The Destructive War by Charles Royster

Author:Charles Royster [Royster, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76059-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

THE BATTLE OF KENNESAW MOUNTAIN

DESPITE the daily June rains, well-dressed Southern ladies went to the top of Kennesaw Mountain and looked through telescopes to see the war below. The twin hills of Little Kennesaw and Big Kennesaw, joined by a saddleback, rose about 800 feet above the surrounding countryside. Moving along the crest of Big Kennesaw, Confederate soldiers and their visitors had a panoramic view. More than nine miles to the northwest lay Allatoona Pass through which ran the tracks of the Western & Atlantic Railroad in its route from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The railroad came to the base of Kennesaw, then passed around it to the northeast, turning back southward to enter the town of Marietta two miles southeast of Kennesaw Mountain. Eleven miles beyond Marietta the tracks crossed the Chattahoochee River. From the top of Kennesaw one could see the church steeples and factory chimneys of Atlanta, six miles southeast of the Chattahoochee.

In the third week of June, the two armies which had been maneuvering and fighting since the first week of May were gathering around Kennesaw Mountain. Both armies—Johnston’s 51,000 men and Sherman’s 94,000—formed great irregular semicircles curving westward around Marietta from one flank two miles north of town to the other three miles south. On June 17 the ladies on the summit were watching one of Johnston’s corps withdraw under fire from Lost Mountain four miles to the west. The corps was pulling back toward Kennesaw to complete a new Confederate line. The ladies saw smoke rising from artillery pieces, which were too far away to be heard. The white tops of thousands of U.S. Army wagons moved over the uneven landscape, passing among woods and cultivated fields. Federal soldiers advanced toward Kennesaw in four long columns. Near the base of the mountain, a house was burning. Looking through their telescopes at the distant skirmish, the ladies occasionally laughed.

General Johnston felt distressed by his army’s situation. He wrote to his wife on June 18: “The Engineering system adopted by Sherman can not well be resisted by an inferior force. We can not get opportunity to fight on equal terms & may have to cross the Chattahoochee—burn this immediately.” The river was the last—and Kennesaw Mountain was the next to the last—of a series of natural barriers that slaves and soldiers and engineers had fortified to keep Sherman’s army away from Atlanta. From Rocky Face Ridge, just south of the Tennessee border, to these final defensible lines outside the entrenchments around Atlanta, Johnston had withdrawn his army. He had originally expected Sherman to use the much larger Federal force in direct assaults. Instead, the Federals had faced his lines with the Army of the Cumberland and the Army of the Ohio, while sending the Army of the Tennessee around his southern flank. Repeatedly, by large-scale movements, Sherman had threatened to reach the rear of the Confederate army and, by the movements of smaller units, had threatened to penetrate its defensive line and divide it. If Sherman

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