Chapter 2: Sergeant

Sam Warren had been in F troop, 4th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry, for the entire war. At the beginning, as the habit had been in the militia, the men had elected the officers and the officers had selected the sergeants and corporals. Sam had been a private. Also like the militia, the units were territorial. Not only was the regiment from only a small area of Illinois, F troop was from two townships of that area. Most of the men had known him as the storekeeper’s son if not as a schoolmate. Now, both officers and men considered him an excellent sergeant.

The 4th had numbered 1200 men in the summer of ‘61. In the fall of ‘63, it had a few less than 500. Sam had plowed with horses and driven teams before he volunteered; he’d never actually been in a saddle. Now, he sat in one confidently. His wariness was not about what his horse, Jack, might do, but what Johnny Reb might do and what his troopers might fall into.

The 4th had been recently rearmed with repeating carbines, and if Johnny Reb wanted to surprise them, he might be surprised himself. They’d spent the year and a good bit of 1862 in The Army of the Cumberland. General Rosecrans preferred maneuver to slaughter, and that choice worked the cavalry. They had recently come back from chasing the Confederates out of Tennessee into North Carolina. They had been east of the infantry when the word came to return to Chattanooga, but mounted men returned faster, even over mountain roads. They’d been given a week to repair, reshoe, and reequip. Now they were detached to the Army of the Tennessee. The Colonel had a map of where they were going, and the Captain had seen the map. Sam knew that they were carrying enough supplies, and that was most of his worry.

They rode for days in the Confederate rear. The civilians they saw were unfriendly, but they were not about to cause trouble. Whatever troops had been alerted did not seem to think that they could deal with a brigade, and Sam was willing to agree with that judgment. They might have stirred up a hornets’ nest, and, if so, they would deal with the hornets on their way back. Well, Sam had joined up to fight Confederates.

The 4th peeled off from the brigade. The other regiments rode into a town. Those troops would capture a railroad station and tear up anything of military value which could be torn up. The regiment would meet up with them before dark.

The regiment’s task was a ravine crossed by a railroad trestle to the east of that town. Four men with axes chopped at some of the vertical posts of the trestle. The rest were chopping shrubbery with knives and hatchets. They piled the shrubbery inside the trestle. When the time came, they would set the shrubbery alight. If all went well, the trestle would be fully burned. Companies E and F had the job of guarding the workers, and they were dismounted, as well. F was on the west side of the stream, and Sam walked the posts making sure that everyone was awake.

“Massa,” came a call from the edge of the woods. Sam didn’t quite aim his carbine in that direction.

“Show yourself,” he said. A negro came out. “You alone?”

“Yassuh.”

“What you want?”

“Contraband,” the slave said. That was the now-obsolete term for the slaves brought into Union lines and freed.

“When we leave here, we’re going to be riding, and probably riding hard. Can’t take anyone with us. Wait for the infantry -- men wearing blue uniforms like ours but on foot. Then you can escape and join them.”

“When will that be?”

“Do I look like a general? I’m a sergeant. It will be when the generals decide.” It would also, of course, depend on what Confederate generals decided. Sam thought, however, that the slave quarters needed to be told that Union generals were deciding what happened in the war. “When you go back, now, go back slowly and don’t say anything.”

How well the slave followed that advice, Sam never knew. Nobody else came from that direction, though, before a train was seen coming up the tracks from the east. The troopers except for a small band with matches withdrew to their horses. The men remaining lit torches, and lit the brush piled into the trestle when the train started across. Alerted by the flame and smoke, the engineer ordered the brakemen to stop the train. The engine was more than half-way across the trestle before it stopped.

The troopers watched as the train caught fire and the trestle crashed down with the engine atop it. They mounted up and rode northeast.

The next road they came to, the regiment rode northwest. They had slowed to a trot and the sun was sinking in the west when a group of mounted men charged into the middle of the column with drawn sabers.

“Carbines, carbines,” Sam shouted. Company E was about overrun by the charge, but Company F turned directly towards the attackers. Most of them used their carbines, and the attackers were shot before they could get close enough to slash. Sam emptied his carbine and let his horse slow while others overtook him. He drew his revolver and got off two shots before there was enough of a lull to reload. He spurred Jack back to a gallop then, and soon was back in contact. Before his carbine emptied again, they were through the melee.

“Reload,” he called. “Stop and reload. Then we’ll go back in order.” They reloaded both carbines and revolvers. Then, with the captain in the lead, they trotted back to their former road. They managed to rope half a dozen horses on the way. Most of the Confederate mounts had disappeared into the trees when they lost their riders. By the time they got back, the battle was almost over.

Half an hour later, the regiment rejoined the brigade. The brigade camped late that night. Sam heard from a friend in another regiment that they had torn up some rails, wrecked the station, and captured some ammunition. Then they had been driven off by an infantry brigade.

It was two days, two days of fairly slow travel, before they camped with the cavalry reserve of the Army of the Tennessee. When another corps arrived on their left, the Confederates retreated a dozen miles and entered trenches which had been dug for them in preparation.

Among enlisted men, Sherman had the reputation of being willing to spend lives to get a victory. They had liked being in Rosecrans’s army where most of the victories had been won by maneuver. The last advance was a pleasant surprise. They were going to take Atlanta, but they’d be happy to take it this way -- surprised but happily surprised. Besides, they were cavalry; the infantry dug the trenches.

Another Union corps came up on their right. The Confederates couldn’t handle that, and they retreated a dozen miles to the next good defensive position. Both sides dug in, and Sherman sent out the cavalry -- most of the cavalry, certainly including the 4th Illinois -- further around the right. They found a railroad but no trestle crossing a convenient valley. The 4th Illinois dug up a few hundred feet of track and burned the railroad ties. Sam didn’t think this would stop the railroad, but it ought to give them a headache.

The cavalry gathered together and entrenched. That wasn’t their usual style, but rumor said that the last corps to arrive was going to extend their front to reach them. Sure as hell, the Confederates were closer. When the Confederates brought up artillery, the Yankee cavalry abandoned that location.

Riding back to their lines, they found the supply wagons of one of the divisions which had forced them out. They shot up the supply-guards, outnumbered and vastly outgunned. They pulled the wagons together, unhitched the draft horses, and rode off leading the horses and leaving the wagons on fire. They swung wide of the trenches and came back to their bivouac to hear that instead of advancing on their right, the infantry had advanced on their left.

Two days later, the Confederates withdrew in good order. The lines were now half-way to Atlanta from where they had started, all without a major battle. The brigade guarded the army’s left flank on the advance. That required more riding than the infantry pace, but nothing that strained the horses.

Other companies captured some Confederate newspapers in their advance. Sam got mail which included the Springfield paper. He read it, and one Confederate paper was passed along to him by another sergeant. The Confederate paper lambasted Johnston for retreating; the Springfield paper criticized Sherman for the slow progress. Sam had no high opinion of newspaper editors, and his recent reading had not increased it. He thought about writing a letter to the Springfield editor thanking him for urging that more Illinois boys die so his headlines could be more exciting. Since the editorial was more than two weeks old, he decided not to bother.

They spent nearly three weeks in the new lines, or well back from the lines in the case of the cavalry. Then, again, most of the cavalry went sweeping around to their right. They got to a Confederate town which was defended only by militia. It had a railroad station, and they tore up the track, ordered off the civilians, and fortified their position. This time, the Confederate infantry which responded was followed by Union infantry. When a unit of colored artillery showed up, the Confederates realized that Sherman was determined that this position would be held. The attacks were continuous, but Johnston retreated again. By now, they were close to Atlanta, and many of the railroads in and out that made Atlanta important had some part in Union hands.

By this time, it was deep winter. North Georgia was not central Illinois, but the people back home in central Illinois were not trying to winter over in a tent.

When the infantry tried to dig the trenches in the new lines at night, they found frozen soil.

More colored artillery units were arriving every week. Sam talked to one of the -- white -- officers. His story was that the Army of the Mississippi had captured Confederate artillery at Vicksburg; they had lost gunners and guns in the campaign, but they had more guns than they had begun with. Grant decided to train a lot of the new colored soldiers as gunners, and many enlisted artillerymen were promoted to officers.

Anyway, an earlier advantage in artillery was turning into a heavy preponderance. Despite raids on the extended supply line, Sherman brought up enough ammunition to make them useful.

Another effort to swing wide to the Union right brought no response from Johnston. Sherman turned those divisions and had them attack the Confederate left. After two bloody days, Johnston fell back to the defense works which had been built around Atlanta. Sherman decided that his advantage in troops, while great, was not great enough to carry that sort of fortification. He wrote Grant. Grant came to inspect, bringing more troops. Then he went back and sent enough troops to surround Atlanta.

Before the encirclement could be complete, Johnston broke out. That was a bloody battle, and Sherman sent his cavalry after the Confederates. Johnston got most of them back to Montgomery, but many who dropped out surrendered to pursuing cavalry, and even more decided to head for the hills. By this time, there were major sections of the South, especially in the hill country, which were occupied by deserters and draft dodgers.

“Dear Mr. President,”
Sherman wrote Lincoln,
“As a Christmas gift, allow me to offer you the city of Atlanta. It is the rail hub of the Southwest and a stab deep into the heart of what the rebels regard as their homeland.”

It was all of that. The Union repaired and rebuilt the railroad from Atlanta to Chattanooga. This was an unstated threat that they would rebuild in whichever direction they planned to march. Davis feared that it would be towards Montgomery, and he ordered the reinforcement and elaboration of the defenses of the capital.

Sergeant Sam Warren had been engaged since two nights before his regiment rode away ‘to war’ -- actually to training.

He wrote:

Dear Alice,

You’ll have read that Sherman took Atlanta.
Actually, some others of us had a little
to do with that, too.
Anyway, I’m here for a while.
Please write. You might think that we have all
the news and you at home have only the dull
details of humdrum civilian life.
The truth is, that the newspapers give you
the real news that I could give you faster
than my letters could. You don’t want to hear
of people who you have met or whose family
you have met spilling blood for some tiny
bit of ground you’ve never heard of that we’re
going to leave tomorrow.
I want to hear -- desperately want to hear --
of the quiet life that is fading in my memory.

The Confederate Constitution called for Congressional elections in odd years, and they were held in the fall. After the immediately preceding military disasters, opposition to the government -- though not the call for peace -- had been victorious too often. The saving grace for Davis was that so much of the Confederacy was occupied by the Federals that no election could be held in many districts. Those offices were filled by retention of the last elected or by appointment, and those were mostly supporters of the administration.

Meanwhile, the East shut down for the winter. Meade kept most of his army in Norfolk, while the prisoners were, at last, sent to camps which had been being built or increased since August. Lincoln had provided a means of forming reconstruction governments in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

Banks’s offensive out of New Orleans had been a total failure. Not only were there no Union troops on the border of Texas with Mexico, there weren’t even any on the border of Texas with Louisiana.

Sherman had no desire to march on Montgomery. Meade had captured the capital of the Confederacy; capturing another would accomplish little -- Davis could move faster than any pursuing army -- and take major effort. He had another plan.

The Confederacy, he wrote Grant, was an empty shell. They had armies resisting Union advances; they had raiders like that devil Forrest; they had nothing military in their interior. He proposed to march from Atlanta to the sea come spring. His army would bring ammunition with it, and eat off the land. Millions of people survived in the state of Georgia buying their food with Confederate rag paper. Tens of thousands more could eat well taking their food at the point of a bayonet. He would avoid, where possible, besieging any entrenched troops. At the end of his march, he would have an Atlantic port, and he could be fed -- and provided with ammunition -- by sea.