Southern Storm (60 page)

The Yankee troopers stopped for the night on the plantation owned by Captain Joseph L. McAllister of the Confederate army, which one Pennsylvanian declared “a beautiful place,” though this did not prevent it being ransacked by other less appreciative cavalrymen. Some members of the 8th Indiana drew coffee water out of the Ogeechee but then had to spit it out since it was “too salty to drink.” In the near distance they could hear the irregular but constant boom of cannon fire as the Union tubes positioned at Cheves’ Rice Mill
*
opened a harassing bombardment on the fort. (The Yankee cannoneers also hoped that the sound of their guns firing might serve to signal the navy downriver of their presence.) At this extreme range there was little chance of doing any significant damage, but a couple of Federal shells came close enough to one of the powder magazines that Major Anderson ordered a protective traverse wall thrown up. Return fire from the fort was equally wild, managing only to scatter a pile of sweet potatoes collected by the Union gunners for their dinner.

The fort commander was at his moment of truth. There was no doubt that the enemy’s sights were set on McAllister, but with fewer
than 200 defenders
*
the result was a foregone conclusion. There was still time to spike the guns, then evacuate the soldiers, but Anderson rejected that option. “I determined under the circumstances, and notwithstanding the great disparity of numbers between the garrison and the attacking force,” he vowed, “to defend the fort to the last extremity.”

Whether Anderson abandoned or fought mattered little to Sherman, who was set on taking the place. “We wanted the [commissary] vessels and their contents,” Sherman declared, “and the Ogeechee River, a navigable stream, close to the rear of our camps, was the proper avenue of supply.” After a quick consultation with Major General Howard, he decided to pass on Brigadier General Kilpatrick’s offer to assault the fort and rely instead on the Second Division of the Fifteenth Corps—Brigadier General William B. Hazen’s—to do the job. Howard had been holding it off the front line in reserve, and besides, Sherman, who had once commanded the division, thought very highly of it.

Hazen, a thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate, was summoned from his headquarters a couple of miles away. When he arrived, Howard and Sherman explained the role his division was to play in the next day’s work and, as Hazen remembered, they “gave me a little map of the country about the mouth of the Ogeechee River.” Then, recounted Sherman: “I gave General Hazen, in person, his orders to march rapidly down the right bank of the Ogeechee, and without hesitation to assault and carry Fort McAllister by storm. I knew it to be strong in heavy artillery, as against an approach from the sea, but believed it open and weak to the rear. I explained to General Hazen, fully, that on his action depended the safety of the whole army, and the success of the campaign.”

Before Hazen could depart to begin organizing matters at his headquarters, Sherman proffered one last piece of advice. He indicated on the map how the ground on the southern edge of Genesis Point was veined with small streams and creeks. Pushing a force of any size through that region would be fraught with difficulties. Sherman was determined that not one piece of the plan go awry, so repeated his
injunction, as Hazen phrased it, “not to find myself behind any creek, so that we could not get forward.”

T
UESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
13, 1864

Throughout southeastern Georgia, good news was where one could find it. It was reported in today’s
Augusta Daily Chronicle & Sentinel
that solid progress was being made on reestablishing telegraphic communication with Macon. More than sixty-five miles of chopped poles and smashed insulators had already been repaired by the Southern Telegraph Company. However, even the upbeat newspaper writers had to admit that “some time must elapse” before the task was finished.

In Savannah, there was increasing concern in high military places regarding Union efforts to cut the narrow communication corridor with Charleston. The Yankees had been island-hopping in the Savannah River like so many fleas; even though their few forays to the South Carolina shore were small-scale, limited in scope, and easily batted away, they portended much worse to come. Such was General Beauregard’s concern that he diverted the last reinforcements he had been able to scrape together (450 men, more or less) to bolster its defense. Echoing Beauregard’s concern, Lieutenant General Hardee informed Major General Wheeler in no uncertain terms that the proper place for his cavalry was on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, not pecking at Sherman’s rear guard. Wheeler at once began the laborious process of ferrying his mounted units across the stream to consolidate them at Hardeeville. All would transfer over save for Iverson’s division, which would continue to harass the Union rear areas. The net result was that the best military asset capable of inflicting real damage on Sherman’s logistical apparatus was off the chessboard.

One of those irritants that so bothered Beauregard and Hardee was the 3rd Wisconsin, now entirely installed on Argyle Island. Most of the men were set to work getting the island’s three rice mills into operation. This was accomplished in short order and soon, bragged a soldier, they were running the “rice-mills to their full capacity, thrashing out rice for our hungry comrades.” One squad had already returned from an unopposed December 12 landing in South Carolina at a place called
Izard’s Plantation. Today there was fighting near Izard’s landing dock as the Argyle Island Yankees tangled in a cross-river exchange with a Rebel reaction force. “We drove them off without much trouble,” snorted a Wisconsin officer.

Closer to the city, Hutchinson Island was also the scene of some limited combat. Rebel snipers had established themselves in several buildings, and one had killed a popular officer in the 134th New York. That was enough for Brigadier General John W. Geary, commanding this sector, who sent sixty men onto the upper island to clean out the murderous nests. When this force proved too small to do the job, Geary promptly reinforced it. The pop-popping of men engaged in a deadly game of hide-and-seek would continue throughout the day.

In a myriad of ways, efforts were made all along the siege line to strengthen positions or improve the flow of supplies. Technicians from the 1st Michigan Mechanics and Engineers labored to close the locks that Confederates had busted open to flood the fields now occupied by Sherman’s men. Other units spread along the wrecked railroad right-of-way, transforming the useless track bed into a valuable wagon road. Abandoned rice mills were put into operation to process the stacks of the confiscated raw product into something edible. All across the rear zones of Sherman’s lines, wagon corrals, cattle herds, and supply caches were secured with earthworks or fortified posts. In a hundred different ways, his men were signaling that they had come to stay.

There were mini-actions all along the main siege lines, few large enough to warrant mention in official reports unless men died. The soldiers in the 63rd Illinois would puzzle for a while about the mission they executed this afternoon. The regiment was called into line not long after 1:00
P.M
., then marched toward Savannah following the railroad tracks. The column halted short of the enemy’s position, where it deployed to the left of the road bed in an open skirmishing order. One more advance was undertaken, bringing the men within extreme rifle range of the Rebels. The order to halt was followed by one to commence firing toward the city. Forty rounds apiece were loosed off before the shooting was halted, the men re-formed in column along the railway line, and then returned to camp “covered with mud up to our forks,” said one. The soldiers guessed they had carried out a diver
sion for an operation somewhere else. Not until the next morning would they understand the reason for their curious action.

Right Wing December 13, 1864

Fort McAllister

William Tecumseh Sherman stood silent and unseen in the obscuring morning shadows, watching Hazen’s division pass on its way to Fort McAllister. There were other pressing matters awaiting the General’s attention this day, but he would entertain none of them. Opening communication with the fleet was the only item on his personal agenda, and Fort McAllister was all that stood in the way. Sherman’s earlier confidence had waned somewhat. He now acknowledged that McAllister “will be found [to be] a strong work,” so he cut orders for Brigadier General Kilpatrick to try to establish contact with the fleet at the next inlet to the south.

The divisional pioneers and Missouri engineers, who had labored hard through the night to complete the crossing in time, were almost through. The span lacked guardrails, but no one in charge was willing to hold things up the extra couple of hours it would have taken to install them, so the soldiers crossed with no handholds. The finishing work, now undertaken in the breaks and pauses of the movement, would have the protections in place by December 14. No one seems to have been hurt or any material lost in the crossing.

Brigadier General Hazen made the passage at about 5:00
A.M
. There is nothing to indicate that he met with either Sherman or Howard this morning, but given the very high level of expectation on the part of the two leaders, some kind of leavetaking would not have been out of the question. Most of the foot soldiers marched in ignorance of their objective; only Hazen and his key officers knew what lay ahead. “There was a general notion [among the ranks] that we were going to assail and capture some obstacle separating the army from its food and raiment,” recollected the brigadier. There were seventeen regiments marching this morning; for eight there would be little to note in journals and diaries save for another stretch of Georgia countryside visited. For the other nine, however, this day would produce the mix of anxiety, determination, fear, adrenaline, and relief that embodied combat.

Once across King’s Bridge, the infantrymen tramped along what Hazen described as “about two miles of causeway with rice fields on either hand.” “While we were going along the causeway,” he continued in a later memoir, “the column was beset by a great crowd of rice plantation people, a simple race, small, ignorant, of all shades of color and speaking a peculiar patois. They were entirely unique and distinct from any other people, and their chatter was…almost unintelligible.”

The officer in command at Fort McAllister, Major George W. Anderson, greeted the new day with foreboding. A sudden increase in Union cavalry patrols to the west had effectively shut down his own scouting efforts, so the major had no idea what was going on beyond his picket outpost about a mile distant. The two enemy cannon at Cheves’ Rice Mill continued to annoy the garrison with an occasional shell. The Federal navy had not made an appearance below the fort, but Anderson wouldn’t put it past them to be cooking up some combined operation. His one grim satisfaction was knowing that the ordnance experts from Charleston had arranged for a deadly surprise along the causeway leading directly to the fort. That, plus the defenses his men had worked so hard to erect, added to the difficulty the enemy would have getting through the swampy areas surrounding the place, gave him some hope that Sherman would find Fort McAllister too costly to capture.

Not long after the tail of Hazen’s column—including six cannon in one and a half batteries—crossed King’s Bridge, Major General Sherman and his staff headed off along the plantation roads, paved with crushed oyster shells, to Cheves’ Rice Mill, from where the General intended to observe operations. Missing from the entourage was Major Hitchcock, who, to his everlasting regret, chose to remain at the main headquarters closer to Savannah. Also with the party were Major General Howard and his staff. Once there, they would be joined throughout the day by a gaggle of officers and aides from the other Fifteenth Corps divisions and the Seventeenth Corps. A crowd of braid and glitter was about to descend on Cheves’ Rice Mill.

With no immediate decisions requiring his attention, Brigadier General Hazen took in the sights as his column trudged south from King’s Bridge. “The day was bright,” he wrote later; “and the march, after leaving the rice-farms, was along a lovely road of shells and white sand, under magnolias and wide-branching live oaks draped in long hanging moss.” Probably around 6:15
A.M
. the Yankee boys passed near Strathy Hall, the formidable residence of Joseph L. McAllister, a portion of whose property had been donated to the Southern cause for the eponymous fort. Kilpatrick’s cavalrymen had already paid the mansion a visit, Hazen observed, “and the contents of the house were strewn upon the floors or scattered about the lawn.” Even though the horse was already out of this barn, Hazen (who had enjoyed a slight prewar acquaintance with the McAllisters) posted some guards anyway, perhaps thinking he might need the structure for a headquarters later on and did not want anyone burning it.