THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA
In the early summer of 1864 General Joseph E. Johnston understood the military situation very clearly. Sherman had driven him from the Tennessee border to the edge of Atlanta, and in Richmond this looked like the equivalent of a Confederate disaster; but to Johnston it looked very different. Sherman had done a great deal, but he had neither routed Johnston's army nor taken Atlanta, and until he did at least one of these things the Northern public would consider his campaign a failure. Feeling so, it might very well beat Lincoln at the polls - and this, as things stood in the fourth year of the war, represented the Confederacy's last and best hope for victory. As Johnston appraised things, his cue was to play a waiting game; stall for time, avert a showdown at all costs, let Sherman dangle ineffectually at the end of that long, tenuous supply line, and count on Northern depression and weariness to turn the tide.
But Davis saw it otherwise, and Davis had the final responsibility. He was a man beset by rising shadows, and as he struggled gallantly to keep life in a dying cause, refusing to recognize the omens of doom, he looked about him with the eyes of a soldier rather than with the eyes of a politician. What might happen in the November elections was a politician's concern; to Davis the victories that would save the Confederacy must be won in the field, and they would never be won unless the Confederate armies turned and fought the invader until the invader had had enough. So Davis relieved Johnston of his command and put General John Bell Hood in his place. Doing so, he made one of the fateful decisions of the war.
Hood was a combat soldier or proved effectiveness. He had commanded a brigade and then a division in Lee's army, fighting with great dash and valor; had been badly wounded in the arm at Gettysburg, had recovered in time to fight at Chickamauga, and there had lost a leg. Patched up, and riding strapped to his saddle, he had been given corps command under Johnston, and he had been bitterly critical of Johnston's series of feints and retreats. He understood stand-up fighting, and now Davis wanted a stand-up fighter and gave Hood Johnston's job. Unfortunately, Hood was suited for subordinate command but not for the top job. The transfer worked to Sherman's immense advantage.
Hood was aware that he had been put in charge of the army to fight, and he lost no time in getting at it. Sherman had crossed the Chattahoochee River and was moving so as to come down on Atlanta from the north and east. Atlanta was ringed with earthworks, and Sherman had no intention of attacking these. He hoped to cut the four railroad lines that converged on the city and thus compel the Confederates either to retreat or to come out and make a stand-up fight in the open. Moving out to attack, Hood was doing just what Sherman wanted.
Hood was not being stupid, for Sherman had in fact incautiously left an opening. McPherson, with Schofield and rather less than half of the Federal troops, had moved to a point on the Georgia Railroad, east of the city, and was marching in, tearing up the railroad as he advanced. Thomas, with the rest of the army, was crossing Peachtree Creek, and there was a gap of several miles between his forces and the men of McPherson and Schofield; and on July 20 Hood attacked Thomas savagely, hoping to destroy him before Sherman could reunite his forces.
Hood's troops attacked with spirit, but there was never a better defensive fighter than George Thomas, and his troops were as good as their general. Hood's attack was beaten off, the Confederates had substantial losses, and Thomas was able to reestablish contact with McPherson and Schofield.
Two days later Hood struck again. This time he swung east, seeking to hit McPherson in the flank the way Jackson had hit Hooker at Chancellorsville. The fight that resulted, known as the Battle of Atlanta, was desperate, and it came fairly close to success. McPherson himself was killed, and for a time part of his army was being assailed from front and rear simultaneously. But the Unionists rallied at last, the Confederate assaults failed, and Hood pulled his men back inside the fortified lines. The two battles together had cost him upward of 13,000 men, and Sherman was now pinning him in his earthworks. The railroads that came to Atlanta from the north and east had been cut, and Sherman began to swing ponderously around by his right, hoping to reach the Macon and Western that ran southwest from Atlanta. Once more Hood came out to attack him, and there was a hard fight at Ezra Church west of the city; once again the Confederates were repulsed, with losses heavier than they could afford, and Sherman was a long step nearer the capture of Atlanta.
It was Atlanta that he wanted, now. He had started out to destroy the Confederate army in his front, and this he had never been able to do; since Hood replaced Johnston that army had been badly mangled, but it still existed as an effective fighting force, and Sherman had been changing his objective. If he could get the city, the campaign would be a success, even though it would not be the final, conclusive success he had hoped to win. Hood alone could not keep him out of Atlanta indefinitely; Sherman had more than a two-to-one advantage in numbers now, and he could reach farther and farther around the city, snipping the railroad connections and compelling the defenders at last to evacuate. Sherman's chief worry now was his own rear - the railroad that went back to Chattanooga, down the Tennessee Valley to Bridgeport, and up through Nashville to Kentucky. There was in the Confederacy one man who might operate on that line so effectively that Sherman would have to retreat - Bedford Forrest - and as the siege of Atlanta began, Sherman's great concern was to put Forrest out of action.
Unfortunately for Sherman, all attempts to do this ended in ignominious defeat; the Federal army, apparently, contained no subordinate general capable of handling this self-taught soldier. Early in June, Sherman sent a strong cavalry column under Major General Samuel D. Sturgis down into Mississippi from Memphis, in the hope that Forrest could be forced into a losing battle. It did not work out as he hoped. Forrest met Sturgis, who had twice his strength, at Brice's Crossroads, Mississippi, on June 10, and gave him one of the classic beatings of the Civil War. Sturgis drew off in disgrace, and Sherman had to make another effort.
He made it in July. With his own army nearing Atlanta, Sherman ordered a powerful expedition under Major General A. J. Smith to move down from Memphis into Mississippi to keep Forrest busy. Top Confederate commander in that area was General Stephen D. Lee, and he and Forrest with a mixed force ran into Smith's expedition near the town of Tupelo. There was a brisk fight in which Forrest was wounded and the Confederates were driven off, a clear tactical victory for the Unionists; but Smith did not like the look of things, and he beat a hasty retreat to Memphis, his withdrawal badly harassed by Forrest's cavalry. In August he was sent out to try again; and this time Forrest slipped past him and rode into Memphis itself - he was traveling in a buggy just now, his wounded foot propped up on a special rack, but he could still move faster and more elusively than any other cavalry commander. He could not stay in Memphis more than a moment, and he did no special harm there, but he did force the authorities to recall Smith's expedition. The moral apparently was that no one could invade the interior of Mississippi as long as Forrest was around.
Brilliant as Forrest's tactics had been, however, the Federal moves had doe what Sherman wanted done; that is, they had kept Forrest so busy in the deep South that he had not been able to get into Tennessee and strike the sort of blow against Sherman's long supply line that would have pulled Sherman back from Atlanta. With Forrest otherwise engaged, Hood could not hold the place forever. On August 25 Sherman broke off his intermittent bombardment of the Confederate lines and began another circling movement to the southwest and south of the city. Hood's efforts to drive the advancing columns back failed, and it was clear now that Atlanta was going to fall. Hood got his army out smartly, and on September 2 the Federals occupied the city.
Here was a victory which the administration could toss into the teeth of the Democrats who were basing their Presidential campaign on the assertion that the war was a failure. (The fact that this was not the kind of victory Sherman and Grant had hoped for in the spring was irrelevant; the fragmentation of the Confederacy was visibly progressing, and the capture of Atlanta was something to crow about.)
OTHER NORTHERN VICTORIES
The victory came on the heels of another one, at Mobile Bay, where tough old Admiral Farragut on August 5 had hammered his way past the defending forts and, after a hard fight, had taken the ironclad ram Tennessee. This victory effectively closed the port of Mobile, and although that city itself would hold out for months to come, it would receive and dispatch no more blockade-runners. One more Confederate gate to the outer world had been nailed shut, and there had been a spectacular quality to Farragut's victory that took men's imaginations. He had steamed through a Confederate mine field (they called mines "torpedoes" in those days) and one of his monitors had run on one of the mines and had been lost, whereat the rest of the battle line hesitated and fell into confusion; but Farragut bulled his way in, and his "Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead!" was a battle cry that stuck in the public's mind as if robust confidence in ultimate victory had been reborn.
Not long after this a third Federal triumph was recorded, and Northern spirits rose still higher.
Jubal Early had led his diminutive Confederate army to the very suburbs of Washington, but he had not been able to force his way in or to stay where he was, and he had retreated to the upper end of the Shenandoah Valley. The War Department had assembled troops to drive him away, but although Early was very badly outnumbered - he had about 15,000 men with him, and the Federals mustered three army corps and a good body of cavalry, 45,000 men or more - everybody was being very cautious, and Grant in front of Petersburg found it impossible to get aggressive action by remote control. He finally put Phil Sheridan in charge of the operation, went to the scene himself long enough to make sure that Sheridan understood what he was supposed to do, and returned to Petersburg to await results.
Sheridan was supposed to do two things - beat Early and take the Shenandoah Valley out of the war. This valley, running southwest from the Potomac behind the shield of the Blue Ridge, had been of great strategic value to the Confederacy ever since Stonewall Jackson had demonstrated its possibilities. A Confederate army moving down the Valley was heading straight for the Northern heartland, threatening both the capital and such cities as Philadelphia and Baltimore, to say nothing of the North's east-west railway connections; but a Northern army moving up the Valley was heading nowhere in particular, since the Valley went off into mountain country and led the invader far away from Richmond. The Valley was immensely fertile, producing meat and grain that were of great importance to Lee's army defending Richmond, and a Confederate army operating in the lower Valley could supply itself with food and forage from the Valley itself. All in all, a Federal army trying to take Richmond could never be entirely secure until the Confederates were deprived of all use of the Shenandoah Valley, and it was up to Sheridan to deprive them of it.
Grant's instructions were grimly specific. He wanted the rich farmlands of the Valley despoiled so thoroughly that the place could no longer support a Confederate army; he told Sheridan to devastate the whole area so thoroughly that a crow flying across over the Valley would have to carry its own rations. This work Sheridan set out to do.
And now, in September of 1864, total war began to be waged in full earnest. Grant and Sheridan were striking directly at the Southern economy, and what happened to Early's army was more or less incidental; barns and corncribs and gristmills and herds of cattle were military objectives now, and if thousands of civilians whose property this was had to suffer heartbreaking loss as a result, that also was incidental. A garden spot was to be turned into a desert in order that the Southern nation might be destroyed.
Sheridan began cautiously. Early was a hard hitter, and although his army was small, it was lean and sinewy, composed of veterans - altogether, an outfit to be treated with much respect. Sheridan did not really make his move until September, and on the nineteenth of that month he fought Early near the town of Winchester, Virginia. The battle began before half of Sheridan's army had reached the scene, and the morning hours saw a Union repulse, but by midafternoon Sheridan had all of his men in hand, and Early was badly beaten and compelled to retreat. Sheridan pursued, winning another battle at Fisher's Hill three days later, and Early continued on up the Valley while Sheridan's men got on with the job of devastation that Grant had ordered.
Few campaigns in the war aroused more bitterness than this one. The Union troopers carried out their orders with a heavy hand, and as they did so they were plagued by the attacks of bands of Confederate guerillas - irregular fighters who were of small account in a pitched battle, but who raided outposts, burned Yankee wagon trains, shot sentries and couriers, and compelled Sheridan to use a sizable percentage of his force for simple guard duty. The Federal soldiers considered the guerillas no better than highwaymen, and when they captured any of them they usually hanged them. The guerillas hanged Yankees in return, naturally enough; and from all of this there was a deep scar, burned into the American memory, as the romanticized "war between brothers" took on an ugly phase.
Guerilla warfare tended to get out of hand. Most bands were semi-independent, and in some areas they did the Confederacy harm by draining able-bodied men away from the regular fighting forces and by stimulating the Federals to vicious reprisals. Best of the guerilla leaders was Colonel John S. Mosby, who harassed Sheridan's supply lines so effectively that substantial numbers of Sheridan's troops had to be kept on duty patrolling roads back of the front, but most partisan leaders were far below Mosby's stature. In Missouri guerilla warfare was especially rough; neighborhood feuds got all mixed in with the business of fighting the Yankees, and the notorious W. C. Quantrill, whose desperadoes sacked Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863, killing about 150 citizens, often looked more like an outlaw than a soldier.
The middle of October found Sheridan's army encamped near Cedar Creek, twenty miles south of Winchester. Early was not far away, but he had been beaten twice and it seemed unlikely that he retained any aggressive intentions, and Sheridan left the army briefly to visit Washington. At dawn on the morning of October 19, just as Sheridan was preparing to leave Winchester to return to camp, Early launched a sudden attack that took the Union army completely by surprise, broke it, and drove various fragments down the road in a highly disordered retreat. Sheridan met these fragments as he was riding back to camp, hauled them back into formation, got them to the battle front, put them in line with the soldiers who had not run away, and late in the afternoon made a furious counterattack which was overwhelmingly successful. Early was driven off, his army too badly manhandled to be a substantial menace any longer, and it was plain to all men that the Confederacy would never again threaten the North by way of the Shenandoah Valley.
This victory aroused much enthusiasm. Like Farragut's fight, it was intensely dramatic; men made a legend out of Sheridan's ride from Winchester and about the way his rallied troops broke the Confederate line, and a catchy little ballad describing the business went all across the North. Coming on the heels of Mobile Bay and Atlanta, Sheridan's conquest was a tonic that checked war weariness and created a new spirit of optimism. No longer could the Democrats make an effective campaign on the argument that the war was a failure. The war was visibly being won, and although the price remained high it was obvious that the last crisis had been passed. Sherman, Farragut, and Sheridan were winning Lincoln's election for him.
LINCOLN REELECTED
Which is to say that they were winning it in part. The victory which Lincoln was to gain when the nation cast it ballots in November was fundamentally of his own making. In his conduct of the war he had made many mistakes, especially in his handling of military matters in the first two years. He had seemed, at times, to be more politician than statesman, he had been bitterly criticized both for moving too fast on the slavery question and for not moving fast enough, and there had always been sincere patriots to complain that he had lacked drive and firmness in his leadership. But he had gained and kept, somehow, the confidence of the average citizen of the North. If his leadership had at times been tentative, almost fumbling, it had firmly taken the mass of the people in the direction they themselves deeply wanted. The determination and the flexible but unbreakable will that kept on waging war in the face of all manner of reverses had been his. The military victories won in the late summer and early fall of 1864 did reverse an unfavorable political current, but in the last analysis it was a majority belief in Lincoln himself that carried the day.
While these triumphs were being won, Grant's army was still dug in at Petersburg. It had had a fearful campaign. Coming to grips with Lee's army in the first week of May, it had remained in daily contact with its foes (except for the two-day interlude provided by the shift from Cold Harbor to Petersburg) for more than five months. It had fought the hardest, longest, costliest battles ever seen on the American continent, and its casualties had been so heavy that it was not really the same army it had been in the spring; most of the veterans were gone now, and some of the most famous fighting units had ceased to exist, and in all of this wearing fighting there had been nothing that could be pointed to as a clear-cut victory. The Army of the Potomac had won no glory, and it had been chewed up almost beyond recognition. It had done just one thing, but that one thing was essential to the final Union triumph: it had compelled Lee to stay in the immediate vicinity of Richmond and fight a consuming defensive fight which he could not win.
For the Army of Northern Virginia, doggedly barring the way to Richmond, had paid a price in this campaign too. It had been worn down hard, and if its losses were not nearly as heavy as the losses which it had inflicted, its numbers had never been as great, and the capacity to recuperate quickly from a hard blood-letting was gone. In all previous campaigns in Virginia this army, under Lee's direction, had been able to make a hard counterblow that robbed the Federals of the initiative and restored the offensive to the Confederacy. That had not happened in the 1864 campaign, partly because Grant had crowded Lee too hard, but even more because the Army of Northern Virginia was not quite the instrument it had been. The razor-sharp edge was gone. The army was still unconquerable on the defensive, and it was still knocking back offensive thrusts made by its rival, but it was no longer up to the kind of thing that had made Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville such triumphs.
In plain words, these two armies had worn each other out. The significance of this was the fact that the really decisive campaigns - the campaigns which would determine the outcome of the war - would therefore be made far to the south and west, where the Confederacy operated at a ruinous disadvantage. A stalemate in Virginia meant victory for the North. Only when the Army of Northern Virginia had the room and the strength to maneuver as of old could the nation which it carried on its shoulders hope to survive. Crippled and driven into a corner, it could do no more than protect the capital while the overwhelming weight of other Federal armies crushed the life out of the Confederacy.
Lincoln's reelection was the clincher. It meant that the pressure would never be relaxed; that Grant would be sustained in his application of a strategy that was as expensive as it was remorseless, and that no loss of spirit back home would cancel out what the armies in the field were winning. It should be pointed out that the Federal government used every political trick at its command to win the election; many soldiers were permitted to cast their ballots in camp, and where this was not possible, whole regiments were furloughed so that the men could go home and vote. However, Lincoln would have won even without the soldier vote. He got 2,203,831 votes to McClellan's 1,797,019, winning 212 electoral votes to 21 for his rival. In some states, notably New York, the winning margin was painfully narrow, and the fact that McClellan could get as much as 45 percent of the total vote indicates that a surprisingly large number in the North were not happy about the course of events since March 4, 1861. However, 45 percent remains a losing minority. By a substantial majority the people of the North had told Lincoln to carry the war on to a victorious conclusion. After November, triumph for the Union could only be a question of time.