X.

ATLANTA.

I.

PRELUDE TO ATLANTA.

SURVEYING from his lofty mountain fastness at Chattanooga the broad subjacent country to the far-off Mississippi, Sherman, to whom Grant, on his removal to Virginia, had delegated the command of all that vast theatre, saw that the war in the West was already nigh its end. The basin of the Mississippi was substantially overrun, the soil of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri fast and forever in Union keeping, while in Mississippi and Alabama on the hither slope of the valley, and Arkansas and Louisiana on the other, such positions were held as to make military operations there on a grand scale waste of time and troops. A profitless blaze of victory might indeed be easily kindled in many quarters; but to the distant south-west, there were no strategie points unconquered which might not better claim the attention of a body of cavalry or an invasion from a base near the Gulf. A few experimental thrustings of cavalry columns, and, in one case, of an infantry column, through the Gulf States, had verified Grierson's pithy saying, that the Confederacy there was "a shell;" and though other such expeditions might meet more discomfort than danger, the shell was not worth the puncturing.

But the Confederacy yet lived in its armies, and of these

one of the two that still held the field strong and defiant confronted Sherman in an entrenched camp at Dalton, where it covered Georgia. But Georgia was now not only the chief granary, it was the main military workshop of the Confederacy, as Florida and Texas had been its corrals. Down in the heart of the State was Atlanta, the centre of a network of manufacturing cities and villages, such as Rome, Roswell, Marietta, and the like, from whose factories the Southern armies were now drawing powder, shot, shell, caps, cannon, small arms, clothing and equipments, wagons and harnesses, all the paraphernalia of war. Central Georgia was a vast grain-growing prairie, whence loaded cars rolled constantly to army store-houses, after harvest-time, to furnish the winter sustenance of many Confederate armies besides that of Johnston's. Georgia was the key-stone of the Confederate arch, whose firm northern buttress was Virginia. Through Macon and Atlanta ran the great railroad lines between the eastern and western Confederacy: to break them would be to sunder direct communication between the Atlantic States and the States of the Gulf, to cleave once more the Southern territory from mountain to sea, as it had been rent asunder on the line of the Mississippi. To do this, and to destroy the army of his adversary, was the task imposed upon Sher

man.

Of that officer's fitness for the task its history is the best evidence; and beforehand there was proof abundant not only in his skill and recognized genius on the one hand, but in his wide experience on the other. He was a man of martial instinct, of quick intelligence, of far-reaching habit of thought, and even on his first field his talents had flashed out. At Bull Run, being for the first time under fire, he handled his brigade with noticeable case, and gave several specific exhibitions of soldierly skill. In his second battle, Shiloh, Sherman was still more conspicuous; for, though commanding a raw division, and while officers ranking him were on the field, the chief

control of the action seems to have been instinctively and at once accorded to him, on the first day. General Halleck, on reaching the scene of action immediately sent word to Washington that "it is the unanimous opinion here that BrigadierGeneral W. T. Sherman saved the fortunes of the day on the 6th," while Grant crowned many words of eulogy by declaring "to his individual efforts I am indebted for the success of that battle." Commencing his record thus brilliantly, Sherman had very naturally soon become General Grant's favorite subordinate. The last act of his famous career had been a superbly rapid and well-conducted march of four hundred miles from Vicksburg to Chattanooga in season to allow him a "full man's share" of what hard blows were to be borne in the dethronement of Bragg from Missionary Ridge; when, without taking breath, once more his fate appointed him to go to the relief of Burnside, then imprisoned at Knoxville : adding one hundred miles to his four hundred, by incredible exertions he saved the gallant garrison. Thus the very nature of his best-known achievements, in the way of moving vast armies over vast regions with the precision and smoothness of mechanism, was the best augury of success in sweeping hither and thither as he might list, throughout Georgia.

For his projected campaign, Sherman demanded one hundred thousand men in the proper ratio of the three arms; and of ordnance two hundred and fifty guns. The actual force with which he took the field was nearly as designed, the aggregate being ninety-eight thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven men and two hundred and fifty-four guns. The command consisted of three armies - Thomas's Army of the Cumberland, sixty thousand seven hundred and seventy-three strong; McPherson's Army of the Tennessee, twenty-four thousand four hundred and sixty-five; Schofield's Army of the Ohio, thirteen thousand five hundred and fifty-nine.

The positions which the opposing armies had now assumed brought into striking light the strategic character of the

region, and the military value of its primary feature, Chattanooga. The great mountain system of East Tennessee ran like a ridge into the heart of the Confederacy: Chattanooga was a natural bastion on the line of Confederate communications. Ousted by Rosecrans from this key-point of the central zone, Bragg felt that without regaining it and the dependent mountain system, the Confederacy would always be vitally menaced, and accordingly essayed the movement which Grant had so rudely rebuffed. The possession of Chattanooga transferred to the Union armies the advantage of interior lines, while their opponents, thrown off in turn upon exterior lines, ran the risk of being beaten in detail. South of Chattanooga, also, the mountains of the Blue Ridge, so hostile to operations directed across them easterly into Virginia or North Carolina, by falling into the champaign country permitted forward movements. Knoxville, the centre of that valley district between the Alleghanies proper and the Blue Ridge, known as East Tennessee, and extending from Cumberland Gap to Chattanooga, was held, like the two latter points, by Union forces, while, on the other flank, the Tennessee River was lined with garrisons sufficient to prevent the passage of infantry from the south. In a word, then, the Union position at Chattanooga, itself impregnable, was well guarded on both flanks, and tempted its possessors to thrust strong columns into the plain below. Meanwhile it gave the inestimable advantage of a single line of operations combined with a double line of supplies, by means of the two railroads running, the one north-west to Nashville, the other due west to Memphis.

The mishap of Bragg at Chattanooga had completed the disappointment and chagrin of that officer at his ill-starred western campaign. With the fact of his misfortunes only too palpable, their precise cause was still somewhat involved in mystery, it now appearing to be his own errors, now the misconduct of subordinates, now the weakness of his force, and

sometimes even a fatality which followed the Confederate cause in that region, whose influence it was hopeless to throw off. Mortified and annoyed, he withdrew to Richmond, and his superior, General J. E. Johnston, took the bâton of command into his own hands. He found himself in possession, at Dalton, of 45,000 effective men-40,900 infantry and artillery, and 4000 cavalry: while several thousand cavalry were ready to be recalled, which meanwhile were prying hither and thither, through Georgia and Alabama, to see if some careless avenue had not escaped the watchful Sherman along his wide flanks, at which entering, they might get upon his enormously attenuated lines of supply. Some other reinforcements were collecting, to be poured into the gaps made by battle. These, therefore, and certain indefinite masses of possible Georgia militia, which, thanks to the impracticable intensity of States' Rights authority, had to be left to come to the field at the call of their own delicate fancy, constituted his army. The whole fortune with which it started on its new career consisted of a testamentary bequest of numerous disasters. To what rôle Johnston was now limited by the evolution of past events, it was easy to see; for his foe, in all a hundred thousand strong, lay intrenched with his main army at the apex of the grand strategic triangle before him, and covering armies drawn a little distance down on either side of the salient. One flank of this Union position was ribbed and ridged with the natural barriers of a great mountain system, the other by a broad river, studded with garrisons at the crossing-points. Of necessity content to protect what remained, rather than to idly attempt regaining what was lost, Johnston fortified himself strongly in and around Dalton, the first position of importance south of the Union advanced lines, now at Ringgold, in front of Chattanooga. But the restless government at Richmond, stung into petulance by past defeat in the West, and half impressed by the fate which seemed inevitably to cloud that horizon, resolved to shake off the spell of