On the Road to Atlanta: fun with pontoons

In early July 1863, the Confederate Army of Tennessee retreated from Middle Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River near Battle Creek on a pontoon bridge. High water broke that bridge on July 3rd. The army could only resume crossing after Lieutenant William W. Carnes, who had resigned from the Naval Academy in 1861, improvised a mast and sailed the wayward pontoons against the current to restore the bridge.

On July 5th, 1864, the Army of Tennessee had a different problem. After a supply train successfully crossed the Chattahoochee River at Pace’s Ferry, outside Atlanta, the Confederates were unable to take down their bridge before Federals from Tom Wood’s Division of the 4th Corps arrived to take the Confederate engineers under fire.

It fell to thirty-three-year-old Capt. Salvanus W. Steele, a civil engineer from Tennessee, to rescue the bridge. A fellow officer once described Steele as “a splendid scout and as brave a man as ever lived;” he proved to be so now. “Remaining on the west bank . . . until all had safely crossed, Capt. Steele then cut the ropes to let that end of the pontoon swing off into the river, the boat or flats thus floating over to the other side. Hardly had the pontoons swung off before the enemy’s sharpshooters appeared on the bank . . . but after a few shots they retired. That night,” ORA observed, “we succeeded in taking out one-half the pontoon from the river, and the second night after, the balance . . . was secured, notwithstanding that the enemy shelled the place severely.” In this last, ORA was mistaken; the bridge was not salvaged. On July 7th, observing that the pontoons were still jumbled up along the south bank downstream, Federal troops managed to tie “a cable” to the end of the bridge and hauled it back across the river, where it became U.S. property.[1]

[1]“ORA,” “From Johnston’s Army,” Mobile Daily Tribune, July 14, 1864.