The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  Morning brought a renewal of Federal pressure all along the line, quite as if there had been no reduction for a sidle. Johnston held his ground, awaiting developments, and shortly after noon received a dispatch from Walker informing him that the report of a downstream crossing was untrue. By then the pressure against Resaca had somewhat diminished, and Johnston decided to go back to his plan for a renewal of the attack by Hood, who promptly returned to the position he had won the day before. A battery, pushed well to the front to support the jump-off, opened prematurely and was replied to so effectively, by infantry and counterbattery fire, that the cannoneers had to abandon all four guns, left mute and unattended between the lines. This did not augur well for the success of Hood’s assault, but as he was about to go forward in all-out earnest, a message came from the army commander, once more canceling the attack and instructing the three lieutenant generals to attend a council of war that evening at his headquarters.

  There they learned the reason for this second change of plans. A follow-up dispatch from Walker reported the bluecoats over the downstream Oostanaula after all, and Johnston had decided to give up Resaca. The council had not been called for a discussion of his decision, but rather for the assignment of routes on the march to meet this threat to the army’s life line; Polk and Hardee would use the turnpike and railway spans, despite the danger of long-range interdictory fire, and Hood the new-laid pontoon bridge.

  All went as planned, or nearly so, including heavy volleys of musketry by front-line units at midnight to cover the withdrawal of iron-tired artillery and supply vehicles. Rear guards took up the pontoons and loaded them onto wagons for use in crossing other rivers, farther south, and the railroad bridge was set afire to burn till it fell hissing into the Oostanaula. Through some administrative oversight — not unlike the one at Tunnel Hill a week ago, which left the railway tunnel unobstructed — in the last-minute confusion, as dawn was breaking, the turnpike bridge was overlooked and left standing, fit for use by the pursuers. All that was really lost in the way of army property, however, was the four-gun Confederate battery abandoned between Hood’s and Schofield’s lines that afternoon. This came hard for the young Kentucky-born West Pointer, who had a great deal of pride in such matters (in time he would take it even harder, since they turned out to be the only guns Johnston lost in the whole course of the campaign) but who consoled himself, as best he could, by pointing out “that they were four old iron pieces, not worth the sacrifice of the life of even one man.”

  Sherman pressed on after the retiring Confederates, hoping to catch up with them before they had time to develop still another stout position in which to receive him, and continued simultaneously two flanking operations he had set in motion two days ago, both involving only cavalry at the outset. Kilpatrick’s division, minus its wounded leader, had been sent five miles downriver on May 14 to install a pair of pontoon bridges at Lay’s Ferry, and Sherman had followed this up yesterday by detaching Brigadier General Thomas Sweeny’s infantry division from McPherson to march down and cross the river at that point, along with Kilpatrick’s troopers, in order to menace Johnston’s rear; which Sweeny had done with such success that the graybacks were now in full retreat. At the same time, a wider, deeper, and potentially even more profitable thrust was launched by sending another of Thomas’s mounted divisions, under Brigadier General Kenner Garrard, far down the right bank of the Oostanaula to threaten and if possible enter Rome, wrecking its factories and iron works and taking over the branch-line railroad leading east along the north bank of the Etowah to Kingston, on the Western & Atlantic, better than twenty miles below Resaca. Now that Johnston was falling back, Sherman decided to beef up this deeper probe by sending Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis’s division of Cumberlanders to follow the cavalry and take part in the raid on Rome and the eastward strike at Kingston.

  The red-haired commander was leaving no card unplayed in his eagerness to come to grips with his skittish opponent, and he scoffed at the notion, advanced by several members of his staff, that Johnston was falling back quite willingly, in accordance with a plan to draw his pursuers southward to their destruction. “Had he remained in Dalton another hour, it would have been his total defeat,” Sherman insisted, “and he only evacuated Resaca because his safety demanded it.” As for the disappointment some critics expressed at his failure, so far, to bring the wily Virginian to all-or-nothing battle — particularly before Polk arrived from Alabama, in the interim between Dalton and Resaca, to shorten the long numerical odds — he countered that, while he shared the regret that he had not managed to do this, he also saw a clear advantage in the way the campaign had developed up to now. “Of course I was disappointed not to have crippled his army more at that particular stage of the game,” he later wrote; “but, as it resulted, these rapid successes gave us the initiative, and the usual impulse of a conquering army.”

  Determined to make the most of that conquering impulse, he devised a pursuit combining speed with other tactical advantages. While Thomas struck out down the railroad, hard in the wake of the fleeing enemy, McPherson was instructed to proceed at once to Lay’s Ferry for a crossing that would place him well to the right on the march south, in position to make another rapid flanking movement as soon as the rebels called a halt or were brought to one by pressure against their rear, and Schofield was told to do the same in the opposite direction, crossing upstream from Resaca at Field’s Ferry for a march well to the east, in case it developed that the enemy right was the flank that should be turned. This not only increased the celerity of the pursuit by not funneling all the Federal troops down one crowded road; it also assured that when the time came for fighting, all three component armies would be ready for action in their accustomed roles, Thomas’s as the holding force and McPherson’s and Schofield’s as flankers. Moreover, to bring all three into better numerical balance and lessen the traffic on the turnpike, Sherman detached Hooker’s three divisions from Thomas and sent them off to the left with Schofield, whose strength thus was raised to more than 30,000 while Thomas’s was reduced to about 40,000, three other divisions, including two of cavalry, having already been detached for the raid on Rome, still in progress down the Oostanaula, and the preliminary crossing at Lay’s Ferry, where Sweeny’s division rejoined McPherson, together with Kilpatrick’s troopers, who fanned out frontward to provide a screen for the column west of the railroad.

  The first day’s march, May 16, ended at Calhoun, where Sherman thought it likely that Johnston would make a stand, six miles down the track from Resaca, but before he could call in either of the lateral columns, which were also over the river by then, the Confederate rear guard pulled out southward in the darkness, headed apparently for Adairsville, ten miles down the line. There was heavier skirmishing there next day near sundown, but dawn of May 18 showed the graybacks gone again. Schofield by now was in the vicinity of Sallacoa and McPherson at McGuire, hamlets respectively half a dozen miles east and west of Adairsville; Sherman, riding with Thomas in the center, held to this spread-eagle formation as he took up the march for Kingston, another ten miles down the Western & Atlantic. He felt certain that Johnston would dig in there, on the near bank of the Etowah, and he wanted to get at him before he had much chance to get set for the shock.

  Spirits were high in all three columns of pursuit, not only because the rebs were on the run, having been turned out of two practically impregnable positions in less than two weeks, but also because well-drilled rail repair gangs — helped considerably, it was true, by the enemy’s rattled negligence in failing to obstruct the tunnel short of Buzzard Roost — had functioned with such efficiency that even the troops out front, in the process of covering better than half the distance from Chattanooga to Atlanta, had scarcely missed a meal along the way. “The rapidity with which the badly broken railroad was repaired seemed miraculous,” Major General O. O. Howard, one of Thomas’s corps commanders, later noted. “We had hardly left Dalton before trains with ammunition and other
supplies arrived. While our skirmishing was going on at Calhoun, the locomotive whistle sounded in Resaca. The telegraphers were nearly as rapid: the lines were in order to Adairsville on the morning of the 18th. While we were breaking up the state arsenal at Adairsville, caring for the wounded, and bringing in Confederate prisoners, word was telegraphed from Resaca that bacon, hard bread, and coffee were already there at our service.”

  All this had been accomplished, moreover, at a cost of fewer than 4000 casualties, and not only was this figure much lower than had been anticipated, it was also — despite the supposed high price entailed in attacking prepared defenses — not much larger than the enemy total, which included a number of lightly wounded men who had to be left behind and thus became permanent losses, as captives, whereas a Union soldier, left behind under similar circumstances, could be patched up and returned to duty, sometimes overnight. It was no wonder then, with success achieved at so low a cost and without the sacrifice of creature comforts, that spirits were high and the outcome of the expected Kingston confrontation seemed foregone. What was more, as the three main widespread columns prepared for a convergence at that point — forty air-line miles from Tunnel Hill, scene of the opening clash eleven days ago — word came that a prize even more valuable than the state arsenal at Adairsville had fallen into the hands of the invaders. That same morning, May 18, Rome fell undefended to Davis and Garrard, who soon would be working their way east along the branch-line railroad to rejoin the Army of the Cumberland.

  Rome with its factories and iron works, so important to the rebel cause, was a strategic plum worth giving thanks for, but tactically the railroad was a prize worth even more, since practically all of Johnston’s reinforcements had reached him by that route. Now it was closed, except to Federal use, and Sherman — still with Thomas, who was engaged in what Howard called “a running skirmish” down the Western & Atlantic with troops from Hardee’s corps, which apparently had been given the rear-guard post of honor on the Confederate retreat — had 100,000 effectives converging as fast as their legs could carry them toward Kingston, where reports indicated that Johnston had at last been brought to bay with his back to the Etowah River.

  For once, by dint of hard marching on rural roads and steady pressure on the rebel rear, execution matched conception; the convergence would be effected by midday tomorrow, May 19, on schedule and with each of the three component armies in its assigned position for the final thrust, Schofield left, McPherson right, and Thomas center. The trouble was that Sherman, for all the speed and precision of his approach, was converging on a vacuum. Johnston was not at Kingston; he was at Cassville, five miles east, preparing to spring an ambush that would eliminate, or at any rate badly mangle, a solid third of the blue force whose commander had at last afforded him the opportunity he had been awaiting ever since the campaign opened, two weeks and better than forty miles ago.

  Leaving Resaca, two days back, he had intended to make a stand at Calhoun, provided he could find a suitable position — athwart a rather narrow valley, say, which would afford protection for his flanks and thus oblige the Federals to come at him head-on, their numerical advantage canceled by the limited width of front — but when reconnaissance revealed none he moved on that night, hoping to find what he was seeking near Adairsville the following day, May 17. He did not. He did, however, receive a telegraphic dispatch and some cavalry reports which together had the double effect of lifting his spirits and enabling him to arrive at a plan for stopping the blue army in its tracks. Stephen Lee, left in charge of the adjoining department when Polk departed for Georgia, responded to Johnston’s week-old request by announcing that Forrest, with 3500 picked horsemen and two batteries of artillery, would set out within three days for an attack on Sherman’s lines of supply and communication up in Middle Tennessee. This was welcome news, indeed, and Johnston called a council of war that evening to pass it on to his corps commanders, along with their respective assignments for carrying out his table-turning plan.

  Intelligence reports from Wheeler made it clear that Sherman’s pursuit was in three columns, widely spaced, and now that Johnston had decided to continue his march toward the Etowah, he saw in this a rare opportunity to deal with one of those isolated segments before it could call on either of the other two for help. From Adairsville, railroad and turnpike ran due south to Kingston; Hardee would continue on that route, skirmishing as he went, to draw Thomas after him and encourage the impression that he was guarding the rear of the other two corps as they moved ahead of him, down the tracks and pike, for a stand at Kingston. But that was by no means to be the case. Polk and Hood would march instead by a road leading east of south to Cassville, a village about two miles on this side of the Western & Atlantic, which swung due east at Kingston, five miles west. The advantage was that Schofield, reinforced to 30,000, would pass near there on his way to the convergence Sherman would surely order when he became convinced that the graybacks intended to call a halt at Kingston. With Thomas five miles off, McPherson perhaps ten, and Hardee in position to delay their eastward advance along the railroad, Hood and Polk should have ample time to dispose of Schofield before the other two could reach him. With any luck, all three gray corps could then combine to take on Thomas and strike at McPherson when he came up in turn. Dealt with piecemeal, all three Union armies might be destroyed in short order, or anyhow crippled and brought to a stumbling halt; which would serve about as well, since they soon would get the news that Forrest had severed their life line, up in Tennessee. That would leave them no choice except starvation or retreat. Either way, the campaign would be over and the world once more would stand amazed at still another Confederate triumph against overwhelming odds.

  Eager though they were to take up their divergent marches, which were to end with a long-deferred return to the offensive, all three corps commanders went with their chief to his tent, where Polk donned his surplice and stood in front of an improvised altar, preparing to fulfill a request Mrs Johnston had made in a letter written two days ago. She wanted the bishop to do for her husband what he had done for Hood the week before; “lead my soldier nearer to God. General Johnston has never been baptised. It is the dearest wish of my heart that he should be, and that you should perform the ceremony.” Once more with candlelight glinting on the brass and gold lace of the uniforms of candidate and witnesses, the rite of baptism was performed, after which the group dispersed to prepare for the execution of the plan designed to reverse the tide of war in North Georgia.

  Hardee took up his march, southward down the railroad, and with the dawn resumed his “running skirmish” with Thomas, who continued to press hard upon his rear. Meantime the other two corps set out on the road for Cassville, Hood in front with orders to occupy a position tonight from which to strike at the left of Schofield’s column next morning, while Polk attacked the front; Hardee would join them from Kingston, later in the day, so that all three could then turn on Thomas and McPherson, simultaneously or in sequence, when they came up in response to Schofield’s cries for help. Unwelcome news from Stephen Lee reached Johnston in the course of the approach march, to the effect that a heavy enemy movement out of Memphis had obliged him to postpone Forrest’s raid on Sherman’s life line. Offsetting this somewhat, however, there was a report from Richmond that the Federals had acknowledged the so-far loss of 45,000 men in Virginia, thirty-one of them generals, and this gave rise to the airing of a theory by some members of Johnston’s staff that Sherman’s intention was to maneuver his adversary south of the Etowah, then call a halt and hurry reinforcements to the bled-down Army of the Potomac. Johnston put no stock in such talk; he remained intent on the prospect of giving Sherman so much trouble, on this side of the Etowah, that he soon would be seeking assistance, not sending it either to Meade or to Banks, whose fight at Yellow Bayou today was the last on his costly, disheartened retreat down Red River.

  Nightfall found the divided Confederate army in position: Hardee at Kingston, prepared to turn east, and Hoo
d and Polk at Cassville, their ambush laid. Johnston’s spirits were as high as Sherman’s across the way, and on far sounder grounds. Some measure of the Virginian’s confidence and martial elation came through in a general order he composed that night and had read at the head of each regiment next morning, May 19:

  Soldiers of the Army of Tennessee:

  You have displayed the highest qualities of the soldier—firmness in combat, patience under toil. By your courage and skill you have repulsed every assault of the enemy. By marches by day and marches by night you have defeated every attempt upon your communications. Your communications are secured. You will now turn and march to meet his advancing columns. Fully confiding in the conduct of the officers, the courage of the soldiers, I lead you to battle. We may confidently trust that the Almighty Father will still reward the patriots’ toils and the patriots’ banners. Cheered by the success of our brothers in Virginia and beyond the Mississippi, our efforts will equal theirs. Strengthened by His support, these efforts will be crowned with the like glories.

  J. E. JOHNSTON,General.

  Despite the weariness resulting from three days and four nights of marches broken only by rearward skirmishes and fitful snatches of roadside sleep — not to mention the cumulative depression that went with having abandoned better than forty miles of highly defensible terrain without so much as a single fight that attained the dignity of a full-scale battle — the reaction on all levels to the reading of this order, from regimental commanders down to drummer boys, was quite as ecstatic as even its author could have wished.