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

  Such a change in tactics, abruptly sprung, would also serve to increase the element of surprise, which figured largely in Sherman’s calculations. But the outlook remained grim, if not downright awesome. “The whole country is one vast fort,” he informed Halleck on June 23. “Johnston must have full fifty miles of connected trenches, with abatis and finished batteries.… Our lines are now in close contact and the fighting incessant, with a good deal of artillery. As fast as we gain one position, the enemy has another all ready.”

  These were minor adjustments, permitting no more than a closer look at the honeycombed slopes of the mountain up ahead, and a closer look only magnified the original impression of impregnability. One-armed Howard, studying the rebel line from a position well to the front, pronounced it “stronger in artificial contrivances and natural features than the cemetery at Gettysburg,” which he had helped to hold despite Lee’s all-out efforts to oust him. But Sherman refused to be distracted, let alone dissuaded. Determined, as he had told Grant the week before, to “inspire motion into a large, ponderous and slow, by habit, army,” he believed that his soldiers, weary of roundabout marches that never quite managed to bring the enemy to bay, needed the stimulus the pending assault would provide, even if most of the blood that was shed turned out to be their own — and he was concerned, as well, lest Johnston’s habitual caution, which had led him to give up so many stout positions in the course of the past seven weeks, should be replaced by a conviction that the Federals would never attack him once he was snugly intrenched. Both of these things counted heavily in the redhead’s calculations, as did the promise of all that would be gained if the attack was anything like as successful as the one up Missionary Ridge, seven months ago, by many of these same men against many of these same opponents, with the difference that there had been no unfordable Chattahoochee in the rebel rear on that occasion.

  Other factors there were, too, no less persuasive because Sherman himself — defined by Walt Whitman as “a bit of stern open air made up in the image of a man” — was perhaps not even aware of their influence on him. For one, the Union army in Virginia was not only doing most of the bleeding in the double-pronged offensive, it was also getting most of the headlines, and despite his dislike of journalists, and indeed of the press in general, he could see that his troops would be heartened by a more equitable distribution of praise, such as the overrunning of Kennesaw would secure. Moreover, back in Nashville and Chattanooga, while preparing for the campaign, he had learned that certain observers snidely characterized him as “not a fighting general.” He dismissed the charge without exactly denying it, saying: “Fighting is the least part of a general’s work. The battle will fight itself.” Still, the imputation rankled, containing as it did some grains of truth, and he welcomed the opportunity, now at hand, to refute it for once and for all. On June 24 he issued a special field order directing his army commanders to “make full reconnaissances and preparations to attack the enemy in force on the 27th instant, at 8 a.m. precisely.”

  That left two full days for getting set; Sherman, having decided to be rash, had also decided to go about it methodically, even meticulously, so as to minimize the cost if the breakthrough failed. For one thing, he would limit the weight of his assault to less than a fifth of the troops on hand, and for another, despite its regrettable but inevitable detraction from the element of surprise, the jump-off would be preceded by an hour-long bombardment from every gun that could be brought to bear on the critical objectives. Of these there were two, main and secondary, neither of them, properly speaking, on the mountain that would give the battle its name, although the secondary effort, assigned to McPherson, would be made against — and, if successful, across — the gently rolling southwest slope of the lower of the two peaks, called Little Kennesaw to distinguish it from Big Kennesaw, the taller and more massive portion of the mountain to the east, overlooking the slow curve of the Western & Atlantic on that flank. This attack would be launched astride the Burnt Hickory Road, simultaneously with Thomas’s main effort, along and to the right of the Dallas Road, one mile south; both commanders would assault with two divisions, their others standing by to exploit whatever progress was achieved. Schofield and Hooker would feint on the far right, Garrard’s cavalry on the left, all at the same prearranged hour, hard on the heels of the softening-up artillery bombardment, so as to prevent Johnston from knowing which part of his line to reinforce from any other, or from his reserves if he had them, before it was swamped. “At the time of the general attack,” the special order ended, foreseeing a happy outcome to the rashness so meticulously prescribed, “the skirmishers at the base of Kennesaw will take advantage of it to gain, if possible, the summit and hold it. Each attacking column will endeavor to break a single point of the enemy’s line, and make a secure lodgment beyond, and be prepared for following it up toward Marietta and the railroad in case of success.”

  Throughout that two-day interim, although few along the eight-mile curve of intrenchments knew what they were waiting or getting set for — “All commanders will maintain reserve and secrecy even from their staff officers,” the field order had cautioned — fire fights, picket clashes, and sudden cannonades would break into flame from point to point, then subside into sputters and die away, sporadic, inconclusive, and productive of little more than speculation. Whether off on the flanks or crouched near the critical center, men listened and wondered, unable to find a pattern to the action. The crash of guns would come from somewhere up or down the line, an Indiana soldier would recall, “then the hurrahing, sometimes the shrill, boyish rebel yell, sometimes the loud, full-voiced, deep-toned, far-sounding chorus of northern men; then again the roar of cannon, the rattle of musketry and the awful suspense to the listeners. If, as the noise grew feebler, we caught the welcome cheer, answering shouts ran along. But if the far-off rebel yell told of our comrades’ repulse, the silence could be felt.”

  Across the way, within the horseshoe curve of works containing Kennesaw and Marietta, the reaction was much the same, but in reverse. No one there could discern a pattern either, including the men of Major Generals Samuel French’s and Benjamin Cheatham’s divisions of Loring’s and Hardee’s corps, respectively astride the Burnt Hickory and Dallas roads, up which the two Union assaults were to be delivered on Monday morning, June 27, one week past the summer solstice.

  The rain left off on Sunday and the sun came up in a cloudless sky next morning at 4.40 to begin its work of drying the red clay roads, the sodden fields and breathless woods. By the time it was three hours high the day was hot and steamy with the promise of much greater heat to come. Twenty minutes later, precisely at 8 o’clock and without preamble, 200-odd Union cannon roared into action, pounding away at the rebel line on the mountainside and across the flats beyond. Crouched in their pits and ditches, jarred and shaken about by the sudden hurtle of metal exploding over and around them, the defenders marveled at the volume and intensity of the fire, which was to them still another manifestation of Yankee ingenuity and wealth. “Hell has broke loose in Georgia, sure enough!” one grayback shouted amid shellbursts, and as the bombardment continued, sustained by an apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition, they began to snatch down the blankets pegged for shade across the open tops of their trenches, preparing for what they knew would come when the guns let up. Finally, close to 9 o’clock, the uproar reached a spasmodic end; the cannoneers stepped back from their pieces, panting, and the blue infantry started forward in two clotted masses, about a mile apart, to assail the Confederate center.

  For a time they advanced in relative security, protected by the intervening woods and the butternut pickets trotting back to join their comrades along the main line of resistance. Then the attackers emerged into brilliant sunlight, silhouetted against the bright green backdrop of trees, and the rebel headlogs seemed to burst spontaneously into flame along their bottoms, all up and down that portion of the line. Sam French, whose left-flank division of Loring’s corps was challenge
d first on Little Kennesaw’s lower slopes, said later that the rattle and flash of musketry, combined with the deep-voiced boom of guns whose crews had held their fire till now, produced “a roar as constant as Niagara and as sharp as the crash of thunder with lightning in the eye.”

  Such was the fury of the sound that accompanied McPherson’s attack, launched astride the Burnt Hickory Road by Brigadier General Morgan Smith, whose division was reinforced for the effort by a brigade from another division in Major General John A. Logan’s corps. Sound and fury were all it came to, however, in the end. In the course of their plunge across a rocky, brush-choked gully, unexpectedly encountered in rear of the line abandoned by the gray pickets, 563 of the 4000 attackers fell before they could get to grips with the defenders intrenched on the far side. At one point “within about thirty feet of the enemy’s main line,” Smith reported, they came close; but there, receiving the full blast of massed rifles, they “staggered and sought cover as best they could behind logs and rocks.” Stalled (“It was almost sure death to take your face out of the dust,” one prone Federal declared, while another expressed a somewhat less gloomy view of the consequences, saying: “It was only necessary to expose a hand to procure a furlough”) they were no longer much of a threat to French, who turned his high-sited batteries a quarter circle to the left and added the weight of the metal to Hardee’s resistance, a mile away, astride and beyond the Dallas Road.

  There Thomas was making a sturdier bid for a breakthrough, and Cheatham’s division had all it could do to keep from being overrun by nearly twice as many Federals as French had had to deal with. “They seemed to walk up and take death as coolly as if they were automatic or wooden men,” one defender was to say of these troops from two divisions under Jeff Davis and Brigadier General John Newton, respectively of Palmer’s and Howard’s corps.

  Two of Cheatham’s four brigades were posted where Hardee’s line bent sharply to the south, creating a somewhat isolated salient, and it was here at the hinge, known thereafter as the Dead Angle, that Thomas struck. “The least flicker on our part would have been sure death to all,” a Tennessee private who helped to hold it later declared. “We could not be reinforced on account of our position, and we had to stand up to the rack, fodder or no fodder.” They did stand up, inflicting in the process — with the help of French’s guns and Cleburne, whose marksmen brought their rifles to bear from up the line — a total of 654 casualties on Newton and 824 on Davis, both of whom notified their superiors that they hoped they could hang on where they were, if that was what was wanted, but that there was no further hope of carrying the position. Howard put it strongest, some time later, looking back. “Our losses in this assault were heavy indeed,” he wrote, “and our gain was nothing. We realized now, as never before, the futility of direct assault upon intrenched lines already well prepared and well manned.” Thomas agreed, sending word around 11 o’clock for those who could fall back to do so at once, while those who could not were to dig in where they were and wait for darkness.

  The sudden resultant drop in the intensity of the fighting came none too soon for the defenders of the Angle, one of whom was to testify that he fired no less than 120 rounds in the course of the repulse. “My gun became so hot that frequently the powder would flash before I could ram home the ball,” he said, adding: “When the Yankees fell back and the firing ceased, I never saw so many broken down and exhausted men in my life. I was sick as a horse, and as wet with blood and sweat as I could be, and many of our men were vomiting with excessive fatigue, overexhaustion, and sunstroke; our tongues were parched and cracked for water, and our faces blackened with powder and smoke, and our dead and wounded were piled indiscriminately in the trenches.”

  Cheatham’s loss came to 195, French’s to 186; between them, they had shot down 2041 of the 12,000 Federals thrown against their works. Other losses, elsewhere in Loring’s and Hardee’s corps, as well as in Hood’s, which had been skirmishing with Schofield all the while, brought the Confederate total to 552. Sherman put his at 2500 — a figure Johnston vowed was a good deal less than half the true one — but later revised it upward to “about 3000.”

  Even so, and despite the shock of the sudden double repulse, he had been willing to drive it still higher at the time. From Signal Hill, his command post on the left, he could see that McPherson had shot his wad, and word had come from Schofield that little could be done on the far right. That left Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga. He too had been checked, losing two of his best brigade commanders in the process, but he might be willing to try again for a repetition of what he had achieved on Missionary Ridge despite conditions even more unfavorable. “McPherson and Schofield are at a deadlock,” Sherman wired him at 1.30. “Do you think you can carry any part of the enemy’s line today? … I will order the assault if you think you can succeed at any point.” Thomas replied: “We have already lost heavily today without gaining any material advantage. One or two more such assaults would use up this army.”

  He recommended a change to siege methods, the digging of saps for a guarded approach. But Sherman, wanting no part of such a time-consuming business, preferred to maneuver the rebels out of position, as before. Encouraged by the let-up of the rain and the fast-drying condition of the roads, he telegraphed Thomas that evening: “Are you willing to risk [a] move on Fulton, cutting loose from our railroad?” Fulton was two miles beyond Smyrna Station, within three miles of the Chattahoochee and about ten miles in Johnston’s rear; Sherman proposed to move by the right flank “with the whole army.” Thomas considered the venture highly risky, exposing as it would the Union life line to Confederate seizure while the wheeling movement was in progress; but in any case, he replied before turning in for the night, “I think it decidedly better than butting against breastworks twelve feet thick and strongly abatised.”

  While waiting for the roads to finish drying Sherman worked on plans for his newest sidle and, eventually, on securing a truce for the burial of the unfortunates who had fallen in the double-pronged repulse. Undaunted — at least on paper — he took the offensive in defending his decision to strike at the rebel center, even though all it had got him was a lengthened casualty list. “The assault I made was no mistake; I had to do it,” he wired Halleck, explaining that after nearly eight weeks of gingerly skirmishing, all the time conforming to a pattern about as precise as if he and Johnston were partners in a classic minuet, Federals and Confederates alike “had settled down into the conviction that the assault of lines formed no part of my game.” Now that both sides knew better, having seen the dance pattern broken as if with a meat ax, he expected to find his adversary “much more cautious.” That was his gain, as he saw it, and he continued to pursue this line of consolation. “Failure as it was, and for which I assume the entire responsibility,” he would assert in his formal report of the lost battle, “I yet claim it produced good fruit, as it demonstrated to General Johnston that I would assault, and that boldly.”

  Earlier, while smoke still hung about the field and the wounded mewled for help between the lines, he had reminded Thomas: “Our loss is small compared with some of those in the East. It should not in the least discourage us. At times assaults are necessary and inevitable.” However, his most forthright statement with regard to losses was reserved for his wife, to whom he wrote two days after the Kennesaw repulse. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” he told her, adding: “It may be well that we become hardened … The worst of the war is not yet begun.”

  That might well be, though there could be no denying that for a considerable number of his soldiers — young and old, recruits and veterans alike — the best was over, along with the worst. Their interment was a grisly thing to watch. “I get sick now when I happen to think about it,” a Confederate wrote years later, remembering the June 30 burial armistice that was asked and granted “not for any respect either army had for the dead, but to get rid of the sickening s
tench.” Although three days of festering midsummer Georgia heat had made the handling of the corpses a repugnant task, he recalled that Yankee ingenuity once more had measured up to the occasion. “Long and deep trenches were dug, and hooks made from bayonets crooked for the purpose, and all the dead were dragged and thrown pell mell into these trenches. Nothing was allowed to be taken off the dead, and finely dressed officers, with gold watch chains dangling over their vests, were thrown into the ditches. During the whole day both armies were hard at work, burying the Federal dead.”

  Thus June ended, bringing with it another pause for a backward look at the casualty count in each of the two armies. In both cases these were lower than they had been the month before, and they were similar in another way as well. Just as New Hope Church and Pickett’s Mill, engagements fought near the bottom of the previous calendar leaf, had reversed the May tally, raising Sherman’s losses above Johnston’s, which had been higher than his opponent’s before the clashes around Dallas, so now did Kennesaw Mountain reverse the count for June, which had been lower for the Union up till then. Sherman’s loss for the past month was 7500, Johnston’s around 6000. This brought their respective totals for the whole campaign to just under 17,000 and just over 14,000. Roughly speaking, to put it another way, one out of every four Confederates had been shot or captured, as compared to one out of seven Federals.

  In time, when the guns had cooled and approximate figures from both sides became available in books, Sherman would take great pride in this reversal of the anticipated ratio of losses between attacker and defender (as well he might: especially in reviewing a campaign fought on ground as unfavorable to the offensive as North Georgia was, against an adversary he admired as much as he did Joe Johnston) but just now there was the war to get on with, the wheeling movement he had designed to flank the rebels off their impregnable mountain and back across the only remaining river between them and his goal, Atlanta. By July 1 the roads were baked about hard enough for marching; the sidle began next day.