The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  The new territory promised almost boundless opportunity—especially after gold was discovered in California in 1849. But acquisition of the new territories brought the suppressed question of slavery, in the form of slaveholders’ rights, to a head. Most Northerners wished to exclude slavery entirely from the new territories. “Free soil and free men,” they cried. A Northern majority in Congress appeared ready to do just that. The potential to carve several additional free states out of the western territory cast a dangerous shadow over the South. Fire-eater James Henry Hammond of South Carolina expressed Southern fears that the North, with an expanded free-state majority, would “ride over us rough shod. . . . Our only safety is in equality of POWER. If we do not act now, we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames.”

  The gnawing question of America’s national identity exploded. Literal fistfights broke out on the floor of the Capitol in Washington. Threats of worse violence abounded. Many fire-eating Southerners declared themselves openly ready to go to war for their freedom from an increasingly tyrannical Northern majority. Even Senator Calhoun was shocked by what he saw among his Southern colleagues in Congress, who rose up “more determined and bold than I ever saw them. Many avow themselves disunionists, and a still greater number admit, that there is little hope of any remedy short of it.”

  Disunionists considered this the moment and the cause they had long sought for a national split. From his Alabama power base, William Lowndes Yancey urged the South to “teach the North, that when we speak brave words, we will follow them, if needs be, by brave acts.” He told his followers that if the people in the North were not ready “to respect our rights, we will promptly dissolve all political connection with them.” Many in the Lower South cheered such fiery words. Ever hopeful of preserving the Union through a unified Southern polity, John Calhoun battled the Free Soilers, as well as Yancey, Hammond, and others ready to secede.

  Back in Georgia, the issue was as hot as anywhere in the country. The Georgia Telegraph called for “secession . . . resistance, open unqualified resistance.” Tempers flared; violence struck home. On a fall day in 1848, then Whig congressman and Unionist Alexander Stephens bumped into Judge Francis H. Cone, a state supreme court justice and lead voice of opposition to any compromise with the Free Soilers, on the steps of Atlanta’s Thompson Hotel, one of several new inns built in the booming upstart railroad town. Bad blood already existed between the two men. The foolhardy, ninety-pound Stephens berated the two-hundred-pound Cone, who lashed out with a knife, slicing Little Alec multiple times, nearly severing his hand, and stabbing him deeply and almost mortally near the heart. Stephens barely survived. His hand was permanently mangled. Cone pled guilty to attempted murder and got off with an $800 fine.

  ALTHOUGH STEPHENS WAS laid up for months, a force committed to reaching a solution to the crisis arose among his fellow Southern Whigs in concert with some of their Northern party brethren and more moderate Democrats. Record high cotton prices, which raised concerns about the economic debacle a true sectional split would bring, aided the desire to reach a compromise. As close as James Calhoun was to his cousin the senator on most political questions—and as personally devoted as he was—his moderate outlook gave him no doubt that he sided with those working to preserve the Union.

  In Washington, moderate voices bid desperately to stave off secession. In September 1850, Congress enacted a legislative series, known collectively as the Compromise, put forth in the Senate by Kentucky’s Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, revised by a young Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and supported by a coalition including Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster. The acts postponed the question of slavery in the new territories until they had applied for statehood, granted California statehood as a free state, banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and, as recompense for the electoral imbalance in favor of the North, promulgated the Fugitive Slave Law. That engendered a system for capturing and repatriating runaway slaves and set criminal penalties for those harboring them. For slaveholders, this was the prime element enabling them to support the Compromise, and for abolitionists, it was the most repugnant. Vociferously opposed by an increasingly consumptive John Calhoun and even more vituperative fire-eaters and abolitionists, the Compromise nonetheless passed.

  Its passage put the fire-eaters on the defensive throughout the Upper South and Northern border states, deflecting calls there for a sectional split back to a national debate about the best ways to resolve differences between the sections. Things were different in the Lower South, where the debate raged on. As cast by Calhoun, Hammond, Yancey, and others, the Compromise could only be viewed as a defeat of Southern interests, presaging far worse defeats to come. Calls went out for resistance, even the taking up of arms. South Carolina, above all, was ready to secede. If it did, Alabama would follow, and likely Georgia after that. Surely other Southern states would in turn.

  WITH THE NATIONAL UNION at stake, the thirty-nine-year-old James Calhoun played an unsung but important role in gaining his state’s support for the Compromise. In late 1850, he was elected as a delegate to the state convention convened on December 10 to consider Georgia’s response to the Compromise. The die was cast ahead of time because he, like most of the popularly chosen men sent to Milledgeville, was an avowed Unionist. He formed part of a persuasive block at the convention that included Howell Cobb, the Georgia Democrat and Speaker of the House of Representatives who had steered the legislation through Congress; a now largely recovered Stephens; and fellow Whig congressman Robert Toombs. As part of a thirty-three-member committee, Calhoun helped draft and, following a tumultuous debate, push through the convention’s final resolutions. Together they came to be known as the Georgia Platform.

  The platform declared the state’s fealty to the Union and urged “preservation of our much loved Union,” but only upon the condition that the compromise laws of 1850 remained in force. Above all, read the final resolution, continuation of the Union “depends” on enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. The convention in its platform presented a defense at once of slavery, state sovereignty, and the compact between the states and the national government in the formation of the Union. “Southerners,” proclaimed Cobb, “have a natural right to revolution [should their inalienable property rights be violated] but not a constitutional right of secession.” He would come to disavow those words, but for now he joined Calhoun and the other convention leaders in crisscrossing the state to win support for the Georgia Platform.

  Though the Compromise seemed only a stopgap measure to hold together two fundamentally misaligned sections of the nation, the Georgia Platform proved a triumph for all wishing to keep the Union whole. Col. John Milledge of Augusta gushed as the convention’s Unionist outcome checked the drive toward secession, “The eyes of the world were upon [Georgia], but calm and inflexible, she came forth in the midst of unparalleled excitement, holding in her hands the destiny of this Empire. . . . Her voice was for peace and the Union. She joined it in 1776 and she saved it in 1850.” Georgia’s leadership in supporting the Compromise quickly brought its more resistant neighbor states into line and assured its popular acceptance. Radical disunionists had been defanged—for the moment.

  NEAR DEATH, Senator John Calhoun saw the Compromise as a loose bandage over a massive, bleeding wound. He was convinced the Union could not hold under its terms. In the last days of his life, he prophesied the coming cataclysm with uncanny accuracy. “I fix its probable occurrence within twelve years or three presidential terms,” he told Virginia senator James M. Mason. “You and others of your age will probably live to see it; I shall not. The mode by which it will be done is not so clear; it may be brought about in a manner that no one now foresees. But the probability is, it will explode in a presidential election.” He died less than two weeks later, on March 31, 1850.

  JAMES CALHOUN, having worked diligently to ensure Southern acceptance of the Compromise that Senator Calhoun died while fighting against, moved,
like many Southern Whigs, from his rapidly dissolving party to the newly created Constitutional Union Party, which, as the name indicated, placed loyalty to the United States as laid out in the Constitution above any sectional feelings. He rose within the party’s ranks, which included many former Whigs, Northern and Southern. Loyal to his region, his country, and his party, he won election to the state senate in 1851 as part of an electoral wave in support of the Compromise that swept through much of the South. Loyalty to town and district, though, was another matter.

  Within a year, he uprooted his family and law practice and moved, in 1852, from the small but refined village of Decatur to Atlanta, the new railroad stop growing up fast within the pine-forested hills and gullies a few short miles to the west. His brother Ezekiel moved his medical practice and home there as well.

  Where once there had been only log cabins, a new city was sprouting. Two more rail lines, one from Macon and another from Augusta, followed the Western & Atlantic down from Chattanooga to the new upland mercantile hub. Though many respectable people still refused to move in among the roughhewn laborers who had come for the jobs building the new rail lines through the land the Cherokee once called home, the clear-sighted attorney and politician could see where Georgia’s future lay. Here, he would finally win “respectable” office, and the South would build its Gate City.

  II

  GATE CITY

  REVOLUTION THUS RAN ITS COURSE from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence.

  —THUCYDIDES, THE HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR III:82, TRANS. RICHARD CRAWLEY

  CHAPTER 7

  THE CORNERSTONE

  MANY PEOPLE REMAINED SKEPTICAL about the value of the railroads penetrating the remote up-country Georgia. Even James Calhoun reportedly had his doubts. An acre of land in Terminus could still be had for fifty cents. With comparatively few miles of track in the South and not enough people or goods to ride over the existing lines, the Western & Atlantic seemed a state-financed railroad to nowhere. Calhoun supposedly insisted, “The terminus of that railroad will never be any more than an eating house.” Fellow DeKalb County representative Chapman Powell was said to have retorted, “True, and one day you will see a time when it will eat up Decatur.”

  Calhoun would come to eat his words, apocryphal or not. Only a dozen families, less than two hundred people, lived in the renamed Marthasville when the first W&A train rolled into town in 1845, but things changed quickly, and the tiny settlement never looked back. It shortly outstripped the older Decatur and Marietta to the north. Although Calhoun’s Decatur neighbors vowed to build a wall between their aristocratic village and the upstart rising in the forest crossroads to the west, within five years of that first train’s arrival, Atlanta, as the crossroads with metropolitan ambitions was ultimately rechristened, had captured three-fourths of Decatur’s population.

  Drawn by railroad jobs and the money the trains brought to town, new residents moved in daily. “It was said that no one was ever born in Atlanta,” wrote Lucy Hull Baldwin, an Atlanta diarist, “but everyone moved there from somewhere else.” They came from all over the South and even included a smattering of Yankees and foreigners in search of opportunity. At first, most came from the up-country neighborhood, James and Ezekiel Calhoun among them. Acknowledging the new reality, in December 1852 the two brothers moved their families into big brick houses they built on Washington Street, a short walk from where the hulking car shed would soon be built and across the tracks from the burgeoning Five Points central business district. The family houses stood directly across the street from Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church; it was a few steps further to the Central Presbyterian Church, and not far beyond stood the Second Baptist and the Trinity Methodist churches, houses of worship that rarely saw the brothers. Like everyone in the town center, they lived close enough to the railroad tracks that soot from trains passing on the Macon & Western line grayed hanging laundry. Bells, whistles, and the clicketyclack of the cars over the rails provided a rhythmic accompaniment to their lives night and day. A fire engine house was stationed across Washington Street to deal with the frequent blazes ignited by sparks flicked out by the passing trains. The town’s three fire companies could do little once fires ignited in any case. Several times, whole streets of trackside houses went up in flames. The city council finally required all downtown structures to be built of fireproof brick or stone.

  James’s eldest son, William Lowndes Calhoun, grew into adult-hood in the Atlanta house. Lowndes, as he was known, recalled the elegance of his father’s home with its “very large rooms . . . handsomely finished and decorated.” It was a lively place. His father’s sociability and good nature drew frequent guests, including many leading political figures of the day. “Within its walls, true Southern hospitality of the old time ever prevailed,” Lowndes said. His father also entertained guests on a large plantation he purchased just outside the incorporated town limits. The property was about a mile beyond the newly surveyed City Cemetery, later renamed Oakland Cemetery, and stood close enough to his house and office that he spent many peaceful afternoons there, returning home before sunset.

  If Calhoun was boundlessly hospitable at home, he was all business at work. His relocated law practice grew with the city. To his great pride, Lowndes apprenticed with his firm starting in 1853, at age sixteen. When court was in session, father and son walked together almost daily from the family’s house around the corner to the new two-story, brick, hundred-foot-long City Hall and County Courthouse. An oversize version of a classic Southern village courthouse, it was topped by a cupola and overlooked a large public square where it served as the city’s most important civic structure and meeting place. It was a place Calhoun would soon come to know intimately.

  In 1854 the last of the four new railroad lines linked up at Atlanta’s central Union Station, a new car shed with a massive vaulted roof perched on heavy brick piers where passengers exchanged trains among the four lines across four parallel platforms. Goods and people now reached the city swiftly from nearly all points of the compass. From nearly a thousand miles away, the New York Times noted that in passing through Atlanta, travelers could now make an unbroken rail journey from New York City almost to New Orleans in less than four days. The tracks across the country, the paper enthused, “are social ties—nationalizing powers—bonds of love and peace. Every mile of them is a new argument for union.”

  Whatever railroads symbolized for the nation’s political future, the locomotives in and out of Atlanta drove startling growth. On most days, close to fifty passenger and freight trains chugged in and out of the center of town, carrying thousands of people and vast amounts of freight with them. The 171-mile run from Augusta took ten hours and forty-five minutes and cost $5.50; for $5 more a passenger could continue on for the nine-hour and fifteen-minute connection over 138 miles to Chattanooga (eleven and a half hours by night), a journey that formerly required five or more uncomfortable days by mule-drawn wagon in fair weather and twice that or longer in snow, ice, or rain.

  Frequent derailments, car fires, and delays to let opposite-running trains pass through were the norm. But comfort mattered less than the railroads’ speed and dependable, low-cost transport of goods for sale, warehousing, and distribution. New residents, new businesses, iron mills and foundries, and fast construction followed the trains into Atlanta like the dense smoke trailing from their stacks. Just five years after the first train chugg
ed into town, the population had grown more than twelvefold, to 2,572 residents. Five years after that, the population had more than doubled again. The city continued to add about another thousand residents a year after that, making it by far the fastest growing in the state. Soon it trailed only Savannah and Augusta in size. Although still far smaller than New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond, by 1860 the tiny up-country frontier village, not even shown on the map fifteen years before, stood among the fifteen largest urban centers in the South.

  Nobody anticipated Atlanta’s stupendous growth, so nobody planned for it. A tradition of haphazard development took hold. New streets paralleled the railroad tracks, causing through roads that had once been Indian paths and cross streets to intersect at odd angles. Businesses, houses and their garden plots, warehouses, and foundries were built willy-nilly along the same roads, often bumping up against railroad tracks. Traffic tie-ups became all too regular. So did accidents, as wagon drivers and pedestrians rushed across the tracks ahead of the trains, sometimes paying a tragic price for their impatience.