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CHAPTER 1
The War in the Spring of 1864
May 1864
In early May of 1864, the main Union army in Virginia, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac, sat in the very same locale it had been a year before: in central Virginia, about to cross the Rappahannock River to advance against Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
Across the Appalachian Mountains — what both sides in the American Civil War called "the west" — Union forces were in a far better position than they had been the year before. They had taken Tennessee's last two major cities, Knoxville and Chattanooga. In doing so, they had cut one of the South's most important railroad lines, that connecting the western Confederacy directly with Richmond via Knoxville and the Cumberland Gap.
More significantly, Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas' Army of the Cumberland had attacked and defeated Gen. Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee outside of Chattanooga and had driven it from the field in the war's first rout of a major Confederate army. The fleeing Southerners left behind 47 cannon — the worst battlefield loss of artillery by either side up to that point in the war.
In short, the United States government's war to conquer Southerners rebelling against its authority, and to forcibly bring its seceded states back into the Union, was in the spring of 1864 stalemated in the east, but being won in the west.
For this reason, Abraham Lincoln, president of those "United" States, had decided to bring his most successful general, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, from Tennessee to Virginia. Grant had given the North its first important victory of the war, the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson. Two months later, Grant had beaten the Rebels in the big battle at Shiloh, east of Memphis. In March 1864, in a White House ceremony, Lincoln presented Grant with his commission as lieutenant general. Only George Washington had held that rank in the U. S. Army. More importantly, Lincoln made Grant general-in-chief of all Federal forces, with authority to form and direct strategy in every theater of the war. Because whipping Lee's tough Rebel army and capturing the Confederate capital at Richmond were the North's chief priorities, Grant would take his place in the field with Meade's army, directing its coming offensive.
Who would take Grant's place in the west? When he boarded his train to Washington, Grant was commander of the "Military Division of the Mississippi," encompassing the whole area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. To succeed him in this position he could have recommended Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, but Grant preferred another officer who had fought under him at Shiloh and in the Vicksburg Campaign, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman was a West Pointer, class of 1840, but had not served in the Mexican War. Disillusioned with his military career, he resigned from the army in 1853. Over the next few years he worked several jobs, including as a banker in California, and failed in all of them. He quit his job as superintendent of a Louisiana military academy when that state seceded in January 1861. When war broke out, he secured a Union colonelcy and eventually promotion to brigadier. He saw action at Manassas, then was transferred to Kentucky to help organize the Union forces there.
A fellow officer once characterized "Cump" Sherman as "a splendid piece of machinery with all of the screws a little loose." When Sherman called for 200,000 troops to launch an offensive into Tennessee, the press started calling him "insane." The War Department sent him home in November 1861 to recover from what was likely a mental breakdown.
Sherman returned to service a few months later in forces commanded by Grant. The two men's friendship grew despite Sherman's spotty performance as a battlefield commander at Shiloh (April 1862), Chickasaw Bluffs (December 1862), and Missionary Ridge (November 1863). It was to Sherman that Grant handed over command of the Military Division on March 18, 1864.
The two generals soon met in Cincinnati to discuss Grant's plan for the coming spring campaign: a simultaneous advance by all Union armies. Lincoln had called for this in January 1862, and had largely been derided for it. Now, two years further into a bloody war, Grant was determined to bring the North's superior manpower and logistical resources to bear against the rebellion and to crush it. When Grant with Meade's army moved against Lee in Virginia, other Union armies were also to advance. Grant wanted Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks, for example, to lead a force against Mobile. Sherman would set out from Chattanooga against the Rebel army in north Georgia, the Army of Tennessee.
Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston commanded that Confederate army. At the start of the war Johnston, a West Pointer and career army officer, had risen to the rank of brigadier general when he resigned to follow his native Virginia into the Confederacy. Quickly named C. S. brigadier, Johnston was assigned commands in the Shenandoah Valley and in northern Virginia where, with Brig. Gen. G. T. Beauregard, he helped orchestrate the Confederates' victory at Manassas in July 1861. Taking command of the Southern army in Virginia, he faced the Union advance against Richmond in spring of 1862. After Federal Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan began marching his huge Army of the Potomac up Virginia's peninsula between the York and James rivers, Johnston assembled his forces there, but gradually retreated back toward the capital. Finally, in late May, virtually ordered by Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his military advisor Robert E. Lee to attack McClellan, Johnston did so. In the resulting battle of Seven Pines, he was seriously wounded on May 31. The next day, Lee took command of Johnston's army and never relinquished it for the rest of the war.
Johnston convalesced and reported for duty to the secretary of war in November 1862. There was no army-level command position open at the time, so the Davis administration created a big superdepartment from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and placed Johnston in charge of it. In his territory were three Confederate armies: Gen. Braxton Bragg's in middle Tennessee; Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's in Mississippi; and Lt. Gen. E. Kirby Smith's in east Tennessee. Unfortunately, Johnston's authority over them was vague; as a result, he did little, even when Grant in May 1863 began marching against Pemberton at Vicksburg. The administration threw together a makeshift relief army of some 20,000 and urged Johnston to attack Grant as he besieged Pemberton. Johnston moved too little and too late; Pemberton surrendered July 4. President Davis later said that Vicksburg fell for "want of provisions inside, and a general outside who wouldn't fight."
Nevertheless, when an army-level command position developed later that year, Davis gave it to Joseph E. Johnston. After the ignominious rout of his army at Missionary Ridge in November 1863, Braxton Bragg resigned; senior corps command Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee took temporary charge. Two weeks later, Johnston was named commander of the Army of Tennessee. He assumed his responsibilities on December 27 at Dalton, Georgia.
During the next several months the new commander worked at building up the troops' spirits, like issuing furloughs; increasing the food, clothing and supplies brought by train from Atlanta; and instituting procedures to shore up discipline in the ranks. Previously the Army of Tennessee's infantry, divided into two corps, was commanded by Lieutenant Gen. Hardee and Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, who took over Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge's corps when the latter left for Virginia. Hardee was experienced and reliable, and with Johnston's arrival at Dalton he reverted to corps commander without complaining. He would stay. Hindman's appointment, however, was temporary. Johnston wanted someone else to command his second corps. When he heard that John Bell Hood, famed division commander in Lee's army, had recovered from his wound at Chickamauga and had been promoted to lieutenant general, Johnston asked that Hood be sent to his army. The War Department complied.
By that time, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, had led 26,000 Northern soldiers across the width of Mississippi, from Vicksburg to Meridian, in a raid whose sole purpose was to tear up Southern railroads, burn factories and shops, and destroy every other form of property that could be deemed of "military value." Sherman intended his men to live "off the country"; he had learned it could be done from Grant the year before in the march on Vicksburg.
Opposing Sherman was Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, whom President Davis had shipped off from Bragg's army after Chickamauga (Bragg actually asked that Polk be courtmartialed for insubordination in the battle). Polk was given command of the Army of Mississippi, which had been assembled for Johnston to use against Grant at Vicksburg (but which he did not). Polk had only 10,000 infantry and as many scattered cavalry. He pleaded for reinforcements.
On February 18, after Sherman's raiding column reached Meridian, an alarmed Jefferson Davis ordered Johnston at Dalton to send Hardee's corps off toward Montgomery to aid Polk. Hardee's troops boarded the trains for Atlanta and beyond; on February 22, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Cheatham's division reached Montgomery. By then, however, having burned much of Meridian, Sherman's troops were marching back toward Vicksburg, doing more damage to government (and civilian) property. Hardee's infantry eventually returned to Johnston's army.
So Sherman, who boasted of his army's destruction of Meridian, was acting offensively, in both senses of the term. The Confederate government also wanted Joe Johnston to show some offense. Even before he took command of the army, Davis wrote him suggesting that after refitting his troops he develop a plan for advancing back into Tennessee.
This was only the first such message from Davis, Seddon and Bragg, who in late February was appointed military advisor to the president. The correspondence was carried on for several months, with Johnston repeating that he was outnumbered by the enemy, that they were well fortified in Chattanooga, and that he lacked both subsistence and transport to get around them in a forward movement.
Johnston was actually correct; the government was asking too much of him. But to Jefferson Davis, who recalled Johnston's retreat up the Peninsula and his dithering in Mississippi, the whole episode again indicated that the general commanding the South's second-largest army lacked a fighting spirit.
CHAPTER 2
Sherman Launches His Campaign
May 5-9, 1864
Sherman broke the Confederates' deadlock by launching his own spring campaign, which immediately put Johnston and his army on the defensive.
Before he did so, Sherman and Grant exchanged letters in which they repeated their understanding of the goals of the coming offensive. "You I propose to move against Johnston's army," Grant wrote on April 4, "to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their War resources."
Sherman answered promptly on the 10th: "I will not let side issues draw me off from your main plan in which I am to knock Joe Johnston, and do as much damage to the resources of the enemy as possible."
Sherman's reply is important for two reasons. First, neither general mentioned anything about Atlanta, only getting into "the enemy's country"; but it was obvious that Federal forces marching south from Chattanooga would be headed for Atlanta. Second, notice the difference between Grant's hope that his friend Cump would break up Johnston's army, and Sherman's promise that he would merely knock it. Sherman's subtle change in his understanding of Grant's orders underscores an aspect of his generalship that he had already demonstrated thus far in the war: that he was a mediocre (at best) battle captain, and that he tended to avoid big, bloody and potentially campaign-ending battles. ("Of course I must fight when the time comes," he had written a daughter in January 1864. "But wherever a result can be accomplished without Battle I prefer it.")
Sherman's real strength lay in maneuver. He had the extra advantage of a formidable numerical superiority over Joe Johnston's army. Available to him was not just George Thomas' Army of the Cumberland near Chattanooga, but Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson's Army of the Tennessee then in north Alabama (which had been under Sherman until his elevation to military division command), as well as Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield's Army of the Ohio, which had been operating in east Tennessee. Once these forces were assembled, Sherman was confident that he could force Johnston to give up the territory of north Georgia, all the way back to Atlanta.
Sherman wrote Grant that he had met with his senior officers "and have signified only to ... Schofield, Thomas and McPherson our general plans." He did not elaborate how he would use his three armies in those "general plans," but it is likely that to his three army commanders he would have outlined his idea of using Thomas' army to fix the Rebels in place with sorties, skirmishing and shelling, while using McPherson's smaller army or perhaps Schofield's to march and maneuver around Johnston's flank, compelling him to retreat lest he be cut off from his line of supply. Again, Sherman did not give Grant details but as we shall see, throughout the Georgia Campaign Sherman would repeatedly outflank Johnston by sending McPherson or Schofield from his right in a flanking march around the Rebel left.
Now here is the important prediction he made to Grant on April 10: "should Johnston fall behind the Chattahoochee I would feign to the right, but pass to the left, and act on Atlanta or on its eastern communications, according to developed facts." With this statement, Sherman was signaling that throughout the campaign he would outflank Johnston by sending columns from the Federal right, but once he had finally reached the Rebels at their climactic position, the Chattahoochee (their last geographic barrier), he would reverse himself: feint to the right but cross troops over the river from his left, thus forcing the enemy to retreat before Sherman's final approach to Atlanta.
It is easy to overestimate the importance of Sherman's outline of plan in his letter of April 10 to Grant, which he wrote a full three weeks before the Georgia campaign even opened. In this exaggerative vein, it is possible to imagine what might have happened if the Confederates had learned of Sherman's plan for crossing the Chattahoochee beforehand. What if the Germans had learned of Eisenhower's plan to merely feint to the left (threaten crossing the English Channel at Calais), but actually strike on the right (that is, land all of his forces on the beaches of Normandy)? This is why historical might-have-beens, especially in military history, are so intriguing — and so profitless.
But the point made here is that a month before his Georgia campaign even opened, General Sherman had a plan to use his superior numbers to force Johnston's army back through north Georgia in repeated, identical flanking maneuvers. Then, at the Chattahoochee, he planned to switch his tactics in what would be the campaign's most important coup.
What Sherman could not tell Grant was that he would refuse to implement the tactics that his superior officer would use to batter Robert E. Lee's army into submission: frontal assaults, relying upon superior numbers and repeated blows to win the Virginia Campaign, essentially by a war of attrition. Instead, as we will see, Sherman would use his superior numbers to fix Johnston's army in position while outflanking it. And superior numbers Sherman definitely had at the start of the campaign:
• Thomas' Army of the Cumberland: 61,600 infantry in the IV, XIV and XX Corps;
• McPherson's Army of the Tennessee: 22,300 infantry in the XV and XVI Corps;
• Schofield's Army of the Ohio: 9,200 infantry of the XXIII Corps;
• cavalry, mostly in Thomas' army: 12, 400;
• and artillery: 4,500 men serving 254 guns.
General Johnston did not know Sherman's exact strength — 110,000 officers and men in all three armies — but, as he had repeated to Davis, Seddon and Bragg, he knew he was outnumbered.
Moreover, because he knew that the government had hoped for him to adopt an offensive policy, at the start of the campaign he could not tell Richmond he planned to do just the opposite: build defensive fortifications at strong topographic positions and hope Sherman would attack him there.
By this point in the war, it had been shown time and again that veteran infantry, well dug in and armed with rifled muskets, could repulse (and bloodily) just about every enemy infantry attack thrown against them. Indeed, after Lee's rather easy victory at Fredericksburg, Johnston is said to have snidely commented: "What luck some people have. Nobody will ever come to attack me in such a place." Here, in north Georgia, he hoped to be proven wrong.
Johnston had half of Sherman's strength. Returns for the Army of Tennessee on April 30, eve of the campaign's onset, showed 42,900 infantry in Hardee's and Hood's corps, 7,800 cavalrymen and 3,100cannoneers (with 144 guns) for a total of 53,800 men present for duty. Not counted in the army returns was the immense number of slaves — teamsters, hospital stewards, officers' servants — who performed tasks otherwise assigned to soldiers.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Long and Bloody Task"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Stephen Davis.
Excerpted by permission of Savas Beatie LLC.
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