Southern Storm (70 page)

This despite a difficult terrain. “We came right across rice fields all cut up with ditches from 1 to 10 ft. wide,” related a Massachusetts soldier, “which we had to get over as best we could; part of the way was through rice as high as our heads & all wet with dew.” By 1:00
P.M
. Carmen’s progress was halted by an increasing enemy force backed
with artillery. Seeing his bluff called and his bet raised, Carmen upped the ante. Orders went to Argyle Island for the rest of the brigade—the 107th and 150th New York regiments—to join their compatriots. As fast as the 107th landed, Carmen parceled it out; four companies to assist the 2nd Massachusetts, two to aid the 3rd Wisconsin, and five to extend the line. The men, said a member of the 107th, “had some severe work skirmishing.”

By 4:00
P.M
. Colonel Carmen had pushed his command to its limits. His four regiments (the 150th New York stood in reserve) held a “line nearly two and a half miles long, front and flanks well covered, and securely resisting Wheeler’s persistent attempts to dislodge it.” The officer dispatched a situation report to his division commander, admitting what he had done and requesting entrenching tools. With an entire brigade now fully committed to an enterprise authorized only for two regiments, Carmen’s superior had little choice but to back him up by sending the tools along. Night found the colonel’s men well posted, but isolated on the South Carolina shore. There was plenty of activity in the darkness as two cannon were hauled across the river to be positioned before more combat the next day. “I had not reached the [Union] causeway,” Carmen later wrote, “but had given the enemy a good scare.”

His evacuation plan finished and nearly ready for implementation, General Beauregard departed Savannah this morning for Charleston. The all-important floating bridge was almost completed. The first and longest leg (about 1,000 feet) began at the bottom of West Broad Street to connect with Hutchinson Island. On Hutchinson, a newly raised causeway snaked across the island to a second section of bridge carrying traffic to Pennyworth Island. A short causeway plugged into the third bridge between Pennyworth and the South Carolina shore. From there yet another temporary roadway linked up with the planked road known as Union Causeway—the Savannah garrison’s only escape route.

The engineering detail under Captain Robert M. Stiles was still hustling to finish the last bridge section when Beauregard left. Lieutenant General Hardee accompanied his superior as far as the head of the elevated passageway, where they encountered Major General
Wheeler, with a report on his battle at Izard’s—Colonel Carmen’s filibustering affair—now several hours old. Beauregard’s sole focus was successfully abandoning Savannah. “Gentlemen,” he said, indicating the smoke and musketry sounds coming from the river, “this is not a demonstration; it is a real attack on our communications. You must get out of Savannah as soon as possible.”

The floating bridge upon which so much depended was not exactly built to standard specs. Normal construction would have deployed relatively small pontoon boats oriented perpendicular to the roadway, but here the seventy-five-to eighty-foot-long barges (all that was available) were lined up end-to-end, moored in place with railroad car wheels as anchors. Existing city wharves and associated buildings were stripped for planking to be laid as flooring, which was then covered with rice straw to muffle the sounds of wheels, feet, and hooves on wood. There was a near tragedy when a number of the precious flats intended for the crossing were destroyed by some of Wheeler’s overzealous cavalrymen, who believed they were keeping them out of the enemy’s hands. The time it took to locate replacements, coupled with unexpectedly heavy morning fogs along the river, further slowed completion of the bridge sections.

Hardee desperately wanted to evacuate this very night, but Captain Stiles still wasn’t finished at sundown. The experienced lieutenant general, who had a good idea how long it would take for the entire 10,000-man garrison to make it over to the South Carolina shore, did not want there to be anyone caught in the city at daylight. When the engineers couldn’t promise having the bridging task accomplished until after 8:00
P.M
., Hardee reluctantly rescheduled the military movement to sunset December 20. That is, unless the enemy had something to say about it.

T
UESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
20, 1864

Midnight–Sunset

The
Harvest Moon,
carrying Major General Sherman, arrived at Port Royal about 8:00
A.M
. A reporter present noted that there was “a general rush…to the dock to get a sight of the illustrious visitor…. The General was looking peculiarly well, and seems fresh for another march more extensive than the one he had just finished.” Following a
breakfast at Foster’s headquarters, and a “casual inspection of the Post,” the two officers retired for a serious discussion.

Exactly what transpired between them is not recorded. Sherman in his
Memoirs
wrote that he “represented the matter to General Foster,” who “promptly agreed to give his personal attention to it.” Major Hitchcock was a tad more specific, noting that Sherman agreed to provide Foster with extra men to cut “off the only remaining avenue open from Savannah—the ‘Union Causeway,’ an old plank road running N.E. from the city to Hardeeville.” These and other discussions kept Sherman occupied throughout the day.

Savannah’s evacuation began at daylight. A Georgian serving with the provost guard remembered observing the long “lines of army wagons” that trundled onto the floating bridge “to seek the safety of the river on Carolina soil. Here and there could be seen a carriage whose owner had been fortunate to secure a passport.” According to a South Carolinian who escaped: “Very few of the citizens [of Savannah] left the city…. All was uncertainty and doubt. Hope was mingled with fear, and it was difficult for any one to decide which preponderated in his own mind…. There was a pretty general hope that the city would be spared, but no one could give any substantial reason for this hope, having no certain grounds upon which to base it, and ignorant of the real condition kept them from arriving at a different conclusion and preparing for the worst.”

Munitions were being shipped across with a haste that resulted in several boxes breaking open to spill their contents on the dock. When Lieutenant General Hardee observed this, he “became quite incensed, thinking the guns had been insecurely packed or piled up loose on the wagons,” said an ordnance official. This individual realized the end was near when he received orders several days earlier to issue rattail files to the army. To anyone experienced with weapons, this could only mean “the spiking of artillery.”
*

Included in the evacuation scheme was all the light, easily portable artillery. Excluded were the much harder to move large-caliber guns, whose crews operated today free of previous restrictions on ammunition expenditure. “Our batteries were awake early this morning, even before I got up,” wrote a member of the 50th Illinois. “Our skirmishers kept up their part of the tune.” Another diarist, in the 9th Iowa, recorded that the opposing batteries “have kept up a regular war all day.” “On account of getting so many shells into our camp they thought best to build breastworks in front…although we lay back in reserve in the woods,” commented a soldier in the 29th Ohio. “Heavy cannonading all around the lines,” added yet another soldier, this one in the 93rd Illinois, “so much it makes me nervous so that I can hardly write.”

Cornelius R. Hanleiter, serving a battery along Savannah’s southern river defenses, received orders at noon to destroy all government property that could not be quickly moved, then to prepare the light artillery for rapid movement. “This intimation of the intention of the Confederate authorities to evacuate Savannah, though suspected for a day or two, was anything but pleasant,” he remembered. The orders caught the battery without sufficient horses to transport everything, so Hanleiter had the unenviable task of deciding what would be left behind. One easy decision was to ship provisions and bedding kept at the post to the part of town where many of the batterymen lived with their families. The officer consoled himself that at least the women and children would enjoy some comfort after the gunners were obliged to abandon them “to the tender mercies of the invaders.”

It proved a nerve-racking day for Colonel Ezra Carmen, whose brigade was fighting hard to maintain its toehold on the South Carolina shore opposite Argyle Island. The Rebels in front were in greater strength and acting more aggressively than at any time since the Yankees had come ashore. Adding to his problems, a Rebel gunboat reached extreme range at high tide to begin pumping its monster shells into Carmen’s
cramped perimeter. The enemy gunners, noted the officer, “opened on our positions, and in fact on any object they could see, firing in nearly every direction of the compass.” Only the falling tide forced the enemy ironclad to pull out of range.

What had begun as a grand adventure was being turned into a grim holding action. An increasingly frantic Carmen fired off three or four dispatches to his division commander requesting reinforcements, “yet I have not even an answer,” he lamented in the afternoon. The once bold officer was now thinking the unthinkable. “If my command is sacrificed it will be because I have been left in an exposed position unsupported,” he said.

At the same time, reports were reaching Carmen suggesting that something was stirring in Savannah. According to an officer from the 3rd Wisconsin, “From one portion of our line wagon trains can be seen leaving the City.” Eager to view it for himself, Carmen climbed into the loft of a barn on his line. Scanning toward the Union Causeway he “could see wagons, family carriages, men and women on foot, singly and in groups, moving north along the road.”

There were signs throughout Savannah that all was not well. A “crowd of women” gathered around the city’s main arsenal, “supplied with pails and buckets,” in response to a rumor that the building “contained provisions.” Until the officials in charge managed to convince the women otherwise, it looked as if they intended “carrying it by storm,” said an arsenal employee. No formal announcement had been made, yet the indications were plain enough. The daughters of one artillery commander helped their father distribute hoarded stores of clothes and blankets to his men. Late this morning the ladies called on acquaintances with the signal corps, only to find the men “busy burning dispatches.”

The concern on everyone’s mind was given voice by one of the provost guards, who said, “Sherman had burned Atlanta and had driven the helpless women and children into exile. What he would do to Savannah was a question often asked, but no one could answer.”

A trickle of Confederate deserters made their way today through the no-man’s-land to the Federal lines. “Sick of war and the rebel cause,” recorded one Federal interrogator. “There has been a rumor
to-day that they are evacuating the city, but the report is not credited,” added a Wisconsin soldier. “It is stated by a deserter that the inhabitants are very anxious that the city should be surrendered, probably fearing that if they hold on, it will share the fate of Atlanta.” Likely from such sources, Brigadier General John W. Geary was able to ascertain “that the enemy had completed a pontoon bridge from Savannah across to the South Carolina shore.” The brigadier promptly “notified the general commanding corps of the discovery.”

It was approaching 5:00
P.M
. before Major General Sherman finished his business on Hilton Head Island, then reboarded Rear Admiral Dahlgren’s flagship for the return run to Savannah. Atmospheric conditions outside had taken a turn for the worse, with a stiff wind blowing up from the southeast. In consequence, the General’s party, recorded Major Hitchcock, “lost considerable time both in starting and on the way by very rough weather.”

Sunset–Midnight

According to the master evacuation plan, as soon as darkness fell, all “light batteries will…be withdrawn by hand from their positions in line with as little noise as possible, and will be sent over the pontoon bridge to Hardeeville.”

Also after sunset, Savannah’s Board of Aldermen met with Mayor Richard D. Arnold in the City Exchange on Bay Street, where they received official notification that the army was decamping. With the news came the sobering realization that responsibility for the city’s safety was passing from military hands into theirs. Somebody at Hardee’s headquarters had copied them on Sherman’s surrender demand, so the elected officials were only too aware of his threat to bombard Savannah, then turn his soldiers loose on the population. They quickly resolved to send a small delegation headed by the mayor to enter the Union lines at daybreak to surrender the city.

Up and down the Union siege lines, the coming of darkness left individual soldiers alone with thoughts of their own mortality. “It is feared
that General Sherman contemplates an assault on these works of the enemy soon,” reflected an Ohioan. “That means death to many of us, and we dread to hear of it.” For many units, the only offensive plan was a straight-ahead advance through waist-deep waters under full observation of the enemy. “I feel a cold shiver yet when I think of that order for the assault before daylight,” recalled a Wisconsin man.

On the Seventeenth Corps front someone had the bright idea to have the men try out small ladders to help them cross the ditches and fortification walls. Watching the soldiers awkwardly rehearse with the clumsy objects, a Wisconsin officer realized with a start that the higher-ups were serious. “When we came to think how the Confederates could sweep the surface of the water with their cannon…, and that those who were, perhaps, only slightly wounded, must surely drown in their helplessness, the prospect of such a charge was not at all pleasing to us,” he said. “I could not go to sleep again for a long time after that.”