This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [234]
Eight days after it had left Atlanta the army reached Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia, and one man recorded that “the army had lived high on the products of Georgia and were growing fatter and stronger every day.” Perhaps unnecessarily, he added that “they had come to look on the trip as a grand picnic, and were not getting tired but more anxious to prolong it if anything.” An Ohioan who had joined in much of the foraging saw a justification for it and wrote exultantly: “There is no haggling over prices or terms and no time wasted in coming to an understanding between the planter and a line of bayonets. He silently and with great show of dignity watches the fruits of his slaves’ labor leaving the plantation to supply his enemy. He has sown the seeds of treason that have ripened into supplies to meet the demands of this enemy, and all he can do is to grin and bear it.”7
Near Milledgeville the army had a brush with a few thousand Georgia militia, stiffened by a little regular cavalry. A brigade from the XV Corps routed the militia with practiced ease, and when the men crossed the field after their enemies had fled they saw with horror that they had been fighting against old men and young boys. One Federal wrote feelingly that “I was never so affected at the sight of dead and wounded before,” and asserted: “I hope we will never have to shoot at such men again. They knew nothing at all about fighting and I think their officers knew as little.”8
Plantations were looted outright; men who had set out to take no more than hams and chickens began carrying away heirlooms, silver, watches — anything that struck their fancy. Here and there southern patriots felled trees to obstruct roads, or burned bridges; there was never enough of this to delay the army seriously, but there was just enough to provoke reprisals, and barns and houses went up in smoke as a result. A general remarked that “as the habit of measuring right by might goes on, pillage becomes wanton and arson is committed to cover the pillage.” An Illinois soldier confessed that “it could not be expected that among so many tens of thousands there would be no rogues,” and another man from the same state burst out: “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”9
Day after day crowds of fugitive slaves fell in on the roads to follow the army. A “mammy” would show up, bundle on her head, baby in her arms, three small children at her heels; the soldiers would ask where she was going and she would say, “To Savannah, sah” — and officers, who were aware that the army’s destination was not known even to the Union rank and file, would wonder how she knew that that was where they were heading.10 Sherman did his utmost to keep these fugitives from following. It was ordered that the army’s progress was on no account to be obstructed or delayed by these hopeful contrabands, but there was no way to keep them from trailing after the soldiers if they chose, and many of them did choose. What became of most of them, no one ever knew. Thousands of Negroes, it was thought, followed the army for a few days and then vanished, going off no one knew where, uprooted persons wholly adrift in a strange and disordered world. In the end, thousands of them did reach the seacoast with the army, but they were only a fraction of the blind, desperate throng that followed for a time and then spun off into unremembered darkness.
They had no historian and they left no records, and the soldiers were by turns amused and bored by them; but as they moved — blindly, hopefully, doomed, going