This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [247]
The army stayed in Columbia’s ruins for two days and then marched on. The country was swampy and the winter rains had been falling steadily — though not steadily enough to save Columbia — and more than half of the time the soldiers had to corduroy the roads so that the wagons and artillery could move. They met little opposition. General Johnston commanded such troops as the Confederacy had been able to get together — a remnant from the broken army Hood had brought back from Tennessee, the men Hardee had pulled out of Savannah, and a scattering of other levies — but he was too weak by far to meet Sherman in open combat, and to Lee he wrote despairingly: “I can do no more than annoy him.” To make things even more one-sided, Sherman was marching now toward strong reinforcements. General Schofield had brought troops east from Tennessee, had taken Wilmington, and was marching toward Goldsboro, North Carolina, to join hands with Sherman.
On March 7 Sherman’s army crossed over into North Carolina. An immediate change in behavior took place. Sherman ordered his officers to “deal as moderately and fairly by North Carolinians as possible,” and the soldiers were informed that there would be no more burning of property; anyone caught starting a fire would be shot forthwith. But when they marched through the turpentine forests, the stragglers who continued to fringe the moving army set fire to the congealed resin in notches on the trees, and for mile after mile the army moved under a pall of odorous pine smoke. An officer wrote that the flames in the forest aisles “looked like a fire in a cathedral,” and one soldier remembered “the endless blue columns swaying with the long swinging step,” and said that above the crackle of the flames could be heard the massed singing of “John Brown’s Body.” When Fayetteville was reached, a Confederate arsenal and machine shop were burned, but nothing else was destroyed. The men apparently had exhausted their fury in South Carolina. They felt that this state was different, and even the bummers were more or less restrained.11
Nearing Goldsboro, the army began to run into resistance. There was a sharp little fight at Averysboro, and on March 19 Johnston moved in and struck the exposed left wing of the army, under Slocum, at Bentonville. But Johnston just was not strong enough to win a victory, even when he hit only half of Sherman’s army. Sherman sent in reinforcements, Johnston was driven off, and on March 23 Sherman marched into Goldsboro and joined Schofield. Thus reinforced, Sherman now commanded eighty thousand veterans, men as cocky and as sure of themselves as any Americans who ever marched. Johnston could be an annoyance but nothing more. This army could go wherever it wanted to go, and the Confederacy was powerless to stop it.
At Goldsboro the soldiers learned that the old days were over. Foraging parties were ordered to give up their horses, and the bummers and stragglers were quietly warned that they had better rejoin their own regiments and be good. With its own supply line established, the army would no longer support itself by living on the country. It was in North Carolina now, and in a matter of weeks it would rub elbows with the better-behaved Army of the Potomac, and everyone now would mind his manners. The protracted Halloween spree had come to an end. There would be no more fires.
Trailing back behind the