December 13, 1864---The Battle of Fort McAllister: Savannah is isolated when Sherman's March reaches the sea

DECEMBER 13, 1864:      

The Battle of Fort McAllister:        

Sherman has not yet marched all the way to the sea. His one remaining obstacle is Fort McAllister, commanding the approaches to the Ogeechee River. It is defended only by a token force (not more than 250) but is surrounded by land mines, abatis, and other obstacles from the landward side. Its guns threaten the Union flotilla offshore.  Sherman details 4,000 men to take the fort. He confidently signals the U.S.S. DANDELION that the fort will be out of action in 15 minutes. It actually does not take that long. Although 175 men are wounded or killed rushing the defenses, and although the defenders pour fire down on them, overwhelming numbers tell. The Confederates, having shot their bolt, surrender. Sherman has reached the sea, and now he controls the approaches to Savannah. 

 

December 12, 1864---The battle for the soul of the 13th Amendment

DECEMBER 12, 1864:       

Clear skies and cold clear air have replaced storming cloud cover over Nashville. General George Thomas U.S.A. sends word to Ulysses S. Grant that he is prepared to move against General John Bell Hood C.S.A. as soon as the mired, mucky roads dry out.

In Washington, D.C.. Abraham Lincoln has been working on obtaining passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution since the morning after his State of The Union Address. Lincoln knows this is an uphill battle, at least in the 38^th Congress. Although it became a lame-duck Congress as of Election Day, and although Lincoln is well aware that he can get easy ratification of the Amendment during the incoming 39^th Congress in which the Republicans hold a 75% majority, he prefers to see the Amendment passed by the fractious and dysfunctional House of Representatives still sitting in December. 

There are a number of very good reasons:

First, Lincoln knows that the Confederate Congress is debating emancipation and he does not wish the South to free the slaves before the North. Such an eventuality could change the military and political landscape beyond reckoning.

Second, Lincoln knows that if the Republican-dominated 39^th Congress passes the Amendment, he will be in a politically weakened position. There have already been difficulties with the Radical Republicans in Congress. They have disputed Lincoln’s very liberal and forgiving Reconstruction plan and have thwarted the counting of Electoral votes in the reconstructed States of the South. Lincoln does not wish to be beholden to the Radicals of his party for passing the Amendment, since as a quid pro quo they may force the implementation of their extremist form of Reconstruction which is both far more harsh to the South and far more cognizant of immediate bestowal of black civil rights than Lincoln’s more tempered plan. Lincoln fears that a political battle over these issues in a freshly-reconstructed America could reignite the military battles.

Third, Lincoln is concerned that if the Amendment is passed without clear bipartisan support it may be subject to juridical disputes or repealed entirely by a future Congress. He wants no such possibilities to raise their ugly heads. He has said it: He will not see re-enslaved those already emancipated or their descendants. He wants to guarantee that slavery is, in fact, dead and buried in the reunified United States. 

To this end, he has asked various Cabinet members, Members of Congress, and other influential figures to press recalcitrant Congressmen of both parties to pass the Amendment. Moral suasion is preferred; spoils jobs are the next best offer; bribery, arm-twisting, threats, and outright sliminess are to be (officially) forbidden, though Lincoln keeps all the buckles of his political bag of tricks unfastened.  

   

Nevada’s Congressional delegation is seated in Washington.

December 11, 1864---The Invincible Confederacy

DECEMBER 11, 1864:       

Thomas Jefferson Moses is besieging Savannah, and finds time to write in his diary: 

To-day we lay under fire. We are close to the rebles. There is a large swamp between us so that we can do nothing more then skirmish with them. Last night the left wing went out skirmishing and to day the right wing goes out. We had one man wounded . . .  

At this point in the Civil War, nobody really knows what is happening, or perhaps it makes better sense to say that too many things are happening at once. The inexorable advance of the Union is clear in hindsight but as 1864, the year when blood flowed as if in rivers, came to a close nothing was clear to those who lived through it.

To most people in the North, the war seemed to be drawing toward its close --- but how many more months or years would it take until victory was achieved? And could the South tap its seemingly inexhaustible reserve of morale to turn the tables on the North yet again? 

Yes, Atlanta was in ruins, Georgia had been laid waste, and Sherman was at the gates of Savannah, but Grant had been standing at the gates of Petersburg and Richmond for months, Nathan Bedford Forrest was still wrecking trains and sinking gunboats in Union-held territory, and marauders had done devilish work in New York, Chicago, Missouri, and even Vermont with only slight interference. 

Most Unionists are hopeful, but none are certain of success.

   

To most people in the South, the war had reached a crisis point --- but the Confederacy had weathered other crises, and had come back from the brink of defeat several times. Morale was low and men had deserted --- just like in the Summer of ’63. But some of those same men were at the gates of Washington in the Summer of ’64. Food was scarce, the weather was freezing, and the ranks were thinned, but victory has always had a way of inspiring men, and more and more there was talk of outfitting a vast army of slaves.  

Most Confederates have been beaten down, but none have surrendered. 

Even as the twin debates about Emancipation went on both North and South in the twin Congresses, a new population of Southerners was beginning to emerge --- they were not the same tired self-righteous fire-eaters who had brought the South precipitately into the war by ranting about the “right” of secession until all other voices were stilled. Rather, they were people --- officers, gentlemen, ladies, workingmen and poor farmers --- who believed that the Confederacy was, simply put, invincible.  Terrible news, such as the burning of Atlanta, was dismissed by such folk as “a trifling loss”. Reported defeats were put down as the disloyalty or lack of faith on the part of newspaper editors, or perhaps as Union propaganda, or most often simply ignored or just disbelieved. For every Westport, Missouri they had their Athens, Georgia; for Sheridan who burned Virginia they had Forrest who burned Tennessee; for Sherman who besieged Savannah they have Hood who besieged Nashville. And they had Lee and Davis to the Union’s Grant and Lincoln. How could they lose?    

December 10, 1864---Sherman besieges Savannah

DECEMBER 10, 1864:       

William Tecumseh Sherman’s army arrives in front of Savannah, Georgia, which has prepared for a siege. The 10,000 Confederate troops in the city, led by General William Hardee C.S.A., have flooded the fields around the city. Only a few narrow causeways give access to the city, and Rebel guns are trained on these approaches. Fort McAllister on the Ogeechee River is manned. On Sherman’s side of the equation, he has 60,000 well-fed, well-armed men, most of whom are spoiling for a fight just so they can enjoy the fleshpots of Savannah (before they wreck the city). Sherman also has the firepower of a Union flotilla offshore bursting with winter supplies, ammunition, fodder for the horses (the one thing he is short of), and mail from home (something the men have not received in six weeks). Sherman moves his batteries into position, he sends messages to the fleet, and then he settles down to see what the outnumbered, outgunned Confederates will do. 

December 9, 1864---"Conditions are not propitious"

DECEMBER 9, 1864:        

 High winds, torrential rains, low temperatures, and driving sleet, turn the area around Nashville into a quagmire in which nothing can move. Wagons bog down to their axles while horses sink into the ooze up to their fetlocks. 

800 miles away, President Lincoln is demanding to know why General John Schofield has not completed the destruction of John Bell Hood’s decimated Confederate Army of Tennessee. When he sends Schofield a telegraph, Schofield’s laconic reply that conditions are not “propitious” for an attack puts Lincoln in mind of General McClellan on the Peninsula in 1862. And when the unknowing Schofield follows this up with a message that his horses need more fodder, Lincoln hears an echo of McClellan’s refusal to pursue Lee after Antietam because his horses were “fatigued.” In truth, conditions are not propitious for an attack, and Schofield does need the extra fodder, but Lincoln cannot know this. 

  

Fearing that Hood will slip away and that the war, measurably closer to its end, will be prolonged, Lincoln’s storied equanimity snaps in a most unusual blaze of rage. He no longer must tolerate McClellanesque generals, not with Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in the fight. He tells Grant that the commanders in Nashville (Schofield and George H. Thomas) must be replaced. 

Grant, a practiced campaigner nonpareil, is having weather problems of his own around Richmond-Petersburg (heavy snow, high winds, and biting cold) and suspects that conditions are just as bad, if not worse, far inland. After he receives a detailed report of conditions from Thomas, Grant shares it with the President, who by then has recovered his usual good humor and expresses characteristic concern for the men in the lines.