Army of the Tennessee
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Army of the TennesseeWeb Page (corps badges) Comments by others Author notes (Johnston quote, Sherman’s quotes, Catton quotes, ) Who (generals, units/ bibliography/ dbase) 1850 demographics, population What
Robisch Emory indictment for war crimes and Grimsley pieces Role of the West in the Civil War Define the prewar West When (timeline) Book Why
desciption of the lives of the soldiers prior to war-evoke sense of past, pastoral and McFeely’s unfulfillment, Chalquist) How
Stories of the units and soldiers—deep research Bibliography Thesis notes—The union was the rebellious army-overtrhowing the order of things-status quo re; the oligrach class (see henry Wilson, Grant;’s VP cnadidate). Reconquering the South for the growth of a new society. This was John Brown incarnate. The terrible swift sword of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Forged out a new alloy-the Westerner! This same alloy was that which bound the US together as a nation, for better or worse. Great armies have affected world history. Khan’s mongolians . . .Alexander’s . . . Charlemagne’s Caesar’s . . .napoleon’s the Crusaders . . . the army of the Tennessee, or the 15th Corps was a great army that has never beens tudied. From shiloh ot Washingto D.C. they were surprised and surprising. They pulled into Vcisburg . . .rolled across Georgia . . .stormed over the mountains of Tennessee . . .swept to the Sea . . .raced and raged through the Carolinas and paraded into D.C. as truly the conquering army returning home. The Army of the potomac was the Home guard, but the army of Grant, then Sherman and the westerners by traveling 2,000 plus miles was the conquering army. Basic organization of civil war infantry Company—100 men commanded by a captain, id’d by letter Regiment-750-1000 men in 10 companies, commanded by acolonel, id’d by numerical and state designation Brigade—3 to 6 k men in 4-6 regimaents, commanded by a brigadier general Division -- 9-12 K men commanded by major general Corps—18-30 K men commanded by a LT. General Volunteer Army!! An infantry regiment of volunteers whose authorized strength in 1863 was 39 officers and 986 men. Each company was divided into platoons and each platoon into two sections. Above the regimental level was the brigade composed of four regiments, the division composed of 3 to 4 brigades; the corps composed of 2 or more divisions and the army having one or more corps. Combination of arms began at the brigade level with the bringing together of infantry, artillery but on the higher echelons wither supporting branches were added. Bruce Catton . .. part of a vast process that nobody planned and that nobody could stop; a process that was turning America into a new sort of country which could do practically anything, any thing under the sun except divide into pieces. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, the blast furnaces and foundries and rolling mills were going up; railroads were reaching from the forks of the Ohio to the Lake Erie shore to take the coal and iron ore and there would be more trains and steamers and mills and mines, year after year, decade after decade. America would cease to have room for things like an empty wilderness at the Soo, with sailors lounging by campfires in lazy waiting, with indians netting fish from a flashing river while ripe berries simmered in iron kettles at the edge of a silent forest the timeless emptiness of unclaimed land an unfretted leisure running beyond vision in every direction. It would have nor room either, for a feudal plantation economy below the Ohio, veneered with chivalry and thin romance and living in an outworn dream, or for the peculiar institution by which that economy lived, or the hot pride and wild impossible visions that grew out of it. The old ways were going, an overpowering compulsive force was being generated and the long trails of smoke that lay on the curving blue horizon of Lake Huron were signs of it. Source MIA—“in one of McPherson’s regiments, it was proudly reported that every regiment from Ohio, Indian and Wisconsin and nearly all of those from Illinois and Iowa had re-enlisted. These westerners thought they were winning and they wanted to be around for the finish. “ Sherman: “Soldiers have a wonderful idea of my knowledge and attach much of our continued success in it. I don’t’ believe anything had tended more to break the pride of the south than my steady persistent progress. My army is dirty, ragged and saucy. I would like to march this army through New York City just as it appears today, with is wagons, pack mules , cattle, niggers and bummers and I think they would make a more attractive show than your fair.” Sherman: “I will challenge the world to exhibit a finer-looking set of men; brawny, strong, swarthy , a contrast to the weak and sickly fellows that came to me in Kentucky three years ago. Whilst wading through the mud and water, and heaving at mired wagons, the soldiers did not indulge in a single groan, but always said and felt that the old man would bring them out all right. If we can force lee to abandon Richmond and can whip him in an open firth, I thin I can come home and rest and leave the other fellows to follow up the fragments. The bare statistics of miles marched, days and weeks spent and men killed and wounded on both sides, convey only a fragmentary and inadequate impression of the great martial feat accomplished by Sherman and his veterans. Long columns of statistics give us only a partial and hazy intimation of the tremendous consequences, some of them physical and material, but others of a far larger significance, spiritual and moral, which sprung form this exhibition of national planning, daring and determination in one of the most spectacular enterprises recorded in the history of modern war. For generations to come, americans should view the feat with all the accompaniments of color and drama to be found in a great historical narrative by Thucydides, or on a romanticized and poetic canvas of JMW Turner when he was most chromatic and imaginative. They would see gain Sherman’s serried lines of bayonets and snake-like files of covered wagons, his foam-flecked cavalry pressing southward along the yellow-clay roads, past pine-clad hills while Atlanta flamed behind them. Their vision would pursue the march as the blue-clad soldiers met ragged battlers in gray, as they moved past forlorn groups of refugees, black and white, male and female, fleeing with bellowing cattle and squealing pigs in from of yankee squads which fired farmhouses and whole towns as they drove inexorably on toward the statehouse of Milledgeville toward the long bridges which betokened the approach to the seacoast. Accompanying this vision would be the flash of flags flying, the sounds of bands playing or the sullen boom of artillery as a new action was begun against the unpredictable Hood or dashing Forrest. The country would never forget Sherman’s fierce determination, his repeated demands for total war against a section against a section that he described as simply “one big fort.” It would never lose its memory of the grim tenacity of Thomas, the gallant immovability of the “hold-the-fort” course , nor the dash and velocity of Kilpatrick’s bodies of cavalry. The march had affected many pragmatic results, but by no means its least gifts were those it had given the American vision and imagination. It had impaired to the sodden, bloody, exhausting and immeasurably depressing conflict some touches of rhetoric, of a grim poetry that would linger in the popular mind of the republic long after the gallant leader died, long after the phrase “Sherman’s bummers” had lost its undertones of meaning for both North and South alike, long after men had ceased to feel the thrill that so nerved millions on hearing the bands strike up clangorously the strains of “Marching through Georgia.” From Catton The following description of atypical marcher by one who made the march has a convincing vigor: He was fertile of resources, and his confidence was unbounded. His careless, swinging gait when on the march was the impersonation of a determination to “get there” although he knew nothing of his destination. Of that , he was careless. His confidence in the longheadedness of the old man was such that he did not disturb himself on that score. He was heading south instead of North and this was ample assurance that Thomas was taking care of Hood and that Grant was ‘holding Lee down.” He went into action as unconcernedly as he took the road in the morning for a day’s march, or if not ordered into the conflict, he would sit on a fence, or lie down in the road, the image of peaceful contentment within hearing of a fierce engagement, apparently, wholly indifferent to the result. . .He waded swamps, made corduroy road, and pulled wagons and cannons out of ruts from which the bottom had seeming dropped. But there was one thing he did not know in all this magnificent effort, he was making immense drafts upon reserve energy and that the day was sure to come when he would find himself far older than his years by reasons thereof. (FY Hedley) The Civil War: A Narrative, III, Foote “The veteran American soldier fights very much as he has been accustomed to work his farm or urun his sawmill. He want s to see a fair prospect that it is going to pay.” Gen. Schofield. p. 354 “If the North design to conquer the south, “ he had written home two years ago, “we must begin at kentucky and reconquer the country from there as we did form the Indians.” SHERMAN Foote, p. 318 “Ibeleive in fighting in a double sesne, “ he said this spring. “first to gain physical results and next to inspire rrespect on which to build up our nation’s power.” Sherman. P. 319 Sherman—“the conquering impulse”—p. 335 Foote “But when I learned that Sherman’s army was marching through the Salk swamps, making its own corduroy roads at the rate of a dozen miles a day or more, “ he said later, “I made up my mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Jeulius Caesar.” Joe Johnston. Foote p. 789. Hopeful, but still deeply worried about what kind of showing his Westerners would manage now that their turn had come, Sherman rose early next morning to observe his six corps as they filed out of their Virginia camps—a march likened by one journalist to “the uncoiling of a tremendous python”—first across the Potomac, then on to a the assembly area back of Capital Hill. There they formed, not without a good deal of confusion, and there at 9 o’clock a cannon boomed the starting signal. He was out front on a handsome bay, hat in hand, sunlight glinting coppery in his close-cropped hair, and though the tramp of Logan XV Corps marchers sounded solid and steady behind him during breaks in the cheers from the bleachers on both sides he lacked the nerve to glance rearward until he topped the rise beside the Treasury building, where a sharp right would bring into view the stand in front of the White House. Then at last he turned in the saddle and looked back. What he saw down the long vista, a full mile and a half to the Capital shining on its hilltop, brought immeasurable relief. “the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.” So he later wrote, adding” I believe it was the happiest and most satisfactory moment of my life.” Now though, he was content to grin as he released his bated breath. “they have swung into it,” he said. They had indeed swung into it, and the crowd responded in kind. A reporter noted “something almost fierce in the fever of enthusiasm” roused b the sight of these lean, sunburnt marchers, all “bone and muscle and skin under their tattered battle flags.” Risking fiasco, their commander had decided to go with their natural bent, rather than try for the kind of spit-and-polish show their rivals had staged the day before, and the game paid off from the moment the first of the set out, swinging along the avenue with a proud, rolling swagger, their stride a good two inches longer than the mincing twenty-two inches required by regulations, and springier as well. “they march like the lords of the world!” spectators exclaimed, finding them “hardier, knottier, wierder “than yesterday’s prim, familiar paraders. Moreover,they provided additional marvels, reminders of their recent excursion across Georgia, some grim, others hilarious in effect. Hushes cam at intervals when ambulances rolled past in the wake of each division, blood-stained stretchers strapped to their sides, and there was also laughter—rolicksome, however: not the kind Sherman had feared—when the crowd found each corps trailed by a contingent of camp followers, Negro men and women and children riding or leading mules alongside wagons filled with tents and kettles, live turkeys and smoked hams. Pet pigs trotted on leashes and gamecock crowed from the breeches of cannon, responding to cheers. “The acclimation given Sherman was without precedent,” the same reporter wrote. “the whole assemblage raised and waved as if he had been the personal friend of the each and every one of them.” Army of the Tennessee Grant Moves South, p. 419 Yet morale was high. The army was moving at last, and there was a general feeling that the campaign was beginning to make sense. Even the incessant labor of creating the road on which they marched seemed to give the soldiers a sense of accomplishment. Colonel Wilson marveled at the army capacity. Without a pontoon train, and with no bridging materials except the lumber that could be obtained by tearing down bards and houses, these troops could make a highway across swamps and bayous without appreciable delay. In a few days, he said, one division build two floating bridges, each one more than 300 feet long, creating a practicable road in a flooded country that might have stumped trained engineers, and he paid his tribute: “those bridges were built by green volunteers who had never seen a bridge train nor had an hour’s drill or instruction in bridge-building.” The men in this army had pioneer backgrounds, and they brought to this work all of the pioneer’s ingenuity and adaptiveness. One Private noted with pride that his division had bridged 1000 feet of water and cut two miles of road through dense woods. Grant was as impressed as Colonel Wilson: he began to see that these Volunteers could do almost anything –build roads, erect bridges, operate steamboats, march day an night in mud and water, fight like veterans – and his confidence in the enlisted men of his command become almost limitless. When he reported on the Vicksburg campaign he recalled this overland march and wrote;” It is a striking feature, as far as my observation goes, of the present volunteer army of the United States, that there is nothing which men are called upon to do, mechanical or professional, that accomplished adepts cannot be found for the duty required in almost every regiment.” New troops coming down the river to Milliken’s Bend to take part in the campaign caught the spirit and felt that there was something romantic and inspiring in this movement. Download 265.27 Kb. Share with your friends:
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