When something is declared endangered, that means it could disappear forever - the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield in Marietta is now on the Civil War Historic Preservation list of endangered battlefields.
It was a place of my boyhood; now it is a place of my adulthood where I like to go because it is so lovely there, so lovely and serene for a location where there was so much death and destruction.
Every time I go there I come away with something new, something I did not know or realize about that hellish, hot day on June 27th, 1864.
Southern men and boys faced men and boys from the North in what many of them remembered as the worst battle they ever fought in what history shows us was the worst war America
ever fought.
It was the worst because it was the bloodiest, but even more because it was fought between Americans, in several cases, literally between brothers, fathers and sons.
On a part of the field known as Pigeon Hill that day entrenched Missouri men in gray and butternut shot down Missouri men in blue.
A few days before the news about the endangered list came out, I revisited the battlefield and stood on Cheatham Hill, where the heaviest fighting occurred.
I knew I stood on the very ground where life ended for so many boys of Ohio and Illinois, stood where George "Pap" Thomas' regiments of his Army of the Cumberland tried to force open and breach the Confederate line under orders from William T. Sherman.
Thomas was a Virginian who chose to stay with the Union and not fight for his native state as so many Virginians did, among them, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas' sisters would not forgive him for that.
Sherman felt the Rebel line was thin and could be broken, and the campaign to capture Atlanta could end with victory that day.
Like many commanders on both sides during the war, he learned once more that entrenched determined soldiers with rifles and cannon could and would stop an attack by assaulting troops, no matter how determined they were.
Sherman called the fight " a sharp but unsuccessful battle."
Tennessee Confederate Sam Watkins recalled how the federal soldiers lay in heaps in front of his trench at what men of both sides called the "Dead Angle," that they approached his line as if they were "mechanical or wooden men", seeming to not care if they lived or died.
They did die and hundreds were wounded; Sherman reported 3,000 casualties in his failed battering ram assault in less than four hours.
As I stood beneath the Illinois Monument, erected at Cheatham Hill 50 years after the battle , I recalled the 'Kingston Trio' hit song of my youth, "Where have all the Flowers Gone" and verses from it struck me with irony and truth.
"Where have all the young men gone, long time passing, where have all the young
men gone, long, long time ago, where have all the young men gone, gone for soldiers every one
Wednesday
October 16th, 2024
9:46PM
