The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  What lay beneath the wagon wheels—mud—also slowed traffic. The red-clay streets were affairs of mud in the rain and deeply rutted and potted when dry. Walking or even driving through town could prove slow torture. Kate Massey, who grew up in Atlanta, remembered how, after it rained, the streets and sidewalks, paved with stone only in the central downtown, turned into thick, gluey mud. “We had intimate relations with it,” she recalled. “Pedestrians waded through it; vehicles mired in it. It was very intrusive, very sticky, and very red.”

  The constant construction and poor street drainage added other dangers. In the same year that the Calhoun families moved to town and three years before the first gas lamps illuminated downtown streets at night, Atlanta’s Daily Intelligencer newspaper warned visitors straying out of the center of town not “to walk [the] street[s] unless the moon shines particularly bright, or unless you can hang on the coattail of some friendly guide.” The pedestrian unfamiliar with his surroundings would “probably find [him]self . . . at the bottom of a pit” and also risked toppling into “deep trenches dug out for cellars.” Little wonder that a New York travel writer journeying throughout the South in 1856 described the overgrown and disorganized town as “the most unattractive place” he had seen on his entire tour.

  Barnyard animals grazed freely, sparking complaints from “greatly annoyed” neighbors about other neighbors’ failure to stable “cows lying around their gates and lots.” Others bemoaned the similarly boorish behavior of the out-of-town visitors on stopovers for train connections or markets. Farmers bringing produce for sale bedded down in wagon yards. Any who sought entertainment, sin, or both found plentiful offerings while staying in town. Even in 1860, when the city was much calmed from its early frontier-settlement days, a census of white residents’ occupations found twenty-three barkeepers, nine professional gamblers, and forty-nine admitted prostitutes. Bearbaiting and cockfighting, one saloon or grog shop after another, brothels on Line Street, outdoor gaming at card tables along Fair Street, public hangings, and other popular amusements drew rollicking crowds. Further out Fair Street, bettors gathered at the fair grounds racetrack for horse-racing sessions. Audiences at the new eight-hundred-seat Athenaeum stage in the Five Points reveled in appearances by the famed midget General Tom Thumb, accompanied by a giant, a bearded lady and a whiskered nine-year-old boy, and concerts by the likes of the savant black pianist Blind Tom. A local semiprofessional acting troop, the Atlanta Amateurs, performed there to rowdy and often drunk audiences.

  The Athenaeum filled the upper floors of a large building, with a grain depot and sometime slave auction mart occupying the first floor. The structure stood directly across the railroad tracks from the Atlanta Hotel. A planter who had come to town to sell his harvest and purchase more slaves with his earnings could spend a comfortable overnight at the hotel, belly up to its bar to enjoy fresh oysters brought in daily from Savannah, stroll over to catch a show at the Athenaeum, and perhaps gamble, drink, and indulge in the town’s other blue offerings, before catching an outbound train home. For the more family minded, parents in summertime could take their children to enjoy ice cream at a parlor on the outskirts of downtown on Peachtree Street, next to a sixty-foot-high, horse- or slave-powered version of the Ferris wheel fully fifty years before the Chicago’s World’s Fair made it a universally popular amusement park ride.

  The genteel and high-minded found little outside church to comfort them. “A rougher village I never saw,” one circuit judge said of early Atlanta. For a small town, Atlanta managed to engender a large and colorful underworld. Prostitution, thievery, brawls, gunfights, and even murder were common, especially in the parts of town known as Snake Nation on the southwestern side of town along Peters Street, where the bodies of murder victims were frequently tossed, and Murrell’s Row, on Decatur Street not far from the car shed. Those who wanted to civilize frontier Atlanta sought to bring order to its streets. A semiofficial organization known as the Rowdy Party liked things the way they were. The two sides battled for control of the town. With no sheriff, jail, or local court until after 1850, criminal gangs had the upper hand.

  When the mayor convened a special court and threatened a Rowdy with imprisonment in Decatur, the accused’s incensed and drunken brethren rolled a War of 1812-era cannon across the street from the town office, at the time on the second floor of the mayor’s dry goods store, and blasted a wad of grass, rocks, and mud through the window. That was the last straw. A committee of brave and well-armed citizens surrounded a house where the Rowdies gathered. The posse captured the gang’s leaders, threw them into a makeshift calaboose, and scattered their followers into the surrounding wilds. Not long after, the shanties and shacks that filled Snake Nation went up in flames.

  NOBODY CAME TO ATLANTA to appreciate its beauty or gracious citizenry in any case. From Charleston to New Orleans, most other Southern towns moved to the rhythms of the planting and harvest seasons. Planters formed their elites, and long-standing aristocratic families dominated social, business, and political life. But in the fast-rising commercial crossroads of Atlanta, people came for business. Their major crop was cash, cash grown through trading and railroad services. Money knew no season, no past, only what it could grow into tomorrow. Young, industrious, and increasingly rich, Atlantans harvested bales of it at all times of the year. The freight cars ferried Black Belt corn and cotton; western grain, bacon, and produce; Virginia and Carolina tobacco; Louisiana salt and sugar; coastal rice, oysters, and fish; Tennessee coal; Appalachian iron, copper, and other minerals; and Northern and European textiles and manufactured products. The town also became the regional foodstuffs market as yeoman farmers from the surrounding countryside rolled in with their wagonloads.

  Trade in all those goods kept the streets and shops crowded, market stalls lively, salesmen barking, the freight depots jammed. A reporter for the Daily Intelligencer observed, “Passing along Whitehall Street [an important commercial street] this morning, we thought of Broadway, New York, and her wholesale trade.” Others boasted that their town was “wonderfully New Yorkish in its notions.” Few elsewhere in the South would have welcomed the comparison; to Atlanta’s “Georgia Yankees,” it was flattery. They were Yankee only in their business-first outlook. Although a number of Atlanta’s leading citizens had immigrated from the North, the makeup of its white population differed little from other Georgia towns. Southern-born natives comprised more than 90 percent of the city’s populace.

  Even the haughtiest outsider had to admire the town’s surge to success and the wealth its industrious citizens acquired and displayed. One visitor from Athens exaggerated only somewhat when he marveled at its “thousands of fine, substantial and costly houses”; another from Augusta agreed that “no city in the South has ever made such rapid and astonishing strides in all avenues of progress.”

  Atlanta was an instant city, one modern in character and mores, unlike anything the South had known. An Atlanta mayor at the close of the 1850s freely admitted that “rough and unpolished [the town] may be . . . [but it is on its way] to becoming a bright and glittering jewel in the diadem of Southern cities.” In a nod to the source of its swift journey to prominence, the city’s new seal was emblazoned with a steaming locomotive. Atlanta’s doors were flung wide open to all who rode in. At a spring 1857 banquet in Charleston, William Ezzard, mayor of Atlanta, was toasted with a salute to his increasingly important city on the move: “The Gate City: The only tribute she levies is the affection and gratitude of those who partake of her unbounded hospitality.”

  HER HOSPITALITY WAS SKIN DEEP. Atlantans shared white Southerners’ deeply ingrained and fiercely defended racist support for the South’s peculiar institution, slavery, even though slaves were a luxury that few Atlantans wanted or needed. Georgia had more slaves and slaveholders than any state in the Lower South, second only to Virginia in the South as a whole, with a slave population by 1860 of more than 462,000, or 44 percent of the state’s total residents. That belied a heav
y imbalance among different regions. African-descended slaves formed around two-thirds of the population in the coastal area and more than half of all people living in the Black Belt, the fertile strip of dark cotton-producing soil running from the South Carolina to the Alabama borders through the lower piedmont. Things differed markedly in the up-country, particularly in Atlanta, where the black portion of the population, slave and free, never amounted to more than 25 percent of residents. In 1860, Atlanta’s population consisted of 7,751 whites, 1,917 slaves, and just 23 freemen. Fewer than 1 in 20 white Atlantans—373 in all—owned slaves. Elsewhere, the number of slaves a man held determined his stature and wealth. In Atlanta, only 44 slaveholders bothered to possess 10 or more bondsmen; just 15 possessed 20 or more.

  The bondsmen who lived in town worked mainly as household domestics and servants—women predominated in the local slave population. Male slaves here stood out because the vast majority worked in nonagricultural settings. They labored in small factories and artisanal shops or in construction. Many had blacksmithing, coach-making, cobbling, and other skills that their masters could hire out; other bondsmen joined railroad and building crews or helped as hospital orderlies. Increasingly, as the need for labor grew, owners allowed their slaves to keep a few cents of the payment as an incentive for hard work or for extra hours of employment they contracted for on their own.

  In working outside the plantation economy and far from the farm fields, Atlanta’s slaves represented a tiny fraction of the South’s overall black population, perhaps fewer than 5 percent. Atlanta’s urban bondsmen worked alongside whites, sometimes even in competition with whites. They heard city talk, those able to read newspapers, and they shared what they learned, creating an information network beyond that of isolated rural slaves. They cared deeply about the tumultuous national events that revolved around their slave status.

  These people, neither fully slave nor entirely free, came to form a unique class of Atlanta residents who lived precariously between the society of their white masters and perpetual enslavement.

  Thus it was that Bob Yancey came to grow rich.

  LAWYER, POLITICIAN, AND PLANTATION owner Ben Yancey, like other men of affairs in the Lower South, watched Atlanta’s explosive growth. With tristate business interests and family ties, he noted its central location, convenient transportation network, plentiful markets, and brimming shops. He finally decided to move his family in 1856, purchasing a large mansion in the most fashionable residential downtown neighborhood on Washington Street, one house below the square in front of City Hall. No sooner had the Yanceys arrived than they packed up again. James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat who supported slaveholders’ rights as fully as any Southerner and courted favor in the South, had won the presidency. He passed over Ben’s powerful brother, W. L., for a cabinet post he longed for. As a sop to the influential Alabaman’s electoral base, Buchanan appointed W. L.’s brother, Ben, commissioner to the Argentine Confederation.

  Ben’s household was shaken up by the move. Slavery had been abolished in Argentina three years before, and Ben risked the valuable Bob’s flight if he brought him to Buenos Aires. So, he would have to leave Bob behind. Atlanta offered Ben a way to turn his multitalented bondsman into an interest-bearing asset. Ben provided Bob the necessary papers, for blacks could not legally own a business, plus the start-up capital needed “to rent a shop and go to public barbering—and trading.” In return, Bob would pay his owner a hefty premium, $150 a year. At about the same moment when Ben’s brother, W. L., declared in a commencement address to the 1857 graduates of the University of Alabama, “Owing to the existence of African slavery in the South, the laws of labor were fixed—permanent—under perfect control,” his brother enabled his slave Bob to open his first barber shop in Atlanta. “I gave him practical freedom and the means of making and using money,” admitted Ben years later.

  For a black man in nineteenth-century America, barbering was one of the rare ways to make a good income. Few whites cut hair. Bob Yancey’s shop on Marietta Street flourished. The barber’s chair provided him with a venue where his skills and personal qualities, including his comfort working closely with whites, paid off handsomely. Clients poured in, and soon he had two shops and employed seven barbers. He and his wife moved into a four-room house he built on land he purchased on Houston Street on a Northside rise just inside the town limits overlooking the downtown. They lived harmoniously alongside several prominent white families, including prosperous slaveholders such as James Calhoun’s former law partner, Amherst Stone, and his wife, Cyrena, as well as Jared Whittaker, influential Southern Rights publisher of the city’s leading Daily Intelligencer newspaper. Unlike his white neighbors, though, Yancey could not walk downtown to enjoy the town’s festive nightlife without a pass and needed to entrust his property deed to Ben Yancey; slaves could not legally own real estate. Notwithstanding the strictures, within a couple years he boasted, perhaps with some merit, “No man in the place stood higher than I did, although I was a colored man.”

  He never made, so he claimed, less than $100 a day—phenomenal riches for a man of any color at the time. Most astonishing, he made that much even on days when few customers needed a shave or hair cut. Barbering was a good business for sure, but what enriched Bob Yancey, as he came to be known during the time Ben owned him, were his side businesses. He bought and sold goods, including fish, fruit, and chickens, through his shops. Boxes of costly tobacco and cigars moved steadily through his store.

  Mostly, though, Yancey, who could not write and probably could not read, had a gift for doubling his dollar. He had “a good financier’s mind and money,” recalled Ben Yancey—plus a market. He carried on the suspect trade handled so often by repressed groups throughout history: high-interest usury. With its steady stream of railroad travelers, tradesmen, and farmers come for the markets, Atlanta routinely ignored laws against gambling, prostitution, and drunkenness. All those vices required ready cash. Bob Yancey had it. He loaned out money at what Ben Yancey termed an “enormous” monthly interest rate to “white gamblers.”

  As an experienced card player himself, he knew his clientele’s weaknesses and strengths. It could be a dangerous business, attracting unsavory sorts. A seventeen-year-old ended an argument with a twelve-year-old “about a foolish bet” in Yancey’s shop by shooting the boy, “inflicting a dangerous if not mortal wound.” Money from loansharking came back to Yancey “fast.” When the exchange of currency became a life-or-death matter for people passing through Atlanta, Yancey’s money-handling skills would prove more valuable still. It was work only a black man in his unique position could do. He managed to save the astounding sum of $16,000 over the next few years. A slave became one of Atlanta’s wealthier men.

  AS EXCEPTIONAL AS YANCEY ’S practical freedom and business success seem, he was not unique among the city’s slave residents. Joshua Badger, descended from early Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers, worked as a dentist and grew wealthy enough to own a substantial Decatur plantation. There, he fathered several children, some with his wife, plus two sons, Roderick and his half-brother, Robert, born of two different slave mothers serving in his household. Rare among white men who fathered children with their female slaves, the senior Badger freely acknowledged his sons. That did not change the fact that two of his children were born slaves to him.

  Living on the family property as family property, Roderick and Robert deeply resented an enslavement that their white siblings did not know. While still a boy, Robert escaped at least three times, only to be captured and returned each time. When Joshua Badger begged his son to remain at home and asked why he fled his father’s love and protection, Robert answered, “Because I want to be free.” His father could do little for him in any case: Even a son required a formal writ of manumission from the Georgia General Assembly, something the legislature was increasingly reluctant to grant.

  The static world of Decatur plantation and village life offered the Badger brothers nothing but slavery
. Joshua educated his slave sons, teaching them dentistry. Joshua took a risk. Since 1833, anyone caught teaching a slave or freeman to read or write faced a fine and possible imprisonment.

  Joshua Badger sent his boys off with their education, dentistry skills, and tools. In 1856, Roderick and his wife moved to Atlanta, where he began to practice the trade. Although they went as “free people of color,” they were officially regarded as slaves. Roderick set up a dentistry practice as perhaps the first dentist of African descent in the Lower South. Most of his clients were white. Like his acquaintance Bob Yancey, Roderick Badger soon began to make and save money that would enable him to lead a life beyond the imagining of most Southern slaves—and prepare him for the day when the freedom he and his brother wanted so dearly might come.

  THREE YEARS AFTER YANCEY and Badger came to Atlanta, a white man, Ephraim Ponder, saw in this emerging black entrepreneurial class and the growing industrial economy a pathway to a comfortable retirement together with his beautiful wife, Ellen. The forty-eight-year-old Ponder and his fourteen-years-younger wife lived in Thomasville, a small cotton town fragrant with pine on the state’s southern border above Tallahassee. One of the southern Georgia Black Belt’s wealthiest men, Ponder had grown rich trading slaves in Virginia during the mid-1850s, frequently in association with his brother, William Ponder, a Thomasville plantation owner. While in Virginia, Ephraim apprenticed many of the slaves he purchased in a variety of artisanal skills, making of them expert carriage makers, cobblers, blacksmiths, metalworkers, carpenters, masons, and other types of craftsmen. The skills greatly increased their market value, and Ponder owned around sixty slaves.