Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, 1863–1865 265
ting a supply of shoes we can help on the work here materially,” he told Brig. Gen.
Alvan C. Gillem, who commanded all troops on the Nashville and Northwestern
Railroad. Thompson had to threaten to relieve his regimental quartermaster, but the
men got their shoes. By the end of January, thirty-four miles of track had been laid,
and by late March, the chief quartermaster in Nashville was ordering construction of
storehouses and a levee at Reynoldsburg, at the other end of the line. The Nashville
and Northwestern track was completed to the Tennessee River well before shallow
water barred steamboats from the Cumberland. 13
Although the ranks of both regiments finally filled, recruiting of Colored
Troops in the Department of the Cumberland lagged. In October 1863, one of
Stearns’ civilian agents wrote from Clarksville, about forty-five miles northwest
of Nashville, that previous commanders of the Union garrison had always turned
away escaped slaves who sought refuge there. Since the new colonel approved of
attempts to recruit black soldiers, the agent said, “There is now here about one
hundred thirty [who] are anxious to enlist. . . . I think they will come in now fast.”
At Gallatin, the same distance northeast of Nashville, 203 recruits were waiting for
tents and overcoats. Besides shelter and clothing, the agent there requested blank
forms for certificates of enlistment that the former slaves could leave with their
wives. The documents would entitle soldiers’ families to federal protection “if
their masters abuse them.” A third agent wrote from a federal garrison twenty-five
miles south of Murfreesborough that “no men can be got outside [the Union lines]
without a military escort for protection.” The parlous state of the post’s defenses
had not stopped him from signing up “as many as . . . possible” of the twenty or
thirty black civilians laboring on the earthworks. 14
The Union Army would need all the labor it could hire to sustain the coming
year’s advance into the heart of the Confederacy. In the fall of 1863, federal divisions
from places as distant as Maryland and Mississippi had converged on Chattanooga
by rail to raise the siege and turn the Confederates back into northern Georgia. Rosecrans
was gone as commander of the Department of the Cumberland and its field
army; in his place was Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, a Unionist Virginian who had
grown up in a slave-holding family. Grant, who had organized the relief of Chattanooga,
went east in March 1864 to assume command of all the Union armies. His
successor in the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, Maj. Gen.
William T. Sherman, commanded the Military Division of the Mississippi, which
included the Armies of the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Tennessee. Each army
represented a geographical department of the same name; taken together, their troop
strengths amounted to more than 296,000 men present. Nearly two-thirds of those
served in garrisons or in guard outposts along the region’s railroads. “If I can put
in motion 100,000 [men] it will make as large an army as we can possibly supply,”
Sherman told Grant. Sherman’s staff calculated that the spring campaign against
Atlanta would require one hundred thirty carloads of freight a day to keep the armies
13 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 2, p. 269, and pt. 3, p. 155; Johnson Papers, 6: 701; Col C. R. Thompson
to Brig Gen A. C. Gillem, 8 Jan 1864 (quotation), 12th USCI, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA.
14 C. B. Morse to Maj G. L. Stearns, 22 Oct 1863 (“There is”); J. H. Holmes to Maj G. L. Stearns,
8 Oct 1863 (“if their”); W. F. Wheeler to Maj G. L. Stearns, 4 Oct 1863 (“no men”); all in Entry 1149,
pt. 1, RG 393, NA.