Hood, in the hope of leading Sherman away from Atlanta, crossed the Chattahoochee on the 1st of October, destroyed the railroad above Marietta and sent General French against Allatoona. It was the brave defense of this place by General John M. Corse that brought forth Sherman’s famous message, “Hold out; relief is coming,” sent by his signal officers from the heights of Kenesaw Mountain, and which thrilled the North and inspired its poets to eulogize Corse’s bravery in verse. Corse had been ordered from Rome to Allatoona by signals from mountain to mountain, over the heads of the Confederate troops, who occupied the valley between. Reaching the mountain pass soon after midnight, on October 5th, Corse added his thousand men to the nine hundred already there, and soon after daylight the battle began. General French, in command of the Confederates, first summoned Corse to surrender, and, receiving a defiant answer, opened with his guns. Nearly all the day the fire was terrific from besieged and besiegers, and the losses on both sides were very heavy.
During the battle Sherman was on Kenesaw Mountain, eighteen miles away, from which he could see the cloud of smoke and hear the faint reverberation of the cannons’ boom. When he learned by signal that Corse was there and in command, he said, “If Corse is there, he will hold out; I know the man.” And he did hold out, and saved the stores at Allatoona, at a loss of seven hundred of his men, he himself being among the wounded, while French lost about eight hundred.
General Hood continued to move northward to Resaca and Dalton, passing over the same ground on which the two great armies had fought during the spring and summer. He destroyed the railroads, burned the ties, and twisted the rails, leaving greater havoc, if possible, in a country that was already a wilderness of desolation. For some weeks Sherman followed Hood in the hope that a general engagement would result. But Hood had no intention to fight. He went on to the banks of the Tennessee opposite Florence, Alabama. His army was lightly equipped, and Sherman, with his heavily burdened troops, was unable to catch him. Sherman halted at Gaylesville and ordered Schofield, with the Twenty-third Corps, and Stanley, with the Fourth Corps, to Thomas at Nashville.
Sherman thereupon determined to return to Atlanta, leaving General Thomas to meet Hood’s appearance in Tennessee. It was about this time that Sherman fully decided to march to the sea. Some time before this he had telegraphed to Grant: “Hood ... can constantly break my roads. I would infinitely prefer to make a wreck of the road ... send back all my wounded and worthless, and, with my effective army, move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.” Grant thought it best for Sherman to destroy Hood’s army first, but Sherman insisted that his plan would put him on the offensive rather than the defensive. He also believed that Hood would be forced to follow him. Grant was finally won to the view that if Hood moved on Tennessee, Thomas would be able to check him. He had, on the 11th of October, given permission for the march. Now, on the 2d of November, he telegraphed Sherman at Rome: “I do not really see that you can withdraw from where you are to follow Hood without giving up all we have gained in territory. I say, then, go on as you propose.” It was Sherman, and not Grant or Lincoln, that conceived the great march, and while the march itself was not seriously opposed or difficult to carry out, the conception and purpose were masterly.
Sherman moved his army by slow and easy stages back to Atlanta. He sent the vast army stores that had collected at Atlanta, which he could not take with him, as well as his sick and wounded, to Chattanooga, destroyed the railroad to that place, also the machine-shops at Rome and other places, and on November 12th, after receiving a final despatch from Thomas and answering simply, “Despatch received—all right,” the last telegraph line was severed, and Sherman had deliberately cut himself off from all communication with the Northern States. There is no incident like it in the annals of war. A strange event it was, as Sherman observes in his memoirs. “Two hostile armies marching in opposite directions, each in the full belief that it was achieving a final and conclusive result in a great war.”
For the next two days all was astir in Atlanta. The great depot, round-house, and machine-shops were destroyed. Walls were battered down; chimneys pulled over; machinery smashed to pieces, and boilers punched full of holes. Heaps of rubbish covered the spots where these fine buildings had stood, and on the night of November 15th the vast débris was set on fire. The torch was also applied to many places in the business part of the city, in defiance of the strict orders of Captain Poe, who had the work of destruction in charge. The court-house and a large part of the dwellings escaped the flames.
Preparations for the great march were made with extreme care. Defective wagons and horses were discarded; the number of heavy guns to be carried along was sixty-five, the remainder having been sent to Chattanooga. The marching army numbered about sixty thousand, five thousand of whom belonged to the cavalry and eighteen hundred to the artillery. The army was divided into two immense wings, the Right, the Army of the Tennessee, commanded by General O. O. Howard, and consisting of the Fifteenth and Seventeenth corps, and the Left, the Army of Georgia, by General Henry W. Slocum, composed the Fourteenth and Twentieth corps. Sherman himself was in supreme command. There were twenty-five hundred wagons, each drawn by six mules; six hundred ambulances, with two horses each, while the heavy guns, caissons, and forges were each drawn by eight horses. A twenty days’ supply of bread, forty of coffee, sugar, and salt was carried with the army, and a large herd of cattle was driven on foot.
In Sherman’s general instructions it was provided that the army should march by four roads as nearly parallel as possible, except the cavalry, which remained under the direct control of the general commanding. The army was directed “to forage liberally on the country,” but, except along the roadside, this was to be done by organized foraging parties appointed by the brigade commanders. Orders were issued forbidding soldiers to enter private dwellings or to commit any trespass. The corps commanders were given the option of destroying mills, cotton-gins, and the like, and where the army was molested in its march by the burning of bridges, obstructing the roads, and so forth, the devastation should be made “more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” The cavalry and artillery and the foraging parties were permitted to take horses, mules, and wagons from the inhabitants without limit, except that they were to discriminate in favor of the poor. It was a remarkable military undertaking, in which it was intended to remove restrictions only to a sufficient extent to meet the requirements of the march. The cavalry was commanded by General Judson Kilpatrick, who, after receiving a severe wound at Resaca, in May, had gone to his home on the banks of the Hudson, in New York, to recuperate, and, against the advice of his physician, had joined the army again at Atlanta.
On November 15th, most of the great army was started on its march, Sherman himself riding out from the city next morning. As he rode near the spot where General McPherson had fallen, he paused and looked back at the receding city with its smoking ruins, its blackened walls, and its lonely, tenantless houses. The vision of the desperate battles, of the hope and fear of the past few months, rose before him, as he tells us, “like the memory of a dream.” The day was as perfect as Nature ever gives. The men were hilarious. They sang and shouted and waved their banners in the autumn breeze. Most of them supposed they were going directly toward Richmond, nearly a thousand miles away. As Sherman rode past them they would call out, “Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.” Only the commanders of the wings and Kilpatrick were entrusted with the secret of Sherman’s intentions. But even Sherman was not fully decided as to his objective—Savannah, Georgia, or Port Royal, South Carolina—until well on the march.
There was one certainty, however—he was fully decided to keep the Confederates in suspense as to his intentions. To do this the more effectually he divided his army at the start, Howard leading his wing to Gordon by way of McDonough as if to threaten Macon, while Slocum proceeded to Covington and Madison, with Milledgeville as his goal. Both were secretly instructed to halt, seven days after starting, at Gordon and Milledgeville, the latter the capital of Georgia, about a hundred miles to the southeast. These two towns were about fifteen miles apart.