When Jefferson Davis stepped off the train that rainy sabbath, Tennesseans from Frank Cheatham’s division were there to meet him. The ramrod-stiff president stepped out on the station platform and told them, “Be of good cheer, for within a short while your faces will be turned homeward and your feet pressing the soil of Tennessee.” Whatever military plan Davis had in mind just then, it seemed a pretty wide extension of Hood’s proposal merely to operate in Sherman’s rear. But in any case, Davis had other matters to attend to first:
High on the list was what to do about General Hardee, who had asked to be relieved when Hood was promoted. Now it was Hood who wanted him gone. In three of Hood’s four battles for Atlanta, Hardee had been in command; in all three he had been tardy in executing his attacks, and Hood privately blamed him for the defeats. If Hood was to stay, Hardee himself wanted out, he told the Confederate president. Davis promptly relieved him and sent him to South Carolina; Frank Cheatham was given permanent command of Hardee’s corps. Next, Davis told Hood he intended to bring in General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, former commander of the Army of Tennessee, to take charge of a new “Military Division of the West, containing everything from Georgia to the Mississippi River. Nominally, Beauregard was to be Hood’s superior, but as it worked out, he became not much more than a sort of glorified military advisor.
That settled, Davis turned to the paramount question at hand, which, as one veteran later put it, was, “What in hell would we do next?” The president was in accord with Hood that Sherman’s supply lines must be cut, forcing him out of Atlanta one way or another. Later, Davis said he told Hood the most important thing was to force Sherman into a battle and annihilate him, whether Sherman followed him up north or started out in some other direction. To accomplish that, Hood said Davis promised him some fifteen to twenty thousand troops from General Kirby Smith’s command across the Mississippi. That said, Davis boarded the train for other points and other speeches, including a wellattended one at Augusta, where he again pledged, “We must march into Tennessee . . . and push . . . the enemy back to the banks of the Ohio.” Exactly what was agreed by Davis and Hood in their secret meetings is not known—Davis’s constant emphasis on taking the army back to Tennessee did not exactly square with what he said later about annihilating Sherman’s army—but it would become the subject of dire recriminations in the years ahead. And dire was also the word for the Confederate situation at this point, dire all the way around but for one amusing episode recalled by Captain Samuel Foster of General Hiram Granbury’s Texas brigade in Patrick Cleburne’s division.
It seemed that after Davis and Hood finished making their momentous decisions, the Army of Tennessee was lined up for a review, and some of the president’s political entourage, their podium lighted by pine torches, were making speeches, including former Texas governor F. R. Lubbock, who, as Foster recorded in his diary, “naturally supposing that the Texas soldiers would be glad to see him, thought he would take this occasion to introduce himself and we would give him a grand cheer.” By mistake, Foster said, “He stopped in front of an Irish Regiment just on our right before he got to us. Thinking he had found us, rode square up about the center, pulled off his hat and says, ‘I’m Governor Lubbock of Texas,’ and just when he expected to hear a big cheer, an Irishman says, ‘an who the bloody Hell is govener Lubbock,’ with that peculiar Irish brogue, that made the governor wilt. He turned his horse and galloped on to catch up with the President and party and passed by us without even looking at us.” Humorous as this scene might have been, the grand review of the army did not come across as entirely satisfactory, and especially not for Hood in the presence of all the political luminaries of the Confederacy who had arrived with Davis. Some brigades, Hood glumly reported afterward, were “seemingly dissatisfied, and inclined to cry out, ‘give us General Johnston.’ I regretted I should have been the cause of this uncourteous reception to His Excellency; at the same time, I could recall no offence save that of having insisted that they should fight for and hold Atlanta forty-six days, whereas they had previously retreated one hundred miles within sixty days.”
Whatever Davis thought of this he kept to himself and on the 27th departed, leaving the fortunes of the Army of Tennessee and, thus, the fortunes of the Confederacy, to remain in the hands of John Bell Hood—as well as with Beauregard, who was on his way to look into things and see what could be done.
Sherman, from his decidedly different point of view, had known for some time what had to be done—or at least what he wanted to do—but he was getting resistance from his Washington bosses about doing it.
Sherman knew that neither his nor Hood’s army could afford to linger around Atlanta, panting and licking its wounds in the red Georgia dirt. So before the dust had settled over the battlefield he began to conceive a plan of operations so radical and daring it defied military sense as it was then practiced. What he proposed was to cut loose from Atlanta and, with two oversized corps totaling sixty-five thousand men, march off into enemy territory some three hundred miles across Georgia, to Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean. During this adventure, he would be completely severed from his supplies and communications along the rail lines that stretched back more than a thousand miles through Nashville, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and the rest of the huge Union army support network that had been amassing in the western theater for the past four years.
Actually, Sherman had begun to conceive of a grand march even before Atlanta fell. He realized, as he wrote later, “We could not afford to remain on the defensive, simply holding Atlanta and fighting for the safety of its railroad.” Initially, though, his idea was to crash down through southwest Georgia and Alabama to capture Mobile, the last port on the Gulf of Mexico still open to the Confederates. But in the midst of the bitterest Atlanta battles, Admiral David G. Farragut and his ironclad armada “damned the torpedoes” at the head of Mobile Bay and seized control of the port. So Sherman began to work on another plan, this one even more audacious: He would take his army southeastward through Macon and Augusta to Savannah, where, presumably, it could be picked up by Union transport ships and moved north to reinforce Grant for the capture of Richmond.
But as his scheme began to evolve, there were doubters—Thomas, for one. Sherman and his senior general were spending a pleasant autumn evening at a house Thomas occupied on Atlanta’s Marietta Street, “which had a veranda with high pillars,” when Sherman discussed with him what he had in mind. The prudent Rock of Chickamauga warned Sherman against straying so far from his lines of supply, but Sherman was determined; as he wrote Washington, “If the North can march an army right through the South, it is proof positive that the North can prevail in this contest.” In the back of his mind, however, Sherman was not so much enamored of tearing up railroad tracks and ruining Confederate military bases as he was of the psychological effect of such an expedition. People all over the North, and more especially the South, and even more especially Europe (which at that stage could still conceivably enter the conflict on the Confederate side), when confronted by this “proof positive,” would realize that the game was up, he reasoned.
But it was not just doubting Thomas who was against the idea. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was violently opposed, as was the irascible General Henry Halleck, powerful military advisor to Lincoln and the War Department. At this stage, Grant was not too keen on it, either, and Grant’s forceful chief of staff and alter ego John A. Rawlins was positively horrified at the idea. All these men saw dangers in addition to marching the Army of the Tennessee into the unknown; there was also the problem of Hood. How, they asked, could Sherman leave the Confederate army free to roam about at will, gobbling up hard-won Union garrisons in Tennessee or even Kentucky and possibly as far as St. Louis or Chicago? Sherman thought he had answered that question by deciding to send Thomas to Nashville and reinforce him with troops from all over the west. In any case, letters and wires raced back and forth from Atlanta to Washington, but nothing was resolved because at thi
s point nobody knew what Hood was going to do. Except Hood.
In the weeks between his defeat at Atlanta and the arrival of Jefferson Davis for the Palmetto council of war, Hood had managed to strengthen the Army of Tennessee to a respectable 44,403 by the return of exchanged prisoners, recuperated wounded, rounded-up awols, and new recruits. On the day after Davis’s departure, Hood issued orders that put the army on the move again.
At three different places along the Chattahoochee River, long columns of gray-and butternut-clad Confederates crossed to the northern bank on pontoon bridges. Captain Sam Foster, relater of the Governor Lubbock fiasco, had this to say in his diary: “Had orders last night to cook up three days rations—which kept the cooking business going all night—this army is going to do something wrong—or rather it will undertake something that will not be a success.” Foster went on to defend his grave prediction by correlating Jefferson Davis’s previous visits to the Army of Tennessee with its failures immediately thereafter. Twice Davis had visited, and twice they were beaten. “Now, after all that experience,” Foster gloomily recorded, “he comes here just after the fall of Atlanta to concoct some other plan for our defeat. . . .”
Be that as it was, on the morning of October 1, Confederate Brigadier General William H. (“Red”) Jackson, commanding the remainder of the cavalry that Wheeler had left behind when he went north to Tennessee, pounced on the railroad at Marietta, Georgia, severing Sherman’s army from its supply line to Chattanooga and Nashville. Meantime, the three corps of Hood’s infantry marched on, and by nightfall next day, they were fifteen miles from Palmetto, rolling north and gaining momentum, like a darkening thundercloud. As the army encamped for the night, one of Hood’s preeminent division commanders, Irish-born Major General Pat Cleburne, found himself serenaded by his men. Touched, Cleburne made a speech in which he compared the Confederate cause with the plight of Ireland, warning that if their cause failed, the South would find itself “trampled and downtrodden” and closed with this flourish, “If this cause which is so dear to my heart is doomed to fail, I pray heaven may let me fall with it.”
Next day, moving parallel to the Western & Atlantic Railroad, Hood struck out at the little stations along the tracks that Sherman had garrisoned with his rear-guard troops. On October 3, he instructed General A. P. Stewart to take his corps and capture the station at Big Shanty, north of Atlanta, which he did next day, destroying a dozen miles of track and taking Union prisoners, and then on to Ackworth station, where he did likewise. As they approached Allatoona Station, Hood received the information that there were large stores of federal supplies there—including about one million rations—so he sent Major General Samuel French, a forty-five-year-old New Jerseyite turned Mississippi planter, and his three-thousand-man division to destroy them. When the Confederates reached Allatoona, however, they found that it was garrisoned not by some thin rear-rank guard but by nearly a full division commanded by Brigadier John M. Corse, whom Sherman had urgently dispatched by rail up to Rome, Georgia, when he first heard Hood was on the move. Now, in as great a panic, he rushed them down the line to defend Allatoona. When French and his men appeared on the scene early in the morning of the 5th, a Wednesday, French sent Corse a note:
Around Allatoona, October 5, 1864
Commanding Officer, United States Forces, Allatoona:
I have placed the force under my command in such positions that you are surrounded, and to avoid a needless effusion of blood I call on you to surrender your forces at once, and unconditionally.
Five minutes will be allowed for you to decide. Should you accede to this, you will be treated in the most honorable manner as prisoners of war.
I have the honor to be, very respectfully yours,
S.G. French
Major General commanding forces
Confederate States
Corse digested this communication and immediately replied:
Headquarters Fourth Division, Fifteenth Corps
Allatoona, Georgia, 8:30 A.M., October 5th, 1864
Major-General S. G. French, Confederate States, etc.
Your communication demanding surrender of my command I acknowledge receipt of, and respectfully reply that we are prepared for the “needless effusion of blood,” whenever it is agreeable to you.
I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
John M. Corse
Brigadier General commanding forces
United States
Those were pretty bold words for a man outnumbered three to two, but Corse, a twenty-nine-year-old failed politician, had a lawyer’s sense of the brazen. In any event, it wasn’t long afterward that, as one veteran wrote, “a desperate little battle was fought.”
Sherman, meanwhile, had been stewing in his own juice. Anxious as he was to get moving on his march to the sea, he had no choice, as Hood had predicted, but to follow him north and drive the Confederates away. Accordingly, he left Slocum’s corps to guard Atlanta and mustered his remaining sixty thousand men to chase after Hood. With both Thomas and Schofield sent up to Tennessee to see about the defenses of that state, Major General Jacob Cox was put in temporary charge of the Army of the Ohio, and Major General D. S. Stanley was given the Army of the Cumberland. O. O. Howard remained in command of the Army of the Tennessee. Declaring that it was “absolutely necessary to keep General Hood’s infantry off our main route of communication and supply,” Sherman marched across the Chattahoochee and set out for Allatoona himself. A day earlier, Sherman had had his signalmen wig-wag a flag message over the heads of the enemy from the top of Kennesaw Mountain, telling Corse to proceed in a big hurry to Allatoona. When Sherman finally arrived at the top of the mountain—at almost the precise moment that Corse was throwing down his gauntlet to French—he reported “a superb view of the vast panorama to the north and west. To the southwest, about Dallas, could be seen the smoke of campfires, indicating a large force of the enemy, and the whole line of railroad from Big Shanty to Allatoona—a full fifteen miles—was marked by the fires of the burning railroad.” Shortly afterward, he wrote, “We could plainly see the smoke of battle about Allatoona, and hear the faint reverberation of the cannon.”
Sherman immediately ordered Cox’s Twenty-third Corps to march west and get between Hood’s main force and that of French at Allatoona and to “burn houses or piles of brush as it progressed, to indicate the head of the column.” Next, he sent the rest of his army straight toward Allatoona to support Corse. That done, Sherman settled back to watch, “with painful suspense,” the battle raging at Allatoona.
Flamboyant as Corse’s refusal to surrender might have been, French, a West Point graduate and Mexican War hero, insisted that he never received it or, for that matter, any other communication from the Union commander. Instead, he said, he waited nearly twenty minutes. At 10 A.M., “No reply having been sent me, the order was given for the assault. . . .” French’s version seems to be borne out by a Confederate artilleryman on the scene, E. T. Eggleston, who wrote in his diary that day, “The enemy procrastinated giving an answer when our troops stormed the works. . . .”
It was one of the most savage small battles of the entire war. Allatoona consisted of a mountain pass that the rail line ran through, a few houses, the huge Union storage park at the depot, and several redoubts manned by infantry and artillery. French’s men overran these last in an hour of “murderous hand-to-hand conflict that left the ditches filled with the dead,” and Corse was forced to withdraw his remaining men to the redoubt in the center. Meantime, having captured the vast federal stores, French determined to bum them. When parties were sent to do that, however, “the matches furnished would not ignite and no fire could be procured,” the general wrote disgustedly in his after-action report.
To make matters worse, a little past noon French received word that some of his signal officers had intercepted one of Sherman’s wigwag messages to Corse saying, “Hold on, I am coming,” and shortly afterward someone brought him news that the federal infan
try was moving up fast in his rear along the tracks. That was enough for the Confederate commander, who, not wishing to be trapped between Corse and whatever was marching up behind him, ordered a withdrawal. By 3:30 P.M. he had his division reformed and moving southwest the fifteen or so miles back to Hood’s army.
The ferocity of this fight is easily told in the casualty figures. French had 799 casualties, 25 percent of his command, while Corse suffered 707, a full 35 percent of those he had brought with him, including himself—he signaled Sherman next day, “I am short a cheekbone and an ear, but am able to whip all hell yet.” While the part about Corse’s wound was not exactly true—in fact, he had received only a scratch—Sherman thought enough of the defense of Allatoona to write him a citation. When the proud young Iowa general met his commanding officer to receive it, however, Sherman observed the ear and cheek still intact and remarked, “Well, Corse, they came damned near missing you, didn’t they?”
Besides Corse’s gallant defense and the hundreds of dead and wounded left on the rocky mountain ground, there was a final item of interest about the battle of Allatoona. Shortly after accounts of the battle began appearing in the press, Reverend P. P. Bliss, a world renowned evangelist of his day, composed a song based on Sherman’s suddenly famous wig-wag signal, “Hold on, I am coming,” which the papers had immediately embellished to “Hold the fort, for I am coming.”
Bliss first sang it at a revival at the Chicago Tabernacle, and it has remained a gospel standard until today:
Ho! my comrades see the signal
Waving in the sky,