Inching ever closer to the Chattahoochee River as the month of July 1864 opened, Federal troops continued their attempt to turn Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s left flank. The Southerners had repulsed attacks against their Kennesaw Mountain Line, and the enemy was probing for a way around them.
With the boys in blue dangerously close to the river and threatening to cross over – which would put them between Johnston’s troops and Atlanta – the general on the evening of July 2 ordered the Army of Tennessee to evacuate the Kennesaw line and fall back to a position earlier established near Smyrna.
On July 3 and 4, elements of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s force engaged the Confederates along the Smyrna-Ruff’s Mill Line. Hard fighting under brutally hot temperatures left many soldiers risking life and limb just to find water. Some successfully filled their canteens; many did not. Both armies commemorated Independence Day beneath the shock and shell of combat.
Sherman recalled, “We celebrated our Fourth of July by a noisy but not a desperate battle … to hold the enemy there till Generals McPherson and Schofield could get well into position below him. We ought to have caught Johnston on his retreat, but he prepared the way too well.”
Tennessee Private Sam Watkins remembered, “Two hundred cannon were roaring and belching like blue blazes. It seemed that the earth was frequently moved from its foundations, and you could hear it grate as it moved.”
Perhaps the earth did not really move, but the Army of Tennessee did. The evening of July 4 found the Confederates occupying the Chattahoochee River Line, the brainchild of Johnston’s artillery chief, Brig. Gen. Francis Asbury Shoup.
Earlier, in June, Shoup approached Johnston with the novel concept for a series of aboveground fortifications, spaced between 60 and 175 yards apart and protecting the Western & Atlantic Railroad crossing of the river near what is now South Atlanta Road/Marietta Boulevard. Johnston approved the plan, and Shoup quickly went to work directing the construction of the various fortifications and connecting palisades.
He also sought artillery to locate where each palisade, which ran from an angle back from each fortification, created what Shoup called a reentrant position. Around 1,000 enslaved persons and convalescing Confederate soldiers worked to build the line.
Soon after the felling of trees and construction of the fortifications began, Johnston – concerned for the safety of the Mayson-Turner Ferry – ordered Shoup to extend the line southward. This directive, which Shoup did not favor but followed, resulted in the line stretching for six miles north and west of the river (today’s I-285 runs north to south at this point and cuts across the line). Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith named the defensive works for their inventor – “Shoupades.”
When Sherman approached the position July 5, he wired officials in Washington: “I must study the case a little.” Sherman consulted with his chief engineer Orlando Poe. The officers decided against attacking the formidable position head-on. Instead, they would go around it.
Deviating from his standard practice of the Atlanta Campaign of continually striking against the left flank of the Southern army, Sherman sent elements of Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio, along with the Federal cavalry of Brig. Gen. Kenner Garrard, toward Roswell – Johnston’s right flank.
Portions of Schofield’s force forded near Sope Creek on July 8, followed the next day with Garrard’s horsemen gaining access to the Atlanta banks of the river after crossing at Roswell. His position no longer tenable, Johnston ordered his army on the evening of July 9 to abandon the River Line and fall back across the Chattahoochee.
“I made good all I proposed,” a frustrated Shoup later wrote. His defensive works, he said, “could have been held by 3,000 men for any reasonable time against a hundred thousand.” (Today, the River Line Historic Area, www.riverline.org, works to protect, preserve and interpret these Civil War earthworks in Cobb County.)
The Federal arrival in the area gave rise to an especially notorious episode of Sherman’s campaign: The forced evacuation of civilian mill workers.
Prior to crossing the Chattahoochee, Northern troops destroyed textile mills in Roswell and in Campbell County (which no longer exists; it’s now part of Douglas and south Fulton counties), as factories there produced goods for the Confederacy. They arrested as “traitors” hundreds of men, women and children who worked in the Roswell Mill. Workers at the Sweetwater Factory (also known as New Manchester) in Campbell also found themselves Federal prisoners.
The troops escorted both groups to Marietta, gave them a few days’ rations and put them on trains heading north. Several of the deported refugees ended up in various Indiana towns; many never returned to their beloved Georgia.
Meanwhile, the Army of Tennessee occupied fortifications ringing Atlanta and awaited the next move of the Northern forces, which continued to make their way across the Chattahoochee. Johnston may not have realized it, but with the movement of his troops across the river, his days as their commander were numbered.
Michael K. Shaffer is a Civil War historian, author and lecturer. He can be contacted at: www.civilwarhistorian.net
For more on the Civil War in Georgia, follow the AJC: http://www.ajc.com/s/opinion/ and http://www.myajc.com/s/battleofatlanta/
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