Hidden History of Civil War Savannah by Michael L. Jordan

Author:Michael L. Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

6

THE BIG SKEDADDLE

The Confederate Evacuation of Savannah,

December 1864

The rebels kept up a bold front till 2 o’clock last night, when they ignominiously skedaddled like [the] thieves and scoundrels they are.

—Wesley De Haven, Sixteenth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment

When General William Tecumseh Sherman set out on his now-famous “March to the Sea,” leaving Atlanta on November 16, 1864, no one knew whether he would successfully reach his destination—or even what that destination was.250 Even as Confederate forces failed time and again to slow Sherman’s advance, the people of Savannah held out hope that their city would be spared. A Southern newspaper correspondent later wrote, “People were in the dark as to what was going on. They hoped we would be able to force Sherman to the coast, either to the right or to the left, and save the city.”251

But it would have been foolish to rely on hope alone, and Savannah’s Confederate commander, Major General William J. Hardee, known as “Old Reliable” for his previous battlefield successes and penchant for thorough training and preparation, began the difficult task of preparing Savannah for battle. The city boasted strong defenses against attack by sea or from nearby Fort Pulaski, which had fallen to Union forces in April 1862. Now Hardee was forced to create new defenses to protect against land attack from the west—the direction of Sherman’s approach.

Hardee began moving troops and cannons to the outskirts of Savannah on November 20.252 His engineers constructed a thirteen-mile-long line of earthen defensive works situated about two and a half miles west of the city. These consisted of dirt forts with cannon emplacements, rifle pits and trenches. Hardee also employed an ingeniously simple means of slowing the enemy: he made the land impassable. There were only five approaches into the city from the west, and Hardee obstructed all of them.253 He also broke dams and rice dikes, flooding the low ground with three to six feet of water.254 Hardee’s troops took their positions inside the fortifications and trenches on December 7—the day before Sherman’s army arrived.255 However, as Marine Lieutenant Henry L. Graves wrote to his mother, “We had splendid positions but not the men to hold them…where I was stationed there were not a hundred men where there ought for successful resistance, to have been at least five hundred.”256

Savannah’s Confederate garrison was badly outnumbered—and largely outclassed—by Sherman’s force. Sherman boasted more than sixty thousand battle-hardened veterans, while Hardee could muster only about ten thousand men, more than a third of whom were poorly trained reserves and state troops (derisively dismissed by Sherman as “a mongrel mass”). Furthermore, hundreds of Hardee’s soldiers were stationed at critical seafront fortifications protecting Savannah from attack by other Union forces and could not be spared to defend against Sherman. To help fill the gaps, Savannah mayor Richard D. Arnold ordered all able-bodied men in the city to report for duty with the army, declaring, “The time has come when every male who can shoulder a musket can make himself useful in defending our hearths and homes.

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