'You have killed the best man in our army'

Military Images, May/Jun 2002 by Sickles, John

The death of John B. McPherson deprived the Union Army of one of its best generals.

John Bell Hood replaced Joseph Johnston in mid-July 1864 because the Confederacy wanted a more aggressive leader. Hood lost no time putting his army on the move. He was trying to wrest the advantage from his opponent, William T. Sherman. Atlanta was the prize.

One regiment, the 5th Confederate Infantry of Patrick Cleburne's command, was given an additional 60 rounds per man for an attack on the 22nd. Moving out through dense underbrush to strike Major General James McPherson's line on the Augusta Railroad amid heavy cannonading from both sides, the 5th, composed of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri men, was commanded that day by Captain Richard Beard.

Beard kept his men advancing on the double quick so rapidly that they captured some Union skirmishers without firing a shot. Suddenly they burst through the underbrush onto a little wagon road. Simultaneously a Union general came thundering down the road with a small entourage behind. Beard guessed that the leader was nothing less than a corps commander. He raised his sword as a signal for the Federal general to surrender. By this time the general was only a few feet from where the Confederates stood.

"He checked his horse slightly, raised his hat as politely as if he was saluting a lady, wheeled his horse's head directly to the right, and dashed off to the rear in full gallop," described Beard.

Corporal Robert Coleman, a Mississippian who Beard described as "gallant but excitable," fired and the general was brought down. He landed on his knees and face. The ball had hit him in the back and passed out the front near his heart.

"Even as he lay there, dressed in his Major General's uniform, his face in the dust, he was as magnificent a looking picture of manhood as I ever saw," remembered Beard.

In the swift altercation one of the horses belonging to a Union staff officer had been killed and the man was lying on the ground near the general. Beard asked the shaken, although still alive soldier who the general was.

"Sir, it is General McPherson. You have killed the best man in our army," replied the Union soldier.

Cleburne's plan had been to sever the Federal line, and the fighting had been terrific. One observer said that the earth "jarred, shook, and trembled."

Within seconds Beard was ordered to march to the right. Part of his command never heard the order and, as a result, he was detached from his own men. He decided to rally to the colors, but he and all of his men who weren't killed were soon captured.

Cleburne ordered his men to take a particularly unnerving enemy artillery battery. One of his men offered to take up a collection and buy him one if he wanted it so badly.

A soldier serving in a nearby Confederate regiment saw the Federals ride up with an ambulance, hastily load a dead man into it, and dash back to Union lines. Later he learned that it was General McPherson whom they'd recovered.

For Beard the war was over. Taken via railroad north to a prison camp, he and his comrades passed through Clyde, Ohio, McPherson's birthplace. Noticing that the flag was flying at halfstaff, one of the prisoners innocently asked why. He was told it was for General McPherson, whom the "damned rebels" had murdered.

McPherson's body lay on a door in General Sherman's headquarters. Sherman himself struggled to hold back tears as he issued orders to check the Confederate advance.

Later on he wrote McPherson's fiancee reflecting on his hopes and plans he'd had for her man: "I expected something to happen to Grant and me; either the Rebels or the newspapers would kill us both, and I looked to McPherson as the man to follow us and finish the war."

As for the officer who ordered McPherson to surrender, Richard Beard finished the war at the Johnson's Island prison camp. He and his best friend, Captain William A. Brown, were discharged from there in June 1865. Brown was still wearing McPherson's hat, which he'd picked up amid all the excitement when the general was killed.

Beard returned to his native Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to find that two of his brothers had already made the supreme sacrifice for the Confederacy. Having already finished college before the war, he entered law school and attained his law license in 1866. He practiced his profession for 65 years.

Beard loved and dwelled in his remembrance of the war. He played master of ceremonies at a local Confederate monument dedication in 1901. He kept track of countless old comrades, and even wrote to Captain Brown's daughter in 1926 extolling the virtues of his old partner.

Once he sent in a humorous anecdote to the Confederate Veteran magazine about a well-- remembered Christmas dinner. While on leave for a wound received at Chickamauga, he and two pals roomed in LaGrange, Georgia, in 1863. Just before Christmas the landlord told them he'd acquired a turkey for Christmas dinner. The day before Christmas he caught Beard and one of his companions at home and informed them that the turkey had died of a sore throat.