Read Southern Storm Online

Authors: Noah Andre Trudeau

Southern Storm (3 page)

BOOK: Southern Storm
6.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The optimism Davis had allowed himself after meeting with Hood positively wilted under the officer’s sour barrage. Davis said “he was distressed to hear such gloomy sentiments from me,” but Taylor saw it as his duty “to express my opinions frankly to him.” They conferred a while longer before Davis left the next morning on a circuitous rail journey to his next stop, Augusta, Georgia. Taylor saw the president off without any bitterness about the deteriorating situation. “I had cut into this game with eyes wide open,” he reflected, “and felt that in staking life, fortune, and the future of my children, the chances were against success.”

The train routing to Augusta brought Davis back through Macon, where General Hardee, now reassigned, boarded on his way to Charleston, South Carolina. There was no enmity between the two, for Davis’s decision had brought solace to both men. “I can say with certainty that
General Hardee was not relieved because of any depreciation of his capacity, his zeal or fidelity,” Davis later testified. Hardee, for his part, opined that Hood’s plan was the “best which can be done, if that does not succeed no other will.”

In Augusta, on October 3, Davis met with General Beauregard. The Louisiana-born officer arrived from an inspection tour of South Carolina with a sense that time was running out on his opportunities for redemption. As the commanding officer at Charleston in 1861, he ordered the batteries to fire on Fort Sumter, and later he was the commander in the field for the first Confederate victory at Manassas. Buoyed by the popular acclaim and political support he received, Beauregard publicly attacked the Davis government for its lack of war preparations, an action that resulted in his banishment to a western subcommand.

It was at the battle of Shiloh in April 1862, when the officer leading the Southern forces was killed, that Beauregard took the reins of an operation he had opposed, and withdrew his men from the battlefield. His subsequent abandonment of the strategically important transportation and supply hub at Corinth further tarnished his reputation. (“There are those who can only walk a log when it is near the ground,” Jefferson Davis scoffed when he learned of Beauregard’s action, “and I fear he has been placed too high for his mental strength.”) There followed a series of appointments to military backwaters, culminating in June and July 1864, when he found himself sharing the defense of Petersburg, Virginia, with General Robert E. Lee. Although equal in rank, Lee had the full confidence of Jefferson Davis as well as direct control over most of the troops on the field, leaving Beauregard to play an increasingly unhappy second fiddle. His summons to meet with Davis promised the chance to command in the field with the fate of the Confederacy at stake. Such a destiny mated well with Beauregard’s romantic soul.

Beauregard opened the meeting by proposing a sweeping reorganization of the South Carolina defensive system, part of which involved promoting a favorite aide two steps in rank to lead it. Davis patiently heard him out before tabling the matter
*
and moving on to his agenda.
He started with an overview of Hood’s plan. Davis’s enthusiasm for the intended course of action was obvious to Beauregard, who approved the scheme, pronouncing it “perfectly feasible,…according to the principles of war.” Davis now got down to the main point of their meeting. He proposed to create a new military command jurisdiction, to be called the Division of the West, encompassing five states and including the commands of John B. Hood and Richard Taylor (the South Carolina coastal defenses would be added later). He wanted Beauregard to take charge.

Beauregard, who had hoped for command of an army, realized at once that what Davis was offering was essentially an administrative and advisory posting, but he would be on his own stage instead of sharing space with others. He understood that much of the appointment was more symbolic than substantial since, as he later stated, “he would be without troops directly under him, with very scanty resources to count upon, and—far worse than all—with a marked feeling of discouragement and distrust growing among the people.” Without making any effort to negotiate terms, Beauregard accepted the new position. He recollected that besides promising him the cooperation of the War Department, Davis suggested that his first official act be to meet with Generals Hood and Taylor. However, before Beauregard left to carry out his new duties, Davis needed him for one more event.

Arm in arm with Beauregard and Hardee, Davis addressed a mass gathering in Augusta. He took care to praise both the officers on stage with him; Hardee, “the hero of many hard-fought fields,” and Beauregard, who “goes with a single purpose…not to bleed but to conquer.” Much of the rest of his speech inspired fear and hope alternately in the hearts of those present. “Would you see the fair daughters of the land given over to the brutality of the Yankees?” he asked. “We are fighting for existence, and by fighting alone can independence be gained. You must consult your hearts, perform more than the law can exact, yield as much as free-men can give, and all will be well,” he exhorted. “Brave men have done well before against greater odds than ours, and when were men ever braver?”
*

The return leg of Jefferson Davis’s visit to the troubled front was
made pleasant by a stop in Columbia, South Carolina, where he stayed with his good friends James and Mary Chesnut. James, a colonel in the Confederate army, had been on Davis’s staff for a period. Mary kept an extensive diary that would, in time, become one of the principal windows into life in the South during the Civil War. As Mary remembered it, Davis arrived soon after dawn, and following a hearty breakfast the president tried to relax by sitting out on the Chesnuts’ piazza. The respite was brief, for some boys recognized him as the “man…who looks just like Jeff Davis on a postage stamp.” Before long a large crowd had gathered, forcing Davis to retreat into his room. More citizens arrived, and the pressure increased on Davis to say a few words. At 1:00
P.M
. he stepped back out on the piazza, which was by now thronged by what Mary recollected as an immense crowd of men, women, and children.

Davis began by praising those present for their steadfastness in the “great struggle for the rights of the states and the liberties of the people.” Once more he lambasted any talk of conciliation with the North. With an unspoken reference to his replacement of Johnston by Hood, Davis asked, “Does any man imagine that we can conquer the Yankees by retreating before them, or do you not all know that the only way to make spaniels civil is to whip them?” He returned to one of the core messages of his talks, reiterating that “now is the good and accepted time for every man to rally to the standard of his country and crush the invader upon her soil.”

Davis spoke movingly of the noble Army of Tennessee’s imminent return to health. He expressed his great hopes for Hood’s operation, which, the president promised his audience, would soon threaten Sherman’s tenuous supply link between Atlanta and Tennessee. Davis built to an upbeat finish. “I believe it is in the power of the men of the Confederacy to plant our banners on the banks of the Ohio [River],” he exclaimed, “where we shall say to the Yankee, ‘be quiet, or we shall teach you another lesson.’”

Mrs. Chesnut had a mint julep waiting for the president when he finished his speech. That evening, thanks to the generosity of neighbors, a fine dinner was served, with excellent wine. Long after the guests had dispersed, the dinner settings been cleared, and the president departed to continue his journey back to Richmond, Mrs. Chesnut ruminated on her chat with Custis Lee, a Davis aide. Lee, she wrote,
“spoke very candidly and told me many a hard truth about the Confederacy and the bad time which was at hand. What he said was not so impressive as the unbroken silence he maintained as to that extraordinary move by which Hood expects to entice…[the Federal force at Atlanta] away from us.”

The slow ride from Columbia back to Richmond, requiring another three changes of train, provided Davis ample time to reflect on the steps he had taken. All that was within his power to do, he had done. Beauregard, Hood, Taylor, Hardee, Cobb—all would have important parts to play in the difficult days ahead. If those men had actually listened to his words, they understood that their salvation would not come from without but from within their region. “If every man fit to bear arms will place himself in the ranks with those who are already there,” Davis had said, “we shall not battle in vain, and our achievement will be grand, final and complete.” If Hood executed his plan well; if Beauregard could choreograph the resources to meet the threats when they appeared; if Taylor, Hardee, and Cobb understood the need to work together, all would be well.

Not long after he returned to Richmond, Davis reported to the Confederate Congress on the progress of the war. He predicted a new phase of the conflict during which Confederate armies would no longer be tied down defending fixed places like cities, which would free them to maneuver to advantage as Hood’s plan allowed. “There are no vital points on the preservation of which the continued existence of the Confederacy depends,” he told the lawmakers. “There is no military success of the enemy which can accomplish its destruction. Not the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington [, North Carolina;] nor Charleston, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor all combined, can save the enemy from the constant and exhaustive drain of blood and treasure which must continue until he shall discover that no peace is attainable unless based on the recognition of our indefeasible rights.”

A
web of iron links bound Atlanta to the Atlantic coast. In prewar times these connections brought prosperity and convenience to those fortunate enough to be located along the right-of-way. Since the war began, those railroad routes marked those same fortunate ones as targets, and what was once a source of pride had become cause for much anxiety. The northern leg of this route to the sea consisted of a track belonging to the Georgia Railroad. It linked Atlanta to Augusta, from which point waterways or other rail connections completed the journey. The southern leg represented two operations: the Macon and Western Railroad hooked Atlanta to Macon, from there the Central of Georgia Railroad completed the circuit through to Savannah.

One of the first stops moving east from Atlanta on the Georgia Railroad was Covington, a gracious village that serviced several nearby plantations. Young Tillie Travis loved her town but despaired over the effect the war was having on it. Because of its proximity to Atlanta, Covington had already endured visits by Union cavalrymen who burned its railroad depot and associated buildings. A number of Covington’s residents had fled since Atlanta’s fall, so many that Travis observed, “Our town looked deserted, indeed.” As September passed through October into November, Travis and the other holdouts had grown used to the almost daily rumors that “the Yankees are coming!” Many of those still in town were in a state of denial because of the
constant false alarms. Thinking about those enemy soldiers, Travis noted that “we had almost concluded that they would vex us with their presence no more.”

A mile and a half from Covington was Oxford, home of one Zora M. Fair, a South Carolina refugee of considerable pluck. Determined to do more for the Confederacy than stoically enduring privations, the young lady stained her skin with walnut juice, frazzled her hair, and went into Atlanta to spy disguised as a Negro girl. Her friends were aghast when they found out about her escapade, but the determined girl returned to set down what she saw and heard in a letter that she sent off to Georgia’s governor.

Some nine miles east of Covington was the sprawling plantation managed by the widow Burge. Born in Maine as Dolly Sumner Lunt (and a relative of the abolitionist U.S. senator Charles Sumner), Mrs. Burge had followed her sister from Maine to Georgia, taught school, and married a certified Southern gentleman named Thomas Burge. Mr. Burge died in the late 1850s, leaving Dolly with a daughter (Sarah, called “Sadai”) and the responsibility of running the plantation on her own. She proved adept, both in adjusting her New England morality to embrace slavery and in her careful management of the busy enterprise. Already she had witnessed the sad procession of refugees from Atlanta, as well as suffering visits from Yankee raiders who rustled some of her livestock.

Dolly Burge offered no apologies for keeping slaves. “I can see nothing in the scriptures which forbids it,” she said. Like many thoughtful owners, she eased any pangs of conscience through benevolent stewardship of her charges. “I have never bought or sold slaves and I have tried to make life easy and pleasant to those that have been bequeathed me,” she explained. Her biggest worry was the outcome of this terrible war. “Shall we be a nation or shall we be annihilated?” she wondered.

Pushing east from Covington, the Georgia Railroad passed through the well-appointed town of Madison, where Emma High lived. The natural beauty of the town was a continuing marvel to her. “The winter was a mild one and there were roses in bloom,” she recalled, “rich and beautiful and in great profusion in many of the flower gardens.” Madison was, by general consensus, one of the most attractive towns in the state, an appearance that offset its more eccentric residents, such as Edmund B. Walker. Walker believed in being prepared, so he pur
chased a coffin built exactly to his measure, which he stored in his attic. As the years passed and his waistline expanded, Walker was known to make periodic visits to his final resting place to assure himself that he still fit.

South of the town, in Jasper County, was the Aiken Plantation, run by the owner’s wife while he was away in the army. Frances B. Aiken was the youngest of the twelve children, all of whom helped their mother manage the operation and watch over the slaves. Later in her long life, Frances never forgot how her mother prepared to deal with any invaders. Her plan was not to spite them but to welcome and charm them, pitting Southern hospitality against Northern aggression. Anyone who knew her mother knew that this was no contest at all.

The Georgia Railroad terminated on the Savannah River at Augusta, one of the Confederacy’s busiest arsenals. The city leaders had been slow to assess potential Yankee threats, so it wasn’t until mid-August that serious work began to erect fortifications around the city. A force of some 500 slaves labored in the summer heat to dig the defensive strong points. The feeling that Georgia’s fate was not being sufficiently considered in far-off Richmond was shared by many. One Augusta newspaper editorial rhetorically asked the Confederate government “whether the State of Georgia is necessary to the achievement of our independence?” By mid-September every available slave had been pressed into the job of protecting Augusta, so many in fact that when the post’s military commander requested a detail to dig some soldier graves, he was told that no extra hands were available.

The course of the Macon and Western Railroad ran south and then east of Atlanta. The population of Macon, another important location for manufactures and munitions, had swelled with workers and refugees. Among the latter was a family from north Georgia. Rebeca Felton’s husband had moved his dependents here early in 1864 to escape the ravages of the Union army’s campaign against Atlanta, but then the capture of the Gate City had put Macon’s future in doubt. “It was very astounding to remember all these reverses and yet we were constantly told we would certainly succeed,” she recalled in later years, “and we clutched at every item of news that indicated a success.”

North from Macon about twenty-three miles was Hillsboro, which had already felt the hard hand of war. A column of Union cavalry had paused briefly in the town on a late July raid aimed at freeing Union
POWs caged near Macon. Mrs. Tabitha Reese endured the presence of Yankee officers in her parlor, even as their men freely pillaged outside. The whole affair left Mrs. Reese’s nerves frayed with what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” Her daughter, Louise, dreaded the next visitation, which seemed inevitable. “We know what terrible means,” she declared. “‘Terrible as an army with banners.’”

From Macon, the Central of Georgia Railroad looped eastward toward Savannah. A spur at Gordon connected the state’s capital, Milledgeville, with the circuit. Legislators from around Georgia began trouping toward Milledgeville in late October for the state assembly’s annual session, scheduled to convene on November 3. The elected officials faced a wide range of issues, from finance to state defense. Included on the agenda was a bill to amend the state’s ban on grain-based liquors to allow for the manufacture and consumption of lager beer. Smart money was betting that the bill would pass.

The legislative session opened with a strident message from Governor Joseph E. Brown, who excoriated the Davis administration for failing to prevent Atlanta’s capture. “But the misfortunes following the misguided judgment of our rulers must not have the effect of relaxing our zeal or chilling our love for the cause,” Brown proclaimed. He dropped something of a bombshell by proposing a convention of states—Southern and Northern—to consider continuing the war. “States can terminate wars by negotiation,” Brown insisted.
*

Behind all the bold words of the governor and the state legislators was the knowledge that if the Yankee army should target Milledgeville, they would all flee. There were others in the town whose sense of duty chained them to this post. One was Dr. R. J. Massey, responsible for “six different wards, something like two hundred sick, wounded and convalescents.” Another was Dr. Thomas F. Green, superintendent of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. His daughter, Anna Maria, was an honor student and a dedicated diarist. Also determined to remain was the Georgia secretary of state, Nathan C. Barnett. Among his responsibilities was the Great Seal of Georgia and all records pertaining to the current legislative session.

Milledgeville boasted more than its share of impressive houses. One
was the Orme house, with its distinctive Doric-columned portico. The mansion’s mistress, Mrs. Richard McAllister Orme, had strong northern roots. Her father, John Adams, was president of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, whose graduates included at least one Union officer in Atlanta. Not far away was the Governor’s Mansion, patterned after a fourteenth-century Italian villa. Its front door opened into a great hall and a rotunda topped with a gilded dome, all illuminated by crystal chandeliers. One of the state’s first families preceding Governor Brown included a cat lover in its ranks, who had a pet entrance cut into one of the house’s fine carved doors.

The Milledgeville spur threaded northward to terminate at Eatonton, where the war’s demands had put women into the working force at the Eatonton Manufacturing Company, which produced a durable heavy cloth called osnaburg as well as pants for soldiers. Other women had formed a Ladies Aid Society whose squads of knitters were urged on with the battle cry, “a sock a day.” Patriotic pride centered on the 102-foot-high flagpole, whose mastlike look was credited to the retired sea captain who had directed its construction. The captain also raised and lowered the standard each day, carefully handling the emblem that had been hand-sewn by a female resident who had attended the first Confederate Congress just to get the proper specifications.

The Central of Georgia continued its eastward wandering, passing through the town of Millen, where another spur shunted off the main trunk line, this one making possible one of the Confederacy’s newest and largest prisoner enclosures. Camp Lawton, as it was called, came into being as a way of relieving the overcrowding and suffering at Camp Sumter (also known as Andersonville), south of Atlanta, which had been in operation since late February. With losses reaching toward one hundred a day from disease, starvation, and violence, a decision was made in July to build another prison. A site was found five miles north of Millen blessed with a good supply of fresh water, high ground for guard stations, and easy access to the railroad spur. Construction on Camp Lawton began in late July, and the first Union prisoners reached the stockade in mid-October as Hood’s planned move forced Camp Sumter’s temporary closure.

Reaction by the POWs to the new, still incomplete facility was mixed. An Ohio artilleryman swore that there was little improvement over Andersonville, while an infantryman from Illinois found the new
location to be “much more pleasant” than Camp Sumter. “Disease and starvation together are decimating us daily,” recorded another Federal captive, “and the average deaths are twenty to thirty-five per day.” There were regular visits from Confederate officials anxious to recruit disaffected Yankees into their ranks. These “galvanized Rebels,”
*
as they were called, were promised better fare and treatment, benefits that a few found irresistible. “Let us not judge them too harshly,” noted a captive who did not sign up, “remembering how sorely they were tempted.” Confederate officials hoped that Camp Lawton was secluded enough to be secure from enemy raiders, even though the nearby railroad marked it clearly on Union maps.

Farther north along the Millen spur was Waynesboro, near which a visitor would find the Carswell house, known as Bellevue. Mrs. Carswell, the former Sarah Ann Devine, was a New Englander who loved to tend her garden. Her special pride was the rosebush that ran along the side of the house. There is no evidence that Mr. Carswell, a lawyer and judge, ever gave much thought to his wife’s horticultural passion, but in the not very distant future that rosebush would come to mean life itself.

Seventeen miles outside Savannah, young Jennie Ihly was boarding with her grandparents, who lived near one of the main roads leading into the port city. Writing years later, Jennie described herself then as “a merry hearted girl, little dreaming of the realities of war, for to me it sounded like a fairy tale as I heard it discussed by the people of matured years.” Lying between this household and Savannah was a belt of tidal marshes that had been cultivated for rice and sea island cotton. Working the rice fields was difficult, dangerous labor, and slave mortality was high.

The Central of Georgia Railroad terminated at Savannah, a town renowned for the public greens that checkerboarded its central district, crowned by the twenty-acre Forsyth Park. Shortly before the war Savannah played host to the English writer William Thackeray, who described it as a “tranquil old city, wide streeted, tree shrouded.” Although the heaviest ground fighting in Georgia was well off to the west, Savannah’s residents had constant reminders of the turbulence
just over the horizon. Refugees were a common sight, as were the temporary holding pens that sprang up to accommodate transiting enemy prisoners. To one observer the Yankees, many from Andersonville, were “altogether the most squalid gathering of humanity it has ever been my lot to look upon.”

Savannah was a once-bustling seaport whose business had been dramatically curtailed by a Federal naval cordon to the occasional bold blockade runner.
*
Among those hurt by the loss of trade was Octavus Cohen, a merchant and cotton exporter. His twenty-four-year-old daughter, Fanny, would soon be moved by events to step from the shadows of anonymity by keeping a journal of the happenings in her city. Another daughter who would leave a record of this time was Frances Thomas Howard, whose father helped man Savannah’s defenses. A resident who feared the changes that were coming was Caro Lamar, who managed her household in the absence of her husband. She was especially suspicious of one of the family’s slaves, William, who she worried would betray them at the first opportunity.

BOOK: Southern Storm
6.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Dry as Rain by Gina Holmes
The Hunt by Megan Shepherd
Wilde Thing by Janelle Denison
Contents Under Pressure by Edna Buchanan
Daring Masquerade by Margaret Tanner
The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri
Bloom by Grey, Marilyn