Review - "The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864" by David Powell

[The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864 by David A. Powell (Savas Beatie, 2024). Hardcover, 19 maps, photos, footnotes, orders of battle, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xvi,545/623. ISBN:978-1-61121-695-0. $39.95]

Given the vast scale of opposing forces and the high military and political stakes involved in the western theater's central conflict of 1864, full-length standalone coverage of the Atlanta Campaign's many large battles has taken a puzzlingly long time to gather steam. The only military history students more dismayed by a similar degree of longstanding neglect are 1862 Peninsula Campaign enthusiasts! Thankfully, the floodgates are now wide open, and the past decade and a half have been a godsend for those seeking the most cutting edge understanding of the May-September 1864 chain of events between Dalton and Jonesboro. Oddly enough, the new battle histories released during this grand revival, with its multiple major works from prime contributors Gary Ecelbarger, Earl Hess, and Robert Jenkins, have frequently come in pairs. Ecelbarger opened the ball in 2010 with a fine history of the July 22 Battle of Atlanta, and since then there has been another July 22 book, a Kennesaw Mountain battle history, two Ezra Church studies, and a pair of volumes covering the Battle of Peach Tree Creek (with another addressing its lead in) released. Most recently, the controversial "Affair at Cassville" was thoroughly examined in a groundbreaking book published earlier this year¹. Smaller works of various kinds have also been produced in recent times, and additional major works touch upon the campaign through other angles such as biography and field fortifications.

Of course, when it comes to single-volume military histories of the campaign, Albert Castel's 1992 tome Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 still sets the standard. In perhaps the most exciting development to date, David Powell, best known for his monumental multi-volume study of the 1863 Chickamauga Campaign, has been applying the same level of research, descriptive detail, and keenly informed analysis to an 1864 Atlanta Campaign project of unprecedented scale. A hefty five volumes are planned, the first of which, The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864, is the subject of this review.

Studies of this kind routinely begin with descriptive assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of each side's high command leadership and army organization. With knowledge of the personalities involved in the decision-making process, it is clear that no one save U.S. Grant himself was higher on the list than William T. Sherman was when it came to preferred candidates for leading the great western army group. However, from a dispassionate point of view, Powell suggests that George Thomas's record up to that time might have made him the objective (or at the very least safest) choice. There's certainly merit in that. On army group organizational matters, Powell is justifiably critical of the decision to eschew a wholesale, streamlined reorganization of Union forces in favor of simply combining three existing departments, with each field army component being of greatly different size and varying in support apparatus. Beyond that awkward arrangement conferring unnecessary additional layers of command and logistics management upon the army group as a whole, the individual army commanders would also have to attend to their more distant departmental administration duties. Of similarly haphazard organization was the mounted arm of Sherman's army group, which lacked a unified command structure and was unevenly distributed among the three armies. On the Confederate side, there was friction and loss of confidence from the start between Army of the Tennessee commander Joseph E. Johnston and Confederate president Jefferson Davis as neither could agree on an offensive versus defensive stance in the theater. Davis could not understand that his western army simply did not have the transportation resources necessary to conduct offensive operations, and, as expanded upon below, Johnston's overly passive approach to the upcoming campaign offered equally unrealistic prospects for success.

Powell also fully explores the implications of the military maneuvering in North Georgia prior to initiation of the main advance in May. Winter events that preceded the spring offensive are typically glossed over in the Atlanta Campaign literature, but Powell describes them in great detail. While the Union probing advances achieved nothing of tactical significance on the ground, they did confirm the strength of the Confederate forward positions in North Georgia and, much more important, kept Johnston from detaching heavy reinforcements for service in the heart of Mississippi, where forces there were opposing Sherman's Meridian Expedition.

Snake Creek Gap was the earliest of the campaign's great what-ifs, with critics of Army of the Tennessee commander James B. McPherson (including Sherman himself) lamenting the young major general's failure to enter Resaca and destroy the critical rail bridge located nearby. Powell correctly presents the situation as being much more complicated than that, with a lot of blame to go around. First, those who argue that McPherson, an innately cautious personality, could have just waltzed into Resaca are clearly misinformed, as nearly 6,000 Confederate infantry defended the post by the time McPherson's van arrived. Never ordered to grab and hold Resaca, McPherson was directed by Sherman to cut the railroad then safely withdraw to the mouth of the gap and await support. Powell argues strenuously and convincingly that it would not have been in McPherson's nature to exceed his orders nor did he have the troops necessary to simultaneously storm and hold Resaca, guard the army trains well to the rear, and block the several roads between the gap and Resaca that led down from the north into his army's rear. That doesn't leave McPherson entirely off the hook, though. The strongest charges leveled against McPherson in the book, that he did not even attempt to seriously damage the railroad north of Resaca and did not make any kind of effort to employ Judson Kilpatrick's cavalry division forward, are compellingly drawn and supported, even after taking into account the cascading effects of another cavalry general's dilatory absence (to an extent, Kilpatrick had to fill in for Theophilus Garrard's late-arriving division). Generally speaking, McPherson and Sherman were both guilty of not positioning the available cavalry to the best effect, with the former taking his cues from the latter. In Powell's final estimation of what most went wrong on the Union side, Sherman erred greatly in not providing his and Grant's beloved protege with enough troops to ensure the assigned task could be completed and the unexpected dealt with, and orders for Joseph Hooker's Twentieth Corps to join McPherson were a day late.

On the other side of the equation, it has been alleged that Joe Johnston was surprised by the presence of McPherson's army at Snake Creek Gap and even that the Confederate commander was unconscionably unaware of the gap's existence. Powell forcibly demolishes any support for the latter claim, but he does justifiably contend that Johnston was indeed unduly surprised by Union passage through Snake Creek Gap and that the blame for it must go to both Joseph Wheeler and Johnston himself for failing to occupy the gap. As Powell keenly observes, Wheeler heavily overcommitted his forces to the Dalton front and Johnston, who devoted his mental energies to the defenses of Dalton and Rome while also personally directing some of his army's cavalry affairs, was similarly neglectful in his duty toward the security of the Snake Creek Gap approach to Resaca.

As he always does, Powell combines operational and tactical narrative seamlessly, his style of presentation and detail-levels more than satisfactory in both areas. Of course, the amount of micro-tactical discussion in this hybrid study can't match that found in a standalone battle tome, but there is more than enough of it selectively reserved for the most momentous events. The Snake Creek Gap, Resaca, and Lay's Ferry sequence receives the most consistently detailed treatment, which is important as the Battle of Resaca has never really received the full attention that it deserves, the previously standard history being Philip Secrist's slim volume². Along the way reminding us that Resaca produced more than 8,000 casualties, Powell's intricate account restores its status as a major battle of considerable import. Indeed, the amount of fine detail lavished upon Resaca in the book bodes well for hopes that future volumes in Powell's series will provide the same reader rewards when it comes to other big clashes similarly awaiting their own turn amid the current sharp upsurge in Atlanta Campaign battle history publishing.

Powell interrupts his discussion of the final stages of the Resaca fighting with a concise yet highly revealing summary of Sherman's logistical preparations for the campaign. In that chapter, Powell effectively explains the pathway through which those talented logistical planners and managers (with immense resources at their disposal) made possible the army group's ability to cut loose from the railroad and achieve wide sweeping maneuvers across rugged, barren geography in ways that its opponent could not match. However, that is not to say that Union superiority in wide maneuver left Johnston bereft of opportunities of his own. It is common enough for critics to point out Johnston's repeated failure to use his central position astride the railroad to mass local superiority against some portion of Sherman's host, which tended to advance on a broad front leaving its river-crossing spearheads vulnerable on occasion to getting caught mid-stream. In addressing this particular phase of the campaign, Powell certainly agrees with eminent Army of Tennessee historian Thomas Connelly that the overly defensive Confederate commander missed a golden opportunity to maul McPherson's vanguard near Calhoun.

Powell's handles the "Cassville Affair" in a pair of late chapters. Powell agrees with Robert Jenkins (as previously mentioned, the author of a book fully dedicated to the topic) that Johnston's version of events, as recorded after the war, was faulty and misleading. Powell is also entirely in accord with the most important aspect of the mystery, the fact (grossly underemphasized in nearly all accounts) that, even if John Bell Hood's corps was not distracted by encroaching Union cavalry and attacked as planned from its flanking position on the Confederate right, there was no substantial Union force present there to damage or destroy. In the informed judgment of both writers, Sherman failed to take the offered bait on that sector of the battlefield, and that stroke of fortune essentially rendered the morning phase of the day's controversies immaterial (beyond it being a source of mutual friction within Hood and Johnston's previously harmonious relationship).

The book's 19 maps are a solid number, with only a few gaps in expected coverage. You won't find the kind of all-pervasive, regimental-level map detail found in the most diehard volumes entirely dedicated to single battles, but that quality is present on a selective basis in Powell's book. Generally speaking, the map content matches the scale and level of detail presented in the accompanying text.

Though President Davis himself, who repeatedly urged Johnston to take the offensive (and, once he did, would be reinforced), possessed an unrealistic perspective on the capabilities of the western Confederacy's principal field army, Johnston proved equally incapable of coming up with a viable alternative strategy for the campaign. As Powell's account of the first weeks in May clearly shows, that did not change as the campaign progressed through its earliest stages. Erroneously maintaining that his army was outnumbered two to one, Johnston completely ceded the initiative to Sherman, believing his only two options were to either take up a strong defensive position (and hope Sherman would attack it head on) or wait for Sherman to commit a gross blunder that could then be exploited by a devastating counterstroke. It was a strategy entirely dependent upon best wishes. As Powell and others have pointed out, the overall disparity in numbers was never as grave as Johnston liked to proclaim, and at one point Sherman held only a roughly 9:8 edge in manpower. Simply hoping that his opponent would pull a Burnside at Fredericksburg was no plan at all, and, as the opening weeks of the campaign clearly demonstrated, Johnston was not audacious enough or flexible enough to take advantage of openings given him nor was he informed as well as he should have been about either the landscape around him or the positions of the opposing chess pieces on it³. Johnston and cavalry chief Wheeler were also no Lee and Stuart when it came to obtaining and processing intelligence. Johnston ultimately electing to retreat whenever and wherever confronted with a difficult operational dilemma would form a running pattern of command behavior first established during the period covered in this book. It was a self-defeating pattern set by Johnston that failed to pay its supposed attritional dividends, further emboldened his Union opponents, demoralized his own army, and eroded already shaky confidence in his leadership.

In The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864, David Powell's ambitious pentalogy has gotten off to a rousing and fully satisfying start. On to Volume 2!

Additional Notes:
1 - Students of the Atlanta Campaign are fortunate that the quality matches the quantity of these battle studies. In chronological order of release (with links to CWBA reviews posted at the time):
• The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta (2010) by Gary Ecelbarger.
• Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign (2013) by Earl Hess.
• The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Sortie, July 20, 1864 (2014) by Robert Jenkins.
• To the Gates of Atlanta: From Kennesaw Mountain to Peach Tree Creek, 1-19 July 1864 (2015) by Jenkins.
• The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta (2015) by Hess.
• Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864 (2016) by Ecelbarger.
• The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Effort to Save Atlanta (2017) by Hess.
• July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta (2023) by Hess.
• The Cassville Affairs: Johnston, Hood, and the Failed Confederate Strategy in the Atlanta Campaign, 19 May 1864 (2024) by Jenkins.
2 - Philip Secrist's The Battle of Resaca: Atlanta Campaign, 1864 was originally published in 1998 and reissued in paperback in 2010 (see the site review of the latter edition). The book offers a fine summary of the fighting on May 14 and 15 as well as an interesting discussion of battlefield archaeology at the site.
3 - Indeed, numerous critics condemn Johnston for his apparent lack of knowledge about the terrain and road networks between Dalton and Atlanta beyond a very narrow corridor encompassing both sides of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. It is a point well taken, although, as Powell suggests, it might be a bit overblown.