THE ARMY OF TENNESSEE
On August the thirty-first Hood fought and lost the battle of
Jonesboro. On September the first he evacuated Atlanta, besieged now
for forty days, bombarded and wrecked and ruined. On the second, with
hurrahing, with music of bands and waving of flags, Sherman occupied
the forlorn and shattered place.
Forty thousand men, Hood and the Army of Tennessee lingered a full
month in this region of Georgia, first around Lovejoy’s Station, then
at Palmetto. On the first of October they crossed the Chattahoochee.
Four days later was fought the engagement of Allatoona. On northward
went Hood over the old route that had been travelled—though in an
opposite direction—in the spring and the early summer-time. Toward the
middle of the month he was at Resaca, and a day or two after he
captured a small garrison at Dalton. Behind him came, fast and
furious, a blue host. He made a forced march west to Gadsden on the
Coosa. He was now in Alabama and presently he marched past Decatur to
Florence on the Tennessee. Sherman sent by rail Schofield and two army
corps to Nashville, where was already George Thomas and his corps. The
blue commanding general had now sixty thousand men in Tennessee, and
sixty thousand in Georgia. To oppose these last there was left
Wheeler’s cavalry and Cobb’s Georgia State troops. On the last day of
October Hood crossed into Tennessee. Before him and his army lay now
the thirtieth of November and the fifteenth and sixteenth of
December—lay the most disastrous battles of Franklin and Nashville.
About the middle of September Sherman evicted the inhabitants of
Atlanta. “I take the ground,” he states upon the occasion, with the
frankness that was an engaging trait in his character, “I take the
ground that Atlanta is a conquered place, and I propose to use it
purely for our own military purposes, which are inconsistent with its
inhabitation by the families of a brave people. I am shipping them
all, and by next Wednesday the town will be a real military town, with
no women boring me every order I give.”
In mid-November, quitting the place, he burned it before he went.
“Behind us,” he remarks, “lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the
black smoke rising high in air and hanging like a pall over the ruined
city.... The men are marching steadily and rapidly with a cheery look
and a swinging pace.”
Of his March to the Sea upon which he was now entered, he says, “Had
General Grant overwhelmed and scattered Lee’s Army and occupied
Richmond he would have come to Atlanta; but as I happened to occupy
Atlanta first, and had driven Hood off to a divergent line of
operations far to the west, it was good strategy to leave him to a
subordinate force and with my main army join Grant at Richmond. The
most practicable route to Richmond was nearly a thousand miles in
distance, too long for a single march; hence the necessity to reach
the seacoast for a new base. Savannah, distant three hundred miles,
was the nearest point, and this distance we accomplished from November
12th to December 21st.” And he telegraphs to Grant that he will send
back all his wounded and worthless and, with his effective army, “move
through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.” He kept his word. They
were thoroughly smashed.
The men, marching “with a cheery look and a steady pace” listened to a
General Order directing them to “forage liberally on the country,” and
“generally to so damage the country as to make it untenable to the
enemy.” They obeyed and made it untenable to all, including women and
children, the sick and the old. They heard that their commander meant
“to make Georgia howl,” and they did what they could to further his
wish. He states indeed—in a letter to his wife—that “this universal
burning and wanton destruction of private property is not justified in
war,” and “I know all the principal officers detest the infamous
practice as much as I do,” but the practice went on—and he was
commander. He left behind him, from north to south of a great State a
swathe of misery, horror, and destruction fifty miles wide. There were
good and gallant men in his legions, good and gallant men by the
thousand, but “Sherman’s bummers” went unchecked, and so far as is
known, unrebuked. The swathe was undeniably there, and the insult and
the agony and the horror. Georgia was “made to howl.” “War is Hell,”
said Sherman, and is qualified to know whereof he speaks.
In the mean time Hood had crossed the Tennessee in chilly, snowy
weather and was moving northward. The snow did not hold. The weather
cleared and there came a season as of an autumnal afterglow. The sun
shone bright though all the trees were bare. Forrest, recalled in this
month from Mississippi, rode ahead of the army, then came the corps of
Stephen D. Lee,—Hood’s old corps,—of A.P. Stewart, and of Cheatham.
The last was Hardee’s old corps. Hardee himself, irreconcilably
opposed to Hood and asking for transferral, had been sent to take
command of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
Something more than forty thousand men, cavalry, infantry, and
artillery, the Army of Tennessee pursued the late November road. It
was a haggard and depleted army, but it could and did fight very
grimly.
Lawrenceburg—Mt. Pleasant—Columbia—and then the Duck River to cross.
The night of the twenty-eighth the engineers laid the pontoon bridge.
At dawn of the twenty-ninth the Army began to cross—slow work as
always and masses of men waiting their turn around fires on the river
bank. “Fire feels good! Autumn dies cold like everything else. Wish I
had a cup of coffee.”—“Last time I had a cup of coffee—”—“O go to h—!
We’ve heard that story before! Somebody tell a good story. J.H. you
tell a story! Tell about the mule and the darkey and the bag of
sugar—”
Down to the water and over the pontoon bridge in the wintry dawn went
the companies and the regiments. The fires on the bank blazed high,
the soldiers talked. “A year ago was Missionary Ridge.”—“Missionary
Ridge!”—“Missionary Ridge!“—“Missionary Ridge was the place good
missionaries never go to!”—“We ran hard in hell, but we fought hard in
hell, too. Fought hard—fought hard—” “Up on Lookout, and Cleburne
holding the hollow ground—D’ye remember how the moon was sick that
night?”—“A year ago! It was awful long when you were little from
Christmas to Christmas—but the length of a year nowadays is something
awful!”—“That’s so! It’s always long when so much happens. I’ve seen
men grow old from Missionary Ridge to Atlanta. I’ve seen men grow old
from Atlanta to—what’s the biggish place across the river?
Franklin?—Franklin, Tennessee.“
The light grew stronger—a winter light, cold and steel-like upon the
flowing river and the moving stream of men. _Fall in! Fall in!_ cried
the sergeants, and the men about the fires left the red warmth, and
stood in ranks waiting to move down to the water. ”— —! These
crossings of rivers! — —! Seeing that men have always warred and I
reckon are always going to war, I don’t see why Nature and God—if
Nature’s got a god—didn’t make the earth a smooth round battlefield
where enemies could clinch just as easy and keep clinched till one or
the other went over the edge of all things, and went down, down, past
whatever stars were on that side! What’s the use of scooping rivers
and heaping mountains in the way? Just a nice, smooth, black, eternal
plain—with maybe one wide river to carry the blood away—“
The soldiers, breaking step, crossed and crossed by the pontoon
bridge. “The Duck River!—Quack! quack!—Franklin’s on the Harpeth.”
“Benjamin Franklin or Franklin Pierce?”—“Benjamin was a peaceful kind
of fellow for a revolutionary—didn’t believe in war! Neither did
Jefferson. Not on general principles. Thought it barbarous. Fought on
necessity, but believed in making necessity occur more rarely.
Perfectly feasible thing! Necessity’s much more malleable than we
think. When we don’t want it war won’t be necessary.”—“Want it! Do you
reckon any one wants it?”—“Lord, yes! until they’ve got it.—Of course
there’s some that likes it even after they’ve got it—but they’re
getting scarce.”—“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s necessary, and
sometimes it’s good fun.”—“Yes. A hard necessity and a savage pastime.
_‘Patriotism’?_ There’s a bigger phrase—‘Mother Earth and Fellow
Men.’”—_Column forward!_
On through the leafless country marched the somewhat tattered,
somewhat shoeless Army of Tennessee. Tramp of feet and roll of wheels,
tramp of feet and roll of wheels.... “Listen! Firing ahead! That’s
Forrest!” The marching Army took up the praise of Forrest. “Forrest!
Forrest’s like Stonewall Jackson—always in front making personal
observations.”—“Forrest! If I was a company in trouble I’d rather see
Forrest coming on King Phillip than King Arthur or the Angel
Gabriel!”—“Forrest! Did you ever see Forrest rally his men? Draws a
pistol and shoots a retreating colour-bearer—takes the colours and
says ‘Come on!’”—“Forrest’s had twenty-five horses killed under
him.”—“Did you ever hear him address his men? He’s an orator born. It
gets to be music. It gets grammatical—it gets to be great sonorous
poetry.”—“Yes, it does. I’ve heard him. And then an hour after I’ve
heard him tell an officer ‘Yes, that mought do’ and ‘It’s got to be
fit.’—And I’ve heard him say he never saw a pen but he thought of a
snake.”—“Forrest? You fellows talking about Forrest? Did you hear what
Forrest said about tactics? Said he’d ‘give more for fifteen minutes
of bulge than for a week of tactics.’”—“Don’t care! He’s right good at
tactics himself. Murfreesboro and Streight’s Raid and other places and
times without number! ‘Whenever you see anything blue,’ he says,
‘shoot at it, and do all you can to keep up the scare!’ Somebody told
me he said about Okalona, ‘Saw Grierson make a bad move, and then I
rode right over him.’ Tactics! Says it’s his habit ‘to git thar first
with the most men.’ That’s tactics!—and strategics—and bulge—and the
art of War!“—” Old Jack himself didn’t know more about flanking than
Forrest does.”—“Did you hear what the old lady said to him at Cowan’s
Station?”—“No. What did she say?”—“Well, he and his men were kind of
sauntering at a gallop through the place with a few million Yankees at
their heels. The old lady didn’t like men in grey to do that-a-way, so
out she runs into the middle of the street, and spreads her skirts,
and stops dead short, unless he was going to run over her, a big grey
horse and a six-feet-two cavalryman with eyes like a hawk, and a black
beard and grey head.—‘Why don’t you turn and fight?’—she hollers,
never noticing the stars on his collar. ‘Turn and fight, you great,
cowardly lump! turn and fight! If General Forrest could see you, he’d
take out his sword and cut your head off!’”
The firing ahead continued—the Tennessee men said that it was near
Spring Hill—and Spring Hill was twelve miles from Franklin. “Going to
be a battle?”—“Yes, think so. Understand Thomas is at Franklin behind
breastworks.”—“All right! ‘Rock of Chickamauga‘ is one of the
best—even if he is a Virginian!”—”Thomas isn’t there himself—he’s at
Nashville. It’s Schofield.”—“All right! We’ll meet Schofield.”—“Column
halted again!—Firing getting louder—Franklin getting nearer—the wind
rising—Smoke over the hill-tops—”—“Who’s this going by?—Give him a
cheer!—Patrick Romayne Cleburne!”—_Column forward!_—“Did you notice
that old graveyard back there at Mt. Pleasant—a beautiful, quiet
place? Well, General Cleburne rode up and looked over the wall, and he
said, says he, ‘If I die in this country, I should like to be buried
here.’”—_Column forward!_
Spring Hill—Spring Hill at three o’clock, and Schofield’s troops
scattered through this region, concentrating hurriedly, with intent to
give battle if needs be, but with a preference for moving north along
the pike to Thomas at Franklin. What they wished was granted them.
Here and there through the afternoon musketry rolled, but there was no
determined attack. Hood says Cheatham was at fault, and Cheatham says
General Hood dreamed the details and the orders he describes. However
that may be, no check was given to Schofield that day, and in the dark
night-time, he and his trains and troops went by the sleeping
Confederate host and escaped, all but unmolested, to Franklin—and
henceforth the Tennessee campaign was lost, lost!
Dawn and marching on Franklin—red dawn and the great beech trees of
the region spreading their leafless arms across the way—sunrise and a
cold, bright day—_Column forward!_—_Column forward!_—Hood “the
fighter” at the head, tall and blue-eyed and tawny-bearded—S.D. Lee
and Stewart and Cheatham—the division commanders, Patrick Cleburne and
“Alleghany” Johnson and Carter Stevenson and Clayton and French and
Loring and Walthall and Bate and Brown, and the artillerymen and the
rumbling guns, and, _tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp!_ the infantry of the
Army of Tennessee. Eighteen hundred of these men were to die at
Franklin. Four thousand were to be wounded. Two thousand were going to
prison. A division commander was to die. Four brigade commanders were
to die, others to be wounded or taken. Fifty-three commanders of
regiments were to be among the killed, wounded, and captured. The
execution was to take place in three or four hours of a November
afternoon and a moonless night. _Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp!_ under
the leafless beeches on the Franklin Pike. _Close up, men—close up!
Column forward!_ “What is that place in the distance with the hills
behind it?—That’s Franklin on the Harpeth.”
The battle opened at four o’clock, and the sun set before five. There
was an open, quite unobstructed plain running full to an abatis and
long earthworks, and behind these were the divisions of Cox and Ruger
and Kimball. Wood’s division was over the Harpeth and a portion of
Wagner’s occupied a hill a short distance from the front. There were
twenty-six guns mounted on the works and twelve in reserve. “At four
o’clock,” says a Federal officer, “the whole Confederate line could be
seen, stretching in battle array, from the dark fringe of chestnuts
along the river bank, far across the Columbia Pike, the colours gaily
fluttering, and the muskets gleaming brightly, and advancing steadily,
in perfect order, dressed on the centre, straight for the works.”
At first Success, with an enigmatical smile, rode with the grey. The
——th Virginia yelled as they rode with her. Cheatham’s men, Stewart’s
men, Cleburne’s famed veteran division yelled. _Yaaaihhhh! Yaaaaihhh!
Yaaaaaiiihhh!_ rang the Rebel yell, and echoed from beyond the Harpeth
and from the Winstead hills. They yelled and drove Wagner’s brigades
and followed at a double, on straight to the gun-crowned works. As the
sun dipped came a momentary halt. Cleburne was at the front of his
troops, about him his officers, behind him his regiments waiting. It
was growing cold and the earth in shadow. A man, a good and gallant
soldier, was sitting on a hump of earth trying to tie a collection of
more or less blood-stained rags around his bare, half-frozen feet. He
worked patiently, but just once he uttered a groan. Cleburne heard the
sound and turned his head. Sitting his good horse he regarded the
soldier for a moment with a half-wistful look, then he dismounted, and
without saying anything to any one, drew off his boots. With them in
his hand he stepped across, in his stockinged feet, the bit of frosty
earth to the soldier. He held out the boots. “Put them on!” he
ordered. The man, astonished, would have scrambled up and saluted, but
Cleburne pushed him back. “Put them on!” he said. “It’s an order. Put
them on.” Stammering protests, the soldier obeyed. “There! they seem
to fit you,” said General Cleburne. “You need them more than I do.” He
moved back to his horse, put his stockinged foot in the stirrup and
mounted.
There sounded the charge. In went the corps of Stewart and Cheatham,
in went Cleburne’s division with the blue flag, Alabama, and
Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, a great veteran division, “General
Pat” leading. In the winter dusk came the whirlwind. There was a
cotton-gin in an open field—there were breastworks—every gun had
opened, every musket was blazing, Casement’s brigade was using
magazine breech-loaders. There grew a welter, a darkness, a shrieking.
General Adams, of Loring’s division, sprang, bay horse and all, across
a ditch and to the top of a parapet. Above him flared in the dark a
flag. His hands were upon the staff. “Fire!” said the colour-guard,
and their bullets killed him and the bay horse. Gist and Strahl were
killed, Granbury was killed. And Patrick Romayne Cleburne was killed,
and lay in his stockinged feet a few yards in front of the breastwork
across which was stretched Adams’s horse.
Thirteen times the grey charged. There was no wind to blow the smoke
away. It lay like a level sea, and men fought in it and beneath it,
and it would have been dark even in daytime. As it was, night was
here, and it was dark indeed, save for the red murder light.
The ——th Virginia fought with the same desperation that its fellow
regiments displayed. A wild energy seemed to inform the entire grey
army. Edward Cary, rushing with his men to the assault, staggering
back, going forward again, felt three times the earth of the
breastworks in his hands.
He fought, since that was the business in hand, as though he loved it.
He did not love it, but he was skilful, poised, and sure, and he knew
no fear. His men had a strange love for and confidence in him. They
never put it into words but “He comes from a sunrise land and knows
more than we” was what they meant. He called half-gods by their names
and had that detachment which perforce men honour. Now, sword in hand,
striving to overmount the breastworks at Franklin, rallying and
leading his men with a certain clean efficiency, he acted an approved
part in the strife, but kept all the time a distance in his soul. He
could not be all savage again and exult or howl. Nor was he merely
civilized, to feel weakness and horror and repugnance before this
blood and dirt and butchery, and yet for pure pride, fear of disgrace,
and confusion of intellect, to call on every coarser fibre of the
past, and exalt in the brain all the old sounding, suggestive words,
the words to make you feel and not to think! He did not call upon the
past though he acted automatically as the past had acted. He put
horror and pity and cold distaste and a sense of the absurd to one
side and did the work, since it still seemed to him that on the whole
it must be done, with a kind of deadly calm. Had he been more than a
dawn type, had he been a very little nearer to the future which he
presaged, he might not have been there, somehow, in that dusk at all.
He might have declined solutions practised by boar and wolf, and died
persuading his kind toward a cleaner fashion of solving their
problems. As it was, he hated what he did but did it.
Again and again the grey wave surged to the top of the breastworks.
There it was as though it embraced the blue—blue and grey swayed,
locked in each other’s arms. Oh! fire and smoke and darkness, and a
roaring as of sea and land risen each against the other—then down and
back went the grey sea, down and back, down and back.... At nine
o’clock the battle rested.
Long and mournful looked the line of camp-fires. There lay on the
groaning field beneath the smoke that would not rise well-nigh as many
dressed in blue as dressed in grey. But all loss now to the grey, with
never a recruiting ground behind it, was double loss and treble loss.
Every living man knew it, and knew that the field of Franklin was
vain, vain! Another artery had been opened, that was all. The South
was bleeding, bleeding to death.
There fell upon the Army of Tennessee a great melancholy. Reckless
daring, yes! but what had reckless daring done? Opportunity at Spring
Hill lost—Franklin, where there was no opportunity, lost,
lost!—Cleburne dead—So many of the bravest and best dead or laid low
or taken, so many slipped forever from the Army of Tennessee—cold,
hunger, nakedness, Giant Fatigue, Giant Lack-of-Confidence, Giant
Little-Hope, Giant Much-Despair—a wailing wind that like an æolian
harp brought a distant crying, a crying from home.... Not Atlanta, not
Missionary Ridge, not Vicksburg,—not anything was so bad as the night
and day after Franklin, Tennessee.
The night of the thirtieth, Schofield, leaving his dead and wounded,
fell back from Franklin to Thomas at Nashville a few miles to the
north. Now there were at Nashville between fifty and sixty thousand
men in blue. On the second of December Hood put his army into motion,
and that evening saw it drawn up and facing Thomas. Returns conflict,
but he had now probably less than thirty thousand men. The loss on the
field had been great, and the straggling was great and continued so.
Also, now at last, there was an amount of desertion.
The weather changed. It became cold winter. For fourteen days Hood who
so despised breastworks, dug and entrenched. “The only remaining
chance of success in the campaign at this juncture,” he says, “was to
take position, entrench about Nashville, and await Thomas’s attack,
which, if handsomely repulsed, might afford us an opportunity to
follow up our advantage on the spot and enter the city on the heels of
the enemy.”—But George Thomas was a better general though not a braver
man than Hood, and he had two men to Hood’s one, and his men were
clothed and fed and confident. He had no better lieutenants than had
Hood, and his army was no braver than the grey army and not one half
so desperate—but when all is weighed and allowed for his advantage
remains of the greatest. And as at Franklin so at Nashville, the grey
cavalry was divided and Forrest was fatally sent on side expeditions.
It began to snow, and as the snow fell it froze. The trees and the
country side were mailed in ice and the skies hung grey as iron and
low as the roof of a cavern. The Army of Tennessee, behind its frozen
earthworks, suffered after a ghastly fashion. There was little wood
for fires, and little food for cooking, and little covering for
warmth. On the thirteenth there set in a thaw, and the fifteenth
dawned, not cold, with a winter fog. Through it the ‘Rock of
Chickamauga’ moved out in force from Nashville, and with his whole
strength struck fair and full the Army of Tennessee.
Two days the two armies fought. In the slant sunshine of the late
afternoon of the second day, the Federal commander brought a great
concentration of artillery against the Confederate centre, and under
cover of that storm of shot and shell, massed his troops and charged
the centre. It broke. The blue poured over the breastworks. At the
same moment other and dire blue strokes were delivered against the
right and left. The grey army was crumpled together like a piece of
cloth. Then in a torrent of shouting and a thunder of guns came the
rout. The grey cloth was torn in strips and fled like shreds in a high
wind. Beside the killed and wounded the grey left in the hands of the
enemy fifty-four guns and four thousand five hundred prisoners. Night
came down; night over the Confederacy.
Ten days and nights the shattered army fell back to the Tennessee,
moving at first through a hail-storm of cavalry attacks. Forrest beat
these off, Forrest and a greatly heroic rear guard under Walthall.
This infantry command and Forrest saved the remnant of the army.
The weather grew atrocious. The country now was hilly, wooded, thinly
populated. Snow fell and then sleet, and the ground grew ice and the
rail fences and the trees were mailed in ice. The feet of the men left
blood-marks on the ice, the hands of the men were frozen where they
rested on the gun stocks. Men lay down by the roadside and died or
were gathered by the blue force hard on the heels of the rear guard.
The ambulances bore their load, the empty ammunition and commissary
wagons carried as many as they might, the caissons were overlaid with
moaning men, the mounted officers took men up behind them. Others,
weak, ill, frozen, shoeless did their piteous best to keep up with the
“boys.” They fell behind, they sank upon the roadside, they drew
themselves into the gaunt woods and lay down upon the frozen snow,
arms over eyes. _Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp!_ went the column on the
road. _Close up, men, close up—close up!_ “It’s the end, it’s the
end!” said the men. “For God’s sake, strike up Dixie!”
“’Way down South in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten—”
XXXIX
COLUMBIA
The bells of the South had been melted and run into cannon, and yet
there seemed a tolling of bells. Everywhere they tolled—louder and
louder!—tolled the siege of Savannah, tolled Hatcher’s Run in
Virginia, tolled Fort Fisher in North Carolina and the blue bombarding
ships—tolled solemnly and loudly, “_The End is come!_”
Forrest guarding, the haggard remnant of the Army of Tennessee crossed
the river on the twenty-seventh of December. There was a council of
war. Where to go to rest—recoup—reorganize? Southwest into
Mississippi? Southwest they marched and on the tenth of January came
to Tupelo. Hood asked to be relieved from command and was relieved,
A.P. Stewart succeeding him. Later the army, now a small, war-worn
force, went to fight in North Carolina. But Stevenson’s division and a
few other troops were sent into South Carolina to Hardee who, with
less than fifteen thousand men, mostly in garrison at Charleston, was
facing Sherman and his sixty thousand, flushed from that March to the
Sea which is described as “one long, glorious picnic,” from the
capture of Savannah, from the plaudits of the Northern press and the
praise of Government. Now the idea that he should join Grant at
Petersburg having been laid aside, Sherman proposed to march northward
through South Carolina.
The bells tolled loud in the South, tolled for the women in the
night-time, tolled for the shrunken armies, tolled for the cities that
waited, a vision before their eyes of New Orleans, Atlanta, Savannah,
tolled for the beleaguered places where men watched in the trenches,
tolled for the burned farmhouses, the burned villages, the lonely,
blackened country with the gaunt chimneys standing up, tolled for
famine, tolled for death, tolled for the broken-hearted, tolled for
human passions let loose, tolled for anger, greed and lust, tolled for
the shrunken good, tolled for the mounting ill, tolled for war!
Through the South they tolled and tolled.
Beauregard took command in South Carolina. It was not known whether
Sherman would move north and west upon Augusta, just over the Georgia
line, or east to Charleston, or almost due north to Columbia. Late in
January he moved from Savannah in ruins, crossed the flooded Savannah
River by pontoon, entered South Carolina, and marched northward toward
Columbia the capital of that state. It being a rainy season, and swamp
and river out of bounds, he made not more than ten miles a day.
At this time one of his staff officers writes, “The actual invasion of
South Carolina has begun. The well-known sight of columns of black
smoke meets our gaze again.” And another Federal officer, “There can
be no doubt of the assertion that the feeling among the troops was one
of extreme bitterness toward the people of South Carolina. It was
freely expressed as the column hurried over the bridge at Sister’s
Ferry, eager to commence the punishment of the original Secessionists.
Threatening words were heard from soldiers who prided themselves on
conservatism in house-burning while in Georgia, and officers openly
confessed their fears that the coming campaign would be a wicked one.
Just or unjust as this feeling was toward the country people in South
Carolina, it was universal. I first saw its fruits at Purisburg, where
two or three piles of blackened bricks and an acre or so of dying
embers marked the site of an old, Revolutionary town; and this before
the column had fairly got its hand in.... The army might safely march
the darkest night, the crackling pine woods shooting up their columns
of flame, and the burning houses along the way would light it on....
As for the wholesale burnings, pillage, devastation, committed in
South Carolina, magnify all I have said of Georgia some fifty-fold,
and then throw in an occasional murder, ‘just to bring an old
hard-fisted cuss to his senses,’ and you have a pretty good idea of
the whole thing.”
General Sherman testifies that “the whole army is burning with
insatiable desire to wreak vengeance on South Carolina. I almost
tremble at her fate.”
And one of his captains remarks of the situation several weeks later.
“It was sad to see this wanton destruction of property which ... was
the work of ‘bummers’ who were marauding through the country
committing every sort of outrage. There was no restraint except with
the column or the regular foraging parties. We had no communications
and could have no safeguards. The country was necessarily left to take
care of itself, and became a howling waste. The ‘Coffee-coolers’ of
the Army of the Potomac were archangels compared to our ‘bummers’ who
often fell to the tender mercies of Wheeler’s cavalry, and were never
heard of again, earning a fate richly deserved.”
Winter is not truly winter in South Carolina, but in the winter of ’65
it rained and rained and rained. All swamps and streams were out,
low-lying plantations were under water, the country looked like a
flooded rice-field. The water-oaks and live-oaks and magnolias stood
up, shining and dark, beneath the streaming sky; where the road was
corduroyed it was hard to travel, and where it was not wheels sank and
sank. All the world was wet, and the canes in the marshes made no
rustling. When it did not rain the sky remained grey, a calm grey pall
keeping out the sun, but leaving a quiet grey-pearl light, like a
dream that is neither sad nor glad.
“It is,” said Désirée, “the air of Cape Jessamine that winter you
came.”
“Yes. The road to Vidalia! We passed at nightfall a piece of water
with a bit of bridge. I helped push a gun upon it, and the howitzer
knocked me on the head for my pains. I fell down, down into deep
water, forty fathoms at the least, and blacker than ebony at
midnight.... And then I waked up in Rasmus’s cabin, and we had supper,
and water came under the door, and we circumvented the bayou, and went
to the Gaillard place which was called Cape Jessamine. And there I
found a queen in a russet gown and a soldier’s cloak. The wind blew
the cloak out and made a canopy of it in the light of torches and
bonfires. She stood upon the levee and bitted and bridled the
Mississippi River—and I fell in love, deep, deep, forty thousand
fathoms deep—”
“Two years.... You were so ragged and splashed with mud—And my heart
beat like that! and said to me ‘Who is this that comes winged and
crowned?’—Listen!”
They were on a road somewhat to the southeast of Columbia, Désirée in
an open wagon driven by a negro boy, Edward—major now of the ——th
Virginia—riding beside her on a grey horse. Ahead, at some distance,
they just saw the regiment, marching through a gloomy wood, bound for
a post on the Edisto. The sound of its going and the voices of the men
came faintly back through the damp and quiet air. But what they heard
was nearer, a passionate weeping amid the trees at a cross-road.
Coming to this opening they found a spacious family carriage drawn by
two ancient plough horses, a cart with a mule attached, and two or
three negro pedestrians. The whole had stopped the moment before and
with reason. A white-haired lady, stretched upon the cushions of the
carriage laid cross-wise, had just breathed her last. The weeping was
her daughter’s, a dark, handsome girl of twenty. Two negro women
lamented also, while the coachman had gotten down from the box and
stood staring, with a working face. There were some bags and pillows
and things of little account heaped in the cart, and on these a small
negro boy was profoundly sleeping.
Edward dismounted and Désirée stepped down from the wagon. “What could
they do? How sad it was!—Was there any help?—” Désirée lifted the girl
from her mother’s form, drew her away to a roadside log, and sitting
there, held her close and let her weep. Edward saw the oldest negro
woman, murmuring constantly to herself, close the eyes of the dead
mistress, straighten her limbs and fold her hands. The other woman sat
on the earth and rocked herself. The plough horses and the mule
lowered their heads and cropped what green bush and grass there was.
The little black boy slept on and on. Edward talked with the coachman.
“Yaas, marster, dat so!—’Bout thirty miles south from here, sah.
_Bienvenu_—er Lauren’s place. En de Yankees come hollerin’ en firin’
en hits daid of night en old Marster en young Marster wif Gineral
Lee.—One officer, he say git away quick! en he give me er guard en I
hitches up, en we lif’ ol’ Mistis out of her bed where she’s had
pneumonia, en Miss Fanny en her mammy en Julia dar wif her boy, we
teks de road.”
Désirée and Edward saw the forlorn cortège proceed on its way with
hopes of a village or some country house. They stood a moment watching
it disappear, then Désirée rested her hand upon his arm and mounted
again into the wagon, and he sprang upon his horse that was named
Damon, and the negro boy touched the mule drawing the wagon with his
whip, and they all went on after the regiment. They found it at
twilight, encamped in the hospitable houses and the one street of a
tiny rain-soaked hamlet. Headquarters was the parsonage and here was a
room ready for the Major’s wife. From colonel to cook the ——th
Virginia loved the Major’s wife. Romance dwelled with her, and a
queenliness that was never vanquished. Her presence never wearied; she
knew when to withdraw, to disappear, how not to give trouble, and how,
when she gave it, to make it seem a high guerdon, a princess’s favour.
Sometimes the regiment did not see her for weeks or even months on
end, and then she came like a rose in summer, a more golden light on
the fields, a deeper blue in the sky. She made mystics of men.
Now the parson’s wife made her welcome, and after a small supper sat
with her in a clean bedroom before a fire. The parson’s wife was full
of sighs, and “Ah, my dears!” and ominous shakings of the head. “South
Carolina’s bound down,” she said, “and going to be tormented. What you
tell me about that dead woman and her daughter is but the beginning.
It’s but a leaf before the storm. We’re going to hear of many whirled
and trodden leaves.”
“Yes,” said Désirée, her eyes upon the fantastic shapes in the hollow
of the fire. “Whirled and trodden leaves.”
“I have a sister,” said the parson’s wife, “in Georgia. She got away,
but will you listen to some of the things she writes?”
She got the letter and read. Désirée, listening, put her hands over
her eyes and shivered a little for all the room was warm. “I should
not have said such things could happen in a Christian land,” she said.
“They happen,” said the parson’s wife. “War is a horror, and a horror
to women. It has always been so and always will be so. And now I must
go see that there is covering enough on the beds.”
At cock-crow the regiment was up and away. Still the same pearly sky,
the same quietude, the same stretches of water crept under the trees,
the same heavy road, and halts and going on. The regiment took dinner
beneath live oaks on a little rise of ground beside a swamp become a
lake. Officers’ mess dined a little to one side beneath a monster
tree. All wood was wet and the fires smoked, but soldiers grow skilful
and at last a blaze was got. Sherman was yet to the southward; this
strip of country not yet overrun and provisions to be had. Officers’
mess to-day sat down under the live oaks to what, compared to many and
many a time in its existence, appeared a feast for kings. There were
roasted ducks and sweet potatoes, rice and milk and butter. Officers’
mess said grace devoutly.
Désirée said grace with her friends, for they had sent back to urge
her wagon forward and to say they had a feast and to beg her company.
She sat with Edward over against the Colonel, and the captains and
lieutenants sat to either side the board. They made a happy dinner,
jesting and laughing, while off in the grove of oaks was heard the
laughter of their grey men. When dinner was over, and half an hour of
sweet rest was over, into column came all, and took again the swampy
road.
That evening headquarters was a fine old pillared house, set in a
noble garden, surrounded in its turn by the fields and woods of a
great plantation. Here there was a large family, an old man and his
married daughters and their daughters and little sons. These made the
men welcome where they camped beside fires out under the great trees
of the place, and the grey officers welcome indoors, and Désirée
welcome and gave her and Edward a room with mirrors and chintz
curtains and a great four-poster bed and a light-wood fire. A little
after the regiment, came up also a small troop of grey cavalry
returning from a reconnoissance to the southward. Infantry and the
plantation alike were eager for Cavalry’s news. Its news was ravage
and ruin, the locusts of Egypt and a grudge against the land. There
were sixty thousand of the foe and it seemed determined now that
Sherman meant Columbia.
“What are the troops at Columbia?”
“Stevenson’s twenty-six hundred men, a few other scattering commands,
Wheeler’s cavalry—say five thousand in all.”
“Could not General Beauregard bring troops from Charleston?”
“General Hampton thinks he might.—Evacuate Charleston—concentrate
before Columbia. But I don’t know—I don’t know! There are not many
thousands even at Charleston.”
“It’s the end.”
“Yes. I suppose so. But fight on till the warder drops!”
There were the young girls and young married women in the great old
house. There was a polished floor, and negro fiddlers had not left the
plantation. Cavalry and infantry officers were, with some exceptions,
young men—and this was South Carolina. “Yes, dance!” said the old
gentleman, the head of the house. “To-morrow you may have neither
fiddlers nor floor.”
They danced till almost midnight, and at the last they danced the
Virginia Reel. The women were not in silks or fine muslins, they were
in homespun. The men were not dressed like the young bloods, the
University students, the dandies of five years back. Their grey
uniforms were clean, but very worn. Bars upon the collar, or sash and
star took the place of the old elaboration of velvet waistcoat and
fine neckcloth. Spurs that would have caught in filmy laces did not
harm the women’s skirts of linsey. The fiddlers fiddled, the lights
burned. Up and down and up again, and around and around....
Edward and Désirée, resting by a window, regarded the room, at once
vivid and dreamy. “We were dancing,” he said, “the Virginia Reel at
Greenwood the night there came news of the secession of Virginia.”
“Much has happened since then.”
“Much.”
The fiddlers played, the lights burned, they took their places. At
midnight the revel closed, and they slept in the chamber with the
mirrors and the fire, until the winter day showed, smoked-pearl,
without the windows. At breakfast-time came a courier from Columbia,
ordering the ——th Virginia back to that place.
The weather cleared and grew colder. The roads drying, the regiment
made good pace. But for all the patches of bright sky there seemed to
hang a pall over the land. The wind in the woods blew with a long,
mournful, rushing sound. Désirée sat in the wagon with bowed head, her
hands in her lap. Edward was ahead, to-day, with the regiment. The
wagon went heavily on, the wind rushed on either side like goblin
horsemen. At intervals during the morning the negro boy was moved to
speech. “Yass’m. All de ghostes are loose in de graveyards. Dey tel’
erbout hit in de kitchen las’ night. Dey been to er voodoo woman, en
she say all de ghostes loose, high en low, out er ebery graveyard, en
she ain’t got no red pepper what kin lay them. She say time past she
had ernough, but she ain’t got ernough now.”
“What are they doing—the ghosts?”
“Dey’re linin’ up in long lines like de poplars, en wavin’ dere arms
en sayin’ ‘De end’s come! De end’s come!’ En den dey rises from de
ground en goes erroun’ de plantation in er ring, ’twel you almos’
think hits jus’ er ring ob mist. But dey keep er-sayin’, ‘De end’s
come! De end’s come!’ Yass’m, dey’re all out, en dere ain’t nothin’
what kin lay them!”
Moving now as they were on a main road to Columbia they this day
passed or overtook numbers of people, all going their way. These
people looked distracted. “What was happening to the southward?”
“Ruin!” they answered. Some talked quickly and feverishly as long as
they might to the soldiers; others dealt in monosyllables, shook their
heads and went on with fixed gaze. Shortly before this time General
Sherman had written to General Halleck: “This war differs from
European wars in this particular—we are not only fighting hostile
armies but a hostile people; and must make old and young, rich and
poor, feel the hard hand of want, as well as their organized armies.”
These on the road to Columbia were the unorganized—the old and very
young and the sick and a great number of women.
The soldiers were troubled. “Sherman’s surely coming to Columbia, and
how will five thousand men hold it against sixty thousand? You poor
people oughtn’t to go there!”
“Then where should we go?”
“God knows!”
“We are from Purisburg. There isn’t a house standing.”
“We are from Barnwell. It was burning when we left. Our home was
burned.”
“I am from toward Pocotaligo. It is all a waste. All black and
burned.”
On they streamed, the refugees. The regiment gave what help, what
lifts upon the way it could. As for Désirée, coming on in her wagon,
she took into it so many, that presently she found no room for
herself, but walked beside the horse. And so, at last, on a dull, soft
day, they came into Columbia.
It was the sixteenth of February. The Capital of South Carolina was by
nature a pleasant, bowery town, though now it was so heavy of heart
and filled with forebodings. Of the five thousand who formed its sole
defence some portion was in the town itself, but the greater part lay
outside, on picket, up and down the Congaree.
The ——th Virginia, coming in, was quartered in the town until it was
known what was to be done. Orangeburg was not many miles below
Columbia, and the head of Sherman’s column had reached Orangeburg.
There was a track of fire drawn across the country; Columbia saw doom
coming like a prairie-fire.
Edward found a room for Désirée and he came to her here an hour before
dusk. They stood together by a window looking down into the street.
“They are leaving home,” she said. “I have seen women and children
going all afternoon. I have seen such sad things in this pretty
street.”
“Sad enough!” he answered. “Désirée, I think that you must go too.”
“No, no!” she said. “No, no! There is nowhere to go.”
“There is Camden and the villages in the northern part of the State.
It is possible that Sherman means when he has done his worst here, to
turn back toward Charleston. There is no knowing, but it is possible.
If he does that, Camden and those other places may escape.”
“And you?”
“There are no orders yet. We may stay or we may march away. O God,
what a play is Life!”
“Those women who are parting down there—saying good-bye to all they
love—they do not at all know that they are going into safety, and
those who are parting from them do not know. It might be better for
them to stay in this large town. They are going away in the dark
night, and the enemy may have parties out where they are going. I had
rather stay here. I think that it is safer.”
“Désirée, Désirée! If a man could see but ever so little of the road
before him! If we are marched away in haste as we may be, you cannot
go with us this time. Then to leave you here alone—”
“There is an Ursuline convent here,” she said. “They will not burn
that. If you leave me and evil comes near I will go there.”
“You promise that?”
“Yes, I promise it.”
It was in the scroll of their fate that he should leave her and that
evil should come nigh. She waked in a strange red dawn to hear the
tramp of feet in the street below. Instantly she was at the window.
Grey soldiers were passing below—a column. In the south broke suddenly
a sound of cannon. She saw a shell, sent from the other side of the
river, explode in the red air above the city roofs. There came a
feeling of Vicksburg again.
A hand was at her door. She opened it and Edward took her in his arms.
“I have but an instant,” he said. “If we go it may be better for this
city than if we stayed. The mayor will surrender it peaceably, and it
may be spared destruction. For you, Désirée—for you—God bless you, God
keep you till we meet again!”
She smiled back at him. “That will be shortly.”
“No man can tell, nor no woman. You will go to the Ursuline convent?”
“Yes, I will go.”
He strained her to him; they kissed and parted. The soldiers went by
in the red dawn, out of the town, toward Winnsboro’ to the northward.
This day also Charleston was evacuated, Hardee with his men moving
north to Cheraw on the Pedee. At Columbia the mayor and aldermen went
out between eight and nine in the morning and, meeting the Federal
advance, surrendered the town, and asked for protection for the
non-combatants within its walls. How it was given let history tell.
Several days later Sherman writes to Kilpatrick: “Let the whole people
know that war is now against them, because their armies flee before us
and do not defend their country or frontier as they should. It is
pretty nonsense for Wheeler and Beauregard and such vain heroes to
talk of our warring against women and children. If they claim to be
men they should defend their women and children and prevent us
reaching their homes.”
Perhaps Wheeler and Beauregard and the other vain heroes would have
prevented it if they could. Since, however, it lay in their hard
fortune that they could not, there remained in General Sherman’s mind
no single reason for consideration.
Désirée went truly to the Ursuline convent, passing swiftly through
the windy streets on a windy day, choosing small back streets because
the principal ones were now crowded with soldiers, keeping close to
the walls of the houses and drawing a scarf she wore more fully about
head and face, for even through the side streets there were now
echoing drunken voices. She came to the convent door, rang, and
greeting the sister who came told how alone she was in the city. The
door opened to admit her of course, and she only wished that Edward
might see her in the convent garden or in the little room where the
nuns said she might sleep that night.
But no one slept in the convent that night. It was burned. The nuns
and the young girls, their pupils, and the women who had come for
refuge stayed the night in the churchyard. It was cold and there was a
high wind. The leafless branches of the trees clattered in it, and
below, on their knees, the nuns murmured prayers, their half-frozen
hands fingering their rosaries. The young girls drew together for
warmth, and the Mother Superior stood, counselling and comforting. And
the convent burned and the city burned, with a roaring and crackling
of flames and a shouting of men.