Confederate wizards of the saddle /

by Bennett H. Young

General Hannon, with a guard, soon herded the precious drove and its course was promptly turned eastward to escape Federal interference. The captors hoped to run the gauntlet of Federal pursuit and with the glorious prize to bring gladness and relief to the hungry men who, in and about Atlanta, with unfailing courage, were hanging on to that citadel with the grim courage of a forlorn hope to save it from capture and destruction.

These cattle and their guards, although vigorously pursued, with favoring fortune escaped the imminent dangers about them and were landed within the Confederate lines. They would yield more than one million pounds of choice beef, thirty-five pounds for every soldier in General Hood’s army. When these lowing beasts joined the Confederate commissary, there was universal delight, and many joys were added to those who so valiantly were defending the environed citadel about which so much of Confederate faith was now centered.

Emboldened by his success, the Confederate chieftain now followed the railroad, northward from Marietta. He was going over the ground with which he became so familiar a few weeks before on Johnson’s retreat from Dalton to Atlanta. No Federal foresight could stay the avenging hand of the Confederate railway wreckers. Dalton, Sherman’s starting point in the early days of May, was captured, and from Resaca to that point, in many places the track was completely torn up. There were Federals behind and Federals all about, but their presence did not disturb the game little southern general and his men in gray. Bridges, trestles, cattle guards, guns, ammunition, mules, horses, were the things he had calculated to capture and destroy, and to this work he bent all the energies of his willing and active followers. In crossing the streams, the ammunition of every soldier was inspected by officers and every man was compelled to tie his cartridge box about his neck to prevent contact with water. The man, the horse, the gun, the powder and ball must be kept in the best possible condition. On these, combined, depended not only the safety of the command, but the success of the campaign. A few sentences from General Wheeler’s order of August 9th, 1864, will tell how stern was the demand for the protection of the horses who were to carry their masters on this strenuous march: “No soldier of any grade whatever will be permitted to carry any article of private property, except one single blanket and one oil cloth.” Officers and men alike were to share these prevailing and bear these stringent exactions. There was no complaint against these drastic regulations. Rarely, if ever, were these orders disobeyed. With noblest patriotism and sublimest self-sacrifice, the volunteers under Wheeler recognized the necessity of such a call and there was no claim of self-denial and no call of physical privation they were unwilling to face or endure, if they only might win their country’s freedom and drive its enemies from its soil.

When marching out of Dalton, the Federal general, Steedman, furiously assailed Wheeler’s command, but he was beaten off, and a direct march was made on Chattanooga. This greatly alarmed the Federal leader, and he hastened to the rescue of that stronghold; and then General Wheeler, as if playing hide and seek, turned again to Dalton, to which place he was in turn followed by Steedman, only to find his wary enemy gone. These valuable days for Federal repair of the railroad were thus consumed in fruitless marching and countermarching, induced by General Wheeler’s strategy. This interrupted the use of the railway for twelve days, and these two hundred and eighty-eight hours meant much to Sherman’s one hundred thousand followers, camped on the Chattahoochee. The exactions of twelve months of war and alternate occupation of both armies had depleted the country along the railway of all that could sustain man or beast, and by the necessities for forage, General Wheeler was compelled to leave this ravaged territory, and marched eastwardly towards Knoxville. There he was sure of reaching supplies, and he quickly turned his steps towards the valleys along the Tennessee River above Chattanooga. Once before, he had crossed at Cottonport, forty miles above that city; but when he came to the scene of his former brilliant operations, floods filled the banks of the stream and prevented a passage there. He resolved to follow the line of the river towards Knoxville and search for some spot at which he might swim or ferry over. Leaving six companies of thirty men each along the railway to harass and alarm the Federals, with the remainder of his troops he rode away. Those left behind gave a good account of themselves. More than twenty loaded trains became victims of their matchless daring, and it was some time before the enemy knew that General Wheeler had moved his sphere of operations.

If one will take an enlarged map and start with a line beginning at Covington, Georgia, forty miles south of Atlanta, where General Wheeler concentrated his troops on August 10th, to begin this expedition, and trace through all the journeyings of his command for the next twenty-eight days, some idea can be obtained of the tremendous energies and wonderful skill that marked this raid. To make this ride without let or hindrance, within the period it covered, with the animals and supplies possessed by Wheeler’s men, would be considered a reasonable march; but encumbered with artillery and ammunition wagons, the sick and wounded that always must follow in the train of a cavalry incursion make the difficulties appalling. Hidden dangers lurked on every side. The constant pursuit, as well as the constant change in the Federal disposition of both cavalry and infantry forces, rendered the game at all places and hours distractingly uncertain, and only a leader of consummate energy, combined with masterful skill, could hope to escape in safety from such desperate and perilous complications. To make the most conservative estimate of excursions from the main line of march would require something like six hundred and fifty miles of riding on this raid. No well-appointed commissary was present to feed man and hungrier beast. These must live from hand to mouth and either take food from the enemy or to impress it from people, loyal in most cases to the South, and already so impoverished by war that starvation was a real and ever present factor. In partisan warfare, soldiers do not care much for the taking of even the necessaries of life from those who oppose or do not sympathize with them; but to go into a farmer’s barn lot and take his hay, corn and oats, shoot down his hogs and cattle for food, and clean up his chicken coops, because you are compelled to take these or starve yourself and your horse; and knowing all the while the owner loves the cause and country for which you are fighting, and probably his sons and relations are somewhere out in the army contending for that which is dear to you and them, is bound to create a profound sense of grief and sorrow and even shame in any honorable soul. These takings of food from sympathizers often leave in the hearts of true men bitter and more depressing memories then the death and wounds on the battlefield, or the pathetic scenes where comrades in the cheerless hospital are wrestling with disease in a combat for life.

If General Wheeler and his men could not find and take from Federals the things that were essential to life, then they were compelled to despoil in the struggle for self-preservation their own friends and countrymen.

There were but few soldiers in General Wheeler’s four thousand men who rode out of Covington, Georgia, on August 10th, 1864, who, as between the consequences of battle and the taking from aged men, helpless women and dependent children their only food supply, would not have gladly accepted the alternative of battle with absolute cheerfulness and the chances it brought of death or wounding. Two-thirds of the territory to be traversed was a friendly country. In East Tennessee, Confederates found few supporters, or well-wishers, and here the southern soldier was not disturbed about discrimination; but Middle Tennessee and Northern Georgia were almost unanimously loyal, and ever greeted the legions in gray with smiles and benedictions, and so long as they had any surplus over starvation’s rations, would gladly have shared it with the trooper who followed Wheeler, Forrest or Morgan on their arduous rides.

In all this long march and hard campaign, there was not one day, hardly one hour, in which there was not contact with the enemy. The Federals appreciated, as well as the Confederates, what the destruction of the railway between Atlanta and Chattanooga meant to Sherman and his great army camped southward in Georgia. If forced by lack of food and munitions of war to recede, it meant losing what had cost a year’s vigorous campaigning and the waste of the thousands of lives that in battle or by disease had been paid as the price of winning the most important citadel of Georgia.

The twenty-four days, from August 10th to September 3rd, were eventful days in the history of the army of the Tennessee. Sherman sat down in front of Atlanta in July, and by slow degrees was endeavoring by siege and starvation to drive General Hood away. This proved a most difficult task. From Atlanta to Nashville was two hundred and eighty-eight miles, and while Sherman might hammer Hood’s lines south of Atlanta, Hood had most potential wreckers in Forrest and Wheeler to operate on this three hundred miles, upon one hundred and fifty-two of which, from Chattanooga to Atlanta, he must rely for those things without which war could not be carried on. Against this line of Sherman’s, the Confederate cavalry again and again were hurled, always with tremendous effect. Now and then they put Sherman and his men on half rations, and the ordnance department counted their stores to calculate what might happen if the pressure was not relieved. No phase of the war presented nobler evidences of skill, great self-sacrifice or physical endurance, as month after month, Wheeler and Forrest went out upon their errands of destruction and waste. Over in Virginia, Stuart and Hampton grandly met the conditions that faced them there. Across the Mississippi, in Arkansas, Missouri and Texas, brave spirits were fearlessly keeping up the conflict against ever-increasing odds; but along the Mississippi, the Tennessee and the Cumberland were surroundings that invoked a breadth of genius and a scope of operation that excited wonder and admiration everywhere the story was told. The distance here was so great, nature’s obstacles so pronounced, that those who measured and calculated and mastered these, needed something almost above the human to forecast and overcome.

The War, from 1861 to 1865, developed many problems that no soldier in the past had ever faced. There were no experiences that the books described that could fully guide the men in this department as to the best means of harassing and defeating armies that came like Sherman’s.