This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [224]
He had not picked the best man to strike. Thomas was as good a defensive fighter as America ever produced, and although the attack caught him at a disadvantage he refused to let the fact bother him. He had sent his leading corps across the creek and had it in position on a hill overlooking Atlanta, when Hood’s men came out and opened a smashing assault, coming around both ends of the advanced line and getting in behind it. But Thomas led two batteries over the creek, prodding the horses to a gallop with the point of his sword — he was not being “Old Slow Trot” today — and his guns broke the Confederate assault waves and drove them back, other troops came up, and at the end of the day Hood’s first massive counterstroke had definitely been a failure. Thomas remarked once that he believed he could whip the Confederates here in front of Atlanta with his own Army of the Cumberland alone, without help from McPherson or Schofield. This battle of Peachtree Creek seems to have confirmed him in this belief.8
But Hood had unlimited energy. If he could not blast Pap Thomas off the ground above Peachtree Creek he would try something else; and as Sherman drew his net in around Atlanta, Hood saw an opening and struck again, with concentrated fury.
While Thomas was crossing Peachtree Creek, McPherson had taken his Army of the Tennessee off to the east. He occupied the town of Decatur, five miles east of Atlanta, and then he moved toward the city; and as he moved — somewhat incautiously, perhaps, in the belief that Thomas was giving the Confederates all they could handle — he exposed his southern flank, and Hood hit him there on July 22, slashing vigorously with his shock troops, striking a blow that might crumple the whole Union left and compel the invaders to draw back north of the Chattahoochee.
McPherson was one of the attractive men in the Union army. He was young and brilliant; had been an honor man at West Point, was loved by Sherman as that grim soldier might have loved a gifted younger brother, and he wore a trim curly beard and had dancing lights of laughter in the corners of his eyes. He was thought to be somewhat Puritanical — he had said once that if to be a soldier a man had to forget the claims of humanity, “then I do not want to be a soldier” — yet he was full of life and bounce, and in captured Vicksburg he and brother officers had strolled through the streets in the evening, serenading southern belles with sentimental vocalizing after the camps were still.… What had they sung? “Juanita,” perhaps?
Far o’er the mountain
Breaks the day too soon.…
It does not matter much. McPherson was engaged to Miss Emily Hoffman of Baltimore, and he had planned to take leave in the winter of 1864 and go north and marry her. But the winter became very busy, and after Grant was summoned east and there were promotions all along the line Sherman had called McPherson in and had told him he could not have leave just now; McPherson was an army commander, the army had to be made ready for hard fighting, and his leave would have to wait until fall, or until next winter, or until some other time. McPherson had acquiesced, and he was still a bachelor; and now, late in July, he was bringing his army in on Atlanta from the east while Thomas’s men buried the dead in front of Peachtree Creek, and Hood caught his formations off guard and was threatening to inflict a ruinous defeat.
McPherson was at lunch when the news reached him. He got his horse and galloped off to the scene of action, and along the way advancing Confederate skirmishers had found a gap in the Union lines and were pushing through for the rear. McPherson ran into some of them, wheeled to retreat, and was shot dead from the saddle; and farther on his leading division repulsed a frontal attack just in time to turn around and meet an attack that was coming