Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

army that was hard to overcome,” and from that point on Cater was convinced that Hood would simply drown the Army of Tennessee in blood. “This order sounded the death knell of the Confederate States of America,” he added. “The mistake that our soldiers then made was in not laying down their arms and stopping further bloodshed.” 53

For Sherman, Hood’s appointment was good news: it meant that the Confederates would at last come out and fight in the open, where Sherman was sure he could beat them. Sure enough, only three days after assuming command, Hood took the Army of Tennessee out of its Atlanta defenses and flung them at the heads of Sherman’s columns. Between July 20 and 28, Hood launched three major assaults, at Peachtree Creek (north and slightly west of the city), near Decatur (east of the city), and at Ezra Church (west of the city), each of which failed to stop Sherman, and all of which taken together cost Hood 19,000 casualties. Hood now slumped wearily into the defenses Johnston had prepared, and settled down to the siege he had been appointed to avoid.54

For Sherman, a siege was still a risky proposition; but with Hood in command, he counted on less vigilance than he would have expected from Johnston. Sherman spent the first half of August using his cavalry to feel around behind Atlanta, looking to cut Hood’s rail line south of the city. Sherman’s cavalry were no match for the rebel horsemen commanded by General Joseph Wheeler, however, and at the end of August, Sherman finally concluded that he would have to do the job with infantry instead. On August 25, leaving only one corps in front of the Atlanta lines, Sherman stole around below Atlanta to Jonesboro, on the Atlanta & Macon Railroad. There his men tore up the railroad tracks, heated the iron rails over bonfires of crossties, and twisted the rails around tree trunks in what became known as “Sherman neckties.” Looking out over the deserted Federal lines around Atlanta, Hood at first thought Sherman had retreated and that he had won a great victory. “Last night the enemy abandoned the Augusta railroad and all the country between that road and the Dalton railroad,” he jubilantly reported to Secretary of War Seddon. Too late, he realized where Sherman really was, and by the time Hood got his army down to Jonesboro, Sherman had finished with the railroad and was ready to deal with Hood. After a stiff, two-day fight at Jonesboro on August 31 to September 1, during which Hood ordered his “men to go at the enemy with bayonets fixed, determined to drive everything they may come against,” Hood decided to abandon Atlanta and withdraw southward. “Hood… blew up his magazines in Atlanta and left in the night-time,” Sherman telegraphed Halleck on September 3. “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”55

With the fall of Atlanta, the first of Grant’s strategic objectives was at last in hand. Ironically, the second of these also dropped into Federal hands at nearly the same time. On August 5, David Farragut sailed a combined flotilla of wooden warships and ironclad monitors into Mobile Bay, and hammered the Confederate forts around the Bay into silence. Although a minefield of Confederate “torpedoes” blocked him from penetrating all the way into the Bay, Farragut took his own flagship, Hartford, to the head of the line and plunged into the minefield with the memorable order “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.”56 The mines sank one of Farragut’s monitors, the Tecumseh, but most of the mines turned out to be ineffective and the rest of the fleet passed safely into the bay. On August 23, 1864, Mobile was effectively sealed off to blockade-runners.57

The question now was what to do with Sherman. It was the navy and not Banks’s infantry that had locked up Mobile, and so Grant’s old idea of Federal infantry linking up with Sherman from Mobile was rendered moot. There was little point in stopping with Atlanta, and Sherman urged Grant not to waste his time and men garrisoning northern Georgia. Instead, Sherman proposed to launch a gigantic raid down through Georgia to Savannah, where he could link up with the Federal forces occupying the Carolina coastline. “The possession of the Savannah River is more than fatal to the possibility of Southern independence,” Sherman argued to Grant over the telegraph. “They may stand the fall of Richmond but not all of Georgia.”58

The reasons Sherman listed behind that argument were threefold. First, he could fan out across the rich Georgia countryside between Atlanta and Savannah and destroy everything of any possible logistical value to the Confederacy. The capture of Atlanta had effectively cut off the northern Confederacy (and with it, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia) from its communications with the arsenals and foundries of northern Alabama. Now Sherman would put the torch to the fields and farms that fed the Confederate armies. Second, he could demonstrate to foreign nations and to the Confederate people how weak and powerless the Richmond government had become, when it could not stop a Federal army from trampling across its geographical abdomen. “I propose to act in such a manner against the material resources of the South as utterly to negative Davis’ boasted… promises of protection. If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist,” Sherman told Grant again on November 6. “This may not be war but rather statesmanship, nevertheless, it is overwhelming to my mind that there are thousands of people abroad and in the South who reason thus: If the North can march an army right through the South, it is proof positive that the North can prevail.” 59 Third, Sherman expected that by putting a major Federal army at the mouth of the Savannah River, he would be in a position to swing north and take Charleston, which