The Gales of November - Part 4
- Jeff Brewer
- Dec 16, 2025
- 11 min read
Fire on the Mountain
Rising up from the Georgia Piedmont to a height of 1800 feet are the twin peaks of Kennesaw Mountain. The densely forested slopes covered in boulders create a crescent shaped ridge that was a natural defensive obstacle between Sherman and his object of Atlanta. Occupying the ground between the two was the Army of Tennessee which had once again, put pick and shovel to great use digging 8 miles of reinforced trenches, redoubts, rifle pits, and every possible defense that could be constructed of felled trees, fieldstones, and dirt. The peaks of the edifice were known collectively as Big Kennesaw and Little Kennesaw.
Johnston anchored his works on the northeast side of his position with his cavalry corps under Lt. General Joseph Wheeler just east of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Traveling in a southwesterly direction, the position gained strength as it crossed the near impregnable heights on Big Kennesaw. Continuing on past Little Kennesaw the line of works came to Pigeon Hill where it turned due south, eventually crossing the Dallas Road, then curving back in a slightly southeastern direction, they crossed Powder Springs Road opposite the Kolb farm finally terminating on Olley’s Creek. Set firmly in the center of these defenses, roughly 3 miles east, was the town of Marrietta, a city of 2,000 inhabitants that was vitally important as a railroad hub. The town also contained small scale industry that supported the railroad including an Engine House, a necessity for the repair and maintenance of locomotives.
Marrietta was equally important to both the Northern and Southern war effort. For Sherman, he needed to capture the town in order to maintain his rail supply line toward Atlanta. All the munitions of war and the endless demand for supplies to subsist his army, began their journey at the enormous Federal supply depot at Johnsonville in Tennessee. Here a constant flotilla of steamboats brought goods from Northern industrial centers to this river landing turned fortress on the Tennessee River. From there they were loaded aboard the Nashville & Northwestern Railroad and transported to Nashville where everything had to be unloaded and reloaded onto the Nashville & Decatur Railroad due to the fact that the two railroads were of different gauge. The Nashville & Decatur was built using a 5-foot, 6-inch gauge while the former railroad was built on a 5-foot gauge necessitating a constant logistical battle to move supplies and men by train, a common failing of rail transport in the Victorian era. Once all munitions and supplies were transferred to the Nashville & Decatur Railroad, they began their journey south out of Nashville, through Franklin, Spring Hill, Columbia, and Pulaski, eventually arriving at Decatur, Alabama. From here the train was switched to the Memphis & Charleston Railroad and lumbered east to Chattanooga, Tennessee where it merged onto the Western & Atlantic Railroad. This circuitous route, though long, allowed a literal supply train to follow behind Sherman’s invading army keeping it well provisioned during the invasion.
For the Confederacy, the fractured route of supply was fraught with much of the same impediments coming from southern origins to northern points of termination. The lack of standardization in railroad gauge was an industrial oversight that plagued both North and South during the war and caused no small amount of grief for the Quartermaster Corps in both armies.
On June 5, after Cleburne’s drubbing of Howard at Pickett’s Mill in late May, Johnston pulled back to a new line anchored on his left at Lost Mountain and his right on Brush Mountain. Jutting forward of this line were the defensive works atop Pine Mountain. Alone and roughly a mile out in front of the main line, this position was problematic to the Southern defense and it was questionable as to whether or not it could withstand a determined assault being so far forward. Surveying the area as to its viability, the Confederate high command was reconnoitering the ground on the late morning of June 14. The entourage included Generals Johnston, Hardee, and Episcopal Bishop turned soldier, Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk, the commander of the Army of Mississippi since its creation on December 27, 1863, the second Southern army to carry that name. Polk had presided over the building of St. John’s Episcopal Church near Ashwood Hall outside Mount Pleasant, Tennessee before being elected the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana. When war broke out in ’61, in response to his sacred calling conflicting with his duties as a military officer, he reportedly was asked, “General, have you laid aside the robe for the sword?” To which Polk replied, “No, I have put the sword over the robe.”
Since coming to Georgia in mid-May, the 20,000-man Army of Mississippi functioned as Polk’s Corps operating within the Army of Tennessee. As the cluster of horsemen surveyed the Union line through binoculars, they caught the attention of General Sherman who turned to General Howard and told Howard to order his artillery to scatter the horsemen. Soon after one of Howard’s gun sections fired off a single round. In a highly improbable result, the solid shot hit Polk squarely in his left arm severing it from his body and cleaving his torso almost completely in two as the round tore into his chest cavity. The wound was catastrophic and Polk was killed instantly. Shocked and stunned, both Johston and Hardee kept their composure and personally helped take the body back down the mountain. News of Polk’s death hit the army as well as the civilian population hard as he was well liked. Up to this point, having a General that was an ordained Bishop seemed to many to give unspoken affirmation that God was present among the Southern arms. Now, Polk’s grim and merciless death seemed a harbinger of things to come as the war drew ever closer to the spires of Atlanta.
After the fighting at Kolb’s Farm, Hood’s costly and ill planned attack did result in Sherman abandoning his efforts at trying to flank Johnston from the west. To the east, Wheeler’s cavalry set poised to raid deep behind Sherman’s lines at any moment. Furthermore, Sherman’s vital supply line, the Western & Atlantic Railroad, set directly under the guns atop Kennesaw Mountain and could advance no further. After two months of a grueling campaign, the Union invasion was stalled.
Sitting in the Georgia summer sun, Sherman was becoming impatient and frustrated. On June 25, he sent a dispatch to General‑in‑Chief Henry W. Halleck at the War Department in Washington, "The whole country is one vast fort, and Johnston must have at least 50 miles of connected trenches with abatis and finished batteries. We gain ground daily, fighting all the time. ... Our lines are now in close contact and the fighting incessant, with a good deal of artillery. As fast as we gain one position the enemy has another all ready. ... Kennesaw ... is the key to the whole country." This time, Joe Johnston had placed the Confederate Army squarely in the path of Sherman’s advance and time, circumstance, and terrain dictated there was no way around.
After Hood was rebuffed on the 22nd, Sherman surveyed the enemy’s line over the next few days. He discussed the situation with the Army of the Cumberland’s Major General George Thomas, Major General James B. McPherson, commander of the Army of the Tennessee, Sherman’s old command, and Lieutenant General John M. Schofield of the Army of the Ohio. He explained that he believed Johnston was over-extended and that he was most likely weakest in the center of his position. He then informed them of his decision to launch a frontal assault. All three of Sherman’s subordinates expressed concern at his plan. Thomas stated he had doubts about the wisdom of the plan, while McPherson and Schofield stated their preferred course of action to continue and try and find another way around Johnstons’ flank. Nevertheless, all were loyal and did not make a formal protestation. On the 24th, each received their orders and returned to their commands and made preparations for the coming battle. The attack was to take place at 8:00 AM on June 27.
Sherman’s plan was for Schofield to extend his army further south to cause Johnston to match his movement and thereby thin his line. On the opposite end, McPherson was to make a feint attack towards Marrietta challenging Wheeler’s cavalry while, behind the feint, the Army of the Tennessee would make an assault at Little Kennesaw. While the Union forces were maneuvering to theoretically draw out Johnston’s line, men of Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland would make the main attack toward the center of the Confederate line.
At precisely 8:00 AM, June 27, 1864, over 200 Federal artillery pieces erupted into a blaze of fire and smoke shaking the ground. Immediately the 187 guns of the Army of Tennessee opened up a fiery response. Twenty-five miles away, over 20,000 inhabitants of Atlanta heard the “continuous roar” of artillery as “the booming of cannon at Kennesaw was distinctly heard in the city, rattling windows and shaking houses” as reported in the local newspaper, the “Atlanta Southern Confederacy”. This violent sensory premonition of an ill fate awaiting them terrified the Atlanta population. Now into its fourth year, the hostilities were increasingly exposing civilians to the carnage of war. Within Atlanta, old men, young boys, widowed women, mothers with children, rich and poor, black and white, freedmen and slaves, were all captured by the psychological terror of hearing the approach of war as the ground literally trembled under their feet.
Back on Kennesaw, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph S. Fullerton, staff officer of the IV Corps of the Army of the Cumberland, wrote, "Kennesaw smoked and blazed with fire, a volcano as grand as Etna." As the grand assault began to move forward, unknown to Sherman or any of his Generals, the Confederates had already determined that the flank attacks were no more than martial distractions. Accordingly, Johnston did not thin his line in the center and was firmly fixed in position as the first attack moved toward their line. Three brigades belonging to Brigadier General Morgan L. Smith’s First Division of McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee, around 5,500 men, advanced blindly through dense undergrowth and up rocky terrain. These were men of Major General John A. Logan’s XV Corps who hailed from the farm lands of the Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, and Indianna. Supporting the attack were young men from the border state of Missouri as well as Michigan and Iowa. Opposite them, ready and waiting in their trenches, were the hardened veterans from Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri and Louisiana, under Brigadier General William W. Loring. Loring was placed in command of the corps after Polk’s death on Pine Mountain less than two weeks prior. The “Fighting Bishop” as Polk was known, was considered by his men as warm and approachable exhibiting a paternal care toward the soldiers he led and was generally well liked by the men in the ranks. The unceremonious killing of their leader was still fresh in minds of these men as they leveled their muskets at the approaching ranks of blue. As Logan’s brigades emerged on the slopes of Little Kennesaw, they were met with a murderous fire as the Southern gunners swept the landscape with massed artillery. Simultaneously`, the infantry opened up with successive volleys of musketry quickly giving way to rapid independent fire. Smith’s attack began to falter as on the right as his men found themselves knee deep in a swamp unable to move forward and unable to withdraw as more forces were coming up in the assault. On the left the attack also stalled unable to scale the rocky heights before the trenches. As Logan rode forward, he saw his men being “uselessly slain” and ordered a withdrawal.
Roughly 2 miles south and an hour behind schedule, Thomas’s 9,000-man main attack was getting underway. Two divisions of the Army of the Cumberland’s IV and XIV Corps led by Brigadier Generals John Newton and Jefferson C. Davis, more Midwestern farm boys, this time with the addition of two Kentucky regiments and one regiment from Minnesota, moved toward the Kennesaw line occupied by Major General Benjamin Cheatham and his division entirely made up of Tennesseans. To Cheatham’s right, Major General Patrick Cleburne once again found his division, men from Arkansas, Texas, and Alabama, in the thick of the fighting.
The Union troops came on in two massive formations known as attack columns, a tactical deployment perfected by Napoleon in ages past. This formation had the advantage of presenting an irresistible force when breaking an enemy line but the disadvantage of offering a compact mass of men to artillery. As the columns came on, Confederate gunners wasted no time in sighting their cannon directly on the approaching formations. As solid shot found their mark, men were dismembered and scattered among their fellow soldiers. Areal burst of spherical case shot rained down shrapnel on the tightly packed ranks. At precisely the point where the Federals were attacking, the Confederate earthworks protruded outward from the line then bent back on itself in a reverse angle creating somewhat of a “fort”. Like waves
crashing on a rocky shoreline, the advancing column broke right and left around the horn of this salient. The result was they now found themselves caught in an enfilading fire which hit them in the front and on both flanks. As they tried to close toward their objective, they were met with massed musket and cannon blasts that seemed to present a ring of fire around them as they found themselves unable to move forward and equally unable to draw off to the rear. The Union men were enduing a terrible toll as officers and enlisted men fell by the scores. Crouching down, individual groups began to recede back away from the works and at the first defile threw themselves to the ground and began digging in using bayonets for picks, plates for shovels, and anything that would move dirt including bare hands. Here the attack halted at the place forever more known as the Dead Angle. Sam Watkins of Columbia was in Company H, Maury Grays, 1st Tennessee Infantry and was present on the line in Cheatham’s Division. He remembered, “It was one of the hottest and longest days of the year, and one of the most desperate and determinedly resisted battles fought during the whole war.”
Sherman’s gamble had been a spectacular failure. Undeterred, he intended to renew the assault ordering Thomas to make preparations to do so. Taking comfort that the killing, while slaughter, was less than that presently going on in Virginia, he told Thomas, “Our loss is small compared to some of those [battles] in the East.” Thomas replied, "One or two more such assaults would use up this army." Sherman finally relented and the renewed attack was called off. Sherman’s had lost over 3,000 men in a little over three hours including Colonel Daniel McCook who was mortally wounded and would succumb to his wounds withing a month. Also killed in action was Brigadier General Charles Harker. The Confederate loss was roughly 1,000.
The next day, June 28, the Union army sent a flag of truce to the Confederate lines requesting a truce to bury the dead. Scores of dead and mangled bodies lay strewn across the slope between the opposing sides. The summer heat had made the rising stench unbearable even for hardened veterans such as these. Johnston agreed to the truce and sent Confederate burial details across the lines where they met Union details in “no man’s land” and joined together in the unenviable yet peaceful task of burying the dead. Perhaps reflecting on his decisions as he watched the dead being covered with dirt, that evening Sherman wrote to his wife Ellen back in Lancaster, Ohio, "I begin to regard the death and mangling of couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash." Since the start of the Atlanta Campaign, in the seven weeks since, Sherman had suffered over 25,000 casualties and the capture of Atlanta seemed as far away as ever. - JLB
Comments