This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [221]
Sherman sent Thomas and Schofield and their men — roughly two thirds of his entire force — up to the slopes, and there was a deal of skirmishing and sparring for a day or so while the Westerners tapped the Confederate defenses to see if they were as strong as they looked. Sherman himself had no taste for butting his army’s head against field fortifications; he wrote that this Buzzard’s Roost place was a “terrible door of death” and he sent curly-bearded McPherson and the Army of the Tennessee off to the right in a swift, wide flanking movement. McPherson got his men, after a day or so, far beyond Johnston’s flank and came through Snake Creek Gap toward the town of Resaca, ten miles to the south of Dalton; it was on the railroad, and if McPherson could seize it Johnston’s men could be driven off into the mountainous country to the east and annihilated at leisure.
McPherson could not quite make it. A cordon of Confederate troops held Resaca, McPherson felt there were too many of them to push out of the way easily, and although Sherman, when he learned that his advance guard had reached the edge of the town, hammered the table and exulted, “I’ve got Joe Johnston dead!” things did not work out as he had planned. McPherson’s men were delayed, Johnston got the rest of his army down there on the double, and after a couple of days of fighting, the flanking advance was resumed.3
Sherman was not duplicating Grant’s program in Virginia. Grant was driving in to fight wherever and whenever a fight could be had; Sherman wanted to maneuver rather than to fight, and when Johnston developed an uncanny ability to block the road with fieldworks Sherman refused to assault them and cast about instead for ways to go around them. In the Army of the Tennessee he had the perfect instrument. It had been his own army; men said that for at least two years it had never had either a brigade or divisional drill, and its soldiers had seen enough of war to place a high value on the art of self-preservation. The men refused to let the wagons carry their spades; they insisted on lugging these tools themselves, and when they came in contact with the enemy their first impulse was to dig trenches in which they could escape enemy bullets. They could size up Confederate defensive works at a glance, and if the works looked too strong they simply did not believe in attacking them — unless they could use their spades and burrow their way forward in security. But they could march, and when a long hike would save their necks they would willingly hike until their legs were ready to fall off.4 So Sherman used them as his flankers. When he found Johnston’s army in his front — as he invariably did: Johnston had a sixth sense for determining where the Yankees were going to show up next — Sherman would put Thomas’s tough veterans in line and open a hot skirmish-line fire and send McPherson’s boys off on a wide swing around the Confederate flank.
Every day the armies were in contact. Every day there were firing and casualties and the wearing labor of digging trenches and rifle pits under the hot southern sun. But every day, too, Sherman would be trying to get around his enemy and reach some place where the Confederates could be caught off balance and compelled to fight in the open, and the Army of the Tennessee marched many miles and lashed out constantly toward the Confederate rear, avoiding head-on attacks like those of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.
Johnston side-stepped and retreated to meet these threats, and the two armies went down through northern Georgia in a series of movements that