“With that ignorance of danger common to new troops, the rebels rushed upon our veterans with the greatest fury. They were received with grape-shot and musketry at point blank range, our soldiers firing coolly while shouting derisively to the quivering columns to come on, as if they thought the whole thing a nice joke. The rebels resumed the attack, but with the same fatal results, and were soon in full flight, leaving more than three hundred dead on the field. Our loss was some forty killed and wounded, while their killed, wounded, and prisoners, are estimated to exceed two thousand five hundred. A pretty severe lesson they received. It is said, ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.’ This first step has been a most expensive one, and judging from the fact that we have not heard from them since, they seem to have interpreted the proverb otherwise than in the recognized sense.”
Gov. Brown reluctantly left in Milledgeville three thousand muskets and several thousand pounds of powder, to be destroyed by our troops. Then came a comic episode in the march. A number of officers and men took possession of the State House, elected a speaker, a clerk, and a chaplain, and went to work upon bills and resolutions in earnest. Calls to order, deciding between members claiming the floor, and humorous hits, filled up the time. When in the midst of the amusing excitement, a courier rushed in, saying, the “Yankees are coming!” then there was a sudden suspension of business, a panic, and a run for the doors. This was succeeded by an uproar of laughter.
Somehow the entreaty of the politicians and editors of the Confederacy to burn and otherwise destroy property likely to fall into our hands, did not move the hearts of traitors. Each waited to see his neighbor commence the havoc, and excepting what the army appropriated, and the rebels carried off, but little damage was done. The enemy was completely in the mist of mystery, and General Sherman’s skilful, blinding movements, successfully deluded his antagonists. Their blows were always hesitating, and, when given by them, were equally ineffectual. It was evident, however, that the Oconee River must be passed at some point by our troops. Accordingly, the enemy posted himself where the railroad crosses the river, five miles east of Gordon, and here burned the bridge. Wednesday, the 23d, brought our troops well up to the river.
The people along the line of march seldom expressed their sentiments to the army. A few illustrations from those who saw and heard for themselves, will give the general feeling: “When they do speak it is not in vain eulogy of the rebel army and the cause in which they are engaged. They are broken in spirits, and the haughty secession ladies, who by force of ‘arms’ and tongue drove their brothers, sons, and lovers, into the army, are now as meek as singed kittens, and only too glad to smile upon a good-looking Yankee. They all frankly admit that their cause is hopeless—that subjugation awaits them in the future, and all they now wish is for the storm to burst and pass; that peace with them, crushed beneath the Yankee heel, is preferable to the present state of things.
“ ‘Great God!’ exclaimed one very intelligent Milledgeville lady, whose all had been taken, ‘little did I think, when I bade my dear boys, who now sleep in their graves, good-bye, and packed them off, that this day would come, when old, impoverished, and childless, I must ask the men whom they fought against for a meal of victuals to satisfy my hunger. But it serves me right; I was deceived, drove them to battle, death, and infamy, and here I stand, their murderer.’
“Riding up to a house one day, I met an old woman and three grown-up daughters at the door uttering frantic appeals for help. I inquired what was wrong, when the old woman pointed to a burning cotton gin, and exclaimed, ‘Put it out! You uns are burnin’ me child!’ I asked where the child was, and succeeded in learning that it was in the burning gin house. Away I went, with some men, to rescue the innocent, and at the door met a ten year old boy, who, badly singed, issued forth from the fiery furnace. Returning to the house, I inquired how the boy came there? Putting the pipe between her lips, to compose her nerves, the old lady at last ventured an explanation: ‘Well,’ said she, ‘we uns heard that you uns killed all the little boys, to keep them out from growing up to fight ye, and we hid ’em.’ Strange as this may seem, among the poor, ignorant dupes of Davis, it is a common belief that the Yankees slay all the male children. We found many infant Moseses and Jeffs hid away in cellars and corn-cribs, but none in bulrushes. An officer called upon a lady in Effingham County, whose plantation had been stripped of every thing, and found her in tears and her children crying for bread. He endeavored to soothe her, when she lifted up her beautiful eyes beseechingly, and implored, ‘Give me something for my starving children.’ Away the officer went to his mess and fed the children from his private larder. On the following morning he was quite chagrined to witness two oak boxes, one barrel of flour, four trunks, and other articles exhumed from the garden by the soldiers.”
The eight days’ march to Millen, seventy-five miles from Milledgeville, was full of varied and remarkable interest. General Kilpatrick, with his “ubiquitous cavalry,” galloped away to the Central Railroad bridge, over the Oconee, twenty-five miles southeast of Milledgeville, where General Howard was trying to build a pontoon bridge, which the rebel General Wayne, with a brigade of released inmates of the penitentiary, and of militia, was determined to prevent; a battle followed, and the enemy was driven back. Then again the unrivalled trooper acted as “a curtain” upon the extreme left, having covered in the same way the right wing in the earlier part of the campaign; while all the time he had the nobler aim, if possible, to reach Millen in time to rescue our incarcerated and dying prisoners of war. “The stockade or coop in which our prisoners were confined, after their removal from Andersonville, was located in a dense pine forest, six miles from Millen station, on the Savannah and Augusta Railroad. It was a square of fifteen acres, enclosed by pine logs set upright in the ground, very close together. At intervals of twenty feet along the palisades were the sentry boxes, fifteen feet from the ground; access to them could only be had by means of ladders on the outside. The palisade logs were uniformly ten inches thick, and so straight and close were they that all view of the pine woods beyond them was shut out from the unfortunates within. Entering at the broad gate they crossed the ‘dead line’ (single rail fence) fearlessly, and approached the burrows or adobe huts where the ‘Yankees’ had slept in confinement. These were not filthy, because no considerable amount of filth could accumulate during the three weeks our men were kept there; but they were cheerless and comfortless. There was no attempt at regularity in laying out this village of Kennel. In one of them the dead body of a Union soldier, name unknown, was found unburied. Decidedly the most comfortable looking appendage to the stockade was the brick cook-house near the centre, with accommodation for a dozen or fifteen men to work at a time. At the southeast angle of the stockade, on the outside, stood a square earthwork, built to command with its guns both the burrows inside and the approaches to the logs on the outside. In the hospital huts, a quarter of a mile from the pen, were good accommodations for three hundred men, and there were evidences that they were not sufficient. A fine large spring, where excellent water bubbled out, completed the lists of objects familiar to the brave boys who had lived in that silent clearing in the pine woods. The dead prisoners were buried in rows, a short distance from the hospital, graves being numbered as high as six hundred and fifty. The prisoners were kept at Millen only three weeks.”
November 29th the “boys” kept Thanksgiving upon the luxuries of Georgia plantations. The Ogeehee was crossed on November 30th. It is a stream sixty yards wide, where the troops passed over on a bridge which was put in repair, and with pontoons.
In a sketch from a reliable source, we have an explanation of the false charge made by a distinguished orator against General Sherman, that he removed a bridge, and left unprotected negroes to the enemy. He knew nothing of the sad affair when it occurred:
“From the time we left Atlanta, with fifty or one hundred contrabands, the ‘colored brigades’ continued to swell in numbers until we arrived at the Ogeechee River, when fully ten thousand were attached to the various columns. They represented all shades and conditions, from the almost white housemaid servant, worth $15,000 in rebel currency, to the tar black, pock-marked cotton picker, who never crosses massa’s door sill. A very large majority of them were women and children, who, mounted on mules, sometimes five on an animal, in ox wagons, buggies, and vehicles of every description, blocked the roads and materially delayed the movement of the columns. It was no unusual sight to behold a slave mother carrying two young children and leading a third, who, in a half nude state, trudged along the thorny path to freedom. Columns could be written descriptive of the harrowing scenes presented by this unfortunate class of fugitives. So much difficulty did General Davis find in moving his column, that at the Ogeechee River, as a military necessity, he placed a guard at the bridge, who halted the caravan of contrabands until the rear of the column passed, and then removed the pontoon. The negroes, however, not to be frustrated, constructed a foot-bridge and crossed. Next day the column had its full complement of negroes.