Authors: Noah Andre Trudeau
Southern Storm (21 page)
Georgia’s head of state, his family, their milch cow, and the last soldiers on duty departed Milledgeville for points south. Governor Brown intended to see his family and servants as far as the town of Montezuma; from there they faced a thirty-mile trek by wagons to the governor’s plantation in Dooly County, southwest Georgia. When the cars reached Gordon, about twenty miles east of Macon, the military force detrained. The small command, under Brown’s state adjutant and inspector general, Major General Henry C. Wayne, was emblematic of
the state’s fortunes. Its 500 men consisted of cadets from the Georgia Military Institute, one artillery battery, a small company of cavalry and one of militia infantry, and a unit made up of factory and penitentiary guards, as well as another consisting of men formerly under guard—convicts doing time for minor offenses who agreed to serve in exchange for a reduced sentence.
In Macon, Lieutenant General Hardee continued to chart the progress of the enemy columns. A force of Yankee infantry was spotted in Hillsboro, while blue-coated cavalry had reached Clinton—important points north and northeast of the city. When Major General Wheeler arrived at 11:00
P.M
., he and Hardee had a quick strategy session. The lieutenant general needed to know something definite about the enemy’s strength and plans. Clinton, on a main road between Macon and Milledgeville, seemed the best place to start. Accordingly, Hardee “ordered Wheeler to make an attack on the enemy to-morrow at Clinton, [so] as to ascertain definitely his movements and intentions.”
S
UNDAY
, N
OVEMBER
20, 1864
Midnight–Noon
Right Wing
A
heavy fog splayed across the countryside around Clinton, blurring and obscuring the town’s many trees and muffling small sounds. Added to the rain and mud, the morning was miserable for the Yankee cavalrymen, under orders to hold the place pending the arrival of friendly infantry. From his headquarters in the Richard Hutchings house near the main road, Brigadier General H. Judson Kilpatrick reacted to intelligence of Confederate mounted probes pushing out from Macon by sending forward his own detachments to harass them. Then all he could do was wait for the slow-marching foot soldiers to arrive.
Left Wing
The Fourteenth Corps abandoned its camps around Newborn, the Second Division in the lead with orders to “push on toward Eatonton Factory,” a cloth-producing facility. Behind the Second moved the First and Third divisions, with Sherman’s headquarters party tucked
between. Major Hitchcock pronounced it “ugly weather,” with “heavy clouds, some rain, sullen mist and fog all round horizon.” The grim conditions mirrored the aide’s troubled thoughts. As much as he hated to admit it, Hitchcock was coming around to Sherman’s point of view. “We must make war,” he told himself, “and it must
be
war, it must bring destruction and desolation, it must make the innocent suffer as well as the guilty, it must involve plundering, burning, killing.”
No one bothered to share these dire tidings with the slaves of Shady Dale. The place itself, recorded the
New York Herald
correspondent, was just another name for “the plantation of an old man named Matthew Whitfield, who owns nearly the whole of [the]…county, and an abundance of stock and crops.” Most of the town consisted of ramshackle cabins for the slaves “who worked the large plantation upon which Mr. Whitfield resided.” Added Major Hitchcock, “We are told he left yesterday or this morning, having collected his horses and mules and ordering the negroes to bring them along. But the darkies wouldn’t follow him, and instead they remained with the stock and joined the Yanks in high glee.”
“The brigade band played a quickstep tune as we went through,”
recalled an Ohio infantryman, “and the negroes flocked out to see us and hear the music, particularly the women, some of whom followed us for over a mile, or rather kept up with the band, dancing and keeping time to the music.” One of the women told a Wisconsin soldier “that she had heard of the bluecoats for a long time and now to see us.” The Midwest boy asked her if she wasn’t glad to meet the Union soldiers. “She said, ‘yes, I love to look at you.’” Reflected the Yankee: “You could see hope and joy in their eyes.”
Off to the east, the Twentieth Corps was moving in a roughly parallel fashion in two separate columns. Farthest out, marching along the west bank of the Oconee River, was John Geary’s division. The forty-four-year-old brigadier noted “the weather rainy, the roads very deep and swampy.” As his columns unwound from their encampments on the Jordan plantation, the soldiers finished burning the owner’s cotton and corn. Also on the list of targets was Parks Mill, which Geary’s men reached by 8:00
A.M
., where a small bridge had been washed away and not replaced. The crossing here was by ferry, so Geary had his men round up the boats. The mill owner’s wife played the Mason card, which secured a guard for her residence, through her smokehouse was emptied by the hungry Federals.
After leaving their camps south of Madison, the two other Twentieth Corps divisions struggled to make much progress. The mud, reported a Connecticut man, “was thick and sticky,” while a Michigan comrade griped about “the clayey roads.” The tail end of the column had it the worst. “The roads were in a bad condition and had to be corduroyed in many places before the wagons could pass,” wrote a New York diarist. “It is raining so hard all of the time the wagons worked up the mud, which made it hard marching for the men.”
Behind them, Madison’s residents (at least those not as resourceful as Emma High’s mother) were making a doleful inventory of losses. “The Yankees left us Sunday morning without a mouthful to eat, nothing to cook and nobody to cook if we had,” complained one. “The inhabitants seemed to be filled with consternation, for they never dreamed that we would penetrate such a retired and remote region of the country,” said a Massachusetts soldier. “While passing an elegant mansion to-day, we observed the first manifestation of Union sentiment on the part of citizens since the march commenced,” added an
Illinoisan. “A number of ladies at the mansion waved their handkerchiefs as we passed, and the men cheered heartily.”
A black older couple had joined the procession accompanying the Left Wing columns. An Illinois soldier had witnessed the couple’s decision to leave: the two stood outside their owner’s home, ready to go, with all their personal belongings in the small bundles that they carried. Their owner tried to convince them to stay, even getting them to admit that he had never mistreated them, and reminding the elder male that they had grown up together as children. All this was true, but with tears in their eyes, the two were determined to leave. “We must go,” the black man said, “freedom is as sweet to us as it is to you.” Added the soldier: “And go with us they did.”
Right Wing
Major General Oliver Otis Howard’s overriding concern was to pass his wagons safely over the muddy Georgia roads to Gordon, where he expected to link up with the Left Wing and Sherman himself. Complicating Howard’s situation were the enemy troops in Macon, who weren’t cowering behind their battlements but actually striking at him. Howard’s orders for today were designed to place a heavy infantry screen between Macon and his vehicles while at the same time using his cavalry to threaten the city from an unexpected quarter. Accordingly, the Seventeenth Corps was directed east from Hillsboro to Blountsville, while the Fifteenth Corps (three divisions of it) marched south from Hillsboro to Clinton, where it would take its blocking position. Once the Fifteenth reached Clinton, it would free up Kilpatrick’s riders for their Macon raid.
Before the long tail of Howard’s wing finally cleared the Ocmulgee River, there was some unfinished business to conduct. Planter’s Factory was put to the torch and destroyed. There was also the problem of the herd of broken-down and discarded creatures that had been accumulated near the pontoon bridge. The order to dispose of the problem wriggled down the chain of command until it stopped with the bridge builders, the 1st Missouri Engineers. Daniel B. Baker, one of the engineers, would never forget what happened next.
“The animals were placed in a short bend in the river,” he wrote, “not far from the bridge with a strong guard of soldiers to keep them from getting away, the soldiers forming one part of the corral and the river the other. As soon as the troops were all over the bridge, we began taking it up, and as soon as this was done the whole regiment was drawn up in a line from a point on the river bank below the bend to a point above the bend, and the order to commence firing into the poor animals began, and it was kept up as long as there was one of them left standing.”
The firecracker sounds momentarily startled the rear guard of Brigadier General John M. Corse’s Fourth Division (Fifteenth Corps), the last infantry to depart the Ocmulgee River. The soldiers “supposed [it] to be skirmishing, but it proved to be the Killing of worthless horses & mules at the ‘crossing,’” noted an Ohio veteran. Corse’s men, plus the wagons, were on course for Monticello. Their aggressive leader wasn’t happy about his responsibilities, for it was clear that his command would be shepherding their charges (the pontoon train, 300 wagons belonging to Kilpatrick’s men, and 3,000 cattle) until they reached Gordon.
Ahead of them, the Seventeenth Corps was passing through Hillsboro and having a grand time doing so. “A colored gal showed that she was pleased at seeing us by dancing on the porch, much to the pleasure of the boys,” remembered an Ohioan. Another Yankee boy had his fun by cobbling together an effigy of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, which he then hung prominently along the town’s main street. “It excited many a pun and joke among the boys, as they witnessed its exhibition in passing,” chuckled a member of the 64th Illinois. Once through Hillsboro, the Seventeenth Corps angled off to the south and east.
Farther south, the remaining three divisions of the Fifteenth Corps closed on Clinton. An Iowa soldier found the passage “muddy & very foggy.” “The roads were so slippery it was hard work to stand up and march,” muttered an Ohioan, while a Hoosier was certain that “nearly every man on foot, both officers and soldiers, fell down, some of them a dozen times.”
As the head of the Fifteenth Corps column reached murky Clinton about midday, Kilpatrick’s troopers began pulling out, creating some confusion that was exploited by a band of audacious Rebel cavalrymen
who rushed through the fog to snatch some prisoners, among them a man who said he was the servant of the Fifteenth Corps commander, Major General Peter J. Osterhaus.
This minor coup was one of the few bright spots for Confederate Major General Joseph Wheeler, trying to carry out General Hardee’s instructions to probe the enemy positions. On his way from Macon to Clinton, Wheeler’s column was harassed by some of the detachments Kilpatrick had sent forward for that very purpose, and valuable time was lost in chasing them away. Then, when the advance party came scrambling out of Clinton with their prisoners, they were closely followed by some angry Yankees, leading to a brief melee in which Wheeler afterward claimed the advantage.
Hardly had Wheeler begun to assess the meaning of finding Union infantry in the town when a courier reached the bantam general with news from Macon that an enemy force was approaching from the east, and the brigade he had posted to protect that quarter had gone to meet it, leaving a hole in the city’s defenses. Macon, with its arms-producing facilities, iron foundries, and munitions works, was too important to put at risk. There was nothing he could do but meet this threat, so Wheeler turned a portion of his command around and headed back.
Still stuck in transit, General P. G. T. Beauregard stopped in West Point, Mississippi, long enough to send one hectoring telegram off to General Hood (“Push on active offense immediately”) and one containing advice to Major General Wheeler. “My views are that positions should be defended only so long as not to risk safety of troops and materials required for active operations in the field,” Beauregard instructed his subordinate. “Meanwhile remove to safe locality all Government property on line of enemy’s march, and consume or destroy all supplies within his reach.”
Beauregard’s earlier public proclamation was given firm stamp of approval by the editorial writers for the
Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel.
“Let not this stirring appeal go by unheeded!” they exclaimed. “Act in accordance with its burning words! Act promptly. Rally around the banner of your own chosen General, and all will be well.” In distant Richmond, a well-placed War Department clerk, after reviewing all communications received, nodded approvingly at Governor Brown’s call-up of Georgia’s white male citizens. “I think Sherman is in danger,” wrote the official.
In Camp Lawton the process of transferring the Union prisoners elsewhere was accelerated. By now the infirmary (such as it was) had been entirely evacuated, and those remaining behind the stockade walls endured a seemingly endless wait as the most important lottery in their life plucked lucky individuals from their midst.
For Sergeant Lucius W. Barber, part of Sherman’s forces in the Atlanta Campaign until he was captured in early October, this was a winning day. Thanks to an acquaintance, Corporal Rollin Mallory, Barber’s name was added to a list of POWs to be exchanged. The two tried without success to have their friend, Private Millen Mackey, tacked on, but there was no room. Besides, the men were told that all remaining prisoners would be transferred within a week. Then, as their names were called, an opportunity presented itself when someone failed to answer. Mackey made a move to step forward but then held back, believing it better to wait until his exchange could be official.
*
Barber passed through the stockade gate on his way to the parole station. “We were free,” he exulted. “The earth, the air, the very ground we trod on, seemed to echo our soul’s deep gratitude.” Within minutes, Barber and his companion had clambered aboard a train heading for Savannah.