The Day Dixie Died by Gary Ecelbarger

Author:Gary Ecelbarger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

8

BLOODY DIVERSION

As General Cleburne’s assault of Bald Hill waned to near silence, the ambulance wagon bearing the body of General McPherson rolled 2 miles north of Bald Hill to General Sherman’s headquarters at the Howard house, the home of Augustus Hurt. Sherman ordered the escorts to carry the body inside as aides yanked a door free from its hinges and set it down to serve as a temporary bier for the dead general. “He was dressed just as he left me,” noted Sherman, who studied the path of the fatal bullet with the help of an army doctor. Sherman was crushed by the death of his protégé, but he took no time to reflect upon what could have been. Logan had commanded the army for about an hour and by the dissipating battle sounds south of him, Sherman must have been relieved that Hood’s three-hour offensive had failed to turn the flank of the Army of the Tennessee. Still, as 3:00 P.M. came and went, Sherman’s experience—and the warnings of Hood’s tenacity that were previously supplied by Schofield and McPherson—would have told him that the battle was not yet over.1

At his headquarters near the city cemetery a mile east of Atlanta, General Hood had stewed for hours over the lack of progress of Hardee’s corps against the Union left. Notwithstanding his decision to change Hardee’s intended march to Decatur and shorten it to an attack upon the rear of the southern flank of the enemy, Hood never appeared comfortable with that very necessary adjustment. He had spent an entire restless morning listening for the sound of battle that was supposed to commence at daybreak.

The long anticipated rolling sound of battle hit Hood’s ears close to noon. He listened to the attacks from south to north against the XVII Corps and soon learned that Maney’s division was not in the rear of an unsuspecting opponent as his plan suggested, but apparently attacking the entrenched flank. (He either personally observed or received an aide’s report of Strahl’s brigade pressing northeastward toward Bald Hill.) Hood was disgusted at that discovery, for in his eyes it completely upended his battle plan to throw Sherman into chaos and send him reeling toward Peachtree Creek. Still, Hood had no way of knowing at that time that the XVI Corps posed an incredible roadblock in the rear or that Cleburne’s division had actually struck the enemy from the rear as he had intended it to. The fact that a portion of Maney’s division was attacking northeastward actually increased the chaos and stress upon the Union left flank, another point that Hood had yet to appreciate.

So, at 3:00 P.M. Hood had to accept the stark reality that McPherson’s army (he had yet to learn of that general’s demise) had been struck hard but had refused to leave the field. Making matters worse was the inevitability that Union reinforcements would head toward the contested flank to buttress the Yankee defense. That not only guaranteed more casualties in Hardee’s corps,

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