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General Lee's new position of general in chief of all Confederate armies became official 150 years ago today. His first action in this capacity was to address the most severe and immediate problem he was facing, the dwindling number of men in grey uniforms. Lee's idea was to promise a pardon to all deserters who reported back to their proper units by March 10th.
Though he no longer needed to do so, the ever diplomatic Lee first consulted President Davis and gained his approval for the plan.
It would not help much. A much bigger factor was that General Sherman's invasion of the Carolinas was now underway. When Sherman was marching through Georgia, it had been Georgia soldiers slipping away from the army to go home and try and protect their families. Now Carolina soldiers were experiencing the same conflict of duty, and behaving very much like the Georgians had done.
Also on this day, a Union army under General Schofield advanced from Fort Fisher with the goal of capturing Wilmington. The plan was to use it as a supply base for General Sherman's troops when they got that far north, as well as a means for feeding reinforcements to him by sea. These troops would inflate Sherman's advantage over his opponents from three to one to four to one.
A minor victory marked an otherwise rapidly deteriorating situation for the South 150 years ago today.
General Sherman's forces had accomplished exactly what had been planned. By marching one wing toward Augusta, Georgia, and one toward Charleston, the rebels had remained in the dark concerning Sherman's actual intentions. Thus they were compelled to keep their already badly outnumbered defenders, divided, attempting to protect both locations.
Ranging out in front of Sherman's army had been General Kilpatrick and his cavalry. Kilpatrick had made no secret of his love for what he was doing and his absence of guilt when it came to destruction. After burning the town of Barnwell, he had written to Sherman that the town's name could now be changed to "Burnwell." He had been publicly boastful in his promises of ruin for the South, stating:
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“In after years when travelers passing through South Carolina shall see chimney stacks without houses, and the country desolate, and shall ask who did this? Some Yankee will answer: Kilpatrick’s Cavalry!”
On this date Kilpatrick's troopers were advancing on the town of Aiken, near Augusta. The population had largely fled, fearing the threats Kilpatrick had made. Standing in between Aiken and the Yankees was General Wheeler and his cavalry, the same force which had so frequently clashed with Kilpatrick in Georgia. Forming his men into a V shape, Wheeler lured the hyper aggressive Kilpatrick into an ambush outside Aiken and Kilpatrick blindly charged into it. Blasted by flanking fire, the Federals were eventually routed and forced to fall back to their camp from the previous evening. Aiken was saved.
The casualties associated with this battle depend upon which source you select. Wheeler claimed to have killed 53 Union cavalrymen, wounded 270 and captured 172, all while suffering just 50 casualties to his force. Kilpatrick reported that he killed 31 rebels, wounded 160, and captured 60, all while losing just 50 of his own men. Obviously someone is lying in this deal, probably both generals.
It was a morale booster for the Confederates to win something, even a small scale action such as this, but that Aiken was spared had no impact on the overall situation. Sherman's march continued unchecked.
Though not of strategic consequence, the locals make a big deal of the battle and stage an annual reenactment. I found an eight minute documentary of them doing it if you are interested.
150 years ago today General Sherman's army emerged from the swampy lowlands it had been crossing and arrived outside of the capitol of South Carolina. He faced no organized opposition, his feints toward Augusta and Charleston having successfully kept the rebel defenders divided and confused. The day before Sherman had abandoned his pretense and both wings had swung toward Columbia.
Normally a town of 8000 residents, Columbia had swollen to 20,000 in recent months. The increase was a product of refugees fleeing in the path of Sherman's destructive advance. The previous day had been foggy, and it was on the morning of the 16th when the Federals got their first look at their target, Sherman among the observers. In his memoirs he wrote:
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Riding down to the river-bank, I saw the wreck of the large bridge which had been burned by the enemy, with its many stone piers still standing, but the superstructure gone. Across the Congaree River lay the city of Columbia, in plain, easy view. I could see the unfinished State-House, a handsome granite structure, and the ruins of the railroad depot, which were still smouldering. Occasionally a few citizens or cavalry could be seen running across the streets, and quite a number of Negroes were busy carrying off bags of grain or meal.
Riding along his lines Sherman came upon a battery which had opened fire on the city, causing citizens to race about in a panic. Sherman halted the unaimed fire and redirected it to specific targets. He had shells dropped near the crowd of slaves who were carrying off the supplies, dispersing them and ending their labor. He also gave permission for his gunners to take a half dozen shots at the statehouse, a not quite finished structure from which the rebel flag waved.
Both General Beauregard and General Hampton were in the city at this time, but with nothing but a handful of cavalry under their immediate command, they had no means for a defense. What Confederate forces there were, abandoned the city in the mid afternoon. At the same time, in Charleston, General Hardee was recognizing that the fall of Columbia meant that the city he was defending would be cut off from communications with the rest of the rebel forces in the state. Sherman would be in between Hardee and any other troops, so to avoid losing his army, Hardee ordered the abandonment of Charleston.
That city, which had withstood a two year siege from the sea by vastly superior forces, and had not yielded, now would be lost to the South.
Sherman's forces would move into Columbia the next day, and another moral controversy would be the result.
With the opposition having fled, 150 years ago today General Sherman's army entered and occupied Columbia, the sixth Confederate state capitol to be captured by the Federals.
Among the town's white population, there were a handful of loyalists and Union sympathizers who welcomed them, but most were sullen and worried about what was to happen. For the blacks of the city, it was "The day of Jubilo" as they swarmed the Yankee soldiers, most wanting to get a look at their deliverer, Sherman. They pressed around him everywhere he went, touching his leg, touching his horse, trying to give him flowers or a drink of something, be it water, lemonade or liquor.
There were already fires burning in multiple locations, set by the retiring rebels to deny Sherman the bales of cotton left behind. Sherman's orders were for his men to extinguish the fires, and then he personally consulted with the mayor concerning the adequacy of the town's fire fighting equipment and men. He was told that they were in good order.
Sherman made his headquarters in the deserted home of a printer and issued orders to his troops that all military property was to be seized or destroyed, but private property was to be respected. As it had been in Georgia and on the approach to Columbia, the order was inconsistently enforced. Many of the Federal soldiers had already found booze and were drunk by mid afternoon. As evening approached, fires began to reappear and rapidly spread. By evening the city was lit by a red/orange glow, the fires having been spread by high winds.
At 11 pm, Sherman emerged from his headquarters and observed the blazing buildings. He saw his own men assisting in trying to put out the inferno and ordered more to join with them. Still, the fires burned throughout the night and a total of 40 city blocks, two thirds of the town, were ultimately consumed before control was established.
Both sides blamed the other for starting the fires and it is still being argued 150 years later. While it is clear that Sherman did not order the burning, southerners claimed it was started by the drunken Yankees, insisting that they saw them racing about with torches, setting buildings alight with no effort to distinguish war contraband from private property. The Federal position was that the fires were started when the winds reanimated the smoldering cotton forces set by the rebels before they evacuated. They pointed out that Union soldiers seen in the areas of fires were working to put them out, not make them spread. Oddly, both southern and northern newspapers agreed that the inferno was deliberate. The northern press reported it incorrectly as Sherman's justified retaliation for having his troops fired upon in the surrendered city. The southern papers reported it incorrectly as Sherman's intentional barbarity.
Deliberate or accidental, Yank or rebel in origin, the flames destroyed the heart of the city and it took decades to restore it to what it had been before the war.
On this same day General Hardee marched his force out of Charleston and headed NW. Forty six months after Major Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter to General Beauregard, it, or what was left of it, once more sported the Stars and Stripes from its flagpole.
As the fires which General Sherman had not authorized were still burning themselves out in Columbia 150 years ago today, new fires, these ordered by the Federal commander, were being set. The 40 block inferno which had wiped out two thirds of the town's structures, had not discriminated between military and private property. Now those assets deemed military contraband, the railroad and its supporting buildings, the metal foundry, storehouses, machine shops and all other structures viewed as useful to sustaining a martial effort, were put to the torch or wrecked by other means.
To the north, General Schofield's army took Fort Anderson on the Cape Fear River under siege today, the commencement of the movement against Wilmington. The bombardment was opened by Federal naval units which were free to steam upriver after the fall of Fort Fisher.
And a bit further to the north, the Confederate Congress was debating a bill to authorize the enlistment of slaves in the rebel army. The cause received a boost from a critical source today when General Robert E. Lee officially endorsed the measure in the hope of finding men to replenish the shrinking Confederate forces.
Having completed the intentional and unintentional destruction of South Carolina's capitol, 150 years ago today general Sherman's army was once more on the march. Their ultimate target, known only to Sherman and Generals Grant and Halleck, was Goldsboro, North Carolina. That would place an army squarely upon General Lee's last remaining supply line, forcing him to come out of his trenches and give up Richmond.
Joining the march were two liberated Union POWs who had recently been shipped from the now closed Andersonville prison. They had been confined along with 980 others inside the walls of the town's insane asylum, sheltered from the elements by whatever crude huts they could construct. The guards deliberately lied to them concerning Sherman's movements, telling them that the Union army had been defeated and driven away. A slave who worked in the asylum's kitchen risked punishment by keeping the men informed of the actual events.
Among the prisoners was Adjudant S.H.M. Byers who had been a captive for a bit more than a year. Upon learning that Sherman had reached and captured Savannah in December, he was inspired to write a poem. The prison glee club set "Sherman's March To the Sea" to music. It began:
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OUR camp-fires shone bright on the mountains
That frowned on the river below,
While we stood by our guns in the morning
And eagerly watched for the foe,
When a rider came out of the darkness
That hung over the mountain and tree,
And shouted, “Boys, up and be ready!
For Sherman will march to the sea.”
and closed with:
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Oh! proud was our army that morning,
That stood where the pine darkly towers,
When Sherman said: “Boys, you are weary;
This day fair Savannah is ours!”
Then sang we a song for our chieftain,
That echoed o’er river and lea,
And the stars in our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea.
The song was smuggled out of the prison by an exchanged New Yorker who took it home and sold it to a music publisher who sold more than a million copies. Its popularity spread back to Sherman's troops as they marched through South Carolina, and they adopted it as their official campaign song.
As Sherman neared Columbia, the rebels began transferring the prisoners further north. Byers and one other cut a hole in the roof of the hospital, wiggled into the tiny crawl space available, and hid there until the Confederates guards were gone. They then emerged, lied their way through rebel pickets and were given shelter by Edward Edwards, a free black resident, until Sherman's troops arrived, singing Byers' song as they marched.
The last of the soldiers departed on the 20th, leaving behind a ruined city and a hatred of Sherman which would last for generations. As the final Federal soldiers took their leave, one Columbia housewife spotted her former house slave moving out with them, riding in a luxurious stolen carriage and wearing some of her former mistresses' best clothes.
The housewife ran out into the street and called "Aunt Sallie! Where are you going?"
That which would have been unthinkable in 1861, materialized 150 years ago today in 1865 due to the desperate nature of the Confederacy's war efforts. The Confederate House of Representatives passed a measure which authorized the use of slaves as soldiers. The late General Patrick Cleburne had been ostracized for suggesting such a thing the previous year. Congressman Robert Toombs of Georgia had famously said "If slaves make good soldiers, then our entire theory of slavery is wrong."
The unthinkable became reality when it was endorsed by the two most respected voices in the South, President Davis and General Lee. Both had insisted that any such measure must be accompanied by the promise of freedom for those who fought, otherwise the newly armed blacks would be too tempted to simply switch sides and fight instead for the nation which did pledge freedom as the reward.
The South was not quite ready for this step, the following day the rebel Senate would put the matter in Limbo by voting to postpone consideration of the bill.
Of course it was already too late, with or without the postponement. The Southern cause had only seven weeks of life left in it at this point, not enough time to raise, train and equip enough slave regiments to make any difference. The Senate would finally approve the measure in March, but the process of raising regiments of slaves had only just begun when the war ended. No slaves ever took up arms in combat under this law.
The guns of Admiral Porter's fleet had knocked out all twelve of the defending guns in Fort Anderson outside Wilmington, NC. A dummy US Monitor had been built out of painted wood and floated forward to lure the rebels into detonating their torpedoes prematurely, clearing the way for Porter's ships to approach. General Schofield's infantry had already cleared the flanks of the fort with a series of attacks, and a frontal attack on the outpost was launched simultaneous to General Hagood's (fort's commander) decision to evacuate the post. Arriving as the rebels were attempting to leave, the assault achieved easy success.
Schofield's 12,000 troops then began to spread to encircle the rest of General Bragg's force (about 6000 men) and Bragg recognized that his position was hopeless, ordering a retreat which began 150 years ago today and was completed overnight. The triumphant Federals would enter Wilmington on the morning of the 22nd. The fighting had cost Bragg 850 casualties to Schofield's total of just over 300.
After Charleston had fallen, Wilmington had been the last major port in the Confederacy not to have been captured. It had already been rendered useless to the Confederacy by the Federal control of the waters outside of the Cape Fear River, and now it would be converted into an active port serving the Union.
General Sherman's army could be supplied by sea and Schofield's army absorbed back into Sherman's as the latter drew near. That would give the Union commander 80,000 troops, opposed by the ultimate fusion of Bragg and General Hardee's armies under Joseph Johnston, who styled the collective the Army of the South. When gathered, the Army of the South would still have fewer than 23,000 in their ranks, a blending of veterans from the Army of Tennessee with the still inexperienced militiamen from Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas.
Things took an ugly turn 150 years ago as threats and counter threats of murder were exchanged between General Sherman and General Wheeler.
Advancing north from Columbia, Sherman's troops continued their destructive march. On the 23rd there had been a rape and murder of a young white farm woman. Some of Wheeler's horsemen arrived not long after the deed had taken place and were informed that seven Yankee soldiers had invaded the home, violated and killed the daughter, and left the mother raving insanely.
Vowing revenge, Wheeler's troopers took to the saddle and after an afternoon's search, came upon a group of seven Federal cavalrymen. They were captured, had their throats slit, and were left in the road with a sign reading "These Were The Seven."
This came a day after news had reached General Kilpatrick that eighteen of his troopers had been caught and executed, with signs hung around their necks reading "Death To All Foragers."
Sherman was infuriated and wrote to Wheeler under a flag of truce, announcing that for every forager executed, the same number of randomly chosen rebel prisoners would be shot. Kilpatrick replied with equally inflammatory expressions of outrage over the idea and of course countered with the threat of killing a like number of Yankee prisoners.
As had happened when Presidents Lincoln and Davis were exchanging the same sorts of threats, everyone's bluff was called and nothing further came of it.
Meanwhile the march continued. Winnsboro, SC, 40 miles north of Columbia, lost all of its food supplies, farm animals and thirty private residences when fires from burning military supporting buildings were set and spread by the wind. The town's Episcopal Church was also destroyed in the fires.
All of this was clearly far outside the limits of the orders Sherman had issued regarding what was to be considered contraband and what was not. Sherman appears to have made no serious effort to stop it apart from seemingly random interventions here and there. In his memoirs, Sherman justified ignoring the excesses of his soldiers.
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Fighting is the least and easiest part of war, but no General ever was or will be successful who quarrels with his men, who takes the part of citizens against the petty irregularities, or who punishes them unduly for gathering fire wood, using wells and springs of water and even taking sheep, chickens and food when their regular supplies are insufficient.
The campaign which was to end with the final fighting in the Shenandoah Valley, began 150 years ago today. It was no longer of matter of strategic control, that had been decided in favor of the Union at Cedar Creek. The Valley no longer served as a source of supply for General Lee's army, nor could it be used as a rebel avenue of invasion to threaten Washington. What it could be used for was as a Federal avenue of invasion and General Grant decided to capitalize on this.
Most of the troops which had taken part in the decisive Cedar Creek battle had returned to their respective armies around Petersburg. What was left for the Confederacy was the defeated General Early and two undersized brigades, a token force of about 1600 men. The infantry from General Sheridan's Valley army were gone, but he still commanded 10,000 cavalry. General Grant sent orders for that force to advance south, destroying the Virginia Central Railroad as they went, as well as the James River canal. After capturing Lynchburg, they were to continue south, linking up with General Sherman's army in North Carolina.
Sheridan gave the active assignment to his cavalry chief, General Wesley Merritt, and at the spearpoint of the advance was General Custer's division. Waiting for Custer at a bridge across the Middle River near Mount Crawford, were 300 rebel riders commanded by Custer's former West Point roommate and frequent battlefield adversary, General Thomas Rosser. They would clash tomorrow, the opening of three day fight which would climax with the Battle of Waynesboro and the final eradication of Early's command.
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