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By Root 1903 0

were almost formalized, like some highly intricate and deadly dance. Johnston could never quite make a permanent stand, Sherman could never quite force a decision, and slowly but steadily the tide of war went on south toward Atlanta, while both governments began to worry. It seemed in Washington that Sherman was not really getting anywhere; Johnston was too elusive, every move Sherman made was countered by a skillful southern move, and although Sherman’s men were getting farther and farther into Georgia they did not seem to be able to win any real victories. In Richmond, on the other hand, there began to be complaints that Johnston could manage a retreat with the utmost skill but that he could not really fight. In Virginia, Lee was killing Union soldiers by wholesale; in Georgia, Johnston was never making a real stand-up fight, and he was getting backed up closer and closer to Atlanta, which the Confederacy could not afford to lose.

The Union soldiers themselves had mixed feelings. In early June an officer in the Army of the Tennessee wrote that he never saw soldiers in better spirits; they trusted Sherman implicitly, and “if we get to Atlanta in a week, all right; if it takes two months you won’t hear this army grumbling.” Yet the marches were hard, men were too busy to do much foraging — and as a result had to live on hardtack and bacon, so that some of them began to come down with scurvy and the rear areas were full of “black-mouthed, loose-toothed fellows” hankering for fresh food and a little rest.5 For three weeks there were heavy rains and the roads turned into quagmires; in open country men and vehicles left the highway and plodded through the wet fields, so that after they had passed it was impossible to tell where the road itself had been — everything was plowed up, trodden down, and turned into a general all-inclusive slough.

The armies moved south through places like Adairsville and Cassville and Allatoona, where Sherman again swung wide in a flanking maneuver and had a hard three-day fight at a country hamlet known as New Hope Church. Then Johnston pulled back to a prepared position on Kenesaw Mountain, and Sherman seems to have got wind of the fact that his men were complaining that there was too much marching going on. He decided, after an extended stalemate, that this time they would make a frontal assault.

The assault was made on June 27, with picked divisions driving up the mountainside toward an open plateau and a little peach orchard, and it was a flat failure. Secure in deep trenches, with head logs running along the parapet and defending infantry snug behind impenetrable defenses, the Confederates blew the assault column all to bits, inflicting a loss of three thousand and suffering hardly any loss themselves; and Pap Thomas, whose men had paid for most of this venture, looked the situation over and remarked to Sherman that “one or two more such assaults would use up this army.”

Sherman himself had something to say about this, as it happened. He seems to have felt that Thomas, with his care to save the lives of his men, was being a little too cautious. To Grant, just at this time, he wrote a complaint: “My chief worry is with the Army of the Cumberland, which is dreadfully slow. A fresh furrow in a plowed field will stop the whole column, and all begin to entrench.”6 But if this feeling existed, he would bow to it. There was no way to get over Kenesaw Mountain — not with all of these armed Southerners waiting there in snug rifle pits with loaded rifles in their hands — and after a few days Sherman began the old flanking maneuvers all over again, swinging out in a wide arc, driving his troops in on Johnston’s flank and rear, and ultimately — without another real battle — forcing his antagonist to leave his impregnable lines and come down in the open country to go on with the dance. Nothing at all had been gained at Kenesaw Mountain, except that the Episcopal bishop who served the Confederacy as an army corps commander, General Leonidas Polk, was killed by a cannon ball during the fighting in that