Resaca: The Atlanta Campaign Begins in Earnest

The fields around Resaca, Georgia, saw some of the bloodiest fighting of eighteen sixty-four's Atlanta Campaign, and they established a pattern that would repeat itself all the way to Atlanta: Sherman would attack, Johnston would hold, and then Johnston would quietly slip away at night to avoid being surrounded.

William Tecumseh Sherman left Chattanooga in May of eighteen sixty-four commanding roughly one hundred thousand men in three armies. His opponent, Confederate General Joseph Johnston, had around sixty-five thousand defending the Georgia mountains. Sherman's strategy was not simply to crush Johnston head-on, but to keep moving, keep flanking, and force the Confederates to retreat or be cut off.

Sherman tried to do exactly that at Rocky Face Ridge near Dalton, sending a flanking column under General James McPherson to cut the Western and Atlantic Railroad at Resaca, Johnston's supply line to Atlanta. McPherson arrived and found Confederate defenses stronger than expected. He pulled back instead of pressing through.

Johnston slipped south to Resaca before Sherman could trap him. The battle ran from May thirteenth through May fifteenth. Both sides dug in along a four-mile front straddling the Conasauga and Oostanaula rivers. The fighting was brutal and close, with neither side able to break the other's lines. Each army suffered around twenty-eight hundred casualties in three days.

Then Sherman sent troops across the Oostanaula River south of the Confederate position, threatening to cut off Johnston's retreat. Johnston evacuated again that night, pulling back toward Adairsville and then Cassville, steadily closer to Atlanta.

The battle at Resaca was tactically inconclusive and strategically decisive in a quiet way: it confirmed that Sherman's flanking method could keep an army moving faster than Johnston could permanently stop it. The road to Atlanta was open, and everyone on both sides could feel it.