Chapter 6: More From Before – Georgia

With General Joe Johnston their commander, battling the Rebs on the road to Atlanta was somewhat like busting through a series of locked doors, repeatedly bruising your shoulder and sometimes throwing your arm out of joint. It was painful, but the job got done.

However, in mid-July, Jeff Davis gave command of the Reb army to John Bell Hood. After that, the campaign might better be compared to slogging through knee-deep mud in a swamp crowded with alligators and cottonmouths.

Even before their change in command, I was kept busy.

That Whitworth rifle made all the difference in the world. Oh, it was a beast to work with. You had to all but screw those bullets down the length of the barrel. I came to think of its ramrod as less of a ram and more as a persuading tool.

And you couldn’t take more than a half dozen shots without having to clean out the powder fouling. That was another chore complicated by the six twisting surfaces in the barrel. But I became further indebted to Captain Eddy for providing me with a solvent that made the job much easier. The man really was a font of knowledge regarding the use and care of all manner of guns, whether smooth bore or rifled, hand held, shoulder-fired, carriage-mounted, or fortification-emplaced.

Moreover, he found a source for more of the hexagonal slugs: the federal armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, though it was through a bit of logic as twisted as the Whitworth’s barrel.

The chief of military ordnance for the Union was General James Ripley. An West Point academy graduate, he’d had a few years fighting Indians in the southeast, then he joined the Ordnance Department. Over the next twenty years there, he advanced through the ranks until he ran the whole, well, the whole shooting match.

The problem was, General Ripley had a warped devotion to muzzle-loading muskets and rifles and an abhorrence for breech-loading firearms, let alone repeating rifles. To that end, he banned the manufacture of breech-loading weapons by the federal armory, even during the Civil War. The arguments offered against breech loaders were that the ease of loading would encourage wasteful use of ammunition and that the complex mechanisms of such arms would become fouled by powder residue and subject to destructive corrosion. These opinions persisted notwithstanding the fact that federal cavalry units were routinely using Spencer repeating carbines quite successfully and that a growing number of infantry units were arming themselves with a variety of breech-loaded arms.

As a result of that Ordnance Department policy, any breech-loading or repeating arms, such as the seven-shot Spencer rifles favored by my fellow Union sharpshooters, were supplied by commercial manufacturers.

However, since my Whitworth rifle was a muzzle-loader, Captain Eddy was able to arrange with one of his academy classmates, another captain who was assigned to the Springfield Armory, to have a small supply of the precision balls manufactured there. I received a shipment of five hundred bullets every month. “More would encourage wasteful use,” Captain Eddy’s classmate wrote him in an irreverent note. Any further inclination toward frivolous shooting was dampened by the fact that I had to assemble my own paper cartridges.

I have to admit that, having seen the Reb sharpshooter at work, and hearing the conversation so similar to that among the Union scouts, pulling the trigger became a heavier burden. Not that I ever shirked that duty; it had simply become more personal and the on-target shots less a cause for celebration and more one of respectful regret.

My usual job was harassing artillery units. By “harassing” I mean killing Reb artillerymen. Because of my brothers’ artillery assignments, that was especially grating work.

To dodge that chore, and ease my conscience, I began to actively hunt officers, high ranking officers.

Company-grade and junior officers -- lieutenants, captains, and majors -- were usually seen singly, with their assigned units, at or very close to the front line. Higher ranking officers, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and all ranks of generals, as well as lower ranking staff officers, tended to be seen in clusters, but not often near the front lines.

However, such officers did find it necessary to be able to visualize the battlefield and occasionally make assessments of the progress of the combat. To do that, they had to come forward. Not the top level generals, necessarily, but officers of sufficient rank to be trusted by the commanders to accurately and comprehensively detail conditions as well as to be able to prosecute their own assignments.

Certain times and events provided sufficient incentive for those upper ranks to make an appearance in forward areas. Those requirements might include: first thing in the morning; before a major attack; to encourage the troops; at any unintended change in battle conditions or troop movements; when first arriving at an intended new position; or at midday and sunset, though that was less dependable. Some commanders or members of command staff had individual habits. One colonel I observed liked to talk to rank-and-file soldiers while he smoked a pipe after meals. He would linger near the entrenched troops and speak to those who might have reason to pass his way. I cured him of that habit. In fact, I cured him of all his habits.

To be able to work any particular special targeting, you had to avoid making your scouting obvious. After I shot that colonel, I moved to a different part of the battlefield with a different command group. That’s what was helpful in being able to see the various units’ battle flags and pennants, which I’d quit shooting at. After a week or ten days, I’d scout the dead colonel’s former group, again, seek another target. I’d move around, make it appear random, and, after a period of renewed caution, the staff officers would soon slip into their old customs.

By the time Hood took over for the Rebs, I’d garnered a bit of a reputation, especially among Union artillerymen. Then again, that might have been my brothers’ doing.

The Toledo regiment had been attached to the Army of the Cumberland, known back then when it first came south in ‘sixty-one, as the Army of Ohio. The Fourteenth was still attached in July of ‘sixty-four, to what was now known as the Army of the Cumberland. Along with the other two armies of Sherman’s command -- the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio (a different army than the former Army of Ohio) -- they crossed the Chattahoochee River, just a few miles north of Atlanta, in mid July.

At that point, General Sherman split his command into three parts, wanting to envelop Atlanta and cut off its supply lines in the process. Beyond the destruction of Confederate supply lines and materiel, Sherman had also been charged with capturing Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee (Not to be confused with the Union’s Army of the Tennessee. The Union Army favored naming their forces after rivers; the Rebels named theirs mostly after states.) As to Sherman’s intent, I reckoned he was going to try a pincer movement, but then, he wasn’t consulting with me, so I had to go by rumors.

In any event, the Army of the Cumberland was given the west flank while Sherman’s other two armies moved further east.

On July twentieth, we resumed our march south, and quickly came upon our next obstacle, Peachtree Creek.

Leprechaun and I had been sent out to scout the south side of the creek, but General Thomas was not expecting any significant resistance, and the army was proceeding with the crossing while we went ahead for a look-see.

Unknown to us, Confederate General John Bell Hood had relieved General Joe Johnston two days previous. Hood was known to be even less accommodating than Johnston was. I believe “aggressive” and “reckless” were two of the terms I later heard applied to Hood’s style of generaling.

By mid-afternoon of the twentieth, substantial numbers of our boys had finished crossing the Peachtree and they’d begun digging in south of the creek. Meanwhile, Leprechaun and I had pressed forward to try to locate any Reb troops. What we soon discovered was that Hood had brought most of his Army of Tennessee up to Peachtree Creek, expecting to confront General Sherman’s entire command there.

We hightailed it back to where advance units of our army were busy preparing defensive positions south of the creek, but the Reb army was right on our tails. The horrified looks some of our Union comrades gave us, you’d think that it had been our idea to invite the Rebs to come along.

There was a battle, a big battle, and it was close.

Hood really pressed us, and some parts of our lines sagged back, while others held firm. The Rebs captured a regiment of New Jersey boys and a four-gun battery. Eddy’s battery was sent to replace them and the artillery began to take a toll on the Reb forces. Our boys had got used to having their way, and they didn’t want the Rebs breaking through.

The rapid ebb and flow on the battlefield made the Whitworth, with its several limiting features, impractical, so I used the Spencer. Company grade officers and sergeants drew my fire, as did the horses of any artillery unit that came into range.

At one point, I was in a tree, firing over the heads of the Union troopers on the battle lines. The breeze was a little more brisk at even that slight elevation and my powder smoke was quickly cleared. In addition, I could see over much of the Union powder smoke toward the Reb lines.

Suddenly, an influx of Rebs allowed them to cross the creek and charge our line. They pushed our line back almost to my position, two hundred yards north of Peachtree Creek. I had just reloaded and immediately began picking out Reb officers and sergeants who appeared most effective at leading and encouraging their troops to press forward. I dispatched seven, then began to reload, when my perch came under fire. Two shots hit the tree trunk opposite me and I heard another whiz by through the foliage, then the firing paused. I figured three, maybe four men with muzzle loaders were now reloading. I had about fifteen seconds to finish loading and find them. The brass cartridges and the loading tube made that doable.

When I searched for the shooters, the sergeant leading that squad made it easy. He was standing, pointing toward my tree, apparently urging others to shoot at me. I put a ball into his head just as two more minie balls impacted the tree.

Because of the arrangement of the branches below me, I couldn’t climb down without exposing myself. I looked around and decided that I could climb up and mostly keep the trunk between me and the Rebs. So I clambered up another ten feet.

The view was limited, due to the foliage, and I had no hope of being able to see my attackers. What I could see, however, in the woods across the creek, was a rapidly approaching artillery limber with a Napoleon twelve pounder being pulled by two horses. They were following a narrow track through the trees. Steadying the Spencer on a branch, I put down one of the horses. That caused the other horse to fall and the gun carriage to bounce over the fallen horses and land upside down. The driver had leaped free, but landed poorly, his head hitting a tree. The horses pulling the caisson just behind it managed to avoid the obstruction, but their rapid change of course caused the caisson to upset and spill the driver and its contents. That mess blocked the remainder of the battery that had been following in line, as the trees pressed close on the track.