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

was lost,” wrote Sara Agnes Pryor, the wife of a Confederate officer. He could read collapse in the streets of Petersburg, since (as Pryor acidly remarked) the town had never been “so healthy”:

No garbage was decaying in the streets. Every particle of animal or vegetable food was consumed, and the streets were clean. Flocks of pigeons would follow the children who were eating bread or crackers. Finally the pigeons vanished having been themselves eaten. Rats and mice disappeared. The poor cats staggered about the streets, and began to die of hunger. … An ounce of meat daily was considered an abundant ration for each member of the family.7

Lee’s men could read collapse even more clearly in the letters that filtered through into the hands of the Confederate soldiers below Petersburg. Those letters now began to tell the terrible tale of civilian starvation, the devastation by Yankee raiders, and the relentless impressment of the ever-shrinking fruits of Southern agriculture by the Confederate War Department. “We have been impressing food and all the necessaries of life from women and children, and have been the mean of driving thousands from their homes in destitute condition,” Lee admitted sadly to James Longstreet in February 1865. The suffering of Confederate women now reached the breaking point, and their letters began to teem with encouragements to desert from the Army of Northern Virginia. “The Condition of the country at large was one of almost as great deprivation & suffering as the army itself,” wrote Edward Porter Alexander, the chief of artillery in Longstreet’s corps. “Naturally, the wives & mothers left at home wrote longingly for the return of the husbands & sons who were in the ranks in Virginia. And naturally, many of them could not resist these appeals, & deserted in order to return & care for their families.”8

Beginning in early January 1865, men began to desert by the hundreds, and then the thousands. “Since Sherman’s victories,” exulted a soldier in the 20th Maine, “we see the affect it is having on Lee’s Army.” They were even deserting in groups, “not only privates but many officers with them.” Over a period of ten days in February, the army lost 1,094 men to desertion; between February 15 and March 18, 1865, almost 8 percent of Lee’s army disappeared either into the Union lines or into North Carolina. Lee himself turned harsh and punitive in an attempt to stop the flow of desertions. On February 25 he rejected a captured deserter’s appeal for mercy without even reading the appeal, and ordered the man shot. “Hundreds are deserting nightly,” Lee explained to the Confederate adjutant general, Samuel Cooper, “and I cannot keep the army together unless examples are made of such cases.” It did little good. On March 4, George Meade reported to his wife that “deserters still continue to come in, there being 75 yesterday,” and more than half of them brought their weapons with them, a sure sign that it was not a shortage of fight that afflicted them. “If we stay here,” wrote one Union officer who had passed forty deserters through his lines in forty-eight hours, “the Johnnies will all come over before the 4th of July.” Yet Lee and his army remained the one outpost of hope for what remained of the Confederacy. Josiah Gorgas hit emotional bottom in mid-January, feeling the finger of despair on his pulse, until he remembered “the brave army in front of us, sixty thousand strong. As long as Lee’s army remains intact there is no cause for despondency.”9

For Grant, the issue was now to tighten his grip on Petersburg and Richmond, slowly draining away the rebel army’s life. On the other side of the siege lines at Petersburg, the resolve of the Confederates, which had seemed so formidable when the siege began the summer before, was visibly weakening, and the real question increasingly seemed to be whether Grant was going to be able to keep Lee from slipping out of Petersburg before Grant could deliver a knockout blow. As for Sherman, he was opposed by little more than 20,000 Confederates. The old Army of Tennessee had been broken up after Hood’s resignation, and its last effective pieces shipped over to the Carolinas to join what was left of the forlorn and homeless garrison of Wilmington, North Carolina, to threaten Sherman. At the urging of the Confederate Congress, command of this patchwork army was at last given back to Joseph E. Johnston by a grudging and suspicious Jefferson Davis on February 23, 1865. Sherman was mildly apprehensive at the return of Johnston, but Johnston knew that it was by now too late to do any serious damage to Sherman. “In my opinion these troops form an army too weak to cope with Sherman,” Johnston sighed. All that Lee could advise him was to “hope for the best.”10

With such small Confederate forces left in the Carolinas, Grant’s impulse in December 1864 had been to pull Sherman and his army out of Georgia entirely and use the navy to transport them up to the James River, where they could reinforce Grant for a fresh assault on Petersburg in the spring. But Sherman demurred, insisting that he could accomplish much more by setting off on yet another raid, this time up into the Carolinas, where he could wreck the Army of Northern Virginia’s last rail lines and supply centers in the Carolinas. Sherman enlisted Halleck as an ally in his cause, and on December 18, Grant once more gave way to Sherman and authorized this new raid. After pausing to rest and refit in Savannah, Sherman and his army were again on the march. In their path was South Carolina, the state whose secession lay at the beginning of the war, and Sherman’s men were determined to make South Carolina suffer in retribution. “South Carolina cried out first for war,” one of Sherman’s Iowans swore, “and she shall have it to her hearts content. She sowed the Wind. She will soon