v1.1.3 / chapter 82 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* Although the war had tended to go idle during the winter months in previous years, the conflict was finally rolling on to its conclusion, and the Union kept up the pressure. Grant continued to put the squeeze on Petersburg, while Union cavalry conducted raids in western Virginia. More significantly, Sherman finally completed his march across Georgia, arriving in Savannah -- much to the relief of President Lincoln and General Grant, who had been wondering where he was.
In the meantime, Hood's push into Tennessee finally went completely bust, with the Confederate Army of the Tennessee crushed in a one-sided battle around Nashville. The only bright spot in the gloom for the Confederacy was Union bungling of an attack on Fort Fisher, on the North Carolina coast, but anyone with foresight could realize the Federals would soon be back.
* On 6 December 1864, Lincoln's personal secretary John Nicolay delivered the President's annual address to a joint session of Congress. The speech attended to the mundane details of foreign and domestic affairs of government. It said little about the war itself, other than that it was going well for the Union, which was obvious in both North and South.
The President used the address to throw cold water on any hopes of die-hard Confederates that by some miracle they would win their independence, pointing out that the Northern election in the fall had endorsed the government's war policy; that the Union armies were larger than they had ever been; and that the Union could "if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely."
He also mentioned Jefferson Davis for the first time in a speech, though Lincoln obliquely referred to him only as "the insurgent leader". The speech stated that "the insurgent leader" had shown no interest in any realistic negotiations to end the conflict, and in fact had made it clear that he would "accept nothing short of the severance of the Union, precisely what we will not and cannot give." Lincoln went on: "He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves." The President was saying in very clear terms that the Union would continue the war until the Southern states gave up their bid for independence, but softened the harshness of that position by offering "pardons and remissions of forfeiture" that were in his power to grant.
He also pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban slavery. That was being a bit impatient, since the current Congress still contained many Democrats who believed that a return to the "status quo ante bellum" was still possible. An antislavery amendment had been passed by the Senate in the spring of 1864, but it needed a two-thirds majority to get through the House of Representatives, and it had failed. Once the new Republicans who had been elected that fall took their seats in the spring of 1865, the balance would decisively shift away from the Democrats and ensure passage of the amendment. In his address, Lincoln told those opposed that they couldn't win, and added: "May we not agree that the sooner the better?"
The President didn't want to wait; he felt that a constitutional amendment to ban slavery once and for all would help persuade the South to give up the fight more quickly. As long as the rebels felt there was a possibility that continued resistance might allow them to cut a deal to preserve slavery in the reformed Union, they might try to hold out. Slavery was doomed in any case, but with a constitutional amendment they could have no hope. Any Southerner who didn't realize the cause was lost by this time was delusional, and Lincoln wanted to do everything he could to deflate their delusions in hopes that they came to their senses.
* The President had other items of business to take care of at the time, Earlier in the month, on 1 December, he had accepted the resignation of Attorney General Edward Bates. Bates, an elderly Democrat, was weary of the war and the politics, and went back home to Missouri. He was replaced by James Speed of Kentucky. Now only Seward survived from Lincoln's original cabinet.
The President also appointed a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. 87-year-old Chief Justice Roger Taney, hated by the Radicals for the Dred Scott decision, finally died in mid-October, and Lincoln had to find a replacement. Bates, Montgomery Blair, and Stanton all wanted the job, but the appointment fell to Salmon P. Chase. Lincoln had let Chase dangle on the hook for some time, partly to ensure that Chase continued his good efforts for the Lincoln reelection, partly to put Chase in his place. However, Chase had worked hard and influentially for him and deserved a reward, and hopefully his duties as chief justice would keep him out of political intrigues.
Certainly, if Chase couldn't be president, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was a pretty good consolation prize, and there was no doubting his competence. There was also no doubting his commitment to the Union, and Chase's appointment would be a major piece in the President's efforts to "reconstruct" the court, breaking with the decades when it was often dominated by proslavery judges. Lincoln passed the nomination to the Senate on 6 December, the same day as the presidential address, and the nomination was quickly confirmed. People went to Lincoln to complain that Chase wasn't the right man for the job, but the President commented: "I know meaner things about Mr. Chase than any of these men can tell me."
There was also the matter of more soldiers for the Army, with Lincoln issuing a request for 300,000 volunteers on 19 December. The net had been tightened for this sweep, the Union Army having reduced the minimum height requirement from 5 feet 3 inches to 5 feet (160 to 152 centimeters). Stanton told him privately that 200,000 more might be needed in March if the war seemed likely to linger on much beyond that time.
* The Union grasp on Petersburg continued to strengthen, with the Federals continuing to stretch out their lines and making probing attacks to the south of the city. Grant called Wright's VI Corps back from the Shenandoah Valley to help step up the pressure, the first soldiers arriving at City Point on 4 December. On hearing of this move, Robert E. Lee ordered the return of two of Early's divisions, or what was left of them, to the Richmond-Petersburg defenses.
On 7 December, the three divisions of Warren's V Corps, reinforced by a single division from Humphreys' II Corps and Gregg's cavalry division, moved out against the Petersburg and Weldon Railroad line well to the south of the city. The objective was to lengthen the gap in the railroad connections that the rebels had plugged with wagons, and disrupt the wagon line as well.
The action went well at first. The land had not been yet ravaged by war, and the foraging was good, and though the Federals were perfectly efficient at their work of destruction the whole adventure had something of the feel of a vacation. However, some Union stragglers had their throats cut by rebel guerrillas and the intruders turned savage, burning everything in sight. One soldier in the Iron Brigade called it "the most vindictive" action he had ever seen, commenting that "the destruction of the houses of peaceable women and children, though venomous in their Union hatred, cannot be justified."
The weather turned cold and nasty, so the Federals returned to their lines, leaving blackened ruins and 16 miles (26 kilometers) of ruined track behind them. They were back where they started from on 10 December. Lee had pulled most of Hill's corps out of the Petersburg defenses and sent it, along with Hampton's cavalry division, to block Warren's move, but all they were able to do was harass the Federal rearguard as the Yankees departed.
* The Federals also sent two other raids into Virginia from the west later in the month. George Stoneman, captured by the rebels in July in Georgia, had been returned on a prisoner exchange and put in charge of Union cavalry in northeast Tennessee. On 10 December 1864, he left Knoxville with 5,500 troopers on a raid into southwest Virginia to wreck the lead and salt mines there.
Breckinridge had only about 1,200 cavalry, holding down the salt mines at Saltville. Stoneman feinted at the lead mines at Marion and Wyethville, forcing Breckinridge to shift and confront the Yankees on 18 December, leading to a daylong series of clashes. While the fighting was underway, Stoneman sent half of his cavalrymen to Saltville to begin wrecking the mines, and then joined them the next day. When the Federals headed back for home on 21 December, they left the salt mines a complete ruin. This was a serious blow to the Confederacy, since there was no other adequate source of salt, required for preserving meat to keep the soldiers in the field fed. The raiders were back in Knoxville by New Year's Day.
In the meantime, while Sheridan was completing his unpleasant task of rendering the Shenandoah Valley uninhabitable, he also decided to send a raid east to cut the Virginia Central at Gordonsville and do whatever other damage possible. He sent Torbert over the Blue Ridge on 19 December with two divisions totaling 5,500 men, while he also sent Custer south towards Staunton in the Valley with a single division of 2,500 men as a diversion.
Early sent a cavalry division under Thomas Rosser to deal with the Federals, resulting in a confrontation north of Staunton after daybreak on 21 December. Custer yielded and went back the way he came, returning back to camp on 22 December. That was very unaggressive by his standards, but he figured that he had performed a diversion as ordered, and given nasty winter weather he didn't feel prepared for a real fight that would present him with a lot of wounded men to care for.
The diversion did work, just not as well as might be hoped. Torbert encountered no real opposition until he ran into a roadblock before Gordonsville on the evening of 22 December. He decided to wait for morning to figure out how to deal with it, but when the sun came up on 23 December, Torbert found that he was confronted by two of Longstreet's infantry brigades, rushed from the Richmond defenses by train during the night.
Like Custer, Torbert decided to give it up, and he and his command returned to Winchester on 28 December. The lack of action in the two-pronged raid was highlighted by the fact that with a total of 8,000 Federal troopers involved, there were only 150 combat casualties, though there were hundreds of cavalrymen who suffered frostbite. In fact the weather had been so harsh, hard on horses as well as men, that most generals wouldn't even have contemplated taking to the field or staying out in it, and so neither Sheridan nor Grant felt very distressed over the failure of the raid.
* With Federal mobility and aggressiveness hobbled by the harsh weather, Lee called back a third division from Early's command to strengthen the defenses around Petersburg and Richmond, leaving Early with one watered-down infantry division and two equally undersized cavalry brigades. Unfortunately, the Confederate cause was stretched so thin that Lee wasn't able to keep up the strength he was trying to accumulate. Intelligence that the Federals were about to move on Fort Fisher and Wilmington forced him to detach Hoke's division to deal with that threat.
The South simply didn't have the manpower any more, and the rebels in the trenches in front of Petersburg were all cold, hungry, and miserable. The heroes in the ranks fought on, but many of the conscripts had no more stomach for the war. They deserted in numbers across to Union lines at Petersburg every night, proclaiming their disgust of a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."
One night Federal pickets heard cries for help from a swamp, and went in and rescued a Confederate deserter. He was a conscript in his sixties, fat, bald, toothless, certainly nothing like the "lean and hungry wolves" that made up the fighters the Union men had learned to respect in the past. They dried him off and let him warm in front of a fire with a cup of coffee; when he regained his strength, he set off on a long gripe about the Confederacy to his captors. One of them related:
BEGIN QUOTE:
He cursed it individually, from Jeff. Davis and his cabinet down through the Congress and public men to the lowest pot-house politician who advocated its cause; he cursed its army, from General Lee down to an army mule; he cursed that army in all its downsittings and uprisings, in all its movements, marches, battles, and sieges; he cursed all its paraphernalia, its artillery and its muskets, its banners, bugles, and drums; he cursed the institution of slavery, which had brought about the war, and he invoked the direst calamity, woe and disaster on the Southern cause and all that it represented; while the earnestness, force, and sincerity with which it was delivered made it one of the most effective speeches I ever heard, and this together with his comical appearance and the circumstances of his capture made the men roar with laughter.
END QUOTE
Some rebel deserters who still had some fight in them actually wanted to join the ranks of the Union. They were all sent West at the end of 1864 to fight Indian tribes. There was no sense in straining their loyalties, and if they had been captured there was the possibility that they might be hanged as traitors. However, despite the poverty of the Confederate cause, despite the destitution of the soldiers, despite the fading of any hopes for success, Lee's men kept on fighting and nobody in the Union side of the trenches around Petersburg thought they were pushovers.
* In contrast to the cold and hungry rebels, the Federals were generally well-fitted for winter weather and had plenty of rations. It wasn't always the best food, but for the holidays the citizens of the North organized drives to provide the troops with turkeys, pies, and all sorts of luxuries, and they feasted at Christmas and New Years.
The fighting spirit of the Army of the Potomac had been drained by years of war, but in compensation discipline had become much tougher, much to the satisfaction of the old-timers. The bounty-jumpers and the other riffraff were told to toe the line and dealt with severely if they didn't. A special tribunal was set up to pass judgement on deserters, and had seven men hanged in one day.
Whatever it took, the Union was going to finish the war. The rear areas were combed for people who could be put into the front lines. Some of the new units coming up to the line were composed of men who had been wounded and out of action for an extended time, or veterans whose enlistments had expired but who decided to sign up again to see the end of the show. These units would often prove as tough and professional as any in the Union Army.
* The weather in Georgia remained fine for marching, and Sherman's men continued to enjoy their excursion. The word had got out ahead of the Yankee columns that it was not wise to provoke the Federals, and civilians were careful to be hospitable. In fact, to Sherman's great satisfaction, many civilians were expressing disgust at the whole war and the lunacy that had dragged them into it. One farmer said: "Why don't you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it."
Sherman was less happy with the way the black folk followed in the wake of his army. He didn't mind prying them away from their masters, but he had no means of caring for them and regarded them as a useless burden. He tried to explain to the black preachers who acted as informal spokesmen for the mob that they should stay where they were, rather than risk their lives and such fortunes as they had by taking to the road. Words weren't enough to discourage people seeking their freedom, and the black trail behind Sherman's army continued to grow. He finally decided to use trickery to rid himself of it. General Jefferson Davis's corps was bringing up the rear of Slocum's column, and when the last of the troops had crossed over Ebenezer Creek, on the road to Savannah, Davis's engineers hastily packed up the pontoon bridge that had been laid down for the crossing, leaving the black folk stranded on the other side.
The Federals did not understand how determined these people were to be free. To the shock of the engineers, when the crowd realized they had been abandoned, they let out a collective wail and rushed into the creek. Many drowned. One Yankee wrote: "As soon as the character of the unthinking rush and panic was seen, all was done that could be done to save them from the water, but the loss of life was still great enough to prove that there were many ignorant, simple souls to whom it was literally preferable to die freeman rather than to live slaves."
* The Federals reached the outskirts of the defenses of Savannah, Georgia, on 9 December. The place was defended, the first real obstacle the Yankees had encountered on their entire march. Sherman was inspecting the Confederate works when a rebel cannonball sailed up and took off a man's head. One witness observed: "The General wisely concluded to leave, and we all rode back up road 1/4 mile."
The rebel works were well built, with their approaches protected by swampland. The linchpin of the city's defenses was Fort McAllister, on the Ogeechee River. Take the fort, and not only would it help undo the city's defenses, but US Navy supply vessels would be able to steam upriver with supplies and ammunition.
The Navy was already waiting. On 13 December, Sherman climbed to the top of
a rice mill along the coast and spotted a vessel offshore. The vessel moved
closer to shore to permit communications by flag semaphore:
WHO ARE YOU?
GENERAL SHERMAN.
IS FORT MCALLISTER TAKEN?
NOT YET BUT IT WILL BE IN A MINUTE.
Sherman's old division from his Shiloh days -- now under Brigadier General
William Hazen, who as a colonel had led his brigade in a stubborn fight that
had helped save the day at Murfreesboro -- performed the assault. It was a
short, sharp fight that lasted about 15 minutes, ending at 4:30 PM. The fort
had been protected by land torpedoes that contributed greatly to Hazen's 134
casualties. He inflicted 48 casualties on the fort's garrison and captured
the rest, about 200 men. That cleared the way for the Navy to start bringing
in rations and mail. Nobody really worried much about the rations, since
they had been eating very well for the last few weeks, though they had been
running low on coffee. However, the accumulated mail was a real pleasure.
* Sherman deployed his troops to surround Savannah, and on 17 December sent a message across the lines to General Hardee, in command of the rebel troops there, to demand his surrender. Sherman promised "to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison" if they surrendered, but said he would resort to "the harshest measures" if they resisted. Hardee refused in formal and polite terms, and also made a more veiled threat of his own: "I have hitherto conducted the military operations entrusted to my direction in strict accordance with the rules of civilized warfare, and I should deeply regret the adoption of any course by you that may force me to deviate from them in the future."
It was a hollow threat. Hardee had only 15,000 troops, a quarter the number of Sherman's, and if he remained in Savannah Sherman would swallow most of them up. Beauregard had come to Savannah just before Sherman's arrival and had already told Hardee to save his army. There was an open escape route to the north, over the Savannah River into South Carolina, and Hardee managed to improvise a pontoon bridge from resources at hand to take advantage of it.
The bridge was completed on the night of 19 December. Hardee's troops spent the next day, 20 December, shooting off excess artillery ammunition to encourage the Federals to keep their distance, and then pulled out after dark. Before dawn on 21 December, the Confederate ironclad CSS SAVANNAH, under construction, blew up in a tremendous explosion after having been torched by the fleeing rebels. The Yankees marched into Savannah a few hours later.
Sherman was conferring with General Foster about coordinating the operations of their two forces that day and didn't get to Savannah until 22 December. He was not happy that Hardee had given him the slip, but was pleased that the rebels had abandoned 200 heavy guns. They had been spiked, but even if the Union couldn't use them as anything but scrap metal, they were no longer available to the Confederacy.
Sherman had more mixed feelings about the fact that his troops had also seized about 30,000 bales of cotton, worth a substantial fortune on the world market. That was a good thing in itself, but he had no patience with the Treasury agents and their hangers-on that came along with captured cotton. However, when Sherman turned his wrath on a Treasury agent, the agent cleverly pacified Sherman by suggesting the general send a telegram to the President, giving Lincoln the city as a Christmas gift. The agent pointed out that the President was amused by such gestures. The idea appealed to Sherman, too, and he promptly sent off the message. It arrived just at the right time, on Christmas Eve.
* Sherman was in high spirits, surprised himself that his decision to march across Georgia had gone so well. He wrote his wife: "Like a man who has walked a narrow plank, I look back and wonder if I really did it."
Northern papers praised him to the skies, and Congress considered a motion to promote him to lieutenant general. Sherman would have nothing to do with it, writing his brother, Senator John Sherman: "I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant." He later elaborated to a visitor: "Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk. And now, sir, we stand by each other always."
Grant originally wanted Sherman to move his troops by sea to help finish off Robert E. Lee and his army. Sherman had got a message from Grant on 15 December that suggested such a course of action. Sherman didn't like that idea at all. His aide, Captain Lewis M. Dayton, said that as the general read the letter he began to "make that nervous motion of the left arm which characterized him when anything annoyed him, as if he was pushing something away from him." Sherman then began to swear and cry out: "Won't do it! I won't do anything of the kind!"
Sherman replied in a message sent on 18 December that the land route north would be more productive: "We can punish South Carolina as she deserves, and as thousands of people in Georgia hoped we would do." Sherman pointed out that the Union's war was as much on a hostile people as on hostile armies, and that Southerners needed to feel "the hard hand of war" so they would understand that they had "been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time ..."
As it turned out, Grant had come to a similar conclusion the very same day Sherman sent off his objections. Sherman got Grant's message on Christmas Day and found it a perfectly pleasant Christmas gift of his own.
* For the moment, Sherman ordered his men to be on their good behavior: Savannah was not looted and trashed. In fact, the Federals made an effort to be helpful to the citizenry, hauling in firewood and opening markets. Sherman gloated that the mayor of the town was "completely subjugated".
Confederates were not fooled by this gentleness, a Richmond paper saying it was just "the repose of the tiger." Sherman was a tiger, having found his way in life after casting about in one direction or another for years. Once his army was ready to move again, he would lead them north, and the Confederacy would not be able to do much to stop them. Some Confederates who were not too lost in their sad delusions understood this perfectly. Confederate Assistant War Secretary John A. Campbell wrote to Justice Samuel Nelson of the US Supreme Court, a colleague in more peaceful days, to consider ways to bring the war to an end, and Campbell bluntly told a friend that "it will all end in reconstruction and that the only question now is the manner of it."
* Confederate General John Bell Hood brought his battered army before Nashville on 2 December. There was no possibility of storming the place, since it was not only very well fortified, but the Federals in the town greatly outnumbered the rebels. All Hood could hope for was to set up in a strong defensive position and let Thomas smash his own forces against rebel earthworks.
This was far more wishful thinking than a plan. Hood didn't even have enough troops to encircle Nashville; he had his men dug in along an arc about four miles (6.4 kilometers) wide to the south of the city, leaving him open to Federal flanking movements. He could have bypassed Nashville and gone north to the Ohio, but he feared that Thomas would cut him off and trap him. Almost any other general would have given it up for lost and gone back home, but it wasn't in Hood's nature to let go.
Hood was not being entirely passive. There was a force of 9,000 Yankees in Murfreesboro, under Generals Granger and Rousseau, and Hood believed he could snap up this force and keep it from adding its weight to the hordes of Federals in Nashville. During Hood's march north from Franklin, he had detached a division under Major General William Bate to Murfreesboro, and when Hood got to Nashville, he ordered Forrest to take two divisions to Murfreesboro and take charge. Hood had served with Thomas under Albert Sidney Johnston before the war and was confident that Old Slow Trot would not react fast enough to take advantage of the separation of the rebel force.
Forrest moved out that day, 2 December. His troopers tore up track and captured blockhouses on the way, linking up with Bate near Murfreesboro on 5 December. Forrest scouted out the Murfreesboro defenses, known as "Fortress Rosecrans" to the occupants, the following morning, 6 December, to find them well laid out and very strong. Since Forrest had only a total of 6,500 men to 9,000 Yankees, there was no possibility of storming the works.
He held his men back, out of reach but not out of sight of the Federals in their earthworks, hoping the Yankees would try to come after him. They did send out a column of 3,500 men and Forrest came close to bagging them, but Bate's division broke and ran, and no threats or curses from Forrest could make them stop. Fortunately the Federals didn't press the issue, and except for the humiliation the rebels were done little injury.
The Confederates remained outside the defenses of Fort Rosecrans, stalemated. On 9 December, Hood ordered Bate to march with his division to Nashville, with one of Cheatham's brigades ordered to march to Murfreesboro as a partial replacement. That cut Forrest down to 4,500 men. Now he was in danger that the Federals would realize his weakness and snatch up his force. All Forrest could do was bluff, but he was very good at bluffing, and the Federals remained so passive that Forrest was able to detach elements to raise hell elsewhere nearby. Still, with Forrest absent, Hood's position around Nashville was even weaker than it had been when the Army of the Tennessee arrived.
* On 9 December, after a spell of mild temperatures, winter weather arrived with a fury. Temperatures dropped well below freezing, accompanied with snow, sleet, and freezing rain that covered everything in solid ice. A warm rain fell on 13 December, turning the landscape into a sea of mud. The rebels had been trying to build strongpoints to protect the vulnerable flanks of their incomplete line, but the harsh weather made such efforts impossible.
By this time, desertion was becoming a problem. The troops had lost confidence in Hood and the miserable weather would have been enough to discourage more motivated troops. Hood instituted a policy of regular roll calls to discourage "straggling", as he called it, demoralizing the men even more by treating them like prisoners. Hood had hoped to rally Tennesseans to the cause, but few were willing to sign up with losers, and so with desertions Hood's army was dwindling, not growing. Hood tried to get work on his defenses going again. He was prodded in this effort by reports received on 13 December from Confederate spies in Nashville that Thomas was massing troops for an attack.
* Thomas had been methodically preparing for such an assault for two weeks. A.J. Smith had arrived with his corps on 30 November, Schofield had led his command into the city the next day, 1 December, and a 6,000 man force commanded by General James Steedman rolled in by rail from Chattanooga the next day. That gave Thomas all the troops he felt he needed, but Wilson's cavalry was in poor condition, many lacking mounts, and Thomas was, not without good reason, intimidated by Bedford Forrest. Thomas wanted to get all 12,000 of his cavalry in fighting shape before taking on the rebels.
Wilson scoured the region for horses, but after years of war finding mounts was a chore. The military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, had his carriage horses taken from him, and even the horses of a traveling circus were seized, though the trained circus ponies were spared the draft.
While Thomas gathered his forces, Grant came down with an entirely
uncharacteristic case of nerves, brought on in part by Sherman's
disappearance into Georgia and in part by War Secretary Stanton's loud
complaints about Thomas's inaction. Grant nagged Thomas to move, acting
peculiarly like Halleck by sending out an endless stream of impatient
telegrams, leading to an ultimatum on 7 December:
ATTACK HOOD AT ONCE AND AWAIT NO LONGER THE REMOUNT OF YOUR CAVALRY.
Thomas felt he was almost prepared to attack on 8 December, but then the
weather went bad and literally put the attack on ice. Thomas's chief of
staff, Brigadier General William Whipple, thought that Grant had a
suspiciously detailed knowledge of anything bad that might be said about
Thomas. Whipple's conclusion was that somebody was feeding Grant anything
that might injure Thomas via telegraph, and finally managed to get hold of a
message written by Schofield that proved this was the case.
After his hasty flight to Nashville, Schofield had suddenly become brave, taking every opportunity to wire Grant about Thomas's timidity. Grant believed it, which was strange, since Schofield had a reputation as an organizational backstabber, and Grant didn't bother to ask James Wilson about the matter. Wilson detested Schofield and greatly admired Thomas, finding him "lofty and serene", not a fast thinker but very methodical. Wilson ranked him with George Washington. Whipple passed Schofield's telegram on to Thomas, who recognized it as Schofield's handwriting, and then wondered to General Steedman, who was present: "Why does he send such telegrams?"
Steedman marveled at the "simplicity" of a man who had been in the army all his grown life asking such a question, and replied: "General Thomas, who is next in command to you in case of removal?" Thomas digested this for a moment, then concluded: "Oh, I see."
On 8 December, in fact, Grant had suggested to Halleck that Thomas be relieved and Schofield put in his place. Halleck, in an odd reversal of roles, cooly replied that if Grant wanted to relieve Thomas, Grant should issue the proper orders himself, since nobody in the War Department saw the need to do it. That gave Grant pause, but he still kept up the nagging. Thomas reasonably replied that it wasn't possible to move, since the countryside was literally covered with ice. Grant was not reassured, though in fact it was so icy and slick in Nashville that even riding a horse was a dangerous exercise, a good way for a cavalry man to get a broken leg or worse. Thomas had called a council of war to discuss his plans for dealing with Hood, and none of Pap's generals thought it was a good idea to go forward until the ice thawed away.
Then Black Jack Logan, who hadn't gone back to his corps after having stumped for Lincoln, showed up at Grant's headquarters at City Point. Grant gave him orders to go to Washington DC and take the train to Nashville by way of Louisville. Grant hedged his bets a bit by telling Logan that if Thomas had gone into action by the time Logan reached Louisville, Logan was to wire Grant for further instructions. If Thomas hadn't attacked, Logan was to go on to Nashville and take command from Thomas. Grant got even more nervous and went to Washington DC, intending to go out to Nashville himself. When he got to Washington on 15 December, he read telegrams sent by Thomas the previous day to the War Department that he was moving out. Grant decided to check into Williard's and wait to hear what happened.
* On the morning of 15 December 1864, Thomas went forward. Steedman was to take three brigades and demonstrate against the eastern end of the Confederate line, while the rest of the army swung around and hit the rebels from the west. There were delays due to fog and mud and traffic jams, Steedman's feint was badly bloodied in the confusion, but by midmorning the fog had burned away and everything was in gear.
There was high ground on the south end of Nashville where the citizenry turned out to watch the fight from a distance. They were almost all Confederate sympathizers, but they had few illusions about Hood's chances. One Federal officer said: "All the hills in our rear were black with human beings watching the battle, but silent. No army on the continent ever played on any field to so large and so sullen an audience."
The Federal flanking movement hit the rebels hard, but they gave ground stubbornly. Still, by the time the sun went down, their defense was crumbling. Thomas believed he had rendered Hood's position impossible, and that the Confederates would withdraw in the night. He gave orders to arrange a pursuit in the morning. Schofield disagreed with Thomas, saying that Hood would almost certainly attack at first light. Thomas knew Hood well enough to think that Schofield might be right, and revised the orders so that the army was in a position to defend or pursue as seemed appropriate.
In fact, Hood was not planning to either attack or retreat. His troops had pulled back in good order to a secondary line of defense and were digging in. Hood still felt that he could inflict lopsided casualties on Thomas, particularly since the new defenses took better advantage of the terrain than the old and of course were more compact. Even Hood wasn't rash enough to feel certain of victory, so he also ordered his wagon trains to withdraw to the south, and passed instructions to his corps commanders on the conduct of a withdrawal should it be necessary.
The sun came up on 16 December, but nothing happened right away. The Federals had become disorganized during the fight the day before, and it took some hours to get everyone in step. It wasn't until noon that the Yankees jumped off, pressing the rebel defenses all along the line, while Wilson took his cavalry around the flank to the west.
The Confederates resisted stubbornly, in fact inflicting such casualties on the Federal push on the eastern end of the line that the fighting there fizzled out in midafternoon. However, on the western end of the line, Federal artillery had been giving the rebels a pounding, a Confederate soldier later saying that the Union gunnery was unsurpassed "for heaviness, continuance, and accuracy." Wilson was also raising hell behind the Confederate defenses with his cavalry. He sent messengers back to Schofield and Thomas to ask for a push by the rest of the army, but nothing happened. Wilson finally galloped back to make the case for an attack himself.
As it turned out, now that Schofield had to actually do some fighting, he had turned timid again. Wilson found Schofield in a meeting with Thomas, who was prodding Schofield to move. Wilson cried out: "For God's sake, order an attack! My men are in Hood's rear! You can see their guidons fluttering behind the hill!" Thomas inspected the scene with his field glasses, then told Schofield: "The attack must be made, even if men are killed."
Thomas finally pushed hard with A.J. Smith's, Schofield's, and Wilson's corps as a cold rain began to fall. Under overwhelming pressure, the defense caved in. Hood was watching to see "a Confederate army abandon the field in confusion." Hood's army faced complete destruction, but Stephen Lee galloped into the mob, grabbed a flag from a color bearer, and waved it shouting: "RALLY, MEN! RALLY! FOR GOD'S SAKE, RALLY! THIS IS THE PLACE FOR BRAVE MEN TO DIE!"
That would seem like an overblown scene in a work of fiction, but things really were desperate, and it worked. A nucleus of resistance formed up around Lee, with a drummer boy standing there calling the troops to arms with an endless drum roll. Lee's rearguard was able to hold up the Yankees long enough for the sun to go down and put a stop to the real fighting. However, Hood had been beaten. There was no stopping the retreat. One officer ordered a soldier to go back and face the enemy. The soldier replied: "You go to hell, I've been there."
A soldier came into Hood's headquarters tent and found the general weeping bitterly, pulling at his hair with his one good hand. It was a sad sight, an indomitable man finally broken. The soldier pitied him, writing much later: "I always loved and honored him, and will ever revere and cherish his memory ... As a soldier, he was brave, good, noble, and gallant, and fought with the ferociousness of the wounded tiger, and with the everlasting grit of the bulldog; but as a general he was a failure in every particular."
That night, Pap Thomas rode up to Wilson, who found his commander uncharacteristically excited, "lit up" in the modern phrase. Thomas roared in a loud voice: "DANG IT TO HELL, WILSON! DIDN'T I TELL YOU WE COULD LICK 'EM?! DIDN'T I TELL YOU WE COULD LICK 'EM?!"
* Indeed he had. Despite the fact that Hood's men had fought very stubbornly, Thomas had only lost a total of a little over 3,000 men in two days of fighting, while Hood had lost about 6,000, the bulk of them captured. Confederate losses would have been worse, but Lee's rearguard action kept the Federals back from Hood's retreating army until the rebels were able to cross Rutherford Creek, south of the battlefield, and burn the bridge behind them. Thomas would have to set up a pontoon bridge to pursue, and not only was moving the big pontoons over muddy roads a major chore, a mixup in orders had sent the pontoons off in the wrong direction.
The Confederate cavalry that had been dispatched to Murfreesboro began to come back to the fold on 17 December, with all back in the ranks on 18 December. Forrest himself arrived that evening and took over the rearguard. His orders had been to withdraw south to Pulaski, but he had decided to rejoin the rest of the army. Hood was glad to see him.
The weather turned terrible, one of the harshest winters in memory for the region, with storms of sleet and rain that turned the roads into alternating beds of ice and quagmires of mud. Forrest was as usual inventive, abandoning half the wagons in the army's train so he could double the teams on the other half, and instructing troops lacking shoes to ride in the empty wagons. Given the disaster that the troops had suffered, they were glad to see a leader who seemed in command of the situation,
The rebels managed to clear the Duck River. Hood had originally intended to stop there, but his army was in such bad shape and the Yankees were so strong that he realized he wouldn't be able to stop until he got over the broad Tennessee. The Federals followed over the Duck on the night of 21 December, and the next day they made contact with Forrest's rearguard. Forrest was in excellent form, setting up roadblocks and then springing ambushes that kept the Yankees cautious, slowing down the pursuit. The Confederates reached the Alabama line on 26 December, and by 28 December they had all managed to get across the Tennessee on a pontoon bridge. Federal gunboats tried to shell the bridge, but rebel artillery managed to drive them off.
Thomas called off the pursuit the next day, 29 December. Grant had been
pleased with the result at Nashville, and had wired Pap on 22 December:
YOU HAVE THE CONGRATULATIONS OF THE PUBLIC FOR THE
ENERGY WITH WHICH YOU ARE PUSHING HOOD.
However, Grant was less pleased when Thomas gave up the pursuit, and relayed
his displeasure to Thomas through Halleck. Grant wanted to finish off the
Confederacy once and for all, to close in and crush the rebels, and remained
convinced that Pap lacked aggressiveness.
* The raggedy troops in the ranks of Hood's army might have disagreed with Grant in the judgement that they had got off lightly. What was left of them reached Tupelo, Mississippi, on 8 January 1865, to go into miserable winter quarters. The locals seemed to be embarrassed to see them as they marched down the roads, one soldier recalling that they "seemed to shrink and hide from us as we approached them."
Hood had little to report to Richmond, which helped confirm the uneasy feeling there that the ecstatic headlines in Yankee newspapers over the crushing defeat of the Confederacy at Nashville were likely not too far off the mark.
In a sense, it was hard to completely blame Hood for the disasters that had wrecked the Army of the Tennessee. Richmond had wanted a general who would fight, regardless of the odds, and they had got exactly what they asked for. Possibly a wiser general would have done better, but most wiser generals would have given it up well before Hood did. Robert E. Lee might have been able to win against such long chances, and there remains the interesting consideration of what Bedford Forrest might have been able to do in Hood's place -- but they were rare geniuses.
The only choices the Confederacy now had were to yield, or stand and fight. To yield was to admit defeat, but overwhelming Federal power made standing and fighting not much more than a valiant, futile sacrifice to a cause that more and more were seeing as entirely lost.
* One of the few remaining coastal bastions of the Confederacy at the end of 1864 was Fort Fisher, at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Fort Fisher protected Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the few places that the increasingly rare blockade runners could go to unload their cargoes.
At the end of August, US Navy Secretary Gideon Welles had proposed a joint Army-Navy assault on Fort Fisher, and Secretary of War Stanton and General Grant had agreed. Admiral Farragut was offered the Navy part of the job, but his health was declining and had to turn it down. Farragut was actually in semi-retirement by that time, receiving a rousing sendoff from a grateful nation, with honors including $50,000 in bonds awarded him by a committee of New York merchants, and the rank of vice-admiral awarded him by Congress, making him the first to hold that rank.
The command of the Fort Fisher expedition went to David Dixon Porter instead. Command of the Army contingent of 6,500 men went to General Benjamin F. Butler. The match between the two commanders could have hardly been worse. Both were self-interested schemers, and in fact they had a long history of bad blood. After the capture of New Orleans, Butler had criticized Porter's reliance on mortar boats in the operation against the forts downriver, leading to a quarrel that Porter had by no means forgotten. Preparations for the operation against Fort Fisher were hindered by the fact that the two men would not talk directly to each other.
There were actually two forts in the area. Fort Fisher protected one channel into the Cape Fear River, named New Inlet, while Fort Caswell protected the other, the Western Bar Channel. Fort Fisher was the real problem. Once it was taken, Fort Caswell would fall quickly. However, taking Fort Fisher was by no means a simple proposition, since it was big, well-armed, and incorporated almost every devious trick the Confederates had learned during the war on how to build really solid fortifications.
Fort Fisher was on a peninsula between the ocean and the Cape Fear river, protecting New Inlet at the south of the peninsula. The fortification was arranged in an "L" pattern, with a set of works 5,700 feet (1,735 meters) long facing the Atlantic, and a set of works 2,050 feet (625 meters) long facing north. The western and southern sides of the fort had little protection, apparently because there was no reasonable way to perform a landing there. The southern tip of the peninsula was protected by a separate fortification, Battery Buchanan.
The walls of Fort Fisher were made of earth covered with sod, backed up by timbers. There were 47 guns, organized into batteries separated by mounds of earth that ensured that if any massive explosion wiped out a battery, the neighboring batteries would be unharmed.
The southern end of Fort Fisher was held down by the "Mound Battery", which contained two heavy guns on a high mound of earth, and bearing on New Inlet. The defensive line at the northern end of the fort was protected by an additional wooden palisade and a network of electrically-detonated land torpedoes. David Porter claimed that only those who had seen Fort Fisher "could form the slightest conception of these works -- their magnitude, strength, and extent."
* Ben Butler came up with an imaginative scheme to deal with Fort Fisher. He had been impressed with the explosion of an ammunition barge at City Point on 9 August and figured there was a lesson in it. Butler felt that the simplest way to deal with Fort Fisher was to load up an old vessel full of powder and then blow it up close to the walls of the fortress. If the explosion didn't simply wipe out the defenders, it would at least blow a hole in the walls that could be quickly exploited by a landing force, while the defenders were still stunned and groggy.
Surprisingly, David Porter approved of the scheme, suggesting it was "at least worth trying." Porter had little inclination to feel enthusiastic about any of Ben Butler's schemes but for once he felt agreeable, though Porter believed the bombship would stun and demoralize the defenders instead of flatly wiping them out. Butler obtained an old derelict named the LOUISIANA and had it filled with hundreds of tons of powder.
* Grant prodded Butler to move against Fort Fisher for weeks, since the attack would help distract the Confederates from Sherman's army, but Butler refused to be hurried. Butler finally showed up off New Inlet with a fleet of transports loaded with soldiers on 15 December 1864. However, due to an unsurprising breakdown in coordination, Porter and his fleet didn't show up until 18 December. He led a massive fleet of 57 ships, including the NEW IRONSIDES, the warships mounting a total of 600 guns.
The weather had gone bad in the meantime, and Porter suggested to Butler that he take his troops and transports back to Beaufort, North Carolina, 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the north and wait for conditions to improve. They stayed there until 23 December. Butler sent word to Porter that the transports would arrive on Christmas Eve.
Porter decided not to wait. He had the LOUISIANA towed to the shoreline just north of Fort Fisher on the night of 23 December, where sailors set clockwork detonators and lit a fire in the aft cabin for insurance. Porter had ordered his fleet to steam well out to sea to be out of the way of the tremendous blast. The clockwork detonators had been set to go off at 1:20 AM, but they failed to work. Finally, at 1:40 AM the bombship blew up.
It was a fizzle. Building a large bomb, particularly with an inefficient explosive like black powder, isn't a trivial task, and although there was much noise, fire, and smoke, Fort Fisher was undamaged. Many of the defenders claimed later it only briefly disturbed their rest, though others found it perfectly awesome. Whatever the case, it had clearly failed.
Porter had not banked all his hopes on the bombship and at about 11:30 AM the next day, the Union fleet moved in to pound Fort Fisher. Butler arrived in advance of his troop convoy that evening, and Porter told him that the heavy bombardment had silenced the defenses; all the army had to do was land and mop up. At 10:30 AM on Christmas Day, Porter's warships resumed their bombardment. At 1:30 PM, 2,000 troops under Major General Godfrey Weitzel landed north of Fort Fisher and cautiously moved against the fort. Weitzel had a good Army man's suspicion of the Navy and didn't believe Porter's glib claims that the Confederates were all but beaten.
In fact, although the Federals had thrown over 10,000 rounds at the fort the day before, little damage had been done, a tribute to the solidity of its construction. Two guns had been knocked off their mounts and 23 Confederates had been killed or wounded. Weitzel also learned from rebel pickets captured by his men that Confederate General Robert Hoke had just arrived in Wilmington by train with 6,000 reinforcements. On being informed of this development, Butler ordered the attack abandoned. At 6:00 PM, the landing force pulled out. Butler then ordered the fleet to return to Hampton Roads, only informing Porter at the last minute.
The operation had been something of an incompetence contest between Porter and Butler, but Butler seemed to have taken the most points, all the more so because in his haste to go back to port he had left 700 soldiers stranded on the beach. Porter had to evacuate them under fire on 26 and 27 December.
* Porter didn't withdraw completely, instead sending his fleet in relays back to Beaufort for refit and resupply. The Confederates weren't fooled. The Yankee attack had been a failure, and the commander of Fort Fisher, 29-year-old Colonel William Lamb, crowed about sending the "foiled and frightened enemy" packing in reports to his superiors.
Porter complained to his own superiors about Butler: the attack had been so timid that only 16 men were lost. Grant didn't need a lot of excuses to sack Ben Butler, and the Lincoln Administration, with elections over and no strong reason to be soft on Butler any longer, was responsive to Grant's request that Butler be given the axe. Butler got the order on 8 January 1865, and left immediately for Washington to protest. General Ord took his place.
Any campaign that got Ben Butler out of uniform did have something to say for it, and Porter by no means felt he was licked. Sherman's forces would need Wilmington as a supply base when they moved up the coast, making the capture of Fort Fisher even more important.
