The Road Past Kennesaw: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 — Edition Insights

Continuous Combat and Its Toll

The Atlanta Campaign, as McMurry presents it, was unusual for its relentless pressure. Unlike many Civil War operations where fighting occurred at infrequent intervals, here the armies were rarely free from the sounds and dangers of combat. The text notes that at Resaca nearly all forces were engaged, while at other times action was limited to skirmishers’ fire. This constant exposure wore down soldiers physically and mentally. The weather compounded the strain: a freak cold wave in mid-June, heavy rains in late May and June, and the normal heat of July and August all hampered movements. On July 12, the heat was so severe that only 50 men from an Illinois regiment could complete a three-mile march. Such details ground the campaign in the soldiers’ bodily experience.

Trench Warfare and Makeshift Defenses

McMurry describes how the campaign saw the development of trench warfare on a large scale. Soldiers built protective works from whatever was at hand: loose rocks, fence rails, tombstones, or even the bodies of dead comrades. By the third or fourth week, both sides had mastered field fortification—a trench with dirt piled toward the enemy, surmounted by a headlog with small firing openings. The text states that such works left “little but the eyes ... exposed” to enemy fire. In front of the trenches, underbrush was cleared and young trees cut so they fell toward the foe, left partly attached to stumps to prevent removal. Telegraph wire was sometimes strung between them as an additional obstacle. These improvised defenses reflect the campaign’s brutal pragmatism.

Daily Hardships: Lice, Heat, and Hunger

The narrative devotes significant attention to the soldiers’ daily struggles beyond combat. Body lice and other vermin affected almost all men; soldiers pinned down in water-filled trenches consoled themselves that they were at least drowning the lice. Federals complained that retreating Southerners infested the country with lice that attacked advancing Northerners. Other pests included chiggers, ticks, snakes, scorpions, flies, and ants. Clothing was a persistent problem: Sherman’s men were better supplied but their wool uniforms were unsuited to the Georgia summer, while Confederates had almost no new clothing after the campaign began. Food shortages forced soldiers to supplement rations with whatever could be taken from farms—corn, pork, chickens, geese, hams, potatoes, apples, and onions. One Federal wrote, “most of the time we are on the move and cannot get such as is fit for a man to eat.”

Readers should note that McMurry’s study is concise—about 20,000 words—and draws on official records and soldier accounts. The foreword by Bell Irvin Wiley frames the campaign as a turning point, but the text itself stays close to the ground, detailing how men coped with mud, heat, lice, and constant threat. Pay attention to the recurring contrast between the strategic prize—Atlanta, a railroad hub—and the squalid, exhausting reality of the soldiers who pursued it.

Reading again about the endless trenches at Kennesaw—the heat, the lice, the sheer weariness of men digging and shooting day after day—my mind drifted to another war’s grinding monotony. The same exhaustion seemed to hang in the air there, too, in that other campaign’s dusty fields. There is a quiet familiarity in such distant suffering, a thread I found again in The Russian Campaign, April to August, 1915 Being the Second Volume of "Field Notes from the Russian Front" — Edition Insights.