This Hallowed Ground (68 page)

The first one struck Fort Fisher, a sprawling sand-dune fortification at the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. Upstream a few miles was Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last seaport. Here, and here only, the blockade-runners could slip in from the mist with the cargoes without which the Confederacy could not live. The sullen guns that looked out of the mounded embrasures would keep pursuing cruisers at a distance, and while Fort Fisher stood the South still touched the outside world — still existed, that is, as a potential member of the community of nations rather than as an isolated area in which there was a smoldering revolt to be suppressed. Just before Christmas in 1864 the Federal government had moved in to smash Fort Fisher.

Unfortunately the job was entrusted to Ben Butler, who was not up to smashing anything. He had the assistance of a first-class fleet under Admiral David Porter — brought east from the Mississippi and Red River valleys for a job that seemed to need the attention of a top-flight fighting man — but even the help of the United States Navy could not make a successful soldier out of Butler. Butler filled a ship with powder, sent it in under the walls of Fort Fisher, and exploded it, fancying that the blast would level the fort and make the work of his troops easy. The explosion took place on schedule, but it had so little effect on the fort that the Confederates merely assumed that a Yankee boiler had blown up. Butler got troops ashore, considered taking the place by storm, then changed his mind, re-embarked his soldiers, and sailed back to Hampton Roads, reporting that the fort was too strong to be taken.

Butler had tried his luck one notch too far. He was a strange and devious character, a one-time Democrat who possessed much political influence and whom it had always been necessary to treat with extreme consideration. But the Lincoln administration had just won a presidential election and it was clearly winning the war as well, and suddenly both Grant and Lincoln realized that Butler was no longer an untouchable. Admiral Porter, good friend of Grant since the Vicksburg campaign, wrote the lieutenant general that Fort Fisher would fall when
ever the army cared to send a competent general down to attend to the job. Butler went back to Massachusetts, a general without an army; a new amphibious expedition was mounted, the army gave Butler’s old command to tough Major General Alfred H. Terry — and on January 15, after a prodigious bombardment by the fleet and a smart charge by the sailors and the infantry, Fort Fisher was captured. The South had lost its last seaport. The dwindling armies which were the Confederacy’s only hold on life would get no more equipment than that which the South itself could provide, and the South’s own resources were coming down close to the vanishing point. In Tennessee youthful General Wilson was putting together a vast mounted army — twelve thousand, five hundred men, all armed with repeating carbines, trained to fight on foot, using their horses only as means of getting from place to place swiftly … true mechanized infantry, in the modern sense, except that their means of locomotion consumed hay and grain rather than gasoline. It would be two months before this mounted army was ready to move, but by spring it would go plunging down into Alabama to break up anything it found that had not already collapsed, and there was no conceivable way in which it could be headed off.

And in Savannah, General Sherman was starting north with his sixty thousand veterans, heading for nothing less than Richmond itself.

The men would make a tough campaign. They had long since come to look on themselves as the appointed agents through which the country would take vengeance on those who had tried to destroy it. To a man, they felt that South Carolina, above all other places, was the spot where vengeance was most called for. (This idea was not unknown, even in the South; many of Sherman’s men, despoiling a Georgia town or plantation, had heard their victims express the hope that when they got to South Carolina they would give the people there a full measure of what they were giving Georgia.) Until now these soldiers had performed the act of devastation casually, without animus; in South Carolina they would act with genuine venom. They could march anywhere, over any ground and in any weather; they believed that they could whip any enemies they would ever meet — a belief that had especial justification in the fact that they were certain to meet no enemy whom they did not greatly outnumber — and the rowdy spirit that lies near the surface all across America never found a more complete fulfillment than it found in them. They would go through South Carolina, if General Sherman led them there, like the wrath of an outraged God.

General Sherman would lead them there. This lean, red-bearded, passionate general had come to see himself as an instrument of justice. He could justify brutality in terms of morality; he had a clouded but authentic vision of what America someday would be, and he saw himself and his
army as the instruments by which punishment would descend on the unfaithful. An army surgeon who had seen much of him in Savannah wrote that Sherman “differs from most men by being more plain. He dresses plainly, talks plainly, fights plainly, and reaches results so plainly that after they are reached they look as simple as setting an egg on end, which all could do after seeing Columbus do it.” What Sherman saw now — saw with terrible clarity, saw it as the private soldiers in his army saw it — was that to break everything loose in South Carolina was to crush the Confederacy’s last hope to fragments. He led his army north from Savannah shortly after the first of the new year with “the settled determination of each individual to let the people know there was war in the land.”
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This was not the picnic hike that had prevailed in Georgia. To go north across the lowlands, Sherman had to cross a flat swampy country crossed by many rivers, most of which were in flood. Joe Johnston, that canny little soldier who was at last being restored to command (now that there was nothing much for a Confederate to command, now that the last hope was evaporating like the mist from damp fields under the morning sun), believed that no army could cross this land in winter with any success. From afar Johnston watched Sherman’s progress, unbelieving; and when he saw Sherman’s army bridging rivers, building roads across swamps, and wading through flooded backwaters, making just as much time as it had made on the dry roads of Georgia, he wrote that “I made up my mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.”
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Johnston was right, in a way. This was not actually an army: it was just a collection of western pioneers on the march — men with axes who could cut down a forest and corduroy a road without breaking step, men who would flounder for miles through floodwaters armpit-deep, making nothing of it except for casual high-private remarks to the effect that “Uncle Billy seems to have struck this river end-ways.” They plowed across the bottom lands as if they were on parade; they built bridges, cut roads, marched in ice-cold water as if they were on dry ground, casually burned towns and looted plantations and set fire to pine forests just for the fun of seeing the big trees burn — and came up north, mile after endless mile, carrying the future on their shoulders without realizing it laughing and frolicking and making a devastation to mark their passage, An Indiana soldier remarked that the men set fire to so much that “some days the sun was almost entirely obscured by the smoke of the consuming buildings, cotton gins, etc.” When deep mud bogged down everything that went on wheels, whole regiments were detailed to take hold of drag ropes and haul wagons and guns out of the mire. It was said that when a staff officer complimented one such detail for its effective work a corporal
spoke up in reply: “Yes, we got the mules and wagons out, but we lost a driver and a damn good whip down in that hole.”
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Mile by mile the army moved north. Every evening the mounted foragers would come in to camp, trailed by hundreds of wagons, buggies, and carriages which they had seized at different plantations and had loaded with foodstuffs; in the morning, when the army moved on, these would be set on fire and abandoned, symbols of the offhand hatred which the rank and file nourished for the state where secession had been born. Going through the town of McPhersonville, Ohio soldiers realized that every house in the place was burning, reflected that “this state was largely responsible for the rebellion,” and thoughtfully noted: “Our line of march throughout this state was marked by smoke in the day and the glare of fire by night.” All along this line of march few buildings escaped the flames; one soldier commented dryly that “where a family remains at home they save their house but lose their stock and eatables.” Another Ohioan remarked that “our men had the idea that South Carolina was the cause of all our troubles” and felt that the state itself was hardly worth the effort it took to conquer it: “The soil was sandy and poor. The houses used for habitation were small and built of logs, rough split staves were used for shingles, wooden pegs for nails, there were no doors, neither sash nor glass in the windows, and there were no plastered inside walls.” An Illinois soldier estimated that perhaps one house in ten escaped destruction, and noted exultantly: “The rich were put in the cabins of the Negroes; their cattle and corn were used for rations, their fences for corduroy and camp fires, and their barns and cotton gins for bonfires. It seemed to be decreed that South Carolina, having sown the wind, should reap the whirlwind.”
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There were Negroes in South Carolina, as elsewhere in the South, and here as always the northern soldiers felt that the man with a dark skin was their friend. A Wisconsin soldier drew a moral from the slaves’ attitude and wrote: “Their mute countenances in South Carolina were the best arguments in favor of abolition. If this war is a great drama, the slave in the scene has been the star actor and has acted his part well. The volunteer army, so far as I know, are all abolitionists. Men whom the arguments of Phillips, Sumner and Beecher hardened into pro-slavery advocates, by the simple protestations and silent evidences of the cruelty of slavery of the poor demented negroes have been made practical abolitionists.… The slaves have furnished us with information of the movements of the enemy, of the roads, of the treatment accorded our men as prisoners. They furnished our men food, shelter, clothing, and piloted escaped prisoners to our lines, all at the risk of their lives.”
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Men in camp at night would watch foragers come in with vast loads of food and forage, which, they agreed, was evidence that “something
besides hell could be raised in South Carolina”; and they added that “from the numerous conflagrations along the way, that much-talked-of place might be supposed to have its location here.” Passing through the town of Barnwell, which the cavalry had set on fire — the troopers jested that the name of the place should be changed to Burnwell — the infantry tramped past one blazing house whose despairing owner was trying frantically and ineffectively to check the blaze. A private innocently called out to ask him how on earth his house had ever caught fire.
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All across the state the army collected much more in the way of food and forage than it could possibly use. When it broke camp in the morning, officers would order the surplus to be piled up so that it could be brought along later by wagon; doubting that any of it would ever be seen again, the skeptical privates would stuff all they could carry in their haversacks. It was generally understood that the piles of surplus were simply abandoned purposely so that the Negroes and poor whites could have something to eat. Clouds of smoke hung over the line of march every day, and one soldier recalled: “In our march through South Carolina every man seemed to think that he had a free hand to burn any kind of property he could put the torch to. South Carolina paid the dearest penalty of any state in the Confederacy, considering the short time the Union army was in the state; and it was well that she should, for if South Carolina had not been so persistent in going to war, there would have been no war for years to come.”
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Almost unnoticed, Charleston fell. Sherman’s men did not go near it. They simply marched across all of its lines of communications, knifing them so that the storied city dropped into Yankee hands like a ripe peach falling from a tree; the Confederate defenders left the place and the army and navy people who had tried so long to break a way in entered unopposed. (In Washington the War Department made plans for a great ceremony, to hoist the flag over what remained of Fort Sumter on the fourth anniversary of the day the fort had been surrendered to Beauregard. Invalided Robert Anderson, a major general now, would be on hand for the occasion.) Meanwhile Sherman’s army came tramping up to Columbia, capital of the state.

Columbia got the full fury of the storm. Confederate cavalry held the place, made just enough resistance to force the Federals to prepare for a regular assault, and then left. Union troops marched in. Here and there little fires started. A great wind came up, the fires spread — and presently most of Columbia was on fire in a senseless, meaningless conflagration that brought the final measure of ruin and despair to the Palmetto State, which had led the South out of the Union.

Concerning the origin of this fire there is still great argument. Sherman held that retreating Confederate cavalry had set fire to baled cotton and
that this had caused the great fire; Confederates retorted furiously that Union troops had started the flames and that Columbia was burned wantonly, for sport, by soldiers who had thrown off all restraint. An Illinois soldier denied that Unionists had caused the fire, but he wrote that the soldiers “smiled and felt glad in their hearts” to see the city burning, and another man from the same state confessed that his whole division was drunk and added: “I think the city should be burned out, but would like to see it done decently.” Wisconsin soldiers went whooping and yelling past blazing buildings, shouting: “This is the nest where the first secession egg was hatched — let her burn!” An Iowan felt that most of the trouble came because the soldiers looted stores and saloons and got drunk, and wrote sorrowfully that “the splendid discipline so rigidly maintained throughout the rank and file of the army, which had preserved the city and protected the people of Savannah … was viciously and recklessly destroyed at Columbia.” He insisted that the fires were not started by the troops who first marched into the city but were the work of individuals and groups from other contingents who had simply wandered in to have fun, and he left a picture of it: “Straggling soldiers, singly and in squads, from the adjacent camps continued to congregate in town, where all joined indiscriminately in the general confusion, wanton plunder and pillage of the stricken city and helpless people. The scene as witnessed at sundown beggared description, for men, women and children, white and black, soldiers and citizens, many of whom were crazed with drink, were all rushing frantically and aimlessly through the streets, shouting and yelling like mad people. The efforts of Colonel Stone and his Iowa brigade as provost guards in the city to preserve order and protect persons and property seemed to be entirely futile.”
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