Southern Storm (20 page)

Most attention was given to the tracks. A New Jersey infantryman recollected “tearing up and burning all the wood work of the road,” while a brigadier reported destroying “a considerable distance of the railroad…by burning the ties and bending and twisting the rails.” Some units were satisfied with a process that produced quantity over quality. “Our Division started out from Madison alone and proceeded to tear up the railroad for a long distance without severing the rails from the ties, like a plow turns the sod over,” attested a Pennsylvania farm boy.

John Geary marched his main column as far as Blue Springs, where most of the command bivouacked on the plantation of Colonel Lee Jordan of the Rebel army. Geary sent a detachment forward from there to carry out his principal objective, the destruction of the railroad bridge across the Oconee River. It was a fine piece of engineering, some 400 yards long and rising 60 feet above the water. The strike group, Geary later reported, “thoroughly destroyed” the structure. Another detail was sent north several miles to wreck a large mill and to destroy all the ferryboats along the Apalachee River.

For all the rest of the Twentieth Corps today was a sloppy tramp southeasterly from Madison. “The roads are rather muddy and hard walking,” said a New York soldier. The lousy weather and poor roads did not dissuade many slaves from liberating themselves. An Illinois soldier remembered how they joined the Federal columns “loaded down with bundles and babies.” “There were old Pomps, young Pomps, She Pomps and pickannies,” reflected a New York man, “and as they trudge along they form a grotesque procession and one that should be seen to be appreciated.” When a squad from the 102nd Illinois reached one plantation, they found a large stash of cotton burning, watched over by an elderly black man. When someone wondered aloud who started the blaze, he answered: “You Yankees did it, and I’m glad of it—
it would never have done me no good.
”

Between the population of Madison and the surrounding homesteads, a number of encounters took place between the invaders and residents. The officer in charge of the town’s provost guard recorded dining invitations for lunch and supper, a visit from a former U.S. senator (Joshua Hill), and the gift of a flower bouquet. The meetings were less social for more isolated homeowners. “I don’t know what in the world the people through here are going to live upon,” worried one woman to a soldier, “for your army is taking everything.” Another infantryman joined a group that was filling canteens from a house well. They were surprised when the house mistress came to the porch with an appeal for them not to waste the water. “Why ma’am, what’s the difference to you?” asked one of the soldiers. “There’s a whole corps on this road and by night there won’t be any left.”

For Dolly Burge, waiting apprehensively at her plantation nine miles east of Covington, this was the day she had been dreading. After a restless night and breakfast without incident, she decided to visit her nearest neighbor. Hardly had she reached him before she heard that the dreaded Yankees were close at hand. Dolly raced back to her home, yelled to her slaves to hide themselves, and in the next instant the vandals were all around her. “Like demons they run in!” she exclaimed. “My yards are full. To my smoke-house, my dairy, pantry, kitchen, and cellar, like famished wolves they come, breaking locks and whatever is in their way.”

Amazingly, a guard appeared, but his authority extended only to the house itself; everything else was fair game. When Dolly protested,
the young soldier shrugged. “I cannot help you, Madam; it is orders,” he said. Mrs. Burge watched in silent, incendiary anger as she witnessed her livestock taken and the cabins used by her slaves plundered. When a sympathetic Union officer, who was also a distant relation, tried to console her, she burst into tears. “I saw nothing before me but starvation,” she later wrote. The officer so calmed her that by the time he departed, Dolly was calling him a friend. Two guards later replaced the single one, and together with Dolly, her family and slaves spent what would be a second night without sleep for the plantation mistress from New England. “I…kept walking to and fro,” Dolly remembered, “watching the fires in the distance and dreading the approaching day, which, I feared, as they had not all passed, would be but a continuation of horrors.”

As they got through the swampy lowlands of the Alcovy River, the Fourteenth Corps made better time in its march toward Shady Dale. Once more the Yankee boys traveled through a bountiful land. “Troops have plenty to eat,” wrote an Illinois man in his journal. “Plenty of corn and potatoes,” said a fellow soldier. When the 21st Wisconsin reached its camp for the night, the men found a nearby hog pen filled to capacity. “There was sport for the boys,” laughed a member of the regiment, “and ere long their hogships [were] given a passport for eternity.”

One unexpected problem that emerged was the large number of soldier casualties resulting from undisciplined melees over poultry and fowls. “Several…men wounded by shooting at chickens,” recorded a diarist in the 34th Illinois. Another in the 113th Ohio noted that two men in a foraging detail “were accidentally shot, or rather carelessly by their comrades, while shooting chickens.” Trying to make light of the matter, an Illinoisan spoke of a soldier “accidentally wounded in the leg while a vigorous assault was being made on a flock of turkeys by the foragers.” In response, wrote another member of the 34th Illinois, “Provost guards are taking up many of the boys for shooting near the column.”

“Negroes by the hundred are coming into our line and we are keeping them with us[,] using them to get forage for us and we find them not bad fellows to have along,” reported an Indiana man. Major James A. Connolly, who had earlier browbeaten a plantation owner into surrendering a captured U.S. flag, had to chuckle this afternoon. Most of
the citizens in the area, he noticed, had tried to hide their livestock and valuables in swampy places. They had used their slaves to help them; however, “the negroes told the soldiers of these hiding places and most of these hidden valuables find their way into our camp to-night.”

Sherman’s headquarters party spent two hours in Newborn, mostly because the General was hugely enjoying himself conversing with a “queer old cock” (Hitchcock’s words) named John W. Pitts. A soldier marching past caught sight of “Gen. Sherman sitting with his hat off[,] tracing his map and questioning an old citizen standing near.” Mr. Pitts, who had founded the little village, was given the full Sherman lecture: the Southern cause was hopeless, its leaders were on the wrong course, its people deserved whatever happened to them. To all this Pitts agreed, even volunteering that the “Confederates were a great deal worse than our men, that they pillaged and plundered everybody, and the inhabitants dreaded their coming.”

Finally the command group moved along, cantering another seven miles before settling in for the night. Along the route they could hear occasional shots as foragers plied their trade. It was reported that several soldiers had been killed or injured in the activity. Hitchcock thought that something needed to be done about it, but Sherman was unconcerned. “I have been three years fighting stragglers,” he explained, “and they are harder to conquer than the enemy.” Also, from where he sat, Sherman saw nothing wrong with taking supplies in this manner. “The country was sparsely settled, with no magistrates or civil authorities who could respond to requisitions, as is done in all the wars of Europe,” he later wrote in justification, “so that this system of foraging was simply indispensable to our success.”

Like many thoughtful people guided by grand theoretical abstractions, Sherman had problems when he saw the human face of people affected by his policies. Earlier this day he had been confronted by an older lady whose foodstuffs and livestock were, according to Major Hitchcock, “rapidly disappearing” at the hands of Sherman’s men. Sherman refused her request for a guard, proffered some lame excuses, and foisted her onto Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis, who was even less likely to be conciliatory. Now Hitchcock could overhear Sherman thinking aloud. “I’ll have to harden my heart to these things,” he
said. “That poor woman today—how could I help her? There’s no help for it. The soldiers will take all she has. Jeff Davis is responsible for this.”

Well after sundown, Hitchcock wandered a bit to observe with interest as several signal officers experimented with a long-distance communication. Three rockets were set up, ignited, and sent whooshing into the night sky, a prearranged signal alerting the Right Wing that the northern jaws of Sherman’s movement were beginning to close on the Georgia capital. “Sherman’s plans are splendid,” he declared.

Right Wing

The Seventeenth Corps completed its crossing of the Ocmulgee River then marched off toward the town of Monticello, leaving the more direct roads to Hillsboro to the Fifteenth Corps (still not yet entirely over the river) and the cavalry. The extra miles tramped resulted in some compensation when the soldiers entered Monticello, which one of them described as a “beautiful town.” Major General Blair sent his troops through with “colors flying.” The town’s young men were all gone, but left behind were “any amount of fine looking gals” for the Yankee boys to ogle. An artilleryman pronounced Monticello “a pretty little village, with some handsome women in it, a great rarity in the South.”

Also making the gunners’ day was their discovery of sacks of shelled corn stored in the courthouse by Rebel quartermasters. Saved the work of finding and packing the fodder, the happy cannoneers piled the bags on their caissons. After somebody mentioned that captured Union prisoners had been held in the town’s jail it wasn’t long before “it was reduced to ashes.” From Monticello, the Seventeenth Corps columns turned south, walking along until they reached Hillsboro, where they bivouacked.

Trudging along with a small squad of Confederate prisoners was a Rebel cavalry officer whose imperious ways had won him no friends among Monticello’s residents. In fact, one of them—a young lady—had revealed his hiding place to the Yankees just to rid the town of his noxious presence. Ignoring a pledge of honor, the officer tried to escape, only to be decked by one of the soldiers guarding him. A member of
Howard’s staff saw the man, who looked dejected and thoroughly beaten. Continued the amused Federal, “the point of it all was the citizens deliberately turned this stupid fellow over and both the men and ladies appeared to enjoy his troubles intensely.”

It was a harder passage for the Fifteenth Corps, which had to lug its wagons up the thoroughly churned east bank of the Ocmulgee. One weary soldier retained vivid images of “the men floundering through the mud and water, slipping and stumbling, causing heads to be cracked by the muskets of those prostrated in the mud.” Three divisions of the Fifteenth Corps navigated the latticework of farm roads that represented a more direct course to Hillsboro, while the rear guard (Fourth Division) remained on the river’s west side.

This meant that the Fifteenth Corps officers had to proceed as much by instinct and luck as by the very generalized maps they had, and not everyone guessed right. “We took the wrong road and so lost two hours,” griped a Minnesota soldier, “and had some hard work in getting right again.” It was especially tough on the wagon guards, who had to remain close to the lumbering, sliding vehicles. One unfortunate slipped under the wheels and broke his leg. Commented a weary comrade in the 93rd Illinois, “every man out of humor.”

Major General Howard’s headquarters this night were in Hillsboro, where he took dinner with the Reese family. Young Louise Caroline Reese kept one eye on her mother, still struggling with her nerves after a Yankee visitation during the summer, and the other on her uninvited guests. “Gen. Howard sat at the table and asked God’s blessing,” she related, “[while] the sky was red from flames of burning houses.” Howard left a guard with the Reese household; after he departed several of his staff officers remained to play some sentimental numbers on the family’s piano and to sing several songs. By the time they withdrew, Mrs. Reese was a basket case, unable to rise from her chair. “All night we sat with the enemy all around us,” recollected Louise.

Back at Planter’s Factory the program of destruction was getting under way. The grist-and sawmills were burned today while preparations were made to finish the job just before the pontoon bridge was dismantled, which was scheduled for next morning. As part of this day’s events, the factory contents were “divided amongst the poor women and girls of which there was a great number.” Off to the side of the crossing point itself, the crowd of broken-down animals continued
to grow as healthier creatures were confiscated from soldiers not authorized to have them, to be exchanged for worn-out wagon and artillery teams.

This was another hard day for Kilpatrick’s troopers. After resting a short while on the river’s east bank, Kilpatrick had his men moving along the farm roads taking them south and east. They were to assume the lead position on the Right Wing by reaching the town of Clinton, some fourteen miles northeast of Macon, and a little more than that beyond the nearest friendly infantry camped around Hillsboro.

“Roads very slippery,” wrote a trooper in the 92nd Illinois Mounted Infantry, while another proclaimed it “a hard day’s travel.” It wasn’t until about 9:00
P.M
. that Kilpatrick’s men entered Clinton. Just outside the town the mounted vanguard encountered a Rebel outpost. Reported a
New York Herald
correspondent on the scene: “General Kilpatrick being in advance, and mistaking the rebels for his own men, narrowly escaped death from their shots.” Six of the enemy scouts became prisoners.

This was an area with an ominous history for the cavalrymen. Some three months earlier, a mounted raiding force led by Major General George Stoneman had been overwhelmed near here by Confederate forces spilling out from Macon. Stoneman and many of his troopers had been captured before being packed off to Southern prison camps. With this on their mind, the troopers sent out on picket built themselves a solid rail barricade. Kilpatrick mulled over a scouting report from the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry containing “valuable information in regard to the movements of the enemy about Macon.” According to the regimental surgeon, Kilpatrick “learned that part of Wheeler’s force had crossed the river near Macon, and now confronted him.”