rein amid the confusion behind his center, crowded now with graybacks who had bolted. He leaned down and snatched a stand of colors from a fugitive color bearer, then brandished it from horseback as he rode among the panicked veterans, shouting hoarsely at them: “Rally, men, rally! For God’s sake, rally! This is the place for brave men to die!”

Some few stopped, then more. “The effect was electrical,” one among them was to write. “They gathered in little knots of four or five, and he soon had around him three or four other stands of colors.” They were not many, but they were enough, as it turned out, to cause the attackers — confused as much by their abrupt success today as they had been at the same late hour the day before — to hesitate before moving forward again through the smoky, rain-screened dusk that followed hard upon sunset. By that time Clayton, unmolested on the right, had managed to withdraw his division from Overton Hill and form it in some woods astride the Franklin Pike, half a mile below. When Lee fell back to there, the same observer noted, “he was joined by a few pieces of artillery and a little drummer boy who beat the long roll in perfect time.” Stevenson’s fugitives rallied too, in response to this steady drumming, and together the two divisions comprised a rear guard that kept open, well into darkness, the one escape route still available to the army.

This was of course no help to the men already rounded up in their thousands on the field of battle, including Johnson — he had just been exchanged in October, five months after his previous capture at Spotsylvania — and all three of Bate’s brigade commanders, Brigadier Generals Henry Jackson and T. B. Smith and Major Jacob Lash. Old Clubby, still crippled from the leg wound he had suffered at McDowell, two and a half years ago, was taken while trying to limp away from his shattered line, and it was much the same with Jackson, a forty-four-year-old former Georgia lawyer-politician, who found the rearward going slow because of the mud that weighted down his boots. He had stopped, and was trying to get them off with the help of an aide, when a blue-clad corporal and three privates came upon him by the roadside.

“You’re a general,” the corporal said accusatively, spotting the wreathed stars on his prisoner’s collar.

“That is my rank,” Jackson admitted.

“Captured a general, by God!” the Federal whooped. He took off his flat-topped forage cap and swung it round and round his head. “I’ll carry you to Nashville myself.”

Smith and Lash on the other hand were taken on Shy’s Hill itself, along with most of their men, when their lines were overrun. Imprisoned, Lash would not receive the promotion he had earned by surviving his superiors, but Smith’s was a crueler fate. A graduate of the Nashville Military Institute and a veteran of all the western battles, he had risen from second lieutenant, over the years, to become at twenty-six the army’s youngest brigadier; which perhaps, since his youth and slim good looks implied a certain jauntiness in happier times, had something to do with what presently happened to him. While being conducted unarmed to the Union rear he was slashed three times across the head with a saber by the colonel of the Ohio regiment that had captured him, splitting his skull and exposing so much of his mangled brain that the surgeon who examined his wounds pronounced them fatal. He did not die, however. He survived a northern prison camp to return to his native state when the conflict was over, then lived for nearly another sixty years before he died at last in the Tennessee Hospital for the Insane, where he spent the last forty-seven of his eighty-five years, a victim of the damage inflicted by the Ohio colonel. This was another face of war, by no means unfamiliar on either side, but one unseen when the talk was all of glory.

It was not the face Thomas saw when, completing a sunset ride from the far right, he urged his horse up Overton Hill, which had just been cleared, and looked out over the field where his troops were hoicking long columns of butternut captives to the rear. He lifted his hat in salute to the victors in the twilight down below, exclaiming as he did so: “Oh, what a grand army I have! God bless each member of it.”

Such hilltop crowing was uncharacteristic of the Rock of Chickamauga, however well it might suit him in his new role as the Sledge of Nashville, but in any case both salute and blessing were deserved. His army captured here today an additional 3300 prisoners, bringing its two-day haul, as a subsequent head-count would show, to 4462 rebels of all ranks. Moreover, another 37 pieces of artillery were taken, which made 53 in all, one more than R. E. Lee had captured throughout the Seven Days to set the previous battle record. Thomas’s loss in killed, wounded, and missing, though twice heavier today than yesterday, barely raised his overall total above three thousand: 3061. Hood lost only half as many killed and wounded as he had done the day before, but his scant loss in those two categories — roughly 1500 for both days, or less than half the number his adversary suffered — only showed how readily his soldiers had surrendered under pressure, thereby lifting his loss to nearly 6000 casualties, almost twice as many as he inflicted. Thomas of course did not yet know these comparative figures. All he knew was that he had won decisively, more so tactically perhaps than any general in any large-scale battle in this war, and that was the cause of his exuberance on Overton Hill and afterwards, when he came down off the height and rode forward in the gathering darkness.

Normally mild of speech and manner, practically never profane or boastful, he continued to be quite unlike himself tonight: as was shown when he spotted his young cavalry commander riding back up the Granny White Pike to meet him. He recalled what he had told him in private on the eve of battle, and he greeted him now, the other would note, “with all the vehemence of an old dragoon” and in a voice that could be heard throughout this quarter of the rain-swept field. “Dang it to hell, Wilson!” he roared, “didn’t I tell you we could lick ’em? Didn’t I tell you we could lick ’em?”

Southward, the disorderly gray retreat continued. Lee’s rear guard task was eased by having only Wood’s corps to contend with; Steedman had stopped, apparently from exhaustion, and Smith and Schofield had been halted to prevent confusion when their two corps came together at right angles on Shy’s Hill. Below there, Wilson’s remounted troopers were opposed by Ector’s surviving handful of infantry and Rucker’s cavalry brigade, assigned by Chalmers to keep the bluecoats off the Franklin Pike, which was clogged with fugitives all the way to Brentwood. Rucker managed it, with the help of Ector’s veterans and the rain and darkness, though at the cost of being captured — the fourth brigade commander in the past two hours — when he was shot from his horse in a hand-to-hand saber duel with two opponents. Lee meantime withdrew in good order, two miles beyond Brentwood to Hollow Tree Gap, where he set up a new rear-guard line by midnight, six miles short of Franklin and the Harpeth.

In this way, from sunset well into darkness, when they finally desisted, the Federals were kept from interfering with the retreat of the army they had routed. But neither could that army’s own leaders interfere with its rearward movement, though they tried. “It was like trying to stop the current of Duck River with a fish net,” one grayback was to say. Not even Ben Cheatham, for all the fondness his men had for him, could prevail on them to pause for longer that he could fix them with his eye. He would get one stopped, and then when he turned to appeal to another, the first would duck beneath the general’s horse and continue on his way. Even so, he had better luck than did some younger staffers who tried their hand. One such, hailing a mud-spattered infantryman headed rearward down the turnpike, ordered him to face about and meet the foe. “You go to hell — I’ve been there,” the man replied, and kept on trudging southward in the rain. None among them had any way of knowing that the war’s last great battle had been fought. All they knew was they wanted no more of it; not for now, at any rate.

Hood was no better at organizing a rally short of Brentwood than the least of his subordinates had been. He tried for a time, then gave it up and went with the flow. A bandaged Tennessee private who had seen and pitied him earlier, just before the break — “How feeble and decrepit he looked, with an arm in a sling and a crutch in the other hand, trying to guide and control his horse” — felt even sorrier for him tonight when, seeking him out to secure “a wounded furlough,” he came upon the one-legged general near Hollow Tree Gap, alone in his headquarters tent beside the Franklin Pike, “much agitated and affected” by the events of the past six hours “and crying like his heart would break.” His left arm dangling useless at his side, he ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair in a distracted gesture as the tears ran down his cheeks into his beard, golden in the light of the lantern on the table by his chair. Unabashed — after the manner of Confederates of all ranks, who respected their superiors in large part for the respect they knew they would receive in turn if they approached them — the bullet-nicked private entered, asked for, and received his furlough paper, then went back out into the darkness and the rain, leaving Hood to resume his weeping if he chose. “I pitied him, poor fellow,” the Tennessean wrote long afterward, remembering the scene. “I always loved and honored him, and will ever revere and cherish his memory.… As a soldier, he was brave, good, noble, and gallant, and fought with the ferociousness of the wounded tiger, and with the everlasting grit of the bulldog; but as a general he was a failure in every particular.”

For all its harshness, Franklin and Nashville had confirmed and reconfirmed this assessment, so far at least as most of the Kentucky-born Texan’s critics were concerned, before it was made: not only because he fought them with so little tactical skill, offensive or defensive, but also because he fought them at all. Within a span of just over two weeks, these two battles had cost him 12,000 casualties — better than twice the number he inflicted — and in the end produced a rout as complete as the one a year ago on Missionary Ridge. Pat Cleburne had saved Bragg’s retreat then with his defense of Ringgold Gap, and though the Arkansan now was in his grave in St John’s churchyard, Stephen Lee performed a similar service for Hood next morning at Hollow Tree Gap, which he held under pressure from Wilson and Wood while the rest of the graybacks crossed the Harpeth. Outflanked, he followed, burning the bridge in his wake, and took up a covering position on Winstead Hill, three miles south of Franklin, where Hood had had his command post for the attack that cost him the flower of his army. Today’s defense only cost him Lee, who was wounded there and had to turn his corps over to Stevenson when he fell back that evening to take up a new position near Spring Hill, another place of doleful memory.

By the following morning, December 18, Cheatham had reassembled enough of his corps to assume the duty of patrolling rain-swollen Rutherford Creek, which the pursuers could not cross, once the turnpike bridge was burned, until their pontoon train arrived. The resultant two-day respite from immediate blue pressure (for the train, having been missent toward Murfreesboro by a clerical error, then recalled, was obliged to creak and groan its way by a roundabout route over roads hub-deep in mud) was heartening to the graybacks plodding down the Columbia Pike. But the best of all news, especially for Chalmers’ drooping horsemen, was the arrival last night of one of the four detached brigades of cavalry, followed today by another, which brought word that Forrest himself would soon be along with the other two. Sure enough, he rode in that night. Ordered by Hood to fall back from Murfreesboro through Shelbyville to Pulaski, he had decided instead to rejoin by a shorter route, through Triune, and had done so: much to his superior’s relief. Hood’s plan had been to call a halt along Duck River and winter in its lush valley, much as Bragg had done two years ago, but he saw now there could be no rest for his ground-down command short of the broader Tennessee, another seventy miles to the south. Accordingly, having begun his withdrawal across the Duck, he was all the more pleased by Forrest’s early return, since it meant that the Wizard and his veteran troopers, lately conspicuous by their absence, would be there to hold off the Federals while the rest of the army went on with its dangerous task of crossing a major river in the presence of a foe not only superior in numbers, warmly clad, and amply fed, but also flushed with victory and clearly bent on completing the destruction begun three days ago at the gates of Nashville.

In taking over this rear-guard assignment — for which he had about 3000 cavalry whose mounts were still in condition for hard duty, plus 2000 infantry under Walthall, roughly a fourth of them barefoot and all of them hungry, cold in their cotton tatters, and close to exhaustion from two days of battle and two of unrelieved retreat — Forrest combined his usual inventiveness with a highly practical application of the means at hand, however slight. Part of the problem was the weather, which changed next day from bad to worse. Alternate blasts of sleet and rain deepened the mud, stalled the supply train, and covered the roads and fields with a crust of ice that crunched and shattered under foot and made walking a torture for ill-shod men and horses. He solved the immobilized wagon dilemma by leaving half of them parked along the pike and using their teams to double those in the other half, which then proceeded. Because of the drawn-out Federal delay, first in clearing brim-full Rutherford Creek and then the more formidable Duck, four miles beyond, there was time for the doubled teams to haul the first relay far to the south and then return for the second before the pursuers bridged and crossed both streams. As for the infantry crippled for lack of shoes, Forrest solved that problem by commandeering empty wagons in which the barefoot troops could ride until they were called on to jump down and hobble back to their places in the firing line. “Not a man was brought in contact with him who did not feel strengthened and invigorated,” one among them was to say of the general who thus converted shoeless cripples into horse-drawn infantry.

Not until the night of December 21, with their pontoons up and thrown at last, did the first Federals cross Duck River to begin next day at Warfield Station, three miles beyond Columbia, a week-long running fight that proceeded south across the frozen landscape in the earliest and coldest winter Tennesseans had known for years. Outflanked, Forrest fell back, skirmishing as he went, and at nightfall took up a new position at Lynnville, twelve miles down the line. Here he staged a surprise attack the following morning, using Walthall’s men to block the pike while his troopers slashed at the Union flanks, then retired on the run before his pursuers recovered from the shock, bringing off a captured gun which he employed next day in a brisk Christmas Eve action on Richland Creek, eight miles north of Pulaski, where Buford suffered a leg wound to become the twenty-first Confederate brigade, division, or corps commander shot or captured in the course of the campaign. By then the main body, unmolested since Forrest took over the duty of guarding its rear, was well beyond the Alabama line, approaching the Tennessee River, and next day the head of the column pulled up on the near bank opposite Bainbridge, just below Muscle Shoals. It was Christmas, though scarcely a merry one, and a Sunday: five weeks, to the day, since Hood left Florence, four miles downstream, on the expedition that by now had cost him close to 20,000 veterans killed, wounded, or missing in and out of battle, including one lieutenant general, three major generals, and an even dozen brigadiers, together with five brigade commanders of lesser rank. Of these, moreover, only two — Lee and Buford — were alive, uncaptured, and had wounds that would permit an early return to the army that had set out for Middle Tennessee in such high spirits, five weeks back, with twice as many troops and guns as were now in its straggled ranks.

Forrest too was over the Alabama line by then, holding Wilson off while the gray main body bridged the river with the pontoons he had saved by doubling their teams. Gunboats, sent roundabout by Thomas from the Cumberland and the Ohio, tried their hand at shelling the rickety span, but were driven off by Stewart’s artillery and Rear Admiral Samuel P. Lee’s fear of getting stranded if he ventured within range of the white water at the foot of Muscle Shoals. Hood finished crossing on December 27; Forrest’s cavalry followed, and Walthall’s forlorn hope got over without further loss on the 28th, cutting the bridge loose from the northern bank. Thomas — whose own pontoons were still on the Duck, seventy miles away, and whose infantry had not cleared Pulaski — declared the pursuit at an end next day. Hood’s army, he said, “had become a disheartened and disorganized rabble of half-naked and barefooted men, who sought every opportunity to fall out by the wayside and desert their cause to put an end to their sufferings. The rear guard, however, was undaunted and firm,” he added, “and did its work bravely to the last.”

Schofield was more generous in his estimate of the defeated army’s fighting qualities, especially as he had observed them during the long-odds Battle of Nashville, where fewer than 25,000 graybacks held out for two days against better than 50,000 bluecoats massed for the most part of their flank. “I doubt if any soldiers in the world ever needed so much cumulative evidence to convince them they were beaten,” he declared. This was not to say they weren’t thoroughly convinced in the end. They were indeed, and they showed it through both stages of the long retreat: first, as one said, while “making tracks for the Tennessee River at a quickstep known to Confederate tactics as ‘double distance on half rations,’ ” and then on the follow-up march beyond, after Hood decided his troops were no more in condition for a stand on the Tennessee than they had been when they crossed the Duck the week before. By way of reinforcing this assessment, Thomas would list in his report a total of 13,189 prisoners and 72 pieces of artillery captured on and off the field of battle in the course of the forty days between Hood’s setting out, November 20, and his own calling of an end to the campaign, December 29. Moreover, weary as they were from their 120-mile trek over icy roads in the past two weeks, the butternut marchers themselves agreed that the better part of valor, at least for now, would be to find some place of refuge farther south, if any such existed. “Aint we in a hell of a fix?” one ragged Tennessean groaned as he picked himself up, slathered with mud from a fall on the slippery pike. “Aint we in a hell of a fix: a one-eyed President, a one-legged general, and a one-horse Confederacy!”

Their goal, they learned as they slogged west across North Alabama toward the Mississippi line, was Tupelo. There, just thirty months ago this week, Braxton Bragg had taken over from Beauregard after the retreat from Corinth, and there he had given them the name they made famous, the Army of Tennessee, first in Kentucky, then back again in Middle and East Tennessee and Georgia. Bragg’s tenure had ended soon after Missionary Ridge, and so would Hood’s after Nashville, a comparable rout; there was little doubt of that, either in or out of the army. “The citizens seemed to shrink and hide from us as we approached them,” a soldier would recall, and the reaction of his comrades was shown in a song they sang as they trudged into Mississippi and the New Year. The tune was the banjo-twanging “Yellow Rose of Texas,” but the words had been changed to match their regret, if not their scorn, for the quality of leadership that had cost them Pat Cleburne and so many others they had loved and followed down the years.

So now I’m marching southward,

My heart is full of woe;

I’m going back to Georgia

To see my Uncle Joe.

You may talk about your Beauregard

And sing of General Lee,

But the gallant Hood of Texas

Played hell in Tennessee.

 5

Back at City Point after breaking off his intended western trip, Grant had the familiar hundred-gun victory salute fired twice in celebration of the Nashville triumph. “You have the congratulations of the public for the energy with which you are pushing Hood,” he wired Thomas on December 22, adding: “If you succeed in destroying Hood’s army, there will be but one army left to the so-called Confederacy capable of doing us harm. I will take care of that and try to draw the sting from it, so that in the spring we shall have easy sailing.” He sounded happy. One week later, however, on learning that Hood’s fugitives had crossed the Tennessee and Thomas had ordered his erstwhile pursuers into winter quarters to “recuperate for the spring campaign,” Grant’s petulance returned. “I have no idea of keeping idle troops in any place,” he telegraphed Halleck, who passed the word to Thomas on the last day of the year: “General Grant does not intend that your army shall go into winter quarters. It must be ready for active operations in the field.”

Grant’s fear, throughout the two weeks leading up to the thunderous two-day conflict out in Tennessee, had been that Old Tom’s balkiness would allow the rebels to prolong the war by scoring a central breakthrough all the way to the Ohio, thereby disrupting the combinations he had devised for their destruction. Yet this fear had no sooner been dispelled, along with the smoke from the mid-December battle, than another took its place; namely, that this same “sluggishness,” as he called it during the two weeks following the clash at the gates of Nashville, would delay the over-all victory which now at last seemed practically within his grasp, not only because of the drubbing given Hood, whose survival hung in the balance until he crossed the Tennessee River, but also because of other successes registered elsewhere, at the same time, along and behind the butternut line stretching west from the Atlantic. A sizeable budget of good news reached City Point while Thomas was failing to overtake his defeated adversary, and every item in it only served to whet Grant’s appetite for more. That had always been his way, but it was even more the case now that he saw the end he had worked so hard for in plain view, just up the road.

Chief among these simultaneous achievements was the occupation of Savannah, eleven days after Sherman’s arrival before it at the end of his march from Atlanta. Having stormed and taken Fort McAllister on December 13, which enabled the waiting supply ships to steam up the Ogeechee, he proceeded with a leisurely investment — or near investment — of the city just over a dozen miles away. Within four days he had progressed so far with his preparations that he thought it only fair to give the defenders a chance to avoid bloodshed by surrendering. He was “prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison,” he said in a message sent across the lines; “but should I be forced to resort to assault, or to the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army, burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war.” The rebel commander replied in kind, declining to surrender, and in closing dealt in measured terms with Sherman’s closing threat. “I have hitherto conducted the military operations intrusted to my direction in strict accordance with the rules of civilized warfare, and I should deeply regret the adoption of any course by you that may force me to deviate from them in the future. I have the honor to be, very respectively, your obedient servant, W. J. Hardee, Lieutenant General.”

Hardee, with barely 15,000 regulars and militia — two thirds of them lodged in the city’s defenses, the rest posted rearward across the Savannah River to cover his only escape route, still menaced by Foster near Honey Hill — had appealed to Richmond for reinforcements to help him resist the 60,000 newly arrived bluecoats closing in from the east and south. Davis conferred with Lee at Petersburg, then replied on December 17 — the day of Sherman’s threat to unleash his burning veterans on Savannah when it fell — that none were available; he could only advise the Georgian to “provide for the safety of your communications and make the dispositions needful for the preservation of your army.” This authorized the evacuation Beauregard had been urging from his headquarters in Charleston, a hundred miles up the coast. With a bridgeless river at his back and no pontoons on hand, that seemed about as difficult as staying to fight against six-to-one odds, but Old Reliable found the answer in the employment of some thirty 80-foot rice flats, lashed together endwise, then planked over to provide a three-section island-hopping span from the Georgia to the Carolina bank. It was finished too late for use on the night of December 19, as intended, so a circular was issued for the withdrawal to begin soon after dark next evening — by coincidence, the fourth anniversary of South Carolina’s secession from the Union — preceded by daylong fire from all the guns, which would not only discourage enemy interference but would also reduce the amount of surplus ammunition to be destroyed, along with the unmovable heavy pieces, when the cannoneers fell back. Wagons and caissons would cross the river first, together with the light artillery, and the men themselves would follow, filing silently out of their trenches after moonset. “Though compelled to evacuate the city, there is no part of my military life to which I look back with so much satisfaction,” Hardee was to say. And the fact was he had cause for pride. The operation went as planned from start to finish, despite some mixups and much sadness, especially for long-time members of the garrison, who thus were obliged to turn their backs on what had been their home for the past three years. “The constant tread of the troops and the rumblings of the artillery as they poured over those long floating bridges was a sad sound,” one retreater would presently recall, “and by the glare of the large fires at the east of the bridge it seemed like an immense funeral procession stealing out of the city in the dead of night.”

Sherman was not there for the formal occupation next morning, having gone up the coast to confer with Foster about bringing in more troops from Hilton Head to block the road to Charleston; the road over which, as it developed, Hardee marched to safety while the conference was in progress. When the Ohioan returned the following day, December 22 — chagrined if not abashed by the escape of 10,000 rebels he had thought were his for the taking — he found his army in possession of Savannah and quartermaster details busy tallying the spoils. These were considerable, including more than 200 heavy guns and something over 30,000 bales of cotton, negotiable on the world market at the highest prices ever known. Most of the guns had been spiked, but the rich haul of cotton was intact, not only because there had been no time or means to remove it, but also because, as Hardee explained to his superiors, it was “distributed throughout the city in cellars, garrets and warehouses, where it could not have been burnt without destroying the city.” A U.S. Treasury agent was already on hand from Hilton Head, reckoning up the profit to the government, and when the red-haired commander bristled at him, as was his custom when he encountered money men, the agent turned his wrath aside with a suggestion that the general send a message, first by ship to Fort Monroe and then by wire to the White House, announcing the fall of Savannah as a Christmas present for Lincoln. “The President particularly enjoys such pleasantry,” he pointed out. Sherman considered this a capital notion, and at once got off the following telegram, composed before the tally was complete.

To his Excellency President Lincoln,

Washington, D.C.

I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition; also about 25,000 bales of cotton.

W. T. SHERMAN

Major General.

He was, as usual, in high spirits after a colorful exploit — and this, which reached its climax with the taking of Savannah and would afterwards find its anthem in the rollicksome “Marching Through Georgia,” had been the most colorful of all. Partly because of that scarehead aspect, lurid in its reproduction in the memory of participants, as well as in the imagination of watchers on the home front, the march achieved a significance beyond its considerable military value, and though the risk had turned out slight (103 killed, 428 wounded, 278 captured or otherwise missing: barely more, in all, than one percent of the force involved) even Sherman was somewhat awed in retrospect. “Like a man who has walked a narrow plank,” he wrote his wife, “I look back and wonder if I really did it.” In effect, after seven months of grinding combat at close quarters, he and his bummers had broken out of the apparent stalemate, East and West, to inject a new spirit of exuberance into the war. You could see the feeling reflected in the northern papers brought to headquarters by the navy, first up the Ogeechee, then the Savannah. “Tecumseh the Great,” editors called him now, who had formerly judged him insane, and there was a report of a bill introduced in Congress to promote him to lieutenant general so that he and Grant could divide control of the armies of the Union. His reaction to this was similar to his reaction four months ago, at the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago, when there was talk of nominating him for President. “Some fool seems to have used my name,” he wrote Halleck from his position in front of besieged Atlanta. “If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House … I would say the penitentiary, thank you.” So it was now in regard to this latest proposal to elevate him. “I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant,” he informed his senator brother. “I want him to hold what he has earned and got. I have all the rank I want.” As if to emphasize this conviction, he presently remarked to a prying inquirer, in a tone at once jocular and forthright: “Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk. And now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

In point of fact, the general-in-chief was standing by him now, even to the extent of deferring to his military judgment: and that, too, was part of the cause for his red-haired exuberance. He had just made Georgia howl. Now he was about to make the Carolinas shriek.

Originally — that is, in orders he found waiting for him when he reached the coast — Grant had intended for Sherman and his Westerners to proceed by water “with all dispatch” to Virginia, where they would help Meade and Butler “close out Lee.” He was to establish and fortify a base near Savannah, garrison it with all his cavalry and artillery, together with enough infantry to protect them and “so threaten the interior that the militia of the South will have to be kept at home,” then get the rest aboard transports for a fast ride north to the Old Dominion. “Select yourself the officer to leave in command, but you I want in person,” Grant told him, adding: “Unless you see objections to this plan which I cannot see, use every vessel going to you for the purpose of transportation.”

Sherman did have objections, despite the compliment implied in this invitation to be in on the kill of the old gray fox at Petersburg, and was prompt to express them. He much preferred a march by land to a boatride up the coast for the reunion, he replied, partly because of the damage he could inflict en route and the effect he believed an extension of his trans-Georgia swath would have on the outcome of the war. Besides, there was a certain poetic justice here involved. “We can punish South Carolina as she deserves, and as thousands of people in Georgia hoped we would do. I do sincerely believe that the whole United States, North and South, would rejoice to have this army turned loose on South Carolina, to devastate that state in the manner we have done in Georgia.” He was convinced moreover, he said in closing, that the overland approach “would have a direct and immediate bearing upon the campaign in Virginia,” and he went into more detail about this in a letter to Halleck, invoking his support. “I attach more importance to these deep incursions into the enemy’s country,” he declared, “because this war differs from European wars in this particular: We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who have been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time now realize the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.” In short, he told Old Brains, “I think the time has come when we should attempt the boldest moves, and my experience is that they are easier of execution than more timid ones.… Our campaign of the last month, as well as every step I take from this point northward, is as much a direct attack upon Lee’s army as though we were operating within the sound of his artillery.”

To his surprised delight, Grant readily agreed: so readily, indeed, that it turned out he had done so even before his friend’s objections reached him. In a letter written from Washington on the same date as Sherman’s own — December 18: he was about to return to City Point: Fort McAllister had fallen five days ago, and Savannah itself would be taken in three more — the general-in-chief sent his congratulations “on the successful termination of your campaign” from Atlanta to the Atlantic. “I never had a doubt of the result,” he said, though he “would not have intrusted the expedition to any other living commander.” Then he added a few sentences that made Sherman’s ears prick up. “I did think the best thing to do was to bring the greater part of your army here, and wipe out Lee. [But] the turn affairs now seem to be taking has shaken me in that opinion. I doubt whether you may not accomplish more toward that result where you are than if brought here, especially as I am informed, since my arrival in the city, that it would take about two months to get you here with all the other calls there are for ocean transportation. I want to get your views about what ought to be done, and what can be done.… y own opinion is that Lee is averse to going out of Virginia, and if the cause of the South is lost he wants Richmond to be the last place surrendered. If he has such views, it may be well to indulge him until we get everything else in our hands.… I subscribe myself, more than ever, if possible, your friend.”

This reached Sherman on Christmas Eve, three days after the occupation of Savannah, and lifted his spirits even higher. Here, in effect, was the go-ahead he had sought for himself and his bummers, whom he described as being “in splendid flesh and condition.” Promptly that same evening he replied to Grant at City Point, expressing his pleasure at the change in orders; “for I feared that the transportation by sea would very much disturb the unity and morale of my army, now so perfect.… In about ten days I expect to be ready to sally forth again. I feel no doubt whatever as to our future plans. I have thought them over so long and well that they appear as clear as daylight.”

Chief among those “other calls … for ocean transportation” were the ones that had secured for the Butler-Porter expedition, whose mission was the reduction of Fort Fisher, the largest number of naval vessels ever assembled under the American flag. Packed with 6500 troops in two divisions, Butler’s transports cleared Hampton Roads on December 13, and five days later joined Porter’s fleet of 57 ironclads, frigates, and gunboats at Beaufort, North Carolina, ninety miles up the coast from their objective. Next morning, December 19, they arrived off Wilmington to find bad weather making up and the surf too rough for a landing. This obliged the transports to return to Beaufort for shelter, but the warships remained on station, riding out the storm while the admiral studied the rebel stronghold through his telescope. Unlike prewar forts, which mostly were of masonry construction, this one had walls of sand, piled nine feet high and twenty-five thick, designed to withstand by absorption the fire of the heaviest guns afloat, and was laid out with two faces, one looking seaward, close to 2000 yards long, and the other about one third that length, looking northward up the narrow sand peninsula, formerly called Federal Point but renamed Confederate Point by the secessionists when they began work on the place in 1861. Defended by a total of 47 guns and mortars, including a battery posted atop a sixty-foot mound thrown up at the south end of the seaward face to provide for delivering plunging fire if the enemy ventured close, the fort seemed all but impossible to reduce by regular methods; nor could the ships run past it, as had been done at New Orleans and Mobile, since that would merely cram them into Cape Fear River, sitting ducks for the rebel cannoneers, who would only have to reverse their guns to blow the intruders out of the water. Porter however had in mind a highly irregular method in which by now he placed great faith. This was the ingenious Butler’s powder ship, brought along in tow from Norfolk and primed at Beaufort for the cataclysmic explosion the squint-eyed general claimed would abolish Fort Fisher between two ticks of his watch.

Porter was inclined to agree, though less emphatically, having made a close inspection of the floating bomb. She was, or had been, the U.S.S. Louisiana, an overaged iron gunboat of close to three hundred tons, stripped of her battery and part of her deckhouse to lighten her draft and make her resemble a blockade runner. In a canvas-roofed framework built amidships, as well as in her bunkers and on her berth deck — all above the water line, for maximum shock effect — 215 tons of powder had been stored and fuzed with three clockwork devices, regulated to fire simultaneously an hour and a half after they were activated. The plan was for a skeleton crew to run the vessel in close to shore, anchor her as near as her eight-foot draft would allow to the seaward face of the fort on the beach, set the timing mechanisms, then pull hard away in a boat to an escort steamer that would take them well offshore to await the explosion; after which the fleet, poised twelve miles out for safety from the blast, would close in and subject what was left of the place to a heavy-caliber pounding, while troops were being landed two miles up the peninsula to close in from the north. Some said the result of setting off that much powder — which, after all, was more than fifty times the amount used near Petersburg, five months ago, to create the still-yawning Crater — would be the utter destruction of everything on or adjoining Federal or Confederate Point. Others — mainly demolition “experts,” who as usual were skeptical of anything they themselves had not conceived — discounted such predictions, maintaining that the shock would probably be no worse than mild. “I take a mean between the two,” Porter declared judiciously, “and think the effect of the explosion will be simply very severe, stunning men at a distance of three or four hundred yards, demoralizing them completely, and making them unable to stand for any length of time a fire from the ship. I think that the concussion will tumble magazines that are built on framework, and that the famous Mound will be among the things that were, and the guns buried beneath the ruins. I think that houses in Wilmington [eighteen miles away] will tumble to the ground and much demoralize the people, and I think if the rebels fight after the explosion they have more in them than I gave them credit for.”

In the fort meantime, during what turned out to be a three-day blow, the garrison prepared to resist the attack it had known was coming ever since the huge assembly of Union warships bulged over the curve of the eastern horizon. Determined to hold ajar what he termed “the last gateway between the Confederate States and the outside world,” Fort Fisher’s commander, Colonel William Lamb, had at first had only just over 500 men for its defense, half the regular complement having been sent to oppose Sherman down in Georgia. Blockade runners kept coming and going all this time, however, under cover of the storm, and on December 21 — when four of the swift vessels made outward runs after nightfall, all successful in slipping through the cordon of blockaders off the coast — some 400 North Carolina militia showed up, followed two days later by 450 Junior Reserves, sixteen to eighteen years of age. This total of 1371 effectives, most of them green and a third of them boys, were all Lamb would have until the arrival of Hoke’s division, which had begun leaving Richmond two days ago, detached by Lee in the emergency, but was delayed by its necessarily roundabout rail route through Danville, Greensboro, and Raleigh.

The gale subsided on the day the Junior Reserves marched in, December 23, and though the wind remained brisk all afternoon, the night that followed was clear and cold. Despite the heightened visibility, which greatly lengthened the odds against blockade runners, the fast steamer Little Hattie, completing her second run that month, made it in through the mouth of the Cape Fear River, shortly before midnight, and soon was tied up at the dock in Wilmington, unloading the valuable war goods she had exchanged in Nassau a week ago for her outbound cargo of cotton.

Although no one aboard knew it, she had overtaken and passed the Louisiana coming in, and the signals flashed from Fort Fisher in response to those from the Hattie were of great help to the skeleton crew on the powder ship, groping its way through the darkness toward the beach. Encouraged by improvement in the weather, Porter had ordered the doomed vessel in at 11 o’clock that night, and had also sent word to Beaufort for the transports to return at once for the landing next day. Lightless and silent, theLouisianadropped anchor 250 yards offshore, just north of the fort, and her skipper, Commander A. C. Rhind — told by the admiral, “You may lose your life in this adventure, but the risk is worth the running.… The names of those connected with the expedition will be famous for all time to come” — started all three clockwork fuzes ticking at precisely twelve minutes short of midnight. Finally, before abandoning ship, he set fire to half a cord of pine knots piled in the after cabin on instructions from Porter, who had little faith in mechanical devices; after which Rhind and his handful of volunteers rowed in a small boat to the escort steamer waiting nearby to take them (hopefully) out of range of the explosion, due by then within about an hour. Now there was nothing left to do but wait.

Twelve miles out, crews of the nearly sixty warships watched and waited too, training all available glasses on the starlit stretch of beach in front of the rebel earthwork. Started at 11.48, the ticking fuzes should do their job at 1.18 in what by now was the morning of Christmas Eve; or so the watchers thought, until the critical moment came and went and there was no eruption. By then, however, the pinpoint of light from Rhind’s fire in the after cabin had grown to a flickering glow, and Porter felt certain all 215 tons of powder would go as soon as the flames reached the nearest keg. He was right, of course, though the wait was hard. 1.30: 1.35: 1.40: then it came — a huge instantaneous bloom of light, so quickly smothered in dust and smoke you could almost doubt you’d seen it. Just under one minute later the sound arrived; a low, heavy boom, a New York Times reporter was to say, “not unlike that produced by the discharge of a 100-pounder.” Moreover, there seemed to be no accompanying shock wave, only the one deep cough or rumble, and a colleague aboard the press boat saw a gigantic cloud of thick black smoke appear on the landward horizon, sharply defined against the stars and the clear sky. “As it rose rapidly in the air, and came swiftly toward us on the wings of the wind,” he later wrote, “[it] presented a most remarkable appearance, assuming the shape of a monstrous waterspout, its tapering base seemingly resting on the sea. In a very few minutes it passed us, filling the atmosphere with its sulphurous odor, as if a spirit from the infernal regions had swept by us.”

If this was anticlimactic — which in fact was to put the measure of Porter’s disappointment rather mildly — what followed, over the course of the next two days, was even more so. Subsequent testimony would show that, while there were those who claimed to have felt the shock as far away as Beaufort, the monster explosion had done the fort no damage whatever, producing no more than a gentle rocking motion, as if the earth had twitched briefly in its sleep. A sentinel on duty at the time made a guess to the man who relieved him that one of the Yankee ships offshore had blown her boiler. Many in the garrison, veterans and greenhorns alike, said later that they had not been awakened by the blast, though this was denied by one of the boy soldiers, captured next day in an outlying battery. “It was terrible,” he said. “It woke up nearly everybody in the fort.” Daylight showed no remaining vestige of the Louisiana, but Fort Fisher was unchanged, its flag rippling untattered in the breeze. Only in one respect did Butler’s experiment work, even approximately, and that was in the disguise he had contrived for the vanished powder vessel. Lamb recorded in his diary that morning: “A blockader got aground near the fort, set fire to herself, and blew up.”

Porter spent the morning absorbing the shock of failure, then steamed in at noon to begin the heaviest naval bombardment of the war to date. Capable of firing 115 shells a minute, his 627 guns heaved an estimated 10,000 heavy-caliber rounds at Fort Fisher in the course of the next five hours, to which the fort replied with 622, though neither seriously impaired the fighting efficiency of the other. Ashore, two guns were dismounted, one man killed, 22 injured, and most of the living quarters flattened, while the fleet lost 83 dead and wounded, more than half of them mangled by the explosion of five new hundred-pounder Parrotts on five of the sloops and frigates. Near sunset, Butler finally showed up with a few transports. The rest would soon be along, he said: much to Porter’s disgust, for the day by then was too far gone for a landing. Disgruntled, the admiral signaled a cease fire.

As the ships withdrew, guns cooling, the fort boomed out a single defiant shot, the last. “Our Heavenly Father has protected my garrison this day,” Lamb wrote in his diary that night, “and I feel that He will sustain us in defending our homes from the invader.”

By 10.30 next morning — Christmas Day and a Sunday — the fleet was back on station, lobbing still more thousands of outsized projectiles into the sand fort. Three hours later, three miles up the way, just over 2000 soldiers were put ashore under Major General Godfrey Weitzel, second in command to Butler, who observed the landing from his flagship, a sea-going tug which he kept steaming back and forth in front of the beach while the troops were moving southward down it, capturing a one-gun outwork when they got within a mile of Fort Fisher’s landward face. Porter maintained a methodical fire — mainly to make the defenders keep their heads down, since he believed he had done all necessary damage to their works the day before. Reports from Weitzel, however, showed that this was far from true. Approaching the fort, his men received volleys of canister full in their faces, and it soon developed that the final hundred yards of ground was planted thickly with torpedoes wired to detonator switches which rebel lookouts could throw whenever they judged an explosion would be most effective. Moreover, prisoners taken on the approach march bragged that Hoke’s division, 6000 strong, was expected to arrive at any minute on the road from Wilmington, hard in the Federal rear. Butler weighed the evidence, along with signs that the rising wind would soon make it impossible for boats to return through the booming surf, and promptly ordered a withdrawal by all ashore. “In view of the threatening aspect of the weather,” he signaled Porter when two thirds of Weitzel’s men had been reloaded — the other third, some 700 wet and cold unfortunates for whom this holy day was anything but merry, were stranded when the breakers grew too rough for taking them off — “I caused the troops with their prisoners to re-embark.” Seeing, as he said, “nothing further that can be done by the land forces,” he announced: “I shall therefore sail for Hampton Roads as soon as the transport fleet can be got in order.”

Fairly beside himself with rage at this unceremonious abandonment of the supposedly joint effort, Porter kept up a nightlong interdictory fire to protect “those poor devils of soldiers,” whose rifles he could hear popping on the beach. Next afternoon, when the wind changed direction, he managed to get them off, thereby limiting the army’s loss to one man drowned and 15 wounded — a total clearly indicative of something less than an all-out try for the fort’s reduction. Butler by then was on his way to Norfolk, however, and the admiral had no choice except to retire as well, though only as far as Beaufort, withdrawing his ships a few at a time, that night and the following morning, so that Fort Fisher’s defenders would not be able to claim a mass repulse.

Nevertheless: “This morning, December 27, the foiled and frightened enemy left our shore,” Lamb wired Wilmington, where Hoke’s veterans were at last unloading from their long train ride. The garrison had in fact had a harder time than Porter knew, losing 70 men in the second day’s bombardment, which, though less intense, had been far more accurate than the first. “Never since the foundation of the world was there such a fire,” a Confederate lieutenant testified. “The whole interior of the fort … was one 11-inch shell bursting. You can now inspect the works and walk on nothing but iron.” Lamb began repairing the damage without delay, knowing only too well that the Yankees would soon return, perhaps next time with an army commander willing to press the issue beyond pistol range of the sand walls.

That was just what Porter had in mind now that his fleet was reassembled at Beaufort, replenishing its stores and ammunition. Moreover, he could see at least one good proceeding from the abortive Yuletide expedition. “If this temporary failure succeeds in sending General Butler into private life, it is not to be regretted,” he wrote Welles, “for it cost only a certain amount of shells, which I expend in a month’s target practice anyhow.”

Grant was of the same opinion in regard to the need for a change when the effort against Fort Fisher was renewed, as he certainly intended it to be. “The Wilmington expedition has proven a gross and culpable failure,” he informed Lincoln on December 28, adding: “Who is to blame I hope will be known.” A wire to Porter, two days later, indicated that he had already decided on a cure. “Please hold on where you are for a few days,” he requested, “and I will endeavor to be back again with an increased force and without the former commander.”

His concern was based on a number of developments. First, because it had been determined that Sherman would march north through the Carolinas, Grant saw Wilmington as an ideal place of refuge, easily provisioned and protected by the navy, in case the rebels somehow managed to gang up on his red-haired friend. Second, he believed that a full report on the recent fiasco would provide him with excellent grounds for getting rid of Ben Butler, whose political heft was unlikely to stand him in nearly as good stead with the Administration now that the election had been won. Third — and no one who knew Grant would think it least — he was no more inclined than ever to accept a setback; especially now, when so many welcome reports were clicking off the wire at City Point from all directions, indicating that the end of the struggle was by no means as far off as it had seemed a short while back.

One of the most welcome of these came from George Stoneman, exchanged since his late-July capture down in Georgia and recently given command of all the cavalry in Northeast Tennessee. Anxious to retrieve his reputation, he set out from Knoxville on December 10 with 5500 troopers in an attempt to reach and wreck the salt and lead mines in Southwest Virginia, so long the object of raids that had come to nothing up to now. Beyond Kingsport, three days later, he brushed aside the remnant of Morgan’s once-terrible men, still grieved by the loss of their leader three months before, and pressed on through Bristol, across the state line to Abingdon, where he drove off a small force of graybacks posted in observation by Breckinridge, whose main body, down to a strength of about 1200, was at Saltville, less than twenty miles ahead. Stoneman bypassed him for a lunge at Marion, twelve miles up the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, obliging Breckinridge to back-pedal in an effort to save the vital lead works there and at Wytheville. This he did, by means of a fast march and a daylong skirmish on December 18; but while the fighting was in progress Stoneman sent half his horsemen back to undefended Saltville, with instructions to get started on the wreckage that was the true purpose of the expedition. Reuniting his raiders there next day, after giving Breckinridge the slip, he spent another two days completing the destruction of the salt works, then withdrew on December 21. Back in Knoxville by the end of the year, he could report complete success. Salt had been scarce in the Old Dominion for two years. Now it would be practically nonexistent, leaving the suppliers of Lee’s army with no means of preserving what little meat they could lay hands on for shipment by rail or wagon to the hungry men in the trenches outside Petersburg and Richmond.

Sheridan too had not been idle during this period of stepped-up Federal activity, coincident with Thomas’s pursuit of Hood and Sherman’s occupation of Savannah. While the greater part of his army continued its impoverishment of the people in the Shenandoah region by the destruction of their property and goods — a scourging process he defined as “letting them know there is a God in Israel” — he launched a two-pronged strike, by three divisions of cavalry, at military targets beyond the rim of his immediate depredations. Torbert, with 5500 horsemen in two divisions, would aim for Gordonsville and the Virginia Central, east of the Blue Ridge, while Custer diverted attention from this main effort by taking his 2500-man division south up the Valley Pike for a raid on Staunton, which if successful could be continued to Lynchburg and the Orange & Alexandria. Both left their camps around Winchester on December 19, Torbert riding through Chester Gap next morning to cross the Rapidan two days later at Liberty Mills. Apparently Custer had decoyed Early’s troopers westward from their position near Rockfish Gap, just east of Staunton, for there was no sign of them as the blue column approached Gordonsville after dark. There was, however, a barricade thrown up by local defenders to block a narrow pass within three miles of town, and Torbert chose to wait for daylight, December 23, before deciding whether to storm or outflank it. Alas, he then found it would be unwise to attempt either. Warned of his approach, Lee had detached a pair of veteran brigades from Longstreet, north of the James, and hurried them by rail to Gordonsville the night before. “After becoming fully satisfied of the presence of infantry,” Torbert afterwards reported, “I concluded it was useless to make a further attempt to break the Central Railroad.” Instead, he withdrew and made a roundabout return march, through Madison Courthouse and Warrenton, to Winchester on December 28.

Custer by then had been back five days, having done only too good a job of attracting Early’s attention. In camp the second night, nine miles from Harrisonburg, he was attacked before reveille, December 21, by Rosser’s cavalry division, which Early had sent to intercept him a day’s march short of Staunton. Driven headlong, Custer kept going northward down the pike, abandoning the raid, and returned to his starting point next day. Between them, he and Torbert had lost about 150 killed or wounded or captured, exclusive of some 230 of Custer’s men severely frostbitten during their fast rides out and back. He would have stayed and fought, he informed Sheridan — he would never be flat whipped till Little Big Horn, twelve years later — except for a shortage of rations and “my unprepared state to take charge of a large body of wounded, particularly under the inclement state of the weather. In addition,” he said, straight-faced, “I was convinced that if it was decided to return, the sooner my return was accomplished the better it would be for my command.”

Grant was not inclined to censure anyone involved: least of all Sheridan, who had exercised his aggressive proclivities in weather most generals would have considered fit for nothing but sitting around campfires, toasting their toes and swapping yarns. Moreover, hard as the two-pronged raid had been on Union horseflesh, not to mention the blue riders’ frost-nipped hands and feet and noses — 258 of Torbert’s mounts had broken down completely in the course of his ten-day outing — it had no doubt been even harder on the scantly clad Confederates and their crowbait nags, which would be that much worse off when spring unfroze the roads and northern troopers came pounding down them, rapid-fire carbines at the ready. That too was a gain, perhaps comparable in its future effect to Stoneman’s descent on Saltville, and the two together fit nicely into the year-end victory pattern whose larger pieces were supplied by Thomas and Sherman, in Tennessee and Georgia, as well as by Pleasonton and Curtis out in the Transmississippi, where the last of Price’s fugitive survivors came limping into Laynesport this week, in time for a far-from-Merry Christmas.

Now that all these pieces were coming together into a pattern, West and East, even those who had cried out loudest against Grant as “a bull-headed Suvarov” — a commander who relied on strength, and strength alone, to make up for his lack of military talent — could see the effects of the plan he had devised nine months ago, before launching the synchronized offensive that had re-split the South and was now about to go to work on the sundered halves.

*  *  *

With mounting excitement, though not without occasional stretches of doubt and fret at the lack of progress in front or back of Richmond, Atlanta, and Nashville, Lincoln had watched the pattern emerge with increasing clarity, until he saw at last in these year-end triumphs the fruits of the hands-off policy he had followed in all but the times of greatest strain. Sherman’s wire — “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah” — reached Washington on Christmas Eve, and the President released it for publication Christmas morning, pleased to share this gift with the whole country. Next day, when John Logan called at the White House, back from Louisville and on his way down the coast to resume command of his XV Corps, Lincoln gave him a letter for delivery to Sherman, expressing his thanks for the timely gift and restating his intention not to interfere with the actions or decisions of commanders in the field.

“When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful,” he admitted, “but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained,’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce. And taking the work of General Thomas into the count, as it should be taken, it is indeed a great success. Not only does it afford the obvious and immediate military advantage, but in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole — Hood’s army — it brings those who sat in darkness to see a great light. But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave General Grant and yourself to decide.”

Other duties, more clerkly in nature, had continued to require his attention as Commander in Chief throughout this final month of the year. One was the approval of a general order, December 2, removing Rosecrans from command of the Department of the Missouri and replacing him with Grenville Dodge, who had recovered by then from the head wound he had suffered near Atlanta in mid-August. Old Rosy had enjoyed no more success than his predecessors had done in reconciling the various “loyal” factions in that guerilla-torn region, and now he was gone from the war for good. Another departure, under happier circumstances, was made by Farragut, who left Mobile Bay aboard the Hartford about that same time, and dropped anchor December 13 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Like his flagship, soon to go into dry dock, the old man was in need of repairs, having declined command of the Fort Fisher expedition on a plea of failing health. “My flag [was] hauled down at sunset,” he informed Welles a week later. As it turned out, he and the Hartford ended their war service together, though there was no end to the honors that came his way. Two days later, on December 22, Congress passed a bill creating the rank of vice admiral, and Lincoln promptly conferred it on the Tennessee-born sailor, who thus became the nation’s first to hold that rank, just as he had been its first rear admiral. To crown his good with creature comforts, a group of New York merchants got up and presented to him, on the last day of the year, a gift of $50,000 in government bonds. “The citizens of New York can offer no tribute equal to your claims on their gratitude and affection,” an accompanying letter read. “Their earnest desire is to receive you as one of their number, and to be permitted, as fellow citizens, to share in the renown you will bring to the Metropolitan City.”

Two other events of a more or less military nature, widely separated in space but provoking simultaneous reactions, engaged the attention of the public and the President at this time. One was a late-November attempt by a group of eight Confederate agents, operating out of Canada, to terrorize New York City by setting fire to a score of hotels with four-ounce bottles of Greek Fire, similar to those used at St Albans the month before. In the early evening of November 25, nineteen fires were started within a single hour, but they burned with nothing like the anticipated fury, apparently because the supposedly sympathetic local chemist had concocted a weak mixture, either to lengthen his profit or, as one agent later said, to “put up a job on us after it was found that we could not be dissuaded from our purpose.” In any case, firemen doused the flames rather easily, except at Barnum’s Museum, a target of opportunity, where bales of hay for the animals blazed spectacularly for a time. All the arsonists escaped save one, who was picked up afterwards in Michigan, trying to make it back to Toronto, and returned to Fort Lafayette for execution in the spring. Though the damage was minor, as it turned out, the possibilities were frightening enough. Federal authorities could see in the conspiracy a forecast of what might be expected in the months ahead, when the rebels grew still more desperate over increasing signs that their war could not be won on the field of battle.

The other semi-military event occurred four days later in the Colorado Territory, 1500 miles away. Indians throughout much of the West had been on the rampage for the past three years, seeing in the white man’s preoccupation with his tribal war back East an opportunity for the red man to return to his old free life, roving the plains and prairies, and perhaps exact, as he did so, a measure of bloody satisfaction for the loss of his land in exchange for promises no sooner made than broken. When John Pope took over in Minnesota two years ago, hard on the heels of his Bull Run defeat, he put down one such uprising by the Santee Sioux, in which more than 400 soldiers and settlers had been killed, and had the survivors arraigned before a drumhead court that sentenced 303 of them to die for murder, rape, and arson. Reviewing the sentences, despite a warning from the governor that the people of Minnesota would take “private revenge” if there was any interference on his part, Lincoln cut the list to 38 of “the more guilty and influential of the culprits.” Hanged at Mankato on the day after Christmas, 1862, wearing paint and feathers and singing their death song with the ropes about their necks, these 38 still comprised the largest mass execution the country had ever staged. Now two years later, farther west in Colorado, there was another — a good deal less formal, lacking even a scaffold, let alone a trial, but larger and far bloodier — in which the President had no chance to interfere, since it was over before he had any way of knowing it was in progress.

Colonel John M. Chivington, a former Methodist preacher and a veteran of the New Mexico campaign, rode out of Denver in mid-November with 600 Colorado Volunteers, raised for the sole purpose, as he said, of killing Indians “whenever and wherever found.” The pickings were rather slim until he reached Fort Lyon, sixty miles from the Kansas border, and learned that 600 Cheyennes and Arapahoes were camped on Sand Creek, forty miles northeast. They had gathered there the month before, after a parley with the governor, and had been promised security by the fort commander on their word, truthful or not, that they had taken no part in recent depredations elsewhere in the territory. Chivington did not believe them, but it would not have mattered if he had. “I have come to kill Indians,” he announced on arrival, “and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” Asked if this included women, he replied that it did. And children? “Nits make lice,” he said.

He left Fort Lyon early the following evening, November 28, reinforced by a hundred troopers from the garrison, on a wintry all-night ride that brought the 700-man column and its four mountain howitzers within reach of the objective before dawn. Two thirds of them squaws and children — most of the braves of fighting age were off hunting buffalo, several miles to the east — the Indians lay sleeping in their lodges, pitched in a bend of the creek at their back. They knew nothing of the attack until it burst upon them, aimed first at the herd of ponies to make certain there would be no horseback escape in the confusion soon to follow. It did follow, and the slaughter was indiscriminate. The soldiers closed in from three sides of the camp, pressing toward the center where the terrified people gathered under a large American flag that flew from the lodgepole of a Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, who had received it earlier that year, as a token of friendship and protection, from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He displayed it now, along with a white flag raised amid the smoke of the attack. Both were ignored. “It may perhaps be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners,” Chivington would report. He claimed between four and five hundred killed, all warriors; but that was exaggeration. A body count showed 28 men dead, including three chiefs, and 105 women and children. The attackers lost 9 killed and 38 wounded, most of them hit in the crossfire. By way of retaliation, or perhaps out of sheer exuberance, the soldiers moved among the dead and dying with their knives, lifting scalps and removing private parts to display as trophies of the raid. Then they pulled out. Behind them, the surviving Indians scattered on the plains, some to die of their wounds and exposure, others to spend what remained of their lives killing white men.

This too — the Sand Creek Massacre — was part of America’s Civil War, and as such, like so much else involved, would have its repercussions down the years. For one thing, Chivington’s coup discredited every Cheyenne or Arapahoe chief (and, for that matter, every Sioux or Kiowa or Comanche) who had spoken for peace with the white man: including Black Kettle, who, in addition to the bright-striped flag, had been given a medal by Lincoln himself for his efforts in that direction. Moreover, when the buffalo-hunting braves returned and saw the mutilations practiced by the soldiers on their people — fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, wives and sisters — they swore to serve their enemy in the same fashion when the tables were turned, as they soon would be, in the wake of a hundred skirmishes and ambuscades. Nor was that the only emulation. There were those in and out of the region who approved of Chivington’s tactics as the best, if not indeed the only, solution to the problem of clearing the way for the settlers and the railroads: Sheridan, for example, who took them as a guide, some four years later, in pursuing a policy summed up in the dictum: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

News of these and other late-November developments found Lincoln hard at work on the year-end message his secretary would deliver at a joint meeting of the House and Senate on December 6, the day after Congress began its second session. Otherwise, much of the month that followed his reëlection — the first ever won by a free-state President — was spent in putting his political house in order. In addition to paying off, as best he could with the limited number of posts at his disposal, the debts he had contracted in the course of the campaign, this meant a clearing up of administrative business that had hung fire while the outcome was in doubt, including the retirement and replacement of a long-time cabinet member, as well as the appointment of a new Chief Justice.

The cabinet member was Attorney General Edward Bates, a septuagenarian old-line Democrat of a type still fairly common in Washington, but getting rarer year by year as the new breed of office-holders settled in. For some time now the Missourian had been feeling out of step with the society around him, out of place among his radical cohorts, and out of touch with the leader who had summoned him here, four years ago, to play a role he found increasingly distasteful. Decrying the “pestilent doctrines” of the ultras, right and left, and complaining in a letter to a friend of “how, in times like these, the minds of men are made dizzy and their imaginations are wrought up to a frenzy by the whirl of events,” Bates believed he saw the cause of the disruption: “When the public cauldron is heated into violent ebulition, it is sure to throw up from the bottom some of its dirtiest dregs, which, but for the heat and agitation, would have lain embedded in congenial filth in the lowest stratum of society. But once boiled up to the top they expand into foam and froth, [and] dance frantically before the gaping crowd, often concealing for a time the whole surface of the agitated mass.” He was disillusioned, he was disillusioned and bitter; he was, in short, a casualty of this war. He had to go, and on December 1, the election safely over, he went. Lincoln found a replacement in another Border State lawyer-politician, James Speed of Kentucky. Now only Seward and Welles remained of the original cabinet slate drawn up in Springfield.

Another source of disappointment for Bates, now on his way home to Missouri, was Lincoln’s rejection of his application to succeed Roger Taney as Chief Justice, and it was no great consolation that others with the same ambition — Montgomery Blair and Edwin Stanton, for two — were similarly passed over in favor of still a fourth one-time cabinet member: Salmon Chase. The eighty-seven-year-old Taney — appointed as John Marshall’s successor by Andrew Jackson in 1836, nine Presidents ago — died in mid-October, following a long illness. Hated as he was by abolitionists for his Dred Scott decision, and scorned by most liberals for several others since, when he fell sick and seemed about to pass from the scene ahead of James Buchanan, Ben Wade prayed hard that he would live long enough for Lincoln to name his successor. As a result, the Marylander not only survived Buchanan’s term, he seemed likely to outlast Lincoln’s. “Damned if I didn’t overdo it,” Wade exclaimed. Then in October, perhaps in answer to supplementary prayers sent up on the eve of what might be a victory for McClellan, the old man died. Chase was the party favorite for the vacant seat at the head of the Court, his views being sound on such issues as emancipation, summary arrests, and a number of controversial financial measures he had adopted as Treasury chief; but Lincoln took his time about naming a replacement. The election was less than four weeks off, and delay ensured Chase’s continued fervent support — as well as Blair’s. Moreover, here was one last chance to watch the Ohioan squirm, a prospect Lincoln had always enjoyed as retribution for unsuccessful backstairs politics. “I know meaner things about Mr Chase than any of these men can tell me,” he remarked after talking to callers who objected to the appointment on personal grounds. One day his secretary brought in a letter from Chase. “What is it about?” Lincoln asked, having no time just then to read it. “Simply a kind and friendly letter,” Nicolay replied. Lincoln smiled and made a brief gesture of dismissal, saying: “File it with his other recommendations.” All the same, and with the uncertain hope (in vain, as it turned out) that this would cure at last the gnawing of the presidential grub in Chase’s bosom, he sent to the Senate on December 6, four weeks after election, his nomination of “Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States vice Roger B. Taney, deceased.” He wrote it out in his own hand, signing his name in full, as he only did for the most important documents, and the Senate confirmed the appointment promptly, without discussion or previous reference to committee.

On that same day, the President’s fourth December message was read to the assembled Congress. Primarily a report on foreign relations and the national welfare, about which it went into considerable diplomatic and financial details furnished by Seward and Fessenden, the text made little mention of the war being fought in the field, except to state that “our arms have steadily advanced.” But in it Lincoln spoke beyond the heads of his immediate listeners — albeit through the voice of Nicolay, who delivered it for him at the joint session — to the people of the South, much as he had done at his inauguration, just under four years ago, when he addressed them as “my dissatisfied countrymen.” Now he had reason to believe that their dissatisfaction extended in quite a different direction, and he bore down on that, first by demonstrating statistically the emptiness of all hope for a Federal collapse or let-up. Pointing to the heavy vote in the recent election, state by northern state, as proof “that we have more men now than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely,” he declared flatly that the national resources, in materials as in manpower, “are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” So, too, was the resolution of the northern people “unchanged, and, as we believe, unchangeable,” to an extent that altogether ruled out a negotiated settlement. Previously he had avoided public reference to Jefferson Davis, making it his policy to pretend that the Mississippian was invisible at best. Now this changed. He spoke openly of his adversary, though still not by name, referring to him rather as “the insurgent leader,” and pronounced him unapproachable except on his own inadmissable terms. “He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union,” Lincoln pointed out: “precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to this effect are explicit and oft repeated. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves.… Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. If we yield, we are beaten; if the Southern people fail him, he is beaten. Either way, it would be the victory and defeat following war.” This did not mean, however, that those who followed Davis could not accept what he rejected. “Some of them, we know, already desire peace and reunion,” Lincoln said. “The number of such may increase. They can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution. After so much, the government could not, if it would, maintain war against them.”

He spoke in this connection of “pardons and remissions of forfeiture,” these being things within his right to grant, but he added frankly that there was much else “beyond the Executive power to adjust,” including “the admission of members into Congress, and whatever might require the appropriation of money.” Nor did he sugar his offer, or advice, with any concession on other matters: least of all on the slavery issue. Not only would the Emancipation Proclamation stand, he also urged in the course of his message the adoption of a proposed amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery throughout the United States. It had nearly passed in the last session, and would surely pass in the next, whose Republican majority had been increased by last month’s election; “And as it is to so go, at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?” Above all, he wanted to speak clearly, both to his friends and to his present foes, and he did so in a final one-sentence paragraph addressed to those beyond the wide-flung line of battle: “In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.”

All this he said, or Nicolay said for him, on December 6. The next ten days were crowded with good news: first from Georgia, where Sherman reached the coast at last, so little worn by his long march that he scarcely paused before he stormed Fort McAllister to make contact with the navy waiting off the mouth of the Ogeechee: then from Middle Tennessee, where Thomas crushed Hood’s left, in front of Nashville, and flung him into full retreat with the loss of more than fifty guns. Lincoln responded by tightening the screws. In late November the War Department had done its part by lowering the minimum standard height for recruits to “five feet, instead of five feet three as heretofore.” Now the Commander in Chief followed through, December 19 — Sherman by then had closed in on Savannah, which Hardee would evacuate next day — by issuing another of his by now familiar calls for “300,000 more,” this time presumably including men who were not much taller than the Springfields they would shoulder. Privately, moreover, Stanton assured Grant that still another 200,000 troops would be called up in March if those netted by the current proclamation did not suffice to “close out Lee.”

Success, as usual, fostered impatience and evoked a sense of urgency: especially in Lincoln, who had read with pleasure a message Grant sent Sherman after the fall of Atlanta, just under four months ago: “We want to keep the enemy pressed to the end of the war. If we give him no peace whilst the war lasts, the end cannot be distant.” Sherman then had marched to the sea, eastward across the Confederate heartland, and after taking Savannah, bloodlessly though at the cost of having its garrison escape, obtained approval for a follow-up march north through the Carolinas. He was preparing for it now. “I do not think I can employ better strategy than I have hitherto done,” he wrote Halleck on the last day of the year: “namely, make a good ready and then move rapidly to my objective, avoiding a battle at points where I would be encumbered by my wounded, but striking boldly and quickly when my objective is reached.” Lincoln liked the sound of that, much as he had enjoyed Grant’s hustling tone in the Atlanta dispatch. But when Stanton set out the following week, on a trip down the coast to confer with the red-haired commander, it occurred to the impatient President that if the Westerners were to come up hard and fast to join in putting the final squeeze on Lee, there had perhaps not been enough stress on the advantage of an early start. Accordingly, he got off a reminding wire to that effect. “While General Sherman’s ‘get a good ready’ is appreciated, and is not to be overlooked,” he told the Secretary, “Time, now that the enemy is wavering, is more important than ever.”

His advice to the southern people, tendered in the December message to Congress, had been more grim than conciliatory; they need only reject their “insurgent leader … by laying down their arms,” and he would do what he could for them in the way of “pardons and remissions.” Since then, however, the news from Nashville and Savannah had encouraged him to believe that the hour was near when they would no longer have any choice in the matter, if only he could provoke in his generals the sense of urgency he was convinced would end the rebellion in short order, and he said as much in the wire that followed Stanton down the coast. Now that their adversary was “on the downhill, and somewhat confused,” he wanted the Secretary to impress on Sherman the importance of “keeping him going.”