Chapter XXII: Dalton

On the twelfth of March, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was placed in command
of all the Federal armies, and on the twenty-sixth joined the army in
Virginia. He says:—

“When I assumed command of all the armies, the situation was about
this: the Mississippi was guarded from St. Louis to its mouth; the
line of the Arkansas was held, thus giving us all the Northwest north
of that river. A few points in Louisiana, not remote from the river,
were held by the Federal troops, as was also the mouth of the Rio
Grande. East of the Mississippi we held substantially all north of the
Memphis and Charleston railroad as far east as Chattanooga, thence
along the line of the Tennessee and Holston Rivers, taking in nearly
all of the State of Tennessee. West Virginia was in our hands, and
also that part of old Virginia north of the Rapidan and east of the
Blue Ridge. On the seacoast we had Fort Monroe and Norfolk, in
Virginia; Plymouth, Washington, and New Berne, in North Carolina;
Beaufort, Folly and Morris Islands, Hilton Head and Port Royal, in
South Carolina, and Fort Pulaski, in Georgia; Fernandina, St.
Augustine, Key West, and Pensacola, in Florida. The remainder of the
Southern territory, an empire in extent, was still in the hands of the
enemy.

“Sherman, who had succeeded me in the command of the Military Division
of the Mississippi, commanded all the troops in the territory west of
the Alleghanies and north of Natchez, with a large movable force about
Chattanooga.... In the East, the opposing forces stood in
substantially the same relations toward each other as three years
before or when the war began; they were both between the Federal and
Confederate capitals.... My general plan now was to concentrate all
the force possible against the Confederate armies in the field. There
were but two such ... east of the Mississippi River and facing north;
the Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee commanding, was
on the south bank of the Rapidan, confronting the Army of the Potomac;
the second, under General Joseph E. Johnston, was at Dalton, Georgia,
opposed to Sherman, who was still at Chattanooga. Besides these main
armies the Confederates had to guard the Shenandoah Valley—a great
storehouse to feed their armies from—and their line of communications
from Richmond to Tennessee. Forrest, a brave and intrepid cavalry
general, was in the West with a large force, making a larger command
necessary to hold what we had gained in Middle and West Tennessee....
I arranged for a simultaneous movement, all along the line.”

“On the historic fourth day of May, 1864,” says General William T.
Sherman, “the Confederate army at my front lay at Dalton, Georgia,
composed, according to the best authority, of about forty-five
thousand men, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston, who was equal in all
the elements of generalship to Lee, and who was under instructions
from the war powers in Richmond to assume the offensive northward as
far as Nashville. But he soon discovered that he would have to conduct
a defensive campaign. Coincident with the movement of the Army of the
Potomac, as announced by telegraph, I advanced from our base at
Chattanooga with the Army of the Ohio, 13,559 men; the Army of the
Cumberland, 60,773; and the Army of the Tennessee, 24,465—grand total,
98,797 men and 254 guns.”

Johnston took command at Dalton in December and spent the winter
bringing back efficiency to the shaken Army of Tennessee. In his
account of the following campaign, he says: “An active campaign of six
months, half of it in the rugged region between Chattanooga and
Dalton, had so much reduced the condition of the horses of the cavalry
and artillery, as well as of the mules of the wagon-trains, that most
of them were unfit for active service.... In the course of an
inspection, and as soon as practicable, I found the condition of the
army much less satisfactory than it had appeared to the President on
the twenty-third of December. There was a great deficiency of
blankets; and it was painful to see the number of bare feet in every
regiment.... There was a deficiency in the infantry, of six thousand
small arms.... The time of winter was employed mainly in improving the
discipline and instruction of the troops and in attention to their
comfort. Before the end of April more than five thousand absentees had
been brought back to their regiments. Military operations were
confined generally to skirmishing between little scouting parties of
cavalry of our army with pickets of the other.... The effective
strength of the Army of Tennessee, as shown by the return of May
first, 1864, was 37,652 infantry; 2812 artillery, and 2392 cavalry....
On the fifth, the Confederate troops were formed to receive the
enemy.... My own operations, then and subsequently, were determined by
the relative forces of the armies, and a higher estimate of the
Northern soldiers than our Southern editors and politicians, or even
the Administration, seemed to entertain. This opinion had been formed
in much service with them against Indians, and four or five battles in
Mexico—such actions, at least, as were then called battles.
Observation of almost twenty years of service of this sort had
impressed on my mind the belief that the soldiers of the Regular Army
of the United States were equal in fighting qualities to any that had
been found in the wars of Great Britain and France. General Sherman’s
troops, with whom we were contending, had received a longer training
in war than any of those with whom I had served in former times. It
was not to be supposed that such troops, under a sagacious and
resolute leader, and covered by entrenchments, were to be beaten by
greatly inferior numbers. I therefore thought it our policy to stand
on the defensive, to spare the blood of our soldiers by fighting under
cover habitually, and to attack only when bad position or division of
the enemy’s forces might give us advantages counterbalancing that of
superior numbers. So we held every position occupied until our
communications were strongly threatened; then fell back only far
enough to secure them, watching for opportunities to attack, keeping
near enough to the Federal army to assure the Confederate
Administration that Sherman could not send reinforcements to Grant,
and hoping to reduce the odds against us by partial engagements.” And
later, of the situation in July before Atlanta: “The troops
themselves, who had been seventy-four days in the immediate presence
of the enemy, labouring and fighting daily, enduring toil and
encountering danger with equal cheerfulness, more confident and
high-spirited even than when the Federal army presented itself before
them at Dalton, and though I say it, full of devotion to him who had
commanded them, and belief of ultimate success in the campaign, were
then inferior to none who ever served the Confederacy or fought on
this continent.”

And again, toward the elucidation of this campaign, General Sherman
speaks: “I had no purpose to attack Johnston’s position at Dalton in
front, but marched from Chattanooga to feign at his front and to make
a lodgment in Resaca, eighteen miles to his rear, on his line of
communication and supply. This movement was partly but not wholly
successful; but it compelled Johnston to let go at Dalton and fight us
at Resaca, where, May thirteenth to sixteenth, our loss was 2747 and
his 2800. I fought offensively and he defensively, aided by earth
parapets. He fell back to Calhoun, Adairsville, and Cassville.... I
resolved to push on toward Atlanta by way of Dallas. Johnston quickly
detected this, and forced me to fight him, May twenty-fifth to
twenty-eighth, at New Hope Church, four miles north of Dallas.... The
country was almost in a state of nature—with few or no roads, nothing
that an European could understand.... He fell back to his position at
Marietta, with Brush Mountain on his right, Kenesaw his centre, and
Lost Mountain his left. His line of ten miles was too long for his
numbers, and he soon let go his flanks and concentrated on Kenesaw. We
closed down in battle array, repaired the railroad up to our very
camps, and then prepared for the contest. Not a day, not an hour, not
a minute, was there a cessation of fire. Our skirmishers were in
absolute contact, the lines of battle and the batteries but little in
rear of the skirmishers, and thus matters continued until June
twenty-seventh, when I ordered a general assault ... but we failed,
losing 3000 men to the Confederate loss of 630. Still the result was
that within three days Johnston abandoned the strongest possible
position and was in full retreat for the Chattahoochee River. We were
on his heels; skirmished with his rear at Smyrna Church on the fourth
day of July, and saw him fairly across the Chattahoochee on the tenth,
covered and protected by the best line of field entrenchments I have
ever seen, prepared long in advance. No officer or soldier who ever
served under me will question the generalship of Joseph E.
Johnston.... We had advanced into the enemy’s country one hundred and
twenty miles, with a single-track railroad, which had to bring
clothing, food, ammunition, everything requisite for 100,000 men and
23,000 animals. The city of Atlanta, the gate city opening the
interior of the important State of Georgia, was in sight; its
protecting army was shaken but not defeated, and onward we had to
go.... We feigned to the right, but crossed the Chattahoochee by the
left, and soon confronted our enemy behind his first line of
entrenchments at Peach Tree Creek, prepared in advance for this very
occasion. At this critical moment the Confederate Government rendered
us most valuable service. Being dissatisfied with the Fabian policy of
General Johnston, it relieved him and General Hood was substituted to
command the Confederate army. Hood was known to us to be a ‘fighter.’
... The character of a leader is a large factor in the game of war,
and I confess I was pleased at this change.”

But in the early Georgian spring, pale emeralds and the purple mist of
the Judas tree, July and that change were far away. The Army of
Tennessee, encamped in and around Dalton, only knew that “Old Joe” was
day by day putting iron in its veins and shoes upon its feet; that the
commissariat was steadily improving; that the men’s cheeks were
filling out; that the horses were growing less woe-begone; that camp
was cheerful and clean, that officers were affable, chaplains
fatherly, and surgeons benevolent; that the bands had suddenly plucked
up heart; that the drills, though long, were not too long; that if the
_morale_ of the Army of Tennessee had been shaken at Missionary Ridge,
it had now returned, and that it felt like cheering and did cheer “Old
Joe” whenever he appeared. Men who had been wounded and were now well;
men who had been on furlough, men who had somehow been just “missing,”
came in steadily. Small detachments of troops appeared, also, arriving
from Canton, Mississippi, and from northern Alabama. The Army of
Tennessee grew to feel whole again—whole, bronzed, lean, determined,
and hopeful.

From northern Alabama came in March the ——th Virginia. For the ——th
Virginia there had been the siege of Vicksburg and the surrender; then
the long slow weeks at Enterprise, where the Vicksburg men were
reorganized; then service with Loring in northern Mississippi; then
duty in Alabama. Now in the soft spring weather it came to Dalton and
the Army of Tennessee.

The village was filled with soldiers. The surrounding valley was
filled with soldiers. From the valley, rude hills, only partially
cleared, ran back to unbroken woods. There was Crow Valley and Sugar
Valley, Rocky Face Mountain, Buzzard Roost and Mill Creek Gap, and
many another pioneer-named locality. And in all directions there were
camps of soldiers. Sometimes these boasted tents, but oftenest they
showed clusters or streets of rude, ingenious huts, brown structures
of bark and bough, above, between, and behind them foliage and bloom
of the immemorial forest. Officers had log cabins, very neatly kept,
with curls of blue smoke coming out of the mud chimneys. Headquarters
was in the village, a white house with double porch, before it
headquarters flag, and always a trim coming and going. At intervals
the weary and worn engines, fed by wood, rarely repaired, brought over
an unmended road a train of dilapidated cars and in them forage,
munitions, handfuls of troops. But in the increasing confidence at
Dalton, in the general invigoration and building-up, the tonic air,
the running of the sap, the smiling of the world, even the East
Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia, and the Western and Atlantic,
roadbed and rolling-stock and force of men, took on, as it were, an
air of lively instead of grim determination. Outside of the town was
the parade ground. Drill and music, music and drill, and once or twice
a great review! Here came Johnston himself, erect, military,
grey-mustached, with a quiet exterior and an affectionate heart, able
and proud. With him rode his staff. Staff more than worshipped
Johnston; it loved him. Here, too, came the lieutenant- and
major-generals—Hardee, one of the best—and Hood the “fighter,”
well-liked by the President—Patrick Cleburne and Cheatham and Stewart
and Carter Stevenson and Walker, and many another good leader and
true. Here the artillery, reorganized, was put through manœuvres, and
Joe Wheeler’s cavalry trotted across, and in the morning light the
bugles blew. It was a lovely Southern spring, with soft airs, with
dogwood stars and flame-coloured azalea, with the fragrance of the
grape and the yellow jessamine, with the song of many a bright bird,
building in the wood. The Army of Tennessee, strong at Chickamauga,
fallen ill at Missionary Ridge, convalescent through the winter, was
now in health again.

There was a small house, half hidden behind two huge syringa bushes.
It had a bit of lawn no bigger than a handkerchief, and the bridal
wreath and columbines and white phlox that bordered it made the
handkerchief a lace one. Here lived Miss Sophia and Miss Amanda,
gentlewomen who had seen better days, and here “boarded,” while the
army was at Dalton, Désirée Cary.

Miss Sophia designed and carried out wonderful bouquets of wax
flowers. Miss Amanda was famed for her bead bags and for the
marvellous fineness of her embroidery. Miss Sophia was a master-hand
at watermelon rind “sweetmeats,” carving them into a hundred pretty
shapes. Miss Amanda was as accomplished in “icing” cakes. Sweetmeats
and wedding and Christmas cakes, embroidery, and an occasional order
of wax flowers had for years “helped them along.” Long visits, too,
after the lavish, boundless Southern fashion, to kinsfolk in South
Georgia had done much;—but now there was war, and the kinsfolk were
poor themselves, and nowhere in the wide world was there a market for
wax flowers, and there was no sugar for the sweetmeats, and no frosted
cakes, and life was of the whole stuff without embroidery! War
frightfully snatched their occupation away. As long as they could
visit, they visited, and they valiantly carded lint and knit socks and
packed and sent away supplies and helped to devise substitutes for
coffee and tea and recipes for Confederate dishes. But kinsmen had
died on the field of battle, and kinswomen had grown poorer and
poorer. One had made her way to Virginia where her boy was in
hospital, and another had gone to Savannah, and another’s house had
been burned. Miss Sophia and Miss Amanda had retired up-country to
this extremely small house which they owned. Beside it and its
furniture they apparently owned nothing else. Even the stout, sleepy
negro woman in the kitchen was a loan from the last visited
plantation. Désirée, applying for board, was manna in the wilderness.
They took her—with faintly flushed cheeks and many apologies for
charging at all—for fifty dollars a week, Confederate money. She had a
bare white room with a sloping roof and a climbing rose. There was a
porch to the house, all bowered in with clematis and honeysuckle. Miss
Sophia and Miss Amanda rarely sat on the porch; they sat in the
parlour, where there were the wax flowers and a wonderful sampler and
an old piano, and, on either side the fireplace, a pink conch shell.
So Désirée had the porch and the springtime out of doors.

Captain Edward Cary’s beautiful wife made friends quickly. Officers
and men, the ——th Virginia had now for months rested her bound slave.
It was not long before that portion of the Army of Tennessee that had
occasion from day to day to pass the house began to look with
eagerness for the smiling eyes and lips of Désirée Gaillard. Sometimes
she was out in the sunshine, gravely pondering the lace border of the
handkerchief. Army of Tennessee lifted hat or cap; she smiled and
nodded; Army of Tennessee went on through brighter sunshine. She was
presently the friend of all. After a while Johnston himself, when he
rode that way, would stop and talk; Hardee and Cleburne and others
often sat beneath the purple clematis and, sword on knees, talked of
this or that. They sent her little offerings—small packets of coffee
or of sugar, once a gift of wine, gifts which she promptly turned over
to the hospital. If they had nothing else, they brought her, when they
rode in from inspection of the scattered camps, wild flowers and
branches of blossoming trees.

Edward came to her when it was possible. The ——th Virginia was
encamped among the hills. Often at dusk he found her at the gate, her
eyes upon the last soft bloom of the day. Or, if she knew that he was
coming, she walked out upon the road toward the hills. The road was a
place of constant travel. Endlessly it unrolled a pageant of the
times. War’s varied movement was here, the multiplicity of it all; and
also the unity as of the sound of the sea, or the waving of grass on a
prairie. Troops, incoming or outgoing,—infantry, artillery,
cavalry,—were to be found upon it. The commissariat went up and down
with white-covered wagons. Foragers appeared, coming in to camp with
heterogeneous matters. Ordnance wagons, heavy and huge, went by with a
leaden sound. Mules and negroes abounded—laughter, adjuration, scraps
of song. Then came engineers, layers-out of defences and the
clay-plastered workers upon them. Country people passed—an old
carryall filled with children—a woman in a long riding-skirt and
calico sun-bonnet riding a white horse, gaunt as death’s own—sickly
looking men afoot—small boys, greybeards, old, old negroes hobbling
with a stick—then, rumbling in or out, a battery, the four guns very
bright, the horses knowing what they drew, breathing, for all their
steadiness, a faint cloud of brimstone and sulphur, the spare
artillerymen alongside or seated on caissons—then perhaps cavalry, man
and horse cut in one like a chesspiece—then a general officer with his
staff—couriers, infantry, more foragers, a chaplain bound for some
service under the trees, guard details, ambulances, more artillery,
more cavalry, commissariat, “Grand Rounds,” more infantry.... Désirée
loved the road and walked upon it when she liked. She grew a known
figure, standing aside beneath a flowering tree to let the guns go by,
or the heavy wagons; moving, slender and fine, upon the trampled verge
of the road, ready with a friendly nod, a smile, a word—a beautiful
woman walking as safely upon a military road as in a hedged garden.
The road loved to see her; she was like a glowing rose in a land of
metal and ore. And when a mile from town, perhaps, she met her
husband, when, turning, she came with him back through the sunset
light, when they moved together, of a height, happy, it was as though
beings of another race trod the road. There needed no herald to say,
“These are gods!”

But much of the time Désirée was alone. She asked for work at the
hospital and was given it, and here she spent several hours of each
day. There were no wounded now at Dalton, only the ill, and these in
the wisely cared-for, steadily built-up army, lessened always in
number. Suffering there was, however, now as always; moanings and
tossings, delirium, ennui, pain to be assuaged, crises to be met, eyes
to be closed, convalescence to be tended. In Dalton as elsewhere the
Confederate women nursed with tenderness the Confederate ill. Désirée
did her part, coming like something cordial, something golden, into
the whitewashed ward. When her hours were over, back she came to the
house behind the syringas, bathed and dressed, and ate with Miss
Sophia and Miss Amanda a Confederate dinner. Then for an hour they
sewed and knitted and scraped lint; then, when the afternoon had
lengthened, she took the palmetto hat she had braided and went out of
the lace handkerchief yard to the road and walked upon it.

Miss Sophia and Miss Amanda had attacks of remonstrance. “Dear Mrs.
Cary, I don’t think you should! A young woman and—pardon us if we seem
too personal—and beautiful! It’s not, of course, that you would suffer
the least insult—but it is not customary for a lady to walk for
pleasure on a public road where all kinds of serious things are going
on—”

Désirée laughed. “Not if they are interesting things? Dear Miss
Sophia, I stopped at the post-office and brought you a letter.”

Miss Sophia put out her hand for the letter, but she held to her text
a moment longer. “I do not think that Captain Cary should allow it,”
she said.

The letter was from Richmond, from the cousin who had gone to nurse
her son. Miss Sophia read it aloud.

MY DEAR SOPHIA:—

I am here and George is better—thank God for all His mercies! The
wound in the leg was a bad one and gangrene set in, necessitating
amputation, and then came this pneumonia. He will live, though, and I
shall bring my son home and keep him while I live! The city is so
crowded, it is frightful. We in Georgia do not yet know the horrors of
this war. I could hardly find a place to lay my head, but now a
billiard-room in a hotel has been divided off into little rooms, each
no bigger than a stall in my stable, and I have one of these. I go for
my meals to a house two streets away, and I pay for shelter and food
twenty-five dollars a day. Flour here is two hundred and fifty dollars
a barrel. Butter is twelve dollars a pound. We live on cornbread, with
now and then a little bacon or rice. Yesterday I bought two oranges
for George. They were eight dollars apiece. Oh, Sophia, it’s like
having George a little boy again! Two days ago there was a dreadful
excitement. I heard the cannon and the alarm bell. George was a little
light-headed and he would have it that there was a great battle, and
that the boys were calling, and he must get up! At last I got him
quiet, and when he was asleep and I went to supper I was told that it
was a Yankee raid, led by an officer named Dahlgren, who was killed.
The reserves had been called out and there was great excitement. We
have since heard fearful reports of the object of the raid. The
President and his Cabinet were to be killed, the prisoners freed and
set to sacking the city which was then to have been burned. Oh, my
dear Sophia, what a world we live in! I was in Richmond on my wedding
journey. I feel dazed when I think of now and then. Then it was all
bright-hued and gay; now it is all dark-hued, with the strangest
restlessness! I never saw so many women in black. You always hear
military sounds, and the people, for one reason or another, are out of
doors in great numbers. The church bells have been taken down to be
melted into cannon. The poverty, the suffering, the crowding are
frightful. But I do not believe there is another such people for
bearing things! George is a great favourite in the ward. They say he
has been so patient and funny. My dear Sophia, I always think of you
with your plum-colour silk bag and your spools of embroidery thread! I
wish I had those spools of thread. Yesterday I had to do some mending,
and I went out and bought one spool for five dollars.—George is waking
up! I will write again. If he only gets well, Sophia,—he and the
country!

Your affectionate cousin,

—— ——

Miss Sophia folded the letter. “Dear George! I am glad enough that he
will get better. He was a sad tease! He used to say the strangest
things. I remember one day he said that behind Amanda embroidering he
always saw a million shut-in women sticking cambric needles into the
eyes of the future. And he said that I had done the whole world in
wax, and he wondered how it would be if we ever got before a good hot
fire.—He wasn’t lacking in sense either, only it never had a chance to
come out, Maria spoiling him so, and darkeys and dogs always at his
heels.—No, dear Mrs. Cary, you’re a young woman, and—you’ll pardon me,
I know!—a beautiful one, and I don’t think Captain Cary ought to allow
it!”

March went, April went, May came. On the first of May, Désirée,
walking on the road, thought she observed something unusual in the
air. Presently there passed cavalry, a great deal of cavalry. She
leaned against a wayside tree and watched. Presently there rode an
officer whom she knew.

He lifted his hat, then pushed his horse upon the dusty turf beneath
the tree. “We’re ordered out toward the Oostenaula! Sherman’s in
motion. The volcano is about to become active.”

“Is it going to overflow Dalton?”

“Well, it would seem so! Though sometimes there’s a new crater. We’ll
see what we’ll see. Anyhow, Cary’ll be sending you to the rear.”

“I’ll fall back when the army falls back.”

Edward came that night and plead with her. She could go to Kingston on
the cars and thence to Rome to the westward, out of the region of
danger—

“Edward,” she said, “haven’t I been a good campaigner?”

“The best—”

“Then, when you can do a thing well, why do something else poorly?
This is the way I am going to live, and when you wed me you wed my way
of life.”

“If harm came to you, Désirée—”

“And I might say, ‘If harm came to you, Edward,’—I know that harm may
come to you, but—I don’t say it, and you must not say it either. With
you is my home, my Cape Jessamine, and I am not going to leave it.”

“With you is my home, my Cape Jessamine—and all the gods know I love
you here—”

“I am not going to Rome. Let us walk a little, in the moonlight.”

The next day came in from Savannah Mercer’s brigade of fourteen
hundred. On the third the scouts reported a great force of the enemy
at Ringgold. On this day, too, the cavalry pickets were driven in
along the Cleveland road. On the fifth the great blue host formed in
line of battle near Tunnel Hill. Over against them were drawn the
grey. The fifth and the sixth were days of skirmishing, of
reconnoissance, of putting forth fingers and drawing them back. In the
first light of the seventh, under a wonderful sunrise sky, the blue
army began a general advance.