Yankees at the Gates

1864: The invasion of Georgia

Immediate historical background for
BILLY JUSTICE: A Story of the Recontrcution
by Steve Marshall

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The West comes East

By September 1863 Grant’s western armies had opened the Mississippi, split the rebellion, captured most of Tennessee, and pushed south into Georgia, the Confederate keystone.

But they didn’t push far, because Braxton Bragg’s Confederates held fast at Chickamauga. After a furious battle — the deadliest of the 19th century, in terms of percentages killed — Grant pulled his armies back to Chattanooga.

Gen. Bragg was then evicted twice: first from the hills around Chattanooga, by Union arms, and then from his own command, by CSA president Jefferson Davis. Gen. Joseph Johnston took over Bragg’s Army of Tennessee (C), and both both sides went into winter quarters.

For four months the two huge armies marked time. They furloughed home to visit farms and families, came back, marked time. When they surprised each other on a road or a path they usually hid or ran or swapped tobacco for coffee. Sometimes they gunned each other down.

The Union musters

In March 1864 President Lincoln named Grant commander of all federal forces. Grant immediately ordered simultaneous all-out offensives in both of the war’s theaters.

Grant made his own headquarters near Washington to direct the Army of the Potomac (U) in a final showdown with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia (C).

The entire west he placed under Gen. William T. Sherman at Chattanooga, with orders to invade Georgia, annihilate Confederate armies, destroy the engines of war, and overthrow slavery.

It had taken time, but Lincoln had finally found generals who would fight. Now four would lead the Union to final victory: U.S. Grant and Philip Sheridan in Virginia, William T. Sherman and George Thomas in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas.

Grant’s program was clear— his initials were widely said to signify “Unconditional Surrender” — and the other three were considered even more aggressive than their chief.

Lincoln looks to November

Abraham Lincoln’s attention was focused not only on the military situation, but also on the coming national election. The president’s renomination was not even assured, much less his return to office.

Lincoln faced strong challenges within his own party and a formidable Democratic rival in George McClellan — the proslavery Potomac general he had removed after Antietam for his effective refusal to destroy Lee and win the war.

The dapper McClellan was still popular in the Army of the Potomac. He was the candidate, moreover, of Atlantic mercantile and shipping interests — capitalists whose profits were closely entwined with Southern cotton, whose support for the war effort was lukewarm, and who organized themselves as the northern Democratic party.

The Democratic platform called for a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy. That position, Lincoln explained, was equivalent to surrender — but it was sure to draw votes in a war-strained North.

Three years’ toll

Both sides were fatigued. But each faced unique conditions, and of the two, the Confederacy was far weaker.

Confederate industrial deficiencies ran deep. In one ominous ratio — firearms production — the North outgunned the south 30-to-1. And for every locomotive built south of the Ohio river, 24 roared off northern turntables and into the fight.

Beneath every Civil War debate — tactics, morality, philosopy, politics — lay these facts of iron.

Even in agriculture, the pastoral South was unequal to the demands of war. King Cotton had long disdained the lowly food crops — he bought his corn in Ohio — and now he could barely feed his soldiers, or his tillers. And the Union blockade aggravated every difficulty.

Both sides were drafting vigorously, and AWOL rates were comparable (the Confederate desertion rush came later). But the less populated South was simply unable to replenish its armies, and by the spring of 1864, the Confederacy had only half as many men under arms as the Union. In Georgia, Sherman’s 110,000 attackers outnumbered Joe Johnston’s 60,000 defenders nearly two to one.

And the grand Confederate alliance with Britain or France — the fundamental realignment of world power that Secession’s fire-eaters had promised in the heady days of ’61 — never came about.

Southern Unionists

The Confederacy had another big problem. Although the Union had largely crushed open sedition in the North, Southern Treason could not destroy treason within.

As the light of freedom rose, loyalty to the Union was virtually unanimous among the slaves, and animated some 15 percent of white Southerners as well. They gave their share — look under Fort Wagner, or the federal stones at Marietta.

So half the people of the South favored a Union victory, if you count enslaved Negroes as people. Most “historians” don’t, but a growing majority of Americans did, and they proved the point in blood. Thus is humanity enlarged.

Terminus, where the rails met

High among the Confederacy’s remaining assets, second only to Richmond, was the city of Atlanta.

It was an unlikely success, this upland town, far from high cotton or navigable water. Just thirty years earlier, during Savannah’s centennial celebrations, Atlanta was a forest.

The spot lay upon the eastern continental divide, a line that runs from the tip of Florida to Minnesota and Canada. The divide sheds water southeast to the Gulf of Mexico and northeast to the Atlantic, direcly and via the Great Lakes. Like all divides, it crosses no stream, and thus attracted attention from those who would build railroads.

In 1837 surveyors from two railroads drove a stake into the divide and agreed their projects should meet there. One was the Georgia Railroad, a private concern already proceeding westward from Augusta. (Upon completion in 1845, at 173 miles, it would be the longest railroad in the world.) The other was the Western & Atlantic, an effort by Georgia’s government to link the state to Chattanooga and points west.

They called the place Terminus, and it became the linchpin of a strategic rail network that linked the Mississippi Valley to the southeastern coast. One set led northwest to the Mississippi, another southwest to the Gulf, and two others eastward to the Atlantic. It was these rails — along with those of the C&O, the Erie and the Pennsylvania farther north — that opened the interior of North America to large-scale trade and manufacturing.

Project engineer J. Edgar Thompson, later president of the world’s biggest corporation, the mighty Pennsylvania RR, renamed the spot Atlanta — the feminine form, he reckoned, of Atlantic. The railroad shops called forth warehouses, trade, and factories. War fueled the mix, and by 1864 Atlanta was the center of Southern industry and transportation.

Made in Atlanta. Union soldiers had seen the city’s name on captured guns and wagons, on Rebel buttons and blankets and shoes. Atlanta was the Confederate forge — and the sooner they closed it down, they reasoned, the sooner they might retire from the soldier business and return to their families.

The Union strikes

On May 4, as Grant crossed the Rapidan River in Virginia, Sherman invaded Georgia from the north.

George Thomas attacked Rebel lines at Dalton, while Gen. James McPherson swept in a southwest arc to threaten the Western & Atlantic — the Confederate army’s supply link to Atlanta — ten miles farther south at Resace.

The Rebels held the iron at Resaca. But McPherson’s next rightward arc threatened the rail even farther south, and the Confederates fell back to defend it.

This became the pattern of the Atlanta campaign: Sherman’s force moving south, flanking right and left to menace the railroad, while Johnston’s force backed up to guard it. In this way the two great armies danced down through the hills and valleys of a North Georgia spring.

The army camp . . .

Most of Sherman’s farmers-in-arms hailed from the old Northwest, the present-day Midwest. The next largest number came from the Northeast. Regiments from border states and the South marched alongside; for his personal guard, Sherman relied on sharpshooters from northern Alabama.

Fully half of Sherman’s three-year men had reenlisted after their trek across Tennessee. Then the force was bolstered by Sherman’s secret order to commanders across the west: Send a few of your best, by night, to the nearest railhead. Army trainmen had guided the levy to Chattanooga.

These tens of thousands of veterans and volunteers formed a dedicated core that the Confederacy could not match.

It was an army of Abolition. They had signed on to a war for Union, but now it was understood: For the Union to survive, slavery and its government must disappear. White northern farmers, it turned out, would fight harder and longer to destroy these things than white southern farmers would fight to defend them.

. . . and the camp followers

Both sides had followers — the usual support staff of peddlers, preachers, and prostitutes, as well as legions of hungry refugees.

The latter came in all complexions. But on one side Abolition was in the air, and slaves were leaving their owners to march, and work, in freedom’s train.

Of the many black backs that labored at war — bridging Georgia’s rivers, digging earthworks, laying rail and ripping it up — most on both sides had toiled under slavery, and many bore physical evidence of it.

But now blacks on the Union side worked as free men, and for wages. They endured racist insult and injury, but they were slaves no more — and a few months later, when Sherman marched through Georgia to the sea, more than 20,000 of them would follow and assist.

Sherman never put Negroes into combat, but other Union generals did. They knew that blacks in blue would fight, and hard — Fort Wagner had settled that.

This armed black Unionism resonated deeply north and south. As the rising “Sable Arm” lifted more shovels and guns, it brought new and explosive factors — military, political, social, psychological — into the complex equation of civil war.

Showdown at Kennesaw Mountain

In May, facing a strong Confederate position at Allatoona, Sherman departed the railroad in another rightward lunge — this time with his entire force and 20 days’ rations.

After fighting in and around Dallas, 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, the Yankees reached back east again to grab the rail at Acworth. But Johnston’s Rebels obstructed Sherman’s next flanking attempts — and the dance was over.

By mid-June Joe Johnston’s army was gathered around Kennesaw Mountain, a two-hump elevation from whose slopes its cannon ruled the railroad. Before he could move on Atlanta, Sherman decided, he must attack the Confederates head on.

His full reasoning is unknown; he may have sensed fatigue in the enemy’s ranks, or acted before it could spread in his own. In any case, on a hot and humid June 27, Sherman attacked from the west.

The Confederates held the Kennesaw slopes. In a week of fighting-in-place they inflicted 3000 casualties, took 1000 of their own, and fairly claimed a victory. But they had merely delayed the Yankee juggernaut. Again Sherman threw out flanking arcs, east and west, and again the Rebels fell back — to the Chattahoochee River, and then behind it.

Across the Chattahoochee

The river was the last physical obstacle protecting Atlanta. Sherman set up a 20-mile line, 100,000 strong, along the stream’s west bank. After a week of constant movements and threats, he finally forced Johnston to concede the river crossings and retreat to Atlanta’s inner fortifications.

On July 17, 1864, Union soldiers took the Western & Atlantic railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee — a two hours’ walk from the old Zero Mile Post, the industrial heart of the Confederacy.

Then Jefferson Davis intervened again. Citing Johnston’s “failure to defend Georgia,” Davis relieved him and placed his army under Gen. John Bell Hood. The move delighted Sherman, for he respected Johnston’s abilities. (Johnston for his part judged Sherman’s army “the greatest since the days of Julius Caesar.” He would face Sherman again, ten days after Appomattox, to surrender the last Confederate army in the field.)

On July 20 Hood emerged from fortified Atlanta to fight the invaders. In battles at Peachtree Creek, Ezra Church, Atlanta East, and Jonesboro, the Confederates inflicted 7,000 casualties — but suffered nearly 20,000 of their own.

The Gate City of the South, meanwhile, underwent more than a month of siege and bombardment. On September 1 Hood withdrew, and Sherman entered the following day. “Atlanta is ours,” he wired Lincoln, “and fairly won.”

Citizen soldiers

The Union troops rested in and around the city for two months, until November and the presidential election. Lincoln’s debt to them was great: They had delivered Atlanta, and now they delivered the vote.

Overwhelmingly, the western armies rejected McClellan — a soldier who would bring them home — and cast their ballots instead for the civilian who asked them to fight on.

Sherman’s ranks included southerners who could not vote, and they favored the Republican president even more heavily. The First Alabama Cavalry declared 94% for Lincoln.

Upon Lincoln’s victory, Sherman fielded questions from his men. Where next? they asked. Salt water, said the general. As word traveled through the camps, a huge cheer greeted the prospect of a war-ending march to the sea.

Four days later, sixty thousand Union soldiers cut their own supply and communication lines — unprecedented in history on that scale — and burned Atlanta’s factories, roundhouses, arsenals, and cotton stores. They made little effort to contain the flames, and soon Atlanta’s industry, shops, and a third of its homes were smoking ruins.

Abolition on the march

And then, as a popular song would soon tell, Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys went marching down through Georgia.

Along their 300-mile route through the Southern autumn, they would discover that Georgia’s cotton planters had finally shifted some acreage into food production, and that Nature had returned an astonishing abundance. They would eat through larders, rip up railroads, trample fences, and burn the richest plantations.

But these assaults on Southern property would pale beside another — the overthrow of chattel slavery, which left Georgia’s planters poorer by four hundred million dollars.

The western armies of the Union, and the social revolution they unleashed, proved more than the Confederacy could bear.

Next: The march to the sea

©2008 Steve Marshall www.BillyJustice.com
Reproduction permitted with above line intact