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

  Walker, a year younger at forty-seven than his chief, who had finished a year behind him at West Point—a veteran of the Seminole and Mexican wars, heavily bearded, with stern eyes, he was one of three West Pointers among the eight Confederate generals named Walker—then demonstrated a difficulty commanders risked with high-strung subordinates in this war, particularly on the southern side. He took offense at his fellow Georgian’s tone, and he said as much to an aide who rode with him on the way back to his division. “Major, did you hear that?” he asked, fuming. The staffer admitted he had; “General Hardee forgot himself,” he suggested. Walker was not to be put off, however. “I shall make him remember this insult. If I survive this battle, he shall answer me for it.” Just then an officer from Hardee’s staff overtook them with the corps commander’s regrets for “his hasty and discourteous language” and assurance that he would have “come in person to apologize, but that his presence was required elsewhere, and would do so at the first opportunity.” So the envoy informed Walker, whose companion remarked soothingly, after they had ridden on: “Now that makes it all right.” But Walker’s blood was up. He was by no means satisfied. “No, it does not,” he said hotly. “He must answer me for this.”

  As it turned out, no one on this earth was going to answer to W. H. T. Walker for anything. Ordered forward shortly thereafter, he and his three brigades clawed their way through the brier patch, hearing Maney’s and Cleburne’s attack explode on the left as it struck McPherson’s flank, and then emerged from a stand of pines into what was to have been the Union rear, only to find a nearly mile-long triple line of bluecoats confronting them on ground that had been empty when it was reconnoitered, half an hour before. Walker had little chance to react to this discovery, however, for as he and his men emerged from the trees, sunlight glinting on his drawn saber and their rifles, a Federal picket took careful aim and shot him off his horse.

  Hood, who had waited and watched impatiently for the past six hours in a high-sited observation post on the outskirts of Atlanta, was dismayed by what he saw no more than a mile away across the treetops. Plunging northwest, on the far left of the Confederate assault, Maney overlapped the Union flank and had to swing hard right as he went past it, which threw his division head-on against the enemy intrenchments facing west. This caused Hood to assume — and later charge — that Hardee’s attack had been launched, not into the rear of the blue left flank, as directed, but against its front, with predictable results; Maney rebounded, then lunged forward again, and again rebounded. Beyond him, out of sight from Hood’s lookout tower, Cleburne was doing better, having struck the Federals endwise, and was driving them headlong up the Flat Shoals Road, which ran just in rear of their works below Bald Hill. Still farther to the east, however, Bate and Walker’s successor, Brigadier General Hugh Mercer, were having the hardest time of all. In this direction, the element of surprise was with the defenders, whose presence was as unexpected, here on the right, as the appearance of the attackers had been at the opposite end of the line.

  Advancing westward yesterday and this morning, under instructions “not to extend any farther to the left” beyond the railroad, lest his troops be spread too thin, McPherson’s front had contracted so much that he could detach one of his three corps, led by Major General Grenville M. Dodge, to carry out an order from Sherman to “destroy every rail and tie of the railroad, from Decatur up to your skirmish line.” Dodge completed this assignment before midday and was moving up to take a position in support of Blair, whose corps was on the left, when he learned that a heavy force of graybacks was approaching from the southeast, up both banks of Sugar Creek. Under the circumstances, all he had to do was halt and face his two divisions to the left, still in march formation on an east-west road, to establish the triple line of defense whose existence Walker and Bate had not suspected until they emerged from the screen of pines and found it bristling in their front. If they had come up half an hour earlier they would have stepped into a military vacuum, with little or nothing between them and the rear of Blair and Logan, whose corps was on Blair’s right, connecting McPherson and Schofield. Now, instead, Walker was dead and Bate and Mercer were involved in a desperate fight that stopped them in their tracks, much as Maney had been stopped on the left, under different circumstances. Thus, of the four gray divisions involved in the attack from which so much had been expected, only Cleburne’s was performing as intended. Yet he and his fellow Arkansans made the most of their advantage, including the killing of the commander of the Army of the Tennessee.

  McPherson was not with his troops when Hardee’s attack exploded on his flank. He was up in rear of Schofield’s left, just over half a mile north of the railroad, conferring with Sherman in the yard of a two-story frame house that had been taken over for general headquarters, about midway of the line confronting Atlanta from the east. What he wanted was permission to open fire with a battery of long-range 32-pounders on a foundry whose tall smokestack he could see beyond the rebel works from a gun position he had selected and already had under construction on Bald Hill — or Leggett’s Hill, as it was called on the Federal side, for Brigadier General Mortimer Leggett, whose division of Blair’s corps occupied it. McPherson’s notion was that if he could “knock down that foundry,” along with other buildings inside Atlanta, he would hasten the fall of the city. Moreover, he had personal reasons for wanting to accomplish this in the shortest possible time, since what he was counting on, in the way of reward, was a leave of absence that would permit him to go to Baltimore and marry a young lady to whom he had been engaged since his last leave, just after the fall of Vicksburg. He had tried his best to get away in March and April, but Sherman had been unwilling, protesting that there was too much to be done before the drive through Georgia opened in early May. So the thirty-five-year-old Ohioan had had to bide his time; though only by the hardest. Just last week he had asked his friend Schofield when he supposed his prayers would be answered. “After the capture of Atlanta, I guess,” Schofield replied, and McPherson had taken that as his preliminary objective, immediately preceding the real objective, which was Baltimore and a union that had little to do with the one he and more than a hundred thousand others would die fighting to preserve.

  Sherman readily assented to the shelling of the city, and ordered it to begin as soon as the guns were in position. His first impression, on finding the rebel trenches empty in his front this morning, had been that Hood had evacuated Atlanta overnight; but that had lasted only until he relocated the enemy in occupation of the city’s inner line, as bristly as ever, if not more so, and now he took the occasion of McPherson’s midday visit to show him, on the headquarters map, his plan for shifting all three armies around to the west for the purpose of cutting Hood’s remaining rail connections with Macon and Mobile, which would surely bring on the fall of Atlanta if the proposed bombardment failed. It was by then around 12.30, and as they talked, bent over the map, the sound of conflict suddenly swelled to a roar: particularly southward, where things had been quiet all morning. Sherman whipped out his pocket compass, trained it by earshot, and “became satisfied that the firing was too far to our left rear to be explained by known facts.” McPherson quickly called for his horse and rode off to investigate, trailed by members of his staff. Sherman stood and watched him go, curly bearded, six feet tall, with lights of laughter often twinkling in his eyes; “a very handsome man in every way,” according to his chief, who thought of his fellow Ohioan as something more than a protégé or younger brother. He thought of him in fact as a successor — and not only to himself, as he would tell another friend that night. “I expected something to happen to Grant and me; either the rebels or the newspapers would kill us both, and I looked to McPherson as the man to follow us and finish the war.”

  From a ridge in rear of the road on which Dodge had been marching until he stopped and faced his two divisions left to meet the assault by Bate and Walker, McPherson could see that the situation here was less desperate than he had
feared; Dodge was plainly holding his own, although the boom of guns from the east gave warning that a brigade he had posted at Decatur to guard the train in the cavalry’s absence was also under attack. Sending the available members of his staff in both directions, with instructions for all units to stand firm at whatever cost, the army commander turned his attention westward to Blair’s position, where the threat seemed gravest.

  In point of fact it was graver than he knew. Cleburne by now had driven Blair’s flank division back on Leggett, whose troops were fighting to hold the hill that bore his name, and numbers of enemy skirmishers had already worked their way around in its rear to seize the wooded ground between there and Dodge’s position. That was how it happened that McPherson, who had sent away all of his staff except an orderly, encountered graybacks while trotting along a road that led across to Leggett’s Hill. Indeed, he was practically on top of one group of Confederates before he suspected they were there. An Arkansas captain, raising his sword as a signal for the two riders to surrender, was surprised by the young general’s response (“He checked his horse slightly, raised his hat as politely as if he were saluting a lady, wheeled his horse’s head directly to the right, and dashed off to the rear in a full gallop”) but not for long. “Shoot him,” the gray-clad officer told a corporal standing by, and the corporal did.

  McPherson was bent over his mount’s withers to keep from being swept from the saddle by the drooping limbs of trees along the road. He fell heavily to the ground, struck low in the back by a bullet that ranged upward through or near his heart. His companion, unhorsed and momentarily stunned by a low-hanging branch, recovered consciousness to find the general lying beside him, clutching his breast in pain, and the butternut soldiers hurrying toward them. He bent over him and asked if he was hurt. “Oh, orderly, I am,” McPherson said, and with that he put his face in the dust of the road, quivered briefly, and died. The orderly felt himself being snatched back and up by his revolver belt; “Git to the rear, you Yankee son of a bitch,” he heard the rebel who had grabbed him say. Then the captain got there and stood looking down at the polished boots and buff gauntlets, the ornate sash about the waist, and the stars of a major general on both dead shoulders. “Who is this lying here?” he asked. The orderly had trouble answering. Sudden grief had constricted his throat and tears stood in his eyes. “Sir, it is General McPherson,” he said. “You have killed the best man in our army.”

  Sherman’s grief was as great, and a good deal more effusive. “I yield to no one but yourself the right to exceed me in lamentations for our dead hero,” he presently wrote the Baltimore fiancée. “Though the cannon booms now, and the angry rattle of musketry tells me that I also will likely pay the same penalty, yet while life lasts I will delight in the memory of that bright particular star which has gone before to prepare the way for us more hardened sinners who must struggle to the end.”

  But that was later, when he could spare the time. Just now he responded to the news that McPherson’s horse had come riderless out of the woods in back of Leggett’s Hill by ordering John Logan, the senior corps commander, to take charge of the army and counterattack at once to recover the ground on which his chief might be lying wounded. Logan did so, and within the hour McPherson’s body was brought to headquarters in an ambulance. Someone wrenched a door off its hinges and propped it on two chairs for a catafalque, and Sherman went on directing the battle from the room where his fellow Ohioan was laid out. Already he had sent a brigade from Schofield to support the one Dodge had defending Decatur from Wheeler’s attack, but aside from this he sent no reinforcements to help resist the assault on his left flank and rear. “I purposely allowed the Army of the Tennessee to fight this battle almost unaided,” he later explained, partly because he wanted to leave to McPherson’s veterans the honor of avenging his fall, and also because he believed that “if any assistance were rendered by either of the other armies, the Army of the Tennessee would be jealous.”

  His confidence in his old army — it had also once been Grant’s, and had yet to come out loser when the smoke of battle cleared — was justified largely today because of Logan, who exercised his new command in style. Dubbed “Black Jack” by his soldiers, the former Illinois politician knew how to translate stump oratory into rousing military terms. Clutching his flop-brim hat in one hand so that his long raven hair streamed behind him in the wind, he spurred from point to embattled point and bellowed: “Will you hold this line with me? Will you hold this line?” The veterans showed they would. “Black Jack! Black Jack!” they chanted as they beat off attacks that soon were coming from all directions: particularly on Leggett’s Hill, which Hood by now had ordered Cheatham to assault from the west while Cleburne kept up pressure from the south and east. Brigadier General Manning Force’s brigade, menaced front and rear, was obliged at times to fight on alternate sides of its breastworks. At one critical point he called for a flag, and a young lieutenant, assuming from the look of things that the time had come to surrender, began a frantic search for a white handkerchief or shirt. “Damn you, sir!” Force shouted. “I don’t want a flag of truce; I want the American flag!” Shot in the face shortly thereafter, he lost the use of his voice and fell back on conducting the hilltop defense with gestures, which were no less flamboyant and seemed to work as well. The hill was held, though at a cost of ten guns — including the four McPherson had planned to use against Atlanta at long range — fifteen stands of colors, and better than a thousand prisoners, mostly from Blair’s other division under Brigadier General Giles A. Smith (one of an even dozen Federal generals with that name, including one who spelled it Smyth) which had given way at the outset, badly rattled by Cleburne’s unexpected flank-and-rear assault.

  Although there were no other outright surprises, the issue continued to swing in doubt from time to time and place to place. Sherman watched with interest from his headquarters on the central ridge, and when Cheatham scored a breakthrough around 4 o’clock, just north of the railroad, he had Schofield mass the fire of several batteries to help restore Logan’s punctured right. Word came then from Decatur that the two brigades of infantry had managed to keep Wheeler’s troopers out of the town square, where the train was parked, and from Dodge that he was confident of holding against weakening attacks on the left rear. Mercurial as always, despite the tears that trickled into his stub red beard whenever he thought of McPherson laid out on his improvised bier inside the house, Sherman was in high spirits as a result of these reports, which reached him as he paced about the yard and watched the progress of the fighting in all directions. Presently the headquarters came under long-range fire, obliging him and his attendants to take cover in an adjoining grove of trees. Sheltered behind one of these, he noticed a terrified soldier crouched nearby in back of another, moaning: “Lord, Lord, if I once get home,” and: “Oh, I’ll be killed!” Sherman grinned and picked up a handful of stones, which he then began to toss in that direction. Every pebble that struck the tree brought a howl or a groan from behind it. “That’s hard firing, my man,” he called to the unstrung soldier, who replied without opening his tight-shut eyes: “Hard? It’s fearful! I think thirty shells have hit this tree while I was here.” The fire subsided, and the general stepped into the open. “It’s all over now; come out,” he told the man, who emerged trembling. When he saw who had been taunting him, he took off running through the woods, pursued by the sound of Sherman’s laughter.

  From end to end, the Federal line was held or restored, except where Smith’s unfortunates had been driven back across the lower slopes of Leggett’s Hill, and though the fighting was sometimes hand-to-hand and desperate, on past sundown into twilight, there was by then no doubt that Hood’s Second Sortie — aside, that is, from the capture of a dozen guns and an assortment of Union colors — had been no less a failure than his First, two days ago. It was, however, considerably more expensive; for this time the Confederate leader held almost nothing back, including the Georgia militia, which he used in a fruit
less attack on Schofield that had no effect on the battle except to swell the list of southern casualties. In the end, Hood’s loss was around 8000 killed, wounded, and missing, as compared to Sherman’s 3700.

  All next day the contending armies remained in position, licking their wounds, until Hardee withdrew unimpeded the following night into the Atlanta works. Saddened by the loss of Walker, who had called at headquarters on the eve of battle to assure him of his understanding and support, as well as by the news about McPherson — “No soldier fell in the enemy’s ranks whose death caused me equal regret,” he later said of his West Point friend and classmate — Hood was profoundly disappointed by the failure of his two sorties to accomplish the end for which they had been designed; but he was by no means so discouraged that he did not intend to attempt a third, if his adversary presented him with still another opportunity. He knew only too well how close he had come, except for the unlucky appearance of Dodge’s corps in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, to wrecking the encircling Union host entirely.

  Frank Blair, for one, concurred in this belief. Hood’s flanking movement, he afterwards declared, “was a very bold and a very brilliant one, and was very near being successful. The position taken up accidentally by [Dodge’s] corps prevented the full force of the blow from falling where it was intended to fall. If my command had been driven from its position at the time that [Logan’s] corps was forced back from its intrenchments, there must have been a general rout of all the troops of the Army of the Tennessee … and, possibly, the panic might have been communicated to the balance of the army.”

  Sherman was not much given to speculation on the might-have-beens of combat, and in any case he no more agreed with this assessment than he did with subsequent criticism that, in leaving Schofield and Thomas standing comparatively idle on the sidelines while Logan battled for survival, he had missed a prime chance to break Atlanta’s inner line, weakened as it was by the withdrawal of a major portion of its defenders for the attack on his south flank. What he mainly concluded, once the smoke had cleared, was that in staging two all-out sorties in as many days — both of them not only unsuccessful but also highly expensive in energy, blood, and ingenuity — Hood had shot his wad. And from this Sherman concluded further that he was unlikely to be molested in his execution of the maneuver he had described to McPherson at their final interview; that is, “to withdraw from the left flank and add to the right,” thereby shifting his whole force counterclockwise, around to the west of the city, in order to probe for its rail supply lines to the south.