Memoir of Louis Trezevant Wigfall part 4

Louis Trezevant Wigfall

Part 4 

General Hood charges that General Johnston did not intend to hold Atlanta. As evidence of this, he says that no officer or soldier believed it, and that General Johnston had thrown up no intrenchments in front of his lines opposite Peach-tree Creek. If General Johnston intended, as he says he did, to strike the head of Sherman's columns, as soon as they appeared across Peach-tree Creek, and before they were intrenched, or had time even to deploy into line of battle, what use had he for field-works? They would have been in his way if erected, and his men would have been uselessly fatigued in constructing them. Not having been present, I cannot speak of the opinion of the army. But, admitting the fact, I submit that the opinion of the army is not always evidence of the intentions of the general. Is it not possible, too, that General Hood may have mistaken his own opinion for that of the army? The evidence that General Johnston did intend to hold the place is given in his report. In addition, it may be added that he held New Hope for a fortnight, and only left it because the enemy
[p. 596]
left their intrenchments confronting it -- moving to the railroad and to the rear. He then held a position in front of Kenesaw for a month, and left that, at last, because, by extending his intrenchments, Sherman had got nearer to Atlanta by several miles than we were. In all the fighting we had been successful, and that in positions frequently prepared for defense in a few hours. Is it probable, then, that General Johnston would not have attempted to hold a place fortified already to his hand under the direction of the Engineer Bureau, and previously inspected by Major-General Gilmer, the chief-engineer of our army? Why had he been strengthening it from the 5th of July, with all the labor he could command, if he did not intend to defend it, in the event of his failing to crush the enemy at Peach-tree Creek? Why was he strengthening it at the very moment of his removal? If the position was as weak as described by General Hood, why did Sherman not attempt to carry it by assault?

The place, in my judgment, could not have been taken either by assault or investment. What are the facts? General Sherman first seized the Augusta road, and held it for six weeks to no purpose. To seize the Macon road he had to let go that to Augusta, which could have supplied our army. In making that movement, he exposed his flank to attack, which blunder was not taken advantage of. His movement was concealed by a curtain of cavalry, and was probably not known to General Hood in time. A large portion of his cavalry under Wheeler was in Sherman's rear, operating on his line of communications. To avoid any such contre-temps, General Johnston kept his cavalry in hand to watch the movement of the enemy and avoid being out-flanked. But I do not propose to discuss General Hood's campaign, which he says was without fault. My purpose is simply to correct errors into which, in my judgment, he has fallen as to General Johnston's, and to do this General Hood has rendered it necessary to consider somewhat the operations around Atlanta. If he did, as he supposes, really commit no blunder, he is probably the only general,
[p. 597]
living or dead, who can claim such good fortune. Napier says: "The greatest masters of the art may err; he who wars walks in a mist, through which the keenest eyes cannot always discern the right path." Turenne exclaims: "Speak to me of a general who has made no mistakes in war, and you speak of one who has seldom made war."

General Hood charges as a fault that General Johnston abandoned territory which he ought to have defended. Similar objections were made by the King of Spain to Soult's plan of the campaign of Talavera, to which the Duke of Dalmatia replied: "Under present circumstances, we cannot avoid the sacrifices of some territory. . . . This will not be distressing as it may appear, because the moment we have beaten and dispersed the enemy's masses we shall recover all our ground. . . . I conceive it impossible to finish this war by detachments. It is large masses only, the strongest that you can form, that will succeed."

Had all the scattered forces in Mississippi and Alabama been concentrated upon Sherman's rear when he was one hundred and forty miles in the interior, and his communications been thoroughly cut, what to-day would have been our condition? "All our ground recovered," Sherman's army destroyed, and Johnston's ready to raise the siege of Richmond or cross the Ohio.

Again, it is alleged that the mountainous country of Northern Georgia offered great advantages, which were abandoned. Napier says: "Here it may be well to notice an error relative to the strength of mountain-defiles, common enough even among men who, with some experience, have taken a contracted view of their profession. From such persons it is usual to hear of narrow passes in which the greatest multitudes may be resisted. Now, without stopping to prove that local strength is nothing if the flanks can be turned by other roads, we may be certain that there are few positions so difficult as to render superior numbers of no avail. Where one man can climb, another can, and a good and numerous infantry crowning the acclivities on the right and left of a disputed pass will soon oblige the defenders
[p. 598]
to retreat or fight upon equal terms. If this takes place at any point of an extended front of defiles, such as those of the Sierra Morena, the dangerous consequences to the whole of the beaten army are obvious. Hence such pases should only be considered as fixed points around which an army should operate freely in defense of more expanded positions; for defiles are doors, the keys of which are the summits of the hills around them. A bridge is a defile, yet troops are posted not in the middle, but behind a bridge, to defend the passage."