When the rain was over, Sherman occupied a strongly intrenched line that followed the contour of Johnston's, and was at nearly all points close to it. Both sides maintained skirmish lines that were almost as strong as lines of battle, and occupied rifle-pits. From these the roar of musketry was almost unceasing, and there was a steady loss of men. On June 14, while General Sherman was reconnoitring the enemy's position, he observed a battery on the crest of Pine Mountain, and near it a group of officers with field-glasses. Ordering a battery to fire two or three volleys at them, he rode on. A few hours later, his signal officer told him that the Confederates had signalled from Pine Mountain to Marietta, "Send an ambulance for General Polk's body." The group on the mountain had consisted of Generals Johnston, Hardee, and Polk, and a few soldiers that had gathered around them. One of the cannon-balls had struck General Polk in the chest and cut him in two. He was fifty-eight years old at the time of his death, had been educated at West Point, but afterward studied theology, and at the outbreak of the war had been for twenty years the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana.
The next day Sherman advanced his lines, intending to attack between Kenesaw and Pine Mountain, but found that Johnston had withdrawn from Pine Mountain, taking up a shorter line, from Kenesaw to Lost Mountain. Sherman promptly occupied the ground, and gathered in a large number of prisoners, including the Fourteenth Alabama Regiment entire. The next day he pressed forward again, only to find that the enemy had still further contracted his lines, abandoning Lost Mountain, but still occupying Kenesaw, and covering Marietta and the roads to Atlanta with the extension of his left wing. The successive positions to which Johnston's army had fallen back were prepared beforehand by gangs of slaves impressed for the purpose, so that his soldiers had little digging to do, and could save their strength for fighting. After a time Sherman adopted a similar policy, by setting at work the crowds of negroes that flocked to his camp, feeding them from the army supplies, and promising them ten dollars a month, as he was authorized to do by an act of Congress. The fortifications consisted of a sort of framework of rails and logs, covered with earth thrown up from a ditch on each side. When there was opportunity, they were finished with a heavy head-log laid along the top, which rested in notches cut in other logs that extended back at right angles and formed an inclined plane down which the head-log could roll harmlessly if knocked out of place by a cannon-shot. Miles of such works were often constructed in a single night; and they were absolutely necessary, when veteran armies were facing each other with weapons of precision in their hands.
Sherman was now facing a little south of east, and kept pressing his lines closer up to Johnston's, with rifle and artillery firing going on all the time. On the 21st the divisions of Generals Wood and Stanley gained new positions, on the southern flank of Kenesaw, where several determined assaults failed to dislodge them; and the next day the troops of Hooker and Schofield pressed forward to within three miles of Marietta, and withstood an attack by Hood's corps, inflicting upon him a loss of a thousand men. As the National line was now lengthened quite as far as seemed prudent, and still the Confederate communications were not severed, Sherman determined upon the hazardous experiment of attacking the enemy in his intrenchments. He chose two points for assault, about a mile apart, and on the morning of the 27th launched heavy columns against them, while firing was at the same time kept up all along the line. He expected to break the centre, and with half of his army take half of Johnston's in reverse, while with the remainder of his troops he held the other half so close that it could not go to the rescue. But his columns wasted away before the fire from the intrenchments, and as in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and Grant's assault at Cold Harbor, only a remnant reached the enemy's works, there to be killed or captured. Among those sacrificed were Brig.-Gens. Daniel McCook and Charles G. Harker, both of whom died of their wounds. This experiment cost Sherman over two thousand five hundred men, while Johnston's loss was but little over eight hundred.
It was evident that any repetition would be useless, and the approved principles of warfare seemed to supply no alternative. What General Sherman therefore did was to disregard the maxim that an army must always hold fast to its communications; and by doing the same thing on a grander scale six months later he won his largest fame. He determined to let go of the railroad north of Kenesaw, take ten days' provisions in wagons, and move his whole army southward to seize the road below Marietta. This would compel Johnston either to fall back farther toward Atlanta, or come out and fight him in his intrenchments—which, as both commanders well knew, was almost certain destruction to the assaulting party. In the night of July 2, McPherson's troops, who had the left or north of the line, drew out of their works and marched southward, passing behind the lines held by Thomas and Schofield. This was the same manoeuvre as that by which Grant had carried his army to its successive positions between the Wilderness and the James River, except that he moved by the left flank and Sherman by the right, and Grant never had to let go of his communications, being supplied by lines of wagons from various points on the Potomac.
When Johnston saw what Sherman was doing he promptly abandoned his strong position at Kenesaw, and fell back to the Chattahoochee; but he did not, as Sherman hoped, attempt to cross the stream at once. Intrenchments had been prepared for him on the north bank, and here he stopped. Sherman, expecting to catch his enemy in the confusion of crossing a stream, pressed on rapidly with his whole army, and ran up against what he says was one of the strongest pieces of field fortification he had ever seen. A thousand slaves had been at work on it for a month. And yet, like many other things in the costly business of war, it was an enormous outlay to serve a very brief purpose. For Sherman not only occupied ground that overlooked it, but held the river for miles above and below, and was thus able to cross over and turn the position. Johnston must have known this when the fortifications were in process of construction, and their only use was to protect his army from assault while it was crossing the river. On the 9th of July, Schofield's army crossed above the Confederate position, laying two pontoon bridges, and intrenched itself in a strong position on the left bank. Johnston, thus compelled to surrender the stream, crossed that night with his entire army, and burned the railroad and other bridges behind him. Sherman was almost as cautious in the pursuit, wherever there was any serious danger, as Johnston was in the retreat; and he not only chose an upper crossing, farther from Atlanta, but spent a week in preparations to prevent disaster, before he threw over his entire army. This he did on the 17th, and the next day moved it by a grand right wheel toward the city of Atlanta.
The Chattahoochee was the last great obstruction before the fortifications of the Gate City were reached, and on the day that Sherman crossed it something else took place, which, in the opinion of many military critics, was even more disastrous to the fortunes of the Confederacy. This was the supersession of the careful and skilful Johnston by Gen. John B. Hood, an impetuous and sometimes reckless fighter, but no strategist. The controversy over the wisdom of this action on the part of the Confederate Government will probably never be satisfactorily closed. The merits of it can be sufficiently indicated by two brief extracts. The telegram conveying the orders of the War Department said: "As you have failed to arrest the advance of the enemy to the vicinity of Atlanta, far in the interior of Georgia, and express no confidence that you can defeat or repel him, you are hereby relieved from the command of the Army and Department of Tennessee, which you will immediately turn over to General Hood." General Johnston said in his reply: "As to the alleged cause of my removal, I assert that Sherman's army is much stronger compared with that of Tennessee than Grant's compared with that of Northern Virginia. Yet the enemy has been compelled to advance much more slowly to the vicinity of Atlanta than to that of Richmond and Petersburg, and penetrated much deeper into Virginia than into Georgia. Confident language by a military commander is not usually regarded as evidence of competence."
Within twenty-four hours the National army learned that its antagonist had a new commander, and there was eager inquiry as to Hood's character as a soldier. Schofield and McPherson had been his classmates at West Point, and from their testimony and the career of Hood as a corps commander it was easily inferred that a new policy might be looked for, very different from Johnston's. Sherman warned his army to be constantly prepared for sallies of the enemy, and his prediction did not wait long for fulfilment. On the 20th, at noonday, as his army was slowly closing in upon the city, the Confederates left the intrenchments that Johnston had prepared for them along the line of Peach Tree Creek, where he would have awaited attack, and made a heavy assault upon Thomas, who held the right of the National line. The weight of the blow fell mainly upon Hooker's corps, and the attack was so furious and reckless that in many places friend and foe were intermingled, fighting hand to hand. A heavy column of Confederates attempted to fall upon an exposed flank of the Fourth Corps; but Thomas promptly brought several batteries to play upon it, and at the end of two hours the enemy was driven back to his intrenchments, leaving hundreds of dead on the field. Hooker also lost heavily, because his men fought without intrenchments or cover of any kind.
| FALL OF GENERAL JAMES B. McPHERSON, NEAR ATLANTA. |