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with a staff officer on board bearing letters from Colonel Dayton to myself and the Admiral, reporting that the city of Savannah had been found evacuated on the morning of December 21, and was then in our possession.
General Hardee had crossed the Savannah River by a pontoon bridge, carrying off his men and light artillery, blowing up his iron-clads and navy-yard, but leaving for us all the heavy guns, stores, cotton, railway cars, steamboats, and an immense amount of public and private property.’ * * * *
Some light is thrown upon the question of the responsibility for
Hardee's escape by the official records.
The aggregate strength of
Sherman's army before
Savannah on December 20, the day before its evacuation, was sixty thousand five hundred and ninety-eight men.
Hardee's field returns for the same day showed an aggregate for his garrison, of all arms and all sorts, of nine thousand and eighty-nine men.
On the 16th of December
General Sherman, in a letter to
General Grant, gave this opinion of the Confederate strength:
‘I think Hardee, in Savannah, has good artillerists; some five or six thousand good infantry, and, it may be, a mongrel mass of eight to ten thousand militia.’
General Sherman had ‘surrounded’ the city, as he so fully explained—that is, he had not surrounded it.
Hardee held the entire
Savannah River front of the city.
Hutchinson Island, opposite, reached from a point below the place to a point opposite the left of the
Union line.
Between
Hutchinson Island and the
South Carolina shore was
Pennyworth Island.
The only possible way of escape for
Hardee, unless he cut through
Sherman's sixty thousand, was by building pontoon bridges connecting these islands and the two shores.
General Slocum, who occupied the
Union left with the Twentieth Corps, had captured two small steamers, and collected a number of flats and small boats immediately after reaching the
Savannah River, and was extremely anxious to cross a corps to the
South Carolina side, which would have effectually invested the city.
With an army of four corps, and either
