They formed a huge block of humanity that was to rush the Confederate lines and break through by mass alone. The Union troops for this attack were packed together like M&Ms in a bag. George Thomas’ Army of the Cumberland to lead the main attack, two full infantry divisions were assigned to attack on a frontage not much wider than your own front yard. He needed to smash the Confederates and drive them off Kennesaw Mountain and back toward Atlanta. So much of the Union army’s attention was being spent on this one small angle in the line that the men of the 1st and 27th knew that something was coming -something bad. The area was now completely open as every tree, bush, weed and vine had been blasted away. It was a convenient and visible target for the artillery of their enemies. They were in a salient, or point of land, that stuck out of their lines toward the Union lines below them across a broad wooded valley. Their numbers were so reduced by the hard fighting in North Georgia that their regiment had been combined with the men of the Twenty-Seventh Tennessee Infantry, and even then their numbers of men did not approach the intended strength of a regiment.Įach night Watkins and his friends would dig out the entrenchments and rebuild them, and each day several batteries of Federal artillery pieces would blast them back down level again with the earth.

They were entrenched along the flank of Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta, Ga. Sam Watkins and his mess mates in Company H (Aytch) of the First Tennessee Infantry were fighting the war with picks and shovels.

Sam watkins company aytch