NEW STRATEGIES IN THE SOUTH
The Federal occupation of Atlanta led to a brief lull - a final intermission, so to speak, before the curtain should rise for the last act in the war. Sherman undertook to make a fortress out of Atlanta, and he ordered all noncombatants to leave - one of the harsh acts for which Georgians never forgave him. There was a brief truce, and Union army teamsters helped the exiles get their pathetic bundles of personal property south of the city and inside the Confederate lines. Not all civilians left Atlanta, but a great many did. The town was more than half depopulated, and many abandoned homes were looted or destroyed outright. Meanwhile, the rival commanders tried to devise new strategic plans.
Sherman welcomed the breathing spell. His army needed rest and a refit, and he himself needed time to decide on his next step. Under the program Grant had laid down in the spring, Sherman had not yet attained his true objective, the destruction of Hood's army; but as he studied the situation now he began to realize that the whole nature of the war had changed, and that a radical reconsideration of possible objectives might be necessary. He was in the very heart of the South, and he had subject to his orders many more soldiers than his foe could bring against him. He could go anywhere he chose to go, and when he selected his goal he might not be bound by the tenets of military orthodoxy. He had broken the shell of the Confederacy, and - as he was to remark - he was finding hollowness within. His problem was to find the best way to exploit that hollowness.
Hood's problem was to get Sherman out of the South. The Confederate could hardly hope to do this by direct attack. The inequality of the opposing forces ruled this out, and the battles around Atlanta had hurt Hood far more than they had hurt Sherman. If Sherman was to be dislodged, it must be by maneuver, and Hood concluded that his best hope was to go west of Atlanta, swing north, and attack Sherman's communications. This would force Sherman to follow him, and in the tangled country of northern Georgia an opportunity for a winning battle might somehow be developed.
So Hood put his army on the march, and as he did so Forrest went up into Tennessee and broke an important section of the railroad between Nashville and the Tennessee River. If this move had been made before the capture of Atlanta, it would have given Sherman serious trouble; even as it was, the Federals assembled 30,000 men to get Forrest out of Tennessee, and Sherman sent his ablest subordinate, Thomas, back to Nashville to make Tennessee secure. Forrest escaped the Federal net and withdrew to northern Mississippi. He got there early in October, just as Hood began his operations against Sherman's railroad line in Georgia.
Sherman left an army corps to hold Atlanta and set out after Hood, and for a fortnight or more the two armies sparred at long range and maneuvered for position. At Allatoona Pass on October 5 Hood saw an opportunity to capture large Federal stores of supplies, which were lightly guarded by a detachment under Brigadier General John M. Corse. The Confederates sent Corse a demand for immediate surrender "to avoid a needless effusion of blood," but the Unionist stoutly replied that he was ready for just such an effusion "whenever it is agreeable to you." From nearby Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman signaled Corse - an interchange of messages which inspired a popular patriotic ballad entitled "Hold the Fort" - and in the fight that followed Corse stubbornly held on, and the Rebels were eventually forced to retire.
Hood could never quite make a real break in Sherman's railroad, and Sherman could never pin the elusive Confederate down for a finish fight; and late in October the two armies turned their backs on one another and set off in opposite directions, each general having at last evolved a new program. Taken together, the decisions of Hood and Sherman put the war into its concluding phase.
Hood had settled on a bold and desperate gamble. He would go over into northern Alabama, and from that area he would march his entire army into Tennessee, in the belief that this would force Sherman to evacuate Atlanta and come after him. Joe Wheeler, with Hood's cavalry, would remain in Georgia to keep an eye on Sherman and hurt him as much as possible. When Hood crossed the Tennessee River and started north, Forrest would go with him in Wheeler's stead. Even if this move did not persuade the Federal authorities to call off Sherman's gigantic raid, Hood might possibly overwhelm Thomas and regain Tennessee for the Confederacy, and after refitting in Nashville, he could drive north into Kentucky. From that state, Hood reasoned, he could threaten Cincinnati, and he might even cross the Cumberland Mountains to fall upon Grant's rear and thus come to the aid of Lee before Richmond. It was a plan born of desperation, and, as it turned out, it was a strategic error of the first magnitude, but the plain fact of the matter was that Hood had no good choice to make.
SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA
Sherman, meanwhile, was looking southeast to the sea, meditating a bold gamble of his own - a gamble all the more remarkable in that it involved a complete reversal of the strategic plan laid down by Grant six months earlier. Grant had insisted that Confederate armies were the chief objectives for the Union strategy. What Sherman was saying now was that he would completely ignore the Confederate army which was supposed to be his target, and that he would go instead for a military intangible - the spirit that sustained the Confederate nation itself. He would march for Savannah and the seacoast, abandoning his own line of supply, living off the lush Georgia country - the harvest was in, there was corn in the bins and forage in the barns, plantation smokehouses were crammed with bacon and ham, and there were hogs and cattle in the fields. If 60,000 Union soldiers (Sherman argued) could go anywhere in the South they wanted to go, making the South support them as they moved and paying no attention to anything the South's army might try to do, they would prove once and for all that the Confederate nation could not protect the homes, the property, or the families of its own defenders. Grant was skeptical at first, but he finally approved Sherman's plan, and Sherman set off to implement it.
By November 16 the strangest movements of the war were under way: Hood was going north, striking for Nashville, and Sherman was marching southeast for Savannah. Atlanta Sherman left in flames: he had ordered that only buildings of some military potentiality should be destroyed, but his soldiers were careless with matches, and the place was full of empty dwellings, and as the Union army left most of Atlanta went up in smoke. With some 60,000 men Sherman set out for the sea.
Nowhere in Georgia was there any force that could give him serious opposition, and the march seemed to the soldiers more like a prolonged picnic than like regular war. The march was leisurely, and as it moved the army fanned out widely, covering a front sixty miles wide from wing to wing; and, by orders and by the inclination of its imperfectly disciplined soldiers, the army laid waste the land as it moved, doing much the same thing Sheridan had done in the Shenandoah Valley but doing it jocosely, like Halloween rowdies on a spree, rather than with the cold grimness of Sheridan's troopers. Regular foraging parties were sent out by each brigade, every morning, to bring in supplies, and these brought in far more than the army needed. Soldiers used to a diet of salt pork and hardtack ate chicken and sweet potatoes, fresh beef and southern ham, anything and everything that a rich agricultural region could provide. The supply wagons were always full, and when the army moved on, it destroyed or gave away to the runaway slaves who clustered about it more food than it had eaten.
In addition, the army was preceded, surrounded, and followed by a destructive horde of lawless stragglers. These included outright deserters, who had abandoned their regiments and had no intention of returning to them, and who were going along now on the fringe of the army just for the fun of it; they included, also, men temporarily absent without leave, who would return to duty later but who were free-wheeling it for the time being; and they included, oddly enough, certain numbers of deserters from the Confederate army, who found kindred spirits among the lawless marauders and went with them for the sake of loot. All of these characters, out from under anyone's control, went under the generic name of "bummers," and they made Georgia's lot far more grievous than Sherman's orders intended. They robbed and burned and pillaged all the way from Atlanta to the sea, not because they had anything against the people they were afflicting, but simply because they had gone outside of all normal controls - including their own.
Sherman probably could have suppressed them if he had tried hard. He did not try. He argued, with some justification, that his responsibility was to get his army safely to the sea, and that he could spare neither the manpower nor the energy to protect the people of Georgia while he got it there. But in point of plain fact the bummers were doing pretty largely what Sherman wanted done. They were undoubtedly being a great deal more brutal and wanton than he would have wanted them to be, but they were effectively laying waste the Confederate homeland, and that was all that mattered - to Sherman. He had said that he would make Georgia howl; Georgia was howling to the high heavens, and much of the impetus was coming from the work of the bummers. It is hard to imagine Sherman making a really serious effort to pull all of these characters under proper restraint.
For this, again, was total war. Sherman's march to the sea was the demonstration that the Confederacy could not protect its own; it was also the nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern bombing raid, a blow at the civilian underpinning of the military machine. Bridges, railroads, machine shops, warehouses - anything of this nature that lay in Sherman's path was burned or dismantled. Barns were burned, with their contents; food to feed the army and its animals was taken, and three or four times as much as the army needed was simply spoiled... and partly because of all of this, Lee's soldiers would be on starvation rations, and the whole Confederate war effort would become progressively weaker. Wholesale destruction was one of the points of this movement. The process through which that destruction was brought about was not pretty to watch, nor is it pleasant to read about today.
Sherman went on toward the sea, taking his time about it, and the Confederacy could do nothing to stop him. Hood, who might have engaged his attention, was going on into central Tennessee, his gamble a failure before it was made. Thomas was assembling an army of more than 50,000 men at Nashville, and Hood was a great deal weaker. The odds were great, and the fact that they were so great was a conclusive demonstration of the North's overwhelming power; the Federal government could take Sherman's army clear off the board and still outnumber the best force Hood could bring to the field.
HOOD IN THE CENTRAL THEATER
It took Thomas a certain amount of time, however, to get all his forces together, and Hood was an aggressive fighter who would use his hitting power to the utmost. He was moving up from the Muscle Shoals crossing of the Tennessee, heading for Nashville by way of Franklin, and Federal General Schofield, commanding two army corps, was falling back from in front of him. Hood outmaneuvered Schofield and at Spring Hill had a chance to cut in behind him and put his whole force out of action - a blow which would have compelled the Federal high command to take Hood's movement very seriously indeed. Hood had particular admiration for the fighting qualities and generalship of the late Stonewall Jackson, and his move was now patterned after Jackson's spectacularly successful flanking march and attack at Chancellorsville. At Spring Hill he came very close to duplicating it, but at the last minute his command arrangements got completely snarled, in one way or another he failed to take advantage of his opportunity, and Schofield's army marched unmolested across the Confederate front, wagon trains and all, to escape the trap. On November 30 Hood overtook him at Franklin; furious because of the chance he had missed, Hood ordered a frontal assault on the Federal line, sending 18,000 men forward through the haze of an Indian-summer afternoon in an attack as spectacular, and as hopeless, as Pickett's famous charge at Gettysburg.
Never was a charge driven home more heroically, or at a greater cost - to a more dismal defeat. In a few hours' time Hood's army lost 6,252 men, including five generals killed. The Union lines held firmly, and Hood gained nothing whatever by the assault. After dark Schofield drew away and continued his retreat to Nashville, and Hood was left in possession of the field, which he would have gained without fighting at all because Schofield had no intention of remaining there. Weaker than Thomas to begin with, Hood had further weakened his army; worse yet, his men had lost confidence in him, realizing that the whole battle had been useless.
No army in the war was unluckier than Hood's army, the gallant Army of Tennessee. It had fought as well as any army ever fought, but mistakes in leadership always intervened to cancel out gains that were won on the battlefields. Bragg had taken it far up into Kentucky and then had been able to do nothing better than lead it back to the south again, its mission unaccomplished. The army had nearly destroyed Rosecrans at Murfreesboro only to see its near-victory turned into defeat. It had completely routed Rosecrans at Chickamauga, but Bragg's inept handling of it thereafter had made the victory barren. It had lost more men than it could afford to lose in the heroic assaults on Sherman's troops around Atlanta, and now, at Franklin, it had almost wrecked itself in an attack that should have never been ordered. It was at a dead end. It could continue to advance, but it was on the road to nowhere.
Hood followed hard, once the Battle of Franklin was over. The Federals in Nashville were solidly entrenched; they had been occupying the city for three years, and by now it was one of the best-fortified places in the country, and Thomas had put together a force at least twice the size of Hood's. Hood put his men in camp on high ground a few miles south of Nashville and waited - for what, it is hard to determine, since he had nothing to gain by hanging out in front of Nashville. He could not conceivably take the place by storm, his force was altogether too small for him to lay siege to it, he could not sidestep and march north without inviting Thomas to attack his flank and rear, and he believed that if he tamely retreated his army would disintegrate. In simple fact he had run out of strategic ideas, even of strategic possibilities, and as he waited he was no better than a sitting duck for the ablest Federal commander in the West.
Thomas was still holding back, preferring not to strike until everything was ready. Just when he completed his preparations a hard sleet storm came down, sheathing the roads and hills with glare ice and making movement impossible, so Thomas waited a few days longer for a thaw. Far off in Virginia, Grant, ordinarily a man without nerves, grew worried. He could not, at that distance, see how completely Thomas was in control of the situation; he feared that Hood would get away from him and march all the way north to the Ohio; and after fruitlessly bombarding Thomas with orders to attack at once, Grant prepared orders relieving the general from command and set out himself to go west and take control.
For the only time in his career Grant was suffering from a case of the jitters. The war was on the edge of being won, but if Hood eluded Thomas and kept on to the north the balance might be upset disastrously, and Grant was fretting about it, not realizing that Hood could do nothing whatever but await Thomas' assault. It appears that under everything there was some coolness between Grant and Thomas. Ordinarily a first-rate judge of soldiers, Grant apparently never quite rated Thomas at his true worth, and now he was unable to contain himself. It quickly became evident that Grant was indulging in a lot of quite needless worry.
Before the order relieving Thomas could be transmitted, and before Grant had gotten any farther on his way than Washington, Thomas struck, the ice at last having melted. On December 15 and 16 the Unionists attacked Hood's army, crushed it, and drove it south in headlong retreat. A rear guard of 5,000 men under Forrest fought a series of delaying actions, and the remnants of Hood's command at last got to safety south of the Tennessee River, but the Confederacy's great Army of Tennessee was no longer an effective fighting force. Hood was relieved from a command which had ceased to mean much, and the bits and pieces of the broken army were assigned to other areas of combat. For the one and only time in all the war, a Confederate army had been totally routed on the field of battle. It goes without saying that Grant never finished his trip west, and the order relieving Thomas was immediately canceled.
SHERMAN'S ADVANCE
Meanwhile, Sherman had kept on moving. As far as the people of the North were concerned, he had disappeared from sight when he left Atlanta. He sent back no progress reports - could not, since all lines of communication with the North were cut - and if he and his whole army had gone underground they could not have been more completely out of touch with the home folks. Lincoln was somewhat worried, at times, but he comforted himself with the grim thought that even if Sherman's army were entirely lost, the North would still have enough soldiers to handle the Confederacy's declining armies; besides which, the President by this time had full confidence in Grant and Sherman, and he was willing to assume that they knew what they were about.
On December 10 Sherman reached the coast just below Savannah, capturing Confederate Fort McAllister, at the mouth of the Ogeechee River, and getting in touch with the U.S. Fleet. News of his safe arrival went north promptly, and Sherman drew his lines to capture Savannah and the force of 10,000 which had been scraped together to defend it. He succeeded in taking the city - it was bound to fall, once Sherman's army had attained full contact with the navy - but Confederate General William S. Hardee managed to get the garrison out safely. The Confederate troops moved up into South Carolina, and Sherman's men marched proudly into Savannah. On December 24 Sherman sent Lincoln a whimsical telegram, offering him the city of Savannah as a Christmas present.
So 1864 came to an end, and as it did the approaching end of the war was visible for all to see. The Confederacy still had an army west of the Mississippi, where it could have no effect on the outcome of the struggle, and it had isolated forces at Mobile and elsewhere in the deep South, but it had nothing to oppose Thomas' victorious troops in Tennessee, it had no chance to bring together enough men to keep Sherman from coming north from Savannah whenever he elected to try it, and Lee was still pinned in the lines at Petersburg, unable to do more than hold on. To all intents and purposes, the Confederacy at the beginning of 1865 consisted of the Carolinas and of the southern strip of Virginia.
One success the South had had, in December. An amphibious expedition under Benjamin Butler had tried to capture Wilmington, North Carolina, the one remaining seaport through which the South could communicate with the outer world. A Union fleet had bombarded Fort Fisher, which commanded the entrance to the Cape Fear River on which Wilmington was situated, Butler had put troops ashore - and then, growing panicky, had concluded that the place was too strong to be taken, had reembarked his men, and had sailed north in disgraceful panic. But even the savor of this defensive victory did not last long. Butler was removed and in early January Grant sent down a new expedition, with Admiral Porter commanding the navy and General A. H. Terry commanding for the army. This time there was no hesitation. The navy pounded the fort hard, then Terry got his troops on the beach and sent them swarming over the defenses. Fort Fisher surrendered, and the Confederacy's last door to the outer world was closed.
Sherman was preparing to march north. In Tennessee a powerful Federal mounted force of 12,000 men armed with repeating carbines was getting ready to cut down into Alabama. Another Federal army was besieging Mobile. Grant was ordering 21,000 Western troops be brought east, to move inland from captured Wilmington and join Sherman as he came north. The war was all but finished.