The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  A ditty chanted by troops captured their sense of the futility:Ever since the creation

  By the best calculation

  The Florida war has been raging . . .

  And yet, ’tis not an endless war

  As facts will plainly show

  Having been “ended” forty times

  In twenty months or so.

  With the war approaching its fifth anniversary and seemingly no end in sight, a young second lieutenant fresh out of West Point must have wondered what the devil he was getting himself into as he stood in a whaleboat being pulled through the tossing green surf breaking across the haulover at the bar of the Indian River Inlet in October 1840.

  Traveling down the Atlantic seaboard to the country’s far corner, the nineteen-year-old William Tecumseh Sherman knew he was entering “into a new world.” His first posting to an Indian war made his unusual middle name, given to him by his father for the Shawnee Indian chief who had battled the American settlers in his native Ohio, more apt than ever. After being rowed across the three-mile-wide lagoon fronting Fort Pierce, he stepped ashore as the sun set into the silhouetted palmettos and saw grass that extended as far as the eye could see. The home of Companies A and F of the Third Artillery served as the eastern anchor for a line of bases running from Tampa Bay across the peninsula. Fort Pierce looked nothing like those that “Cump,” as he was called by academy classmates, had studied on the banks of the Hudson River. It looked more like an indigenous fishing village than a refuge for hardened soldiers fighting a war.

  Three rows of colorful, raised log houses thatched with Palmetto leaves, tropical tree houses perched over the sandbar on stilts, served as officer quarters. Bunkhouses open to the breezes off the lagoon housed the men. Bird feathers, animal pelts, rattlesnake skins, and shark jaws and teeth decorated the structures. A stockade fence not sturdy enough to stop anything more aggressive than an encroaching alligator demarcated the inland intervals between the houses. Horses, chickens, cawing crows, “a full-blood Indian pony,” and a fawn wandered and fluttered about the parade ground. Large green turtles languished in cages in the lagoon where they were being fattened for butchering.

  The bayonet-straight Cump was described by an officer, who encountered him for the first time there on the banks of the lagoon, as “thin and spare, but healthy, loquacious, active, and communicative to an extraordinary degree.” He found the red-headed young man with the sharply observant eyes “as bright as the burning bush.” Intense, hardworking, and smart, he had left his mark at West Point, he felt, as much for demerits earned for indifference to the academy’s rules and regulations as for academic prowess. But the young officer quickly adapted to his new surroundings, fitting in well among the rest of the regular army men who’d already spent their summer baking under the blazing sun. “The fragrance of the air, the abundance of game and fish, and just enough adventure, gave life a relish,” he recalled. Amid the palmettos, slash pine, and mangroves, he soon longed for “those splendid Ohio orchards of apples and peaches,” but he savored oysters by the bushel and turtle meat at the officer’s mess table. Fishing was presently the fort’s principle business. He waded into the clear warm water, learning from a local character “of some note,” Ashlock, “the best fisherman I ever saw,” to spear shark along the bar, troll for red fish, and net turtles. With crows, hens, and rabbits wandering in and out of his room, he admitted that it wasn’t clear whether it “was the abode of man or beast.”

  A MONTH AFTER CUMP’S arrival, however, the refreshment of cooler days brought the return of the winter campaign in earnest. The Fort Pierce troops started “hunting up and securing” bands of Seminoles they encountered in their patrols, mostly by boat through the chains of lagoons, ranging north some two hundred miles and south about fifty to the Jupiter Inlet, and even down to Lake Worth and the Everglades. The soldier’s life in the field pleased Sherman. He relished “threading through the intricate mazes of the Everglades in canvas, wading through the endless swamps carrying our ‘five days rations, to last ten,’ piling up the bushes to make a bed above the water—testing the comparative merits of alligator & crow stands.”

  On one occasion, company soldiers struck upon fifty Indians camped near the Indian River Inlet haulover, shooting down several and capturing many others. One of the soldiers who claimed to have “dispatched” three Indians brought a scalp back to the fort as a trophy.

  Sherman saw little good in the native enemy, who succeeded in staving off his demise only through “cunning and perfidy.” Still, he could admire captured Indians as “noble looking” and appreciated their stoic acceptance of their miserable fates at the government’s hands. He was also impressed by their ability to endure pain, including an Indian girl who survived a shot in the back that exited through her cheek.

  He did not have even such grudging compliments to offer the “cursed militia,” with whom he dealt during the campaign. “Good for nothing” and a “pack of rascals,” he complained, they “never rendered a particle of service but when called upon to act have either disgraced themselves and the regulars with whom they have acted or else.”

  While Sherman never shot an Indian and complained that the effort resulting in “picking up here and there a family” was “absurd” to call a “war,” the hunt for Seminoles was a good training ground, he contended, because “the Indian is most likely to be our chief enemy in times to come.” While his assessment would not prove true until decades later, the experience of fighting the Indians did help shape his outlook on more conventional war making. He gained a sense of what it took to win against an enemy fighting over its own ground—and what was wrong with a war being waged on the enemy’s terms. While in Florida, he studied geography and geology in his spare time, believing that knowledge of terrain was part and parcel of a winning strategy and that inadequate mapping and scouting badly undermined the army’s efforts to ferret out the Seminoles.

  He also learned to distrust anything less than an enemy’s complete capitulation. The young lieutenant saw how easily the natives, fighting over their own turf, could utilize subterfuge to continue their resistance even when they seemed beaten. Every time the government negotiated with a few of the Indians for their removal, when the time came for them to surrender, he complained, “None present themselves.” The government responded by sending in the army to round them up, but in too few numbers, and, not surprisingly, “they all get massacred.” In the farce acted out time and again throughout the Southeast, a larger force followed upon the first, but the enemy was now positioned to choose the place of battle, resulting in “a few hundred killed,” at which point “the Indians retreat, scatter, and are safe,” to repeat the process “ad infinitum.” A fighting force, he reasoned, should not relinquish the signal advantage by letting its enemy choose the field of battle.

  The exasperating, slow-motion war was a withering disaster for a great army, top to bottom. Sherman was sympathetic to the failures of the Florida commanders, who quickly found themselves stuck in figurative swamps that added to their woes in the real swamps. Little wonder few good men lasted when, he lamented, “the best officer is selected to direct the affairs of the army—comes to Florida, exposes himself, does all he can, gets abused by all, more than likely breaks down his constitution, and is glad enough to get out of the scrape.” He expected to fight on until the war ended, though, he lamented, “when that will be God only knows.” He feared that he might die of old age chasing Indians through the steamy green Florida maze.

  INSTEAD OF GETTING TIED up in the drip-drip-drip of a hit-and-run war against an enemy able to sustain such combat indefinitely, he longed for “something decisive.” Sherman wanted the government to launch “a war of extermination . . . the most certain and economical method” for winning against an enemy that fought over its own ground and refused to capitulate, though so obviously overmatched.

  While it was too late for a total peninsular war, he did witness how effective a well-organized campaign
ruthlessly aimed at the enemy’s morale—his shelter and stomach—could prove. Col. William Jenkins Worth took command of Florida that winter. His aide-de-camp described the now standard dilemma that the new army chief faced in battling the Seminoles:Every hammock and swamp was to them a citadel, to which and from which they could retreat with wonderful facility. Regardless of food or the climate, time or distance, they moved from one part of the country to the other, in parties of five and ten; while the soldier, dependent upon supplies, and sinking under the tropical sun, could only hear of his foe by depredations committed in the section of the country over which he scouted the day before.

  Worth would need to come up with a new strategy and the ability to move his men with the same swift mobility as his enemy if he wanted to end Seminole resistance for good. His determination finally succeeded.

  In May 1841, at a time when the war would normally have begun to wind down and the Indians to retreat to their interior crop and pastures, Worth renewed the attack. He arranged his forces in a bayoneted net extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, designating companies to destroy whatever Indian stores, herds, and crops under cultivation they found. He also sent small mobile detachments of twenty men into the swamps to eliminate Indian refuges. The smoke from the many fires they set wafted on the humid air. He intended to starve the last Seminoles out, leaving them nowhere to hide and driving them straight into the army’s guns.

  LIEUTENANT SHERMAN PARTICIPATED in one of the most significant results of Worth’s comprehensively enveloping strategy and ruthlessly aggressive tactics. That summer, the normally blasé Fort Pierce lookouts spied a band of Indians approaching the stockade wall. Calling up to the alarmed soldiers, they announced that Coacoochee, Chief Wild Cat, leader of one of the most violent and elusive remaining Seminole parties, was ready to surrender. Wary of a trick, the post commander sent Sherman to lead a squadron to follow the Indians into the swamps to bring Coacoochee back to Fort Pierce.

  When Cump met the native chieftain in a hammock almost ten miles from the fort, the white officer refused to dismount when invited. He also made sure to secure Coacoochee’s warriors’ weapons. After taking a leisurely bath and the time to dress ceremonially, which included donning a bloodstained shirt clearly taken off a dead white man, Coacoochee and a few of his men went willingly under Sherman’s escort. Once in the fort, he offered to surrender upwards of 150 of his followers in return for provisions. However, he demanded thirty days to ready his people. The fort’s commanding officer accepted the deal.

  Throughout the month, Coacoochee and several in his band freely roamed in and out of the fort, eating base food and drinking commissary whiskey. Finally, the fort’s commander understood that the delay would continue indefinitely; the Indians had no intention of surrendering. He invited Coacoochee and another chief to his quarters for a council. Once there, the two were clapped in irons while Sherman and others seized as many Indians in and around the fort as they could.

  The rest of Coacoochee’s people fled inland, but his capture broke their resistance. Even the most intransigent among them turned themselves in and soon found themselves back with Coacoochee beyond the Mississippi.

  The fitful violence would last another year, but in August 1842, Worth reached an agreement with the last Seminoles in Florida—301 in all, including 112 warriors—to establish a reservation for them in southern Florida. Sherman later admitted that “it was a great pity to remove the Seminoles at all,” since the swamps of Florida proved to be less valuable land and more fittingly reserved to create a homeland for all the southeastern tribes. But that was hindsight. The Second Seminole War was over.

  During his time in Florida, Sherman’s regiment, he boasted to his foster brother, “had caught more Indians and destroyed more property in a fair method than the rest of the army.” And the endless war finally came to an end.

  SHERMAN LEFT FLORIDA HAVING gleaned valuable lessons about the shortcomings of what he had learned in the West Point classroom. The kind of Napoleonic line-of-march battleground parades waged between two opposing professional armies colliding in open fields often did not apply in the American frontier. Topography, natural history, waterways, even trees and other vegetation had to figure into an army’s deployment. Conventional Napoleonic tactics against an enemy fighting close to the ground and not reliant on a supply line resulted only in waste of the conventional army’s men, money, and materiel. Such warfare tipped the balance strongly in favor of the force fighting over its homeland and placed the army dependent on supply lines at a grave disadvantage. Other ways of fighting would be needed.

  To fight an Indian war, the army would need to think, if not fight, like Indians, with unorthodox methods that sometimes breached accepted rules of war. In such a fight, war was not simply a question of killing more of the enemy; it required psychological calculations as well. A different strategy and mind set were necessary in a war in which victory depended on sapping an enemy’s will to fight by destroying the base of his strength—his family, home, and larder. Entire populations would need to be uprooted. In such a conflict, cold-hearted ruthlessness was Sherman’s key to victory.

  THE SECOND SEMINOLE WAR was over, but its hangover lingered. In February 1844, now twenty-four years old and still a lieutenant, Sherman was detailed to the army’s inspector general to investigate compensation claims for equipment and horses lost in the war filed by Georgia militia who had mustered for the fight. After several months in Charleston and Savannah, he found himself in Marietta, Georgia, a small, well-to-do resort town in the shadow of a blue-gray pine- and oak-cloaked hump rising out of a northwestern Georgia upland plain called Kennesaw Mountain. His keen sense of irony—and dislike for civilians and home guards—got a heavy workout during the six weeks he spent taking depositions, “cross question[ing] and pump[ing] the claimants to see whether the old horse (killed in Florida) is not still at work in his corn field at home.” His investigations led him to witness “many a rich scene and . . . unfolded some pretty pieces of rascality for an honest and religious people.”

  While there, Sherman spent his free time riding “repeatedly” over the nearby mountain. From its summit, he appreciated its preeminent place within a chain of three humps in the spreading up-country plateau. He could also overlook the railroad survey and construction work underway on the new Western & Atlantic ( W& A) Railroad. The state-owned rail line was moving out from its southern terminus, a settlement formerly known rudely as just “Terminus” and recently redesignated “Marthasville,” on the far side of the wide brown Chattahoochee River about twenty miles to the southeast. It was a densely forested spot, yet one where John C. Calhoun would say in the following year that geography dictated any railroads connecting the Mississippi River valley and the southern Atlantic coast “must necessarily unite.” Cherokee and Creek tribes had warred over that site, believing it was the sacred center of their universe. The first stretch of W&A track, now eight years in the building, was already complete through Marietta. It would continue from there to snake its way north to the banks of the Tennessee River opposite Chattanooga. From there, the hope was that railroad would bring western produce and other products from as far away as St. Louis. Other lines were also now being planned that would intersect at Marthasville to carry those goods the rest of the way to the big port cities of Charleston and Savannah.

  Marthasville in 1844 didn’t amount to much. It had no streets, though four dirt through roads converged there near the W&A’s zero marker, and there were about a dozen or so log houses (some offering saloon service), a general store, and a grocery, plus a sawmill busily churning out railroad ties. Two hotels were set to open to guests in the coming year. Until then, fewer than one hundred people called Marthasville home. The town wasn’t even on the map, but its ambitions were already telling. A move was afoot to rename it “Atlanta,” a coined word emblematic of its reach toward an oceanic future.

  IN MARCH, CURIOUS TO SEE more of what he called Georgia’s “
wild Cherokee country,” Sherman took a long horseback ride and camping trip through the northwestern corner of the state where the Indians had lived until six years earlier, visiting the mysterious Indian mounds at Etowah and the surrounding vine-tangled pine-forest wilderness. Riding along the unfinished W&A grade, he employed his time pursuing his military engineer’s passion for geography, making a “topographical sketch of the ground” around the rugged Allatoona Pass. He could not yet know it, but his visit to the region would prove of “infinite use” when he returned to the same spot twenty years later.

  The accumulated learning of his early army years spent chasing Indians through the swamps in Florida and then touring through Georgia would later seem “providential.” When he returned to war against an enemy fighting, as had the Indians, over its own homeland, he found that “every bit of knowledge then acquired [was] returned tenfold.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ANOTHER PASSAGE

  EIGHT YEARS BEFORE William Tecumseh Sherman’s first entry into the Southeast, sometime in 1832 around the time that the twenty-one-year-old James Calhoun had begun to realize the lifelong dream that had impelled him to ride across Georgia’s warred-over western Indian frontier, another young man departed on a daring passage of his own. Though his journey was far shorter, really no more than a fifteen-minute walk along a muddy boulevard frantic with carriage traffic, he nonetheless crossed a vast and potentially dangerous gulf. Race, too, demarcated this frontier.