“At seventeen years many their fortunes seek
But at fourscore it is too late a week”
said I sotto voce.
“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now. We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”
He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is the allotted span, but....”
I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”
That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of the “Coming of the Lord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance. Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s messenger.
So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—carrying salvation to the sea—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.
The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders to corps commanders and then passed on to all ranks. The men slept in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock, when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here, another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey, roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well, and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodder were provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of everything?) moved on.