USA > Georgia > The army reunion : with reports of the meetings of the societies of the Army of the Cumberland; the Army of the Tennessee; the Army of the Ohio: and the Army of Georgia > Part 6
USA > Ohio > The army reunion : with reports of the meetings of the societies of the Army of the Cumberland; the Army of the Tennessee; the Army of the Ohio: and the Army of Georgia > Part 6
USA > Tennessee > The army reunion : with reports of the meetings of the societies of the Army of the Cumberland; the Army of the Tennessee; the Army of the Ohio: and the Army of Georgia > Part 6
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24
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a condition of success, that he would be an unwise com- mander who would discourage it. The emulation which grows out of the same elements of pride and self-confidence, shows itself in the division, the corps, or the army organization as well. In the larger unit it has much of the same value as in the smaller, and contains the same fallacy. We have all felt its influence, and know that there was none of us who did not feel a deeper thrill of pride and pleasure when he saw the flag bearing his own corps emblem moving to the front, than in looking upon any other banner that floated over the advancing host.
I said that time has modified these feelings somewhat. God forbid that either our interest in the cause for which we fought, or our personal satisfaction and pride in our own share of the work, should diminish ! But I think that year by year, as the past recedes into the distance, the feeling will grow more and more general, and less individual ; more an army feeling, and less that of a corps or division ; more a national feeling, and less a local or sectional one. Looking back at our fathers' (leeds in the old War of Independence, we hardly care now to inquire whether they served with Gates or Green, with Lafayette or with Schuyler. We are are satisfied with their glory in being members of the old Continental Army which established the Republic. In like manner our sympathies have been growing wider, and our appreciation of our comrades' work has been enlarging; the attraction has been extending the circle of its influence until we who have had our regimental reunions, our corps and subordinate army reunions, have felt the impulse to assemble, not as the Army of the Cumberland, of the Tennessee, of Ohio, or of Georgia, but as the Grand Army of the West, with which our posterity will be proud that we were identified, when our subordinate divisions shall have been forgotten by all but the diligent student of history.
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And if our brothers of the Grand Army of the East could be with us, our welcome would prove that we have no jealousy of their splendid career, and hold it the dearest and most precious of all our honors, that we were a part of the great patriotic host-a unit in sentiment, peers in courage, and rivals only in honorable deeds -the army that saved the nation ! Therefore, although I am here as the deputed repre- sentative of the Army of the Ohio, I shall not detain you long with any thing which may be peculiar to that organization, but shall hasten to the inquiry, how an army society may be made to produce some durable results, by throwing light on the history of the war, or by thorough and scientific criticism of its events.
The Army of the Ohio, which last bore that name, was organized in the summer of 1863, prior to General Burnside's occupation of East Tennessee, and consisted at that time of the Ninth and Twenty-Third Corps, and a cavalry corps, besides detached garrisons and troops in various posts of the Department of the same name. After the terrible winter of 1863-64, following the memorable siege of Knoxville, the Ninth Army Corps returned to the East and resumed its old position in the Army of Virginia, leaving the Twenty-Third Corps, with the cavalry and detached troops, to continue the army name. The regiments of which it was composed had nearly all been newly organized in the spring of 1863, but were made up, in considerable part, of officers and men who had seen much service in the earlier part of the war. Its regiments came from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and East Ten- nessee ; and during the first year of the new organization had had the benefit of the systematic discipline and firm command of General Hartsuff. Thence, after a brief interval, it passed into the hands of General Stoneman, and, finally, just before the opening of the spring of 1864, it received as its permanent
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commander, General Schofield, whose presence here to-day prevents me from speaking of him in the terms of admiration and deep-rooted confidence which every member of the Army of the Ohio had learned to feel, long before the Government had done justice to his services in the field, or recognized the administrative sagacity which is now so fitly employed at the head of the War Department.
The winter which ushered in the year 1864, and the camp at Strawberry Plains, in East Tennessee, was the " Valley Forge" of the Twenty-third Corps. The raising of the siege of Knoxville was after the wagon roads to the Ohio river, two hundred miles away, had become impassable from the fall rains. No railroad communication existed ; neither food nor clothing could be procured from the distant depots of supply ; the surrounding country was exhausted, and our men were left to shiver in their rags, their frames debilitated by rations so reduced in quantity and quality that we shrunk from estimating the small proportion they bore to the regulation allowance. The minute account of that winter campaign, and a just tribute to the patriotic heroism of the men who, in the midst of all their sufferings, re-enlisted by whole regiments for a new terms of " three years, or during the war,"-is a tribute the Army of the Ohio owes to its heroes of the rank and file, and would be a military memoir which would give the pro- ceedings of an Army Society real value to the future historian.
The Ist of May, 1864, found the Army of the Ohio taking its place as the left wing of the Grand Army, and prepar- ing to cross the Georgia line as the campaign of Atlanta opened. Our first union with the combined army was in front of Dalton, where we made the demonstration on the enemy's works east of the ridge, whilst Thomas attacked Buzzard's Roost and Rocky Face, and McPherson was moving through Snake Creek Gap for Resaca. When the Army of the Ten-
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nessee had completed its movements, and we were ordered to withdraw from the menacing but exposed and isolated position on the extreme left, retiring in line of battle, over ridges, where the quartz rock seemed never to have lost its original sharpness of angles, and through ravines, tangled, and almost impassable, the enemy's skirmishers following closely our steps, the officers and men of the Cumberland Army, from the crags above, watched the movement, and their applause of its steadiness and precision was grateful to our hearts as a proof that our efforts to cultivate discipline and aplomb had not been in vain, and that we were received as equals by the men who had fought at Stone River and Chickamauga. Other compli- ments, subsequently received, may have sounded better in general orders, but none were ever more satisfactory to the recipients than when we were told, with hearty voice, in rough camp phrase, that our comrades of the other armies were convinced we " would do to tie to."
Our initiation was complete, and the bloody conflict at Resaca followed quickly, where we left many a brave fellow . by the banks of Camp Creek. Then came the crossing of the Oostenaula, the new concentration about Kingston and Cass- . ville, with the accompanying combats, the crossing of the Etowah, and the advance on Kenesaw and Marietta. Some- times on the right wing, sometimes on the left, constantly on a flank, we shared with the Army of the Tennessee the rapid work of the campaign, the solid masses of the Cumberland usually occupying the centre, and giving momentum to the whole.
At the crossing of the Chattahoochie the Army of the Ohio had the post of honor, and the brilliant strategy of our General- in-Chief was not balked by any lack of skill or dash in the execution. It would be hard to select a more stimulating martial scene than the passage of that important river; or
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one in which all the details of dramatic effect were more complete. Beneath the cloudless skies of a warm and lazy summer day, the Twenty-third Corps marched silently under the cover of the ridges skirting the river, till Soap Creek was reached, where Colonel Buel's canvas pontoons were quickly framed and launched, the overhanging woods and tortuous course of the brook hiding the work from the enemy's outpost on the opposite shore of the river, behind whose precipitous hills Johnston lay, his attention fixed upon the masses of the great army encamped at the railroad-crossing several miles below. So unsuspicious of danger were the enemy's outpost, opposite, that a Georgia soldier of the detach- ment was writing a cheering letter to his wife at home, telling her to have no anxiety for him, as there were no Yankees within miles of them, when his writing was rudely interrupted, not to be resumed, and the half-finished letter was left to tell at once its pathetic story of household anxieties and troubles, and the completeness of the enemy's surprise. As if by magic, a long line of blue-coated skirmishers issued from the wooded hills into the bottom land; a regiment dashed into a difficult ford above; another, in the white pontoons, shot from the mouth of the creek, rowed by stout arms, that worked with a will ; a few shots from the single cannon on the hill, upon the southern side; a rattling musketry fire from the covering skirmishers; the boats are over; the men are formed, and go up the slope on the run with bayonets fixed ; capturing the gun, and meeting on the crest their comrades who had crossed by the ford; whilst the panic stricken outpost fly to Johnston's camp with the portentous news that the line of the Chattahoochie was broken. An hour's work of the nimble pontooniers puts down the bridge, and, before the enemy can move to resist the crossing, the whole corps is impregnably entrenched on the heights, and a tête de pont secured from which the army may move out at leisure.
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Then came the closing in upon Atlanta, and Hood's well- conceived effort to crush our left, after making a ruse of withdrawing all his forces into the works of Atlanta ; an effort which was foiled, though the loss of the noble McPherson made it a costly day to us. Sherman's headquarters were that day at the " Iloward House" with the Army of the Ohio, and we love to remember how his usual nervous rest- lessness changed to quiet, smoothly moving work, and suavity of manner as the affair became serious.
My time will not permit even a hasty sketch of the operations about Atlanta; of the change to an aggressive policy on the part of the enemy, after Hood relieved Johnston; of the manner in which their forces were hurled against our earth- works, till, in the chaffing between pickets, the rebels began to say, with bitter humor, that they had about enough men left for "another killing." Still less can I follow up the interesting episode of the October movements, and the daring strategy of Hood in his march toward Tennessee, which might have succeeded with another opponent, and have brought our whole army north of the river, but which was met by a still more daring move, the march to the sea, for which English critics find no other parallel than Marlborough's famous march from the Low Countries to Blenheim on the Danube. At Rome, in Georgia, the Army of the Cumberland was divided ; our Army of the Ohio going back with the Fourth Corps to operate against Hood, and the Army of Georgia was organized from the remainder of General Thomas' command. When we parted with Sherman at Rome, he expressed his faith that the march to the sea would be unimpeded, and that we who were remanded to Tennessee would find the fighting, if there was to be any. We found it, at Franklin and Nashville, and we will only say of it, that we did not mean that our comrades of the grand army should be ashamed
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of us. Sherman knew into whose hands he had committed the important task of foiling Hood; and Thomas and Schofield were fully equal to their work: more than this, they would not thank me for saying.
The nation was slow in gaining full knowledge of that Tennessee campaign, and there is room for doubt whether it is yet fully understood. The motives for the delay in making the attack upon Hood, at Nashville, are perhaps pretty well comprehended, and the result so brilliantly vindicated the Fabian policy and the inflexible adherence of our com- mander, in that important battle, to what he knew to be right, that words are not now needed on that point. I believe, however, that the strategy of the enemy will, as a matter of military science, be approved by the final verdict of com- petent critics, and it will be more and more clearly seen that Hood's movements upon Nashville was not the random blow of a madman, but a move in the military game which, though of a desperate character, was wisely and boldly pushed, in view of the desperate circumstances in which the Confederacy was placed by Sherman's march upon Savannah. The game was played of necessity for the whole or none, and we won it, thanks to the God of battles, and to the courage and skill of Thomas and Schofield, who had no child's play to deal with. Hood's original movement against our line of communi- cations, when we were at Atlanta, was a daring attempt to transfer the theatre of operations out of Georgia and into Tennessee again. Our chase of him to Galesville, in Alabama, seemed to warrant him in believing he would be successful, and he kept on through that state, always in reach of communi- cation with the South, manifestly expecting us to follow him. A mediocre commander would have done it; a timid one would have put the whole army upon the railroad, and have sought to head the enemy off' before he could reach Nash-
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ville. Either policy would have been a substantial success for the Rebellion. Hood was, however, pitted against a boldness and originality more than equal to his own. When it became evident that the enemy could not be overtaken and forced into a decisive engagement, the march to the sea, a true stroke of military genius, was instantly determined upon, and the Fourth and Twenty-third Corps alone were detached and sent to Nashville to make head against Hood, until General A. J. Smith's command, coming from the West, might restore something like equality to Thomas' army, and enable him to take the aggressive, whilst Sherman went into the very heart of the Confederacy to take its life, and make its two arms at Richmond and Nashville useless, if not powerless.
Hood's first daring conception failed, because it was met by a more audacious and able one. When, then, he learned that Sherman was back at Atlanta, it was too late to regain his lost position, and the only possible means of bringing his adversary back was by a coup d'etat against Thomas before he could concentrate force enough to oppose him. Here our game in Middle Tennessee became the dilatory one, and Scho- field's work was to hold Hood back till Thomas had prepared at Nashville to meet him. Hence our delay at Pulaski till Hood had left Lawrenceburg, and the race to Columbia to secure the crossing of Duck River, our infantry advance reach- ing the place just in time to save our cavalry from being driven out of it. Hence, also, our delay at Columbia till the last moment-even till one of the enemy's corps was in our rear at Spring Hill, where, however, by some inconceivable fatuity, Cheatham allowed us to make an unmolested flank march, by night, within musket shot of his camp-fires. These hair-breadth escapes were not rashly incurred, for General Schofield had calculated the minutes, and knew that his veterans could ont-maneuver by night marches all the enemy's move-
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ments in the short winter days ; and, whether by day or night, we were ready for an attack. Every hour we stayed was gained for the concentration at Nashville, and the skill of our commander was turning our perils to the great advantage of the purposes of the campaign.
At Franklin we were obliged to offer battle, to give our trains time to ford the Harpeth, and Hood very rightly judged that if he could drive us into the river, nothing could stop his march to the Ohio. IIe delivered, therefore, a series of attacks, more pertinaciously obstinate and determined than any we nad before experienced. The field was without obstructions, our defensive works were only a hastily constructed breast- work of earth, and it was the fairest possible test of the problem whether courage and numbers could, by a direct attack in front, take such a line from men of equal courage and discipline, armed with Springfield rifles. The result seemed to prove that the fire may be made too withering for any troops to preserve their organization under it. Breech-loading weapons would leave still less doubt of it. An event. not included in the plan of our defence, seemed, for the first hour, to give the enemy reasonable hope of success, but though their repeated assaults obliged us to renew our fire at intervals till late in the night, at midnight we were unmolested in obeying our orders to withdraw, and complete our concentration at Nashville the following day, December 1, 1864.
Up to this point Hood's conduct of the campaign seems to me to have been on true military principles, and the risks he took to have been warranted by an ordinary calculation of the chances of war. Taking into account his great losses at Franklin, par- ticularly the extraordinary fact of the death or disabling of thir- teen general officers (a conclusive proof of the desperation with which the assaults were made), his policy in continuing the advance to Nashville may well be questioned. We must not
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forget, however, that he was ignorant whether our losses were not almost as great as his, and of the extent of the reinforcements Thomas might receive. The cause of the Confederacy was at such a pass that even a halt, whilst Sherman was in the heart of Georgia, would be ruin, and he was under a kind of necessity to keep up the appearance of aggressive action That his doing so imposed upon the country a false opinion of his strength, was plainly manifest in the nervousness every where felt and expressed at the delay in delivering the return blow at Nashville. Even the most competent judges at a distance began to question whether Hood were not master of the situation, and we may, therefore, fairly concede that he seemed to have ground for reasonable hope. Fortunately our commander at Nashville was a man of Washingtonian character and will, and knowing that his country's cause depended upon his being right and not upon his merely seeming so, he waited with immoveable firmness for the right hour to come. It came, and with it a justification of both his military skill and his own self-forgetful patriotism, so com- plete and glorious that it would be a mere waste of words for me to talk about it. Our choice of the anniversary of that memorable event for our reunion is itself a proof of our estimate of its importance. I have enlarged upon the events which led to it, because I think they have not been fully understood, and because the Army of the Ohio and its commander had a larger responsibility and a more personal interest in them. At Nash- ville we were relatively a smaller fraction of the national forces, and a description of its incidents comes more properly from our brothers of the Cumberland Army.
During our operations about Nashville, the cavalry corps of the Army of the Ohio was not idle. Under the command and leadership of General Stoneman, an expedition into South- western Virginia was made, which, for rapidity of movement, and completeness of execution, considering the inclemency of the 6
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season, was not surpassed by any expedition of the kind during the war. With the two divisions under his command, General Stoneman penetrated the enemy's country to Saltville, destroyed the important salt works there, together with much material of war; captured twenty-two pieces of artillery, and so routed and destroyed the enemy's forces under Breckinridge, that East Tennessee was never again troubled by a hostile presence. Again, in March, 1865, whilst we of the main body of the Army of the Ohio were engaged in operations, to which I shall presently allude, General Stoneman made another important expedition out of East Tennessee into South-western Virginia, destroying the railroads by which escape from Richmond was possible for Lee's army, and performing brilliant and valuable services which, but for the fact that it occurred during the general crash of the Rebellion, would have attracted uni- versal attention. A little later, the same commander, with his dashing horsemen, had almost succeeded in capturing the person of Jefferson Davis, whose escort surrendered, but who himself, by changing his direction of flight toward the Atlantic coast, escaped for the moment, but only to fall quickly into the hands of General Wilson and his gallant troopers.
I have thus sketched the outline of the exploits of our cavalry corps to the end of the war for the sake of a closer connection of the narrative, and will now ask you to return for a moment to the operations of the Ohio army in Middle Tennessee.
No one who was there will be likely to forget the drenching winter rain-storm in which the Battle of Nashville ended ; nor the chase after the routed enemy to the Tennessee river, by roads which were one deep and continuous mire, and through chilling alternations of rain and snow. Hardly was the river reached, when the Army of the Ohio received orders, at Clifton, not far above Pittsburg Landing, to proceed by river and rail to Washington, and thence, by sea, to the mouth of Cape Fear river,
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Oration of General Cox.
in North Carolina. From a winter campaign in the valley of the Tennessee, we proceeded without delay to another winter cam- paign on the Atlantic coast, some two thousand miles distant, by our route of travel; and our Western troops had to add to their experience the pleasure of being cooped up in trans- ports at sea, during a storm, off Cape Hatteras. February and March were occupied with the capture of Wilmington, the advance from Newberne, the battle of Kingston, and in the construction of railways from the coast to Goldsboro, where we again met our old comrades of the armies of Tennessee and Georgia, coming up through South Carolina to complete their tour through the Confederacy. Again under our old chief, we marched against our old adversary, Joe Johnston, and, at Greensboro, on the castern slope of the same mountain chain whose western face had been so familiar to us a year before, we had the honor of receiving the arms and issuing the paroles of the only remaining army of the Rebellion. In these opera- tions in North Carolina, we received into our organization of the Army of the Ohio, the Tenth Corps, which had recently done memorable service in the capture of Fort Fisher, and that gallant body of men, under the command of General Terry, was made free of the brotherhood of the Western army, though they were Eastern men all, and had never served west of the Alleghanies.
It would be pleasant to linger longer over these scenes, and to touch upon some of the peculiar points of interest in a campaign among the swamps of the Carolina coast, for all who are represented here did not march through the Salk- chatchic. My time, however, is too nearly exhausted to permit me to do this, or even to attempt to portray the enthusiastic joy of the meeting at Goldsboro, and the still wilder tumult of rejoicing when, on the march to Raleigh, we got the news that Grant had "fought it out on that line," and that Lee had
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surrendered. The two great brothers-in-arms, who were almost brothers in blood by virtue of the singularly unselfish friend- ship which has honored them scarcely less than their great deeds, met at Raleigh and congratulated each other that, by God's good providence, the work begun at Donelson and Henry was accomplished, and that now they would be able to say, in tones of authority, to the men who had made war upon the nation's existence, "Cease your Rebellion !" The recent recognition by that nation of the fact that the remainder of the road to the permanent and enduring peace we long for, can be best marked out by him whose modest sagacity and heroism, whose unfaltering faith in his country's destiny, was our guide through the gloom of our great struggle, is proof to the world that Republics are not altogether ungrateful, nor do they require great trumpet-blowing of one's own merits to make them know a true leader when they see him. With the Administration of the country in such hands, and the Generalship of the Army committed to his twin-brother in renown and in patriotism, who will dare doubt that we "shall have peace?" The Republic longs most earnestly for unity of sentiment as well as for unity of government, -for unity of hearts as well as unity of territory, and we may rightfully hope that an administration in which the even justice of the civil ruler is meted out with the honorable courtesy which always marks the true soldier, will win back all American hearts to true allegiance to the nation.
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