Fighting Sherman in Georgia
Dallas-New Hope Church,
May 29th – 31st, 1864. (Continued)
About noon on the 30th Major General William T. Sherman, in company with several of his generals, were seen riding along the front of the Union Army of the Tennessee near Dallas. (The Confederate division of Major General B. F. Cheatham, including Tipton’s infantry soldiers) were opposite the Federal commanders. General John A. Logan was wounded slightly in the arm during the excursion. Sherman’s reconnaissance of this portion of the line was to help with the logistics of reuniting his armies while shifting them toward his rail and supply line at Acworth subsequently for another drive on Atlanta.
The last days of May allowed the private soldiers of both armies time to bathe and rest. The month-long marching and fighting from Dalton to Dallas, had taken a toll on the soldiers of both armies in Northern Georgia. Soldiers of both armies became skilled at erecting fortifications to protect themselves from attack.
Many spent their days and nights “improving their defenses–throwing up breastworks, digging rifle pits, traverses, trenches, communication trenches, and sleeping pits, strengthening parapets and emplacing head logs, thus creating a landscape that would become all to familiar to the soldiers of World War I.”
They had learned that four-feet wide parapets were not sufficient to stop solid shot at close range. Consequently they had to increase the standard parapet wall to twelve feet.
Historian Edward P. Shanahan wrote that “Johnny Reb and Billy Yank” endured “physical and psychological strain, sleeplessness, rain, mud, cold nights, hot sultry, steamy days, filth, lice, the stench of dead and decaying bodies, both human and animal…The soldiers fighting in the trenches were tired and jittery, many nearing exhaustion.”
Sherman and Johnston had each lost about 9,000 men in the month of May.
Spotsylvania
The soldiers in Georgia however, have faired much better than their counterparts in northern Virginia in terms of casualties. The savage fighting and carnage of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the North Anna, had resulted in a staggering toll of killed, wounded and missing. During the month General U. S. Grant had fought and maneuvered General Robert E. Lee’s army closer to Richmond. In the process Grant had lost nearly 40,000 men. Lee’s soldiers confronted Grant every step of the way, loosing 17,000 veteran
soldiers. While the North had the manpower to replenish Grant’s army with replacements there were few Confederate reinforcements available for Lee.
The Spotsylvania Court House Campaign lasted from May 7 – 21, 1864. The tiny crossroads village was southeast of the Wilderness. Grant tried to interpose his army between Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia, forcing Lee to attack his numerically superior force. Lee correctly guessed the flank movement of the Army of the Potomac and hurried a Confederate corps to the village on a night march where they arrived at the Courthouse on the 8th.
In a series of engagements Grant attacked the Confederate entrenchments. The late Historian Patricia L. Faust writes:
“At 4:30 a.m. on May 12, Major General Winfield S. Hancock’s Corps struck the tip of the (Rebel) “Mule Shoe” salient. Almost an entire Confederate division was captured but additional units blunted the breakthrough. For 20 hours the opponents, in a severe rainstorm, engaged in some of the war’s most vicious fighting. Lee erected a new line at the base of the salient and withdrew to it. Grant assaulted these new works six days later, only to be repulsed at a fearful loss.”
Tiptonian General Cadmus Wilcox and men of his Division were engaged at Spotsylvania.
Spotsylvania to be continued.
