By this time people were beginning to gossip about Hood behind his back, hinting that he was making a fool of himself with Buck. Charles Venable of Lee’s staff called Buck a flirt. “She can’t help it,” he told Mrs. Chesnut. “She does not care for the man. It is sympathy for the wounded soldier.” In this, Venable was doubtless correct. Buck seemed to enjoy tormenting her suitors, including Hood—perhaps especially Hood. She made a point of correcting his diction and his manners, even yawned in his face. There was a strong aura of Scarlett O’Hara about Buck; she might even have been the model for Scarlett O’Hara—bright, fickle, strong, stunningly beautiful, and with no illusions about her power over men. On Christmas Day, 1863, Hood proposed to her again. She turned him down.
This might have been enough for most people, but not Sam Hood, clearly a man in love who knew how to set his star in motion. During the next six weeks he somehow was invited to practically every place Buck might show up—parties, dances, dinners, amateur theatricals, even church—and slowly a relationship of sorts developed, strained though it was. He was using his crutches more easily by then and was even able to ride his horse, with some help mounting it. He would take Buck for carriage rides, after which she would usually come back complaining about him.
At the end of January 1864, Hood, again at the Chesnuts, announced he had been promoted to lieutenant general and given a corps in Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. “Suddenly his eyes ablazed as he said this,” Mary Chesnut recorded. “I said to myself, ‘All that ambition still—in spite of those terrible wounds.’” At that point Hood declared, “This has been the happiest year of any, in spite of all my wounds.”
Buck was there, at the other end of the sofa, with Hood sitting between them. “When I am gone, it is all over. I will not come back,” he remarked—ostensibly to Mary Chesnut. “Are you not threatening the wrong end of the sofa?” she replied.
Before the evening was over, Buck had taken a diamond star from Hood and promised to sew it on his new hat, an encouraging sign, at least for the general. By now Buck’s friends, including the Chesnuts, were becoming alarmed that the affair might be getting too serious. “How I want him to go back to the army,” puffed Henry Brewster, a Confederate politician. “These girls are making a fool of him.”
But Hood persisted, and Buck was more and more in his company, often “guarding” him in public, shielding him with her body from the rush of crowds. Privately she would tell people, “Engaged to that man—never—for what do you take me?” But publicly they had become—at least to much of Richmond society—an item.
In mid-February, Buck announced that she and Sam Hood were engaged. It was not a clean change of heart for her—not by any means. Her version of the story to Mrs. Chesnut was that she had gone down to his carriage to say good night, and he had held out his good hand and asked her to marry him once more. “Say yes or say no,” the tall young general told Buck. “I will not be satisfied with anything else—yes—or no is it?”
“Well, he would keep holding out his hand,” Buck told Mary Chesnut. “What could I do? So I put mine in his. Heavens, what a change came over his face.”
“Now I will speak to your father,” Hood declared. “I want his consent to marry you at once.”
So he had become engaged, but almost by default. When Buck told her parents about the engagement, they went into shock, forbidding her to make a public announcement in the evident hope the thing would break of its own weight. But this seems only to have set off something rebellious in Buck. A few days later the engagement was announced in the Charleston Mercury. Buck blamed Hood for leaking it, but she now not only admitted it openly, but warmed to it as well. Richmond society seemed stupefied. Some gossiped that Hood had no property in Kentucky, that West Point was a “pauper’s school,” that there was “nothing in him”—only the military glory. Others stoutly defended him. Burton Harrison, Jefferson Davis’s private secretary, retorted, “Only the military glory! The glory and the fame that he has gained during the war—that is Hood.” The subject of Hood—his engagement to Buck, his spectacular rise in rank—was in the air of every salon and parlor in Richmond that winter.
General John C. Breckinridge, prewar U.S. vice president and former Kentucky senator and a boyhood friend of Hood’s, asked Mary Chesnut at a party one evening, “What’s the name of that fellow who has gone to Europe for Hood’s leg?”
“Dr. Darby.”
“Suppose it is shipwrecked?”
“No matter—half a dozen are ordered.”
At this point Buck’s mother raised her hands. “No wonder the general says they talk of him as if he were a centipede,” she huffed, “his leg is in everybody’s mouth.” The elder Mrs. Preston was to prove a formidable obstacle in the romance.
Hood was destined to have only a few days with his new fiancée. Orders were delivered for him at the Spottswood Hotel, telling him to report to Dalton, Georgia, and his new corps command. On February 16 he boarded his baggage and horses on a train and set out west, first stopping in Columbia, South Carolina, to visit Major “Willie” Preston, Buck’s brother, who was stationed there with his artillery battery. Willie was later killed under Hood’s command during the battle of Atlanta.
It had to have been a bittersweet parting for Hood. At long last love, but now war called him back. Whatever his feelings were, he also must have somehow sensed that he was not meant for the silver tea sets and velvet drapes and polished marble and mahogany of Richmond society, so far removed from the grime and smoke and horror—and, probably, the exhilaration of the battlefield—after all, his whole life, he had been a warrior.
The night before he left Richmond, Hood was at the Chesnuts’ with Buck, and he said to her, “You look mighty pretty in that hat. You wore it at the turnpike—where I surrendered at first sight.” Mary Chesnut, recording that Buck was wearing “last winter’s English hat with the pheasant’s wing,” turned to Hood, who had hobbled over to the window, and said to him, “Actually, if you stay here in Richmond much longer, you will grow to be a courtier.”
8
Go On As You Propose
Through the end of that long 1864 October Sherman hung around the Alabama-Georgia line watching Hood—who was still at Gadsden—and resumed his agitated plea for permission to begin what he now referred to as “the big raid.” One of his corps commanders, General David Stanley, remembered his mood in those days:
Sherman, like the rest of the ranking officers, lived in a tent. He was nervous and sleepless. Long after the rest of the company had gone to bed he would remain sitting on a camp stool, wrapped in a well worn army overcoat, leaning over the remains of the evening fire and seemingly pondering over the tremendous campaign before him. At times, for want of company, he would join the sentinel, walk alongside of him on his post, and, despite regulations, enter into long conversations with him. He used to say that these sentinels always knew someone away back home whom he knew.
As the days passed, Sherman fumed and boiled and was more nervous and sleepless than ever. His nervous tics began to recur as he plotted his march to the sea, and he continually telegraphed Washington for permission to get on with it. “This movement is not purely military or strategic,” he wired Halleck, “but it will illustrate the vulnerability of the South.” In the same vein he sent Grant a long telegram outlining his overall views of the political situation, in hopes of shaking something loose. All had been to no avail. Grant’s chief of staff, John Rawlins, was still dead set against the idea, as were Halleck and the Lincoln government. Sherman may have conquered Atlanta, but he had failed in his main objective, which was to destroy Hood’s army, and now he proposed to abandon that mission altogether and go off in a different direction. “This is not war, but rather statesmanship,” Sherman argued to Grant.
But to the feisty Sherman’s extreme annoyance, Grant was not convinced. “Do you not think it is advisable,” Grant telegraphed him back the same evening, “now that Hood has gone so far north, to entirely
ruin him before starting out on your proposed campaign? With Hood’s army destroyed, you can go where you please with impunity.” Finally, the commanding general went on to more or less order Sherman to follow after the Confederate army.
The exasperated Sherman wired back the moment he received Grant’s reply.
If I could hope to overhaul Hood, I would turn against him with my whole force; then he would retreat to the southwest, drawing me a decoy away from Georgia, which is his chief object. . . . No single army can catch Hood, and I am convinced that the best results will follow from defeating Jeff. Davis’ cherished plan of making me leave Georgia by manoeuvering. . . . I regard the pursuit of Hood as useless. Still, if he attempts to invade Middle Tennessee, I will hold Decatur, and be prepared to move in that direction but, unless I let go of Atlanta, my force will not be equal to his.
When he sent this telegram, Sherman was in transit to a command post more closely between his divided armies, down to Kingston, Georgia, all the destructive activities against his Atlanta-to-Chattanooga railroad by Hood’s army having been miraculously repaired in the space of two weeks. On the ride down, still fuming, he penned an after thought, which he fired off to Grant later in the day. “If I turn back the whole effect of my campaign will be lost. . . . I am clearly of opinion that the best results will follow my contemplated movement through Georgia.”
He probably needn’t have bothered—though perhaps this last little communiqué pushed Grant over the edge in his favor. In any case, he had barely arrived in Kingston when he got another wire from Grant—the one he’d been waiting for these many weeks: “I do not see that you can withdraw from where you are to follow Hood, without giving up all we have gained in territory. I say, then, go on as you propose.”
Sherman had been working out his plan in his head and on paper from the time he occupied Atlanta, and now he put it in action. To counter the threat of Hood’s advancing into Tennessee, he had recently sent back to George Thomas at Nashville the Twenty-third Army Corps under General Schofield and the Fourth Army Corps under David Stanley. In addition to a corps of garrison troops at Nashville, Thomas had the equivalent of another corps in the three divisions of the Nashville District that he had stationed at Murfreesboro, Decatur, and Chattanooga. Not only that, but most of General A. J. Smith’s Sixteenth Corps was supposedly on the way to Tennessee from Missouri to complete the picture. Thus, when all was said and done, Thomas would have on hand twelve divisions of infantry plus three divisions of cavalry—some seventy-five thousand men—to undo whatever Hood was planning to do to him.
But all was not said and done. First, Smith’s Missouri force was delayed, owing to some mischief created on the other side of the Mississippi by the Rebel General Sterling Price. Second, one of Thomas’s corps—the one he organized out of the Nashville garrison—was composed of noncombatant quartermaster troops who probably wouldn’t be worth much in a fight. Finally, it was conceivable that Hood could somehow bottle up, delay, or destroy the three spread-out divisions at Murfreesboro, Decatur, and Chattanooga, thus subtracting yet another Union corps from the equation. All in all, then, Thomas might conceivably have more problems on his hands than Sherman knew, or cared to think about.
What Sherman did know of his old West Point classmate Thomas was that he was dependable—slow perhaps, cautious certainly—but dependable, and Sherman was perfectly content to leave the fate of the entire western theater of the war to “the Rock of Chickamauga” while he went on his big raid.
Having brought down from Tennessee all the supplies he needed, Sherman sent back his sick and wounded and anything he could not take with him and then proceeded to re-destroy all the railroads and telegraph lines leading back to Tennessee, utterly cutting himself off from his sources of communication and supply. He had organized his remaining army into two “wings” led by Generals Howard and Slocum, and by mid-November he was prepared to embark on a three-hundred-mile southeastward march across hostile territory to Savannah, Georgia, and the sea.
Two long months before, when the mayor and two councilmen of Atlanta begged Sherman to rescind his order expelling the citizens from the city, the general had replied with his usual florid bluntness, that war is hell: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” he said. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. . . . If the United States submits to division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against those terrible hardships of war.
Now Sherman was prepared to put this philosophy into practice on the grandest scale yet imagined in any war: His sixty-thousand-man army would cut a sixty-mile-wide swath through the breadbasket of the South, systematically destroying practically everything in its path. Not since the depredations of Attila the Hun and the Duke of Alva had such an adventure been conducted in Western civilization, but Sherman’s reasoning was definitely nineteenth—if not twentieth—century in character. So far, it had been the border states—Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland, Kentucky, and parts of Mississippi and Louisiana—that bore the brunt of the war. Now it was Sherman’s intention to bring down its horrors on the very heart of the Confederacy—from Atlanta to Savannah and, in particular, South Carolina, which had started the whole thing in the first place, then northward, seven hundred miles up to Richmond itself. His campaign would ruin the South militarily, physically, and psychologically.
Warring against civilians and quasicivilians had become commonplace by the middle of the following century—Hitler’s bombing of London and other English cities, for example, and the Allied carpetbombing missions over Germany—though the military consensus subsequently showed that in most cases such strategies merely tended to stiffen resistance. Sherman was not the first Civil War general to adopt such a policy. General David Hunter burned schools in Virginia, and there was Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah, who bragged that when he was through with the valley even a crow would have to look somewhere else for its food. To Sherman it was all expedience: the sooner the war was over, the sooner the bloodletting would stop; and that justified everything.
Sherman’s marching orders to his generals were specific regarding the destruction of private property and the molesting of citizens, which was forbidden unless mandated by some military need. But in the event, this turned out to be mostly lip service. Later, in his after-action report, he shrugged off what happened by saying that some of his men “did some things they ought not to have done,” which was one of the understatements of the war.
On November 16, Sherman started out from Atlanta with his four corps, three thousand supply wagons, and artillery. Even years later he was able to describe the scene vividly: “Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.” Before they left, he had ordered that anything militarily useful be destroyed and to that end sent his engineers to burn down the offending structures. Afterward, he characterized as more or less “accidental” the fact that nearly two thousand buildings had gone up in flames, most of them private homes and shops. He continued: “The day was extremely beautiful, clear sunlight, with bracing air, and an unusual feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds—a feeling of something to come.”
Thus, with Sherman now on the march south and Hood embarking north, an extraordinary spectacle was introduced to the war: two armies that had been locked in a death embrace for four bloody years now moved off in opposing directions—despite the serious misgivings of the governments of both sides—each to a singular destiny.
Pap Thomas did not at all like what his old West Point roommate had gotten him into. Here was Sherman traipsing off with the bulk of the western army to face nothing more than some old men and boys of the Georgia militia, while the onus fell on Thomas to fend off Hood’s entire army of forty-thousand combat veteran
s. Time and again, Sherman insisted that Hood would not try to enter Tennessee, but Thomas correctly believed otherwise. Actually, he had proposed to Sherman that he be allowed to go off to the sea with his much smaller army, leaving Sherman and the bulk of the Union forces to hold Atlanta and Tennessee and go after Hood, but the red-haired Ohioan waved off this proposal and, despite Thomas’s opposition to his plan, ordered his old friend north to hold the line on his own.
When Sherman first sent Thomas to the defense of Tennessee, “the Rock” had requested that the Army of the Cumberland, his old command, be sent with him. This also was denied, however, for Sherman picked only the choicest of divisions for his march to the sea and left Thomas to settle for an amalgam of troops from various quarters, including raw recruits and the sick and lame that Sherman had directed back to him. Furthermore, many of the regiments Sherman promised to Thomas were in fact nonexistent because their terms of enlistment had expired, while still others had been shipped back to their homes en masse to vote in the presidential election. There were about twelve thousand cavalry under Thomas’s jurisdiction, but most of them, because of a scarcity of horses, were dismounted and scattered all over Tennessee. In short, what Thomas commanded at this point was a lot of people, not an army.