The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  The state legislature responded to the “threat ” of a race war by rushing to “disarm” would-be black insurrectionists. Laws reaching back before American independence barred blacks from owning horses, carrying firearms, being employed by druggists, or purchasing poisons. Georgia legislators reinforced the bans in December, adding penalties against whites caught furnishing weapons or poison to blacks. Locally, in towns and the countryside, vigilante committees formed to patrol roads and check in on slave quarters.

  Portions of Atlanta society went on alert. In early December, the minutemen, now numbering nearly two hundred and campaigning openly for secession, designated twenty-one members as a Committee of Safety. Without the city’s official permission—with Mayor William Ezzard a founding member of the association, it was a given—the minutemen’s special committee took on the authority to summon before it “all suspected characters, with power to rid the community of such when they should be proved to be hostile and dangerous to the rights and interests of the city or the state.”

  After the election, Calhoun and other Unionists despaired. They urged acceptance of the results but resistance to any attempt by the federal government to restrain slave property rights. Instead, they tried to revive the words of the Georgia Platform behind the Compromise of 1850. It was futile. They could no more hold back the gathering popular forces pushing for disunion than an ancient tree can resist a hurricane. “All Union men here were held in reproach,” Calhoun said. As if physically poisoned by the political miasma engulfing his beloved city, he fell “dangerously sick” with typhoid fever. Nonetheless, the Union Association and others put him up to represent Fulton County in opposition to secession ordinances a state convention, called by the legislature for mid-January, would consider. He ran together with his friend and protégé George W. Adair, a former lawyer and train conductor turned successful real estate developer. Calhoun and Adair still stood for compromise, though their position left them “very unpleasantly situated,” said Calhoun. With the vigilance committee poking into their loyalty, it now became “dangerous for Union men to express themselves publicly,” he added. The cooperationist men faced off against a secessionist slate pledged to stand united for “war in every way in which it was defined or definable” if the incoming president should try to force the state back into the Union.

  The Unionists’ chances largely evaporated after news reached Atlanta of South Carolina’s epochal December 20 vote to secede. Jubilant minutemen blasted a fifteen-gun salute to the first state to proclaim its withdrawal from the Union at sunrise two days later, marking the start of a daylong celebration. They fired off one hundred more guns in the afternoon in front of a huge throng come from far and wide to hear fiery speeches, including one by Howell Cobb, who had just resigned as the lame-duck president James Buchanan’s secretary of the treasury. That night a torchlight procession wound its way through Atlanta, gathering strength as it went, until stopping with thousands on hand downtown to burn Lincoln in effigy. The sound of gunfire rang through the chill night air. The U.S. flag came down, and a state flag flew in its place over Atlanta and the rest of Georgia.

  Lincoln’s inauguration was still three months off, but secession was increasingly a foregone conclusion. Ever optimistic about an independent Southern nation’s future, the Intelligencer made a Christmas Day promise that independence would come without “the shedding of a single drop of blood.” On New Year’s Day, its ultraist sister newspaper in Augusta, the Daily Constitutionalist, urged its readers to vote their hopes for secession: “If you would hush this quadrennial struggle which convulses the land every Presidential election, and still political discord, and give peace and quiet to our disturbed land, go on! look not back! for daylight will now be sooner seen before than behind.”

  Not everyone believed such rosy forecasts. On the night of December 31, rather than celebrate the New Year or his recent remarriage, Calhoun, still only “partially recovered,” addressed a public gathering. “Ardently attached” to the United States, he made what he called “the best argument I could to induce the people not to dissolve the Union.” In somber tones, he asked listeners to recognize that “the Constitution of the United States had not been violated” by Lincoln’s election. The South had “no sufficient cause of war, or secession.” In the white heat of the secessionists’ call to arms, his dispassionate words melted away into the last night of the year.

  ATLANTA LIVED NOW WITH its feet in the raging river of rebellion. The current swept the people away. Their own and their Virginian forebears’ successful settling, shaping, and exploiting of the landscape and human chattel bolstered their hopes for a still better future through the radical step of secession; they were an independent-minded people creating an independent nation of independent states. They had a model in mind in their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ fight against their British overlords. This would be the second American Revolution.

  On a miserable rainy January 2, the pro-secession slate crushed Calhoun’s by an almost two-to-one margin. His sometime business associate Whitaker had worked hard in person and in the Daily Intelligencer pages for the stunning outcome. He trumpeted, “There is, perhaps, no place in Georgia where the result looked more doubtful a month ago.” Statewide, the secession delegates won a bare majority, with about 44,000 votes for immediate secessionists to some 42,000 favoring cooperationists. The vote was so close that Governor Brown wouldn’t publish the final tally for several months and, even then, claimed a much wider majority in favor of secession. On that historic day, Brown ordered Georgia militiamen to seize Savannah harbor’s Fort Pulaski, a currently empty federal garrison. On January 19, the convention delegates gathered in Milledgeville, where they needed little time to vote 166 to 130 for secession. Georgia left the Union.

  LITTLE INTERESTED IN LIFE beyond his family and his religious and business activities, bookseller and paper goods merchant Samuel P. Richards could not help but notice the booming guns, peeling bells, and exploding fireworks echoing throughout the city. With family and business connections above and below the Mason-Dixon Line and in England, his homeland, he had followed his brother Jabez from New York City to Georgia. They sold Bibles and religious tracts, stationery, greeting cards, and sheet music out of a traveling buckboard until they set enough money aside to open their first Book, Music, and Fancy Store in Macon in 1848, where Samuel remained for thirteen years. “Jabe” made the move to Atlanta first, opening a second Richards Bros. store on Decatur Street. Samuel would not follow him there until 1861. Once in Atlanta, after crowding in with his brother’s family, he built a four-room, two-story stone house near his brother’s on Washington Street at the Fair Street corner on the edge of the fashionable Southside residential district. They found a ready welcome for their wares in the flourishing town.

  Samuel Richards turned thirty-seven in early 1861, sharing his birthday celebrations with those for the swiftly advancing secession movement. He seemed years older. With just a smattering of gray in his dark hair and beard, he rarely relaxed his severe churchman’s demeanor. Devout to a fault, “there was no figure more familiar than his” at the Second Baptist Church, a few minutes’ walk up Washington Street to where it fronted City Hall Square. He volunteered as the church’s deacon and clerk and could be found there on his knees twice a day. He also sang bass at choir practice in the evenings and at Sunday services.

  His sole worldly diversion, other than harmonizing with amateur singing groups, together with tens of thousands of other eager readers, was to devour the latest Charles Dickens novel as soon as the most recent installment reached his shop. At times, he seemed to step out of one of those pages—and not as one of the more likeable characters. Like the sanctimonious and blustery Mr. Bumble, the church beadle of Oliver Twist, he seemed “always angry and cross” and quick to “correction and discipline” with his own and others’ children, recalled a woman who was an “everyday intimate” of the Richards household as a child. Mischievous local boys shar
ed “tales of his ogreish behavior” and, out of spite, “plagued him to death” by taunting his cow, picking fruit from his trees, and plucking flowers out of his carefully tended garden. He never lost the habit, gained from his long days as an itinerant back-roads peddler, of selling at the greatest profit and accounting for every penny in his household and shop. He won few friends with his abstemious and sometimes cutthroat business tactics. Increasingly well-to-do, he nonetheless welcomed only paying boarders into his home, renting even to relatives. He was, recalled his granddaughter’s dearest childhood friend, “the absolute antithesis of the old Southern type.” Little matter, for he felt right at home in his store alongside the two hundred other shopkeepers in the town’s bustling Five Points commercial center.

  In an age when politics was the all-consuming topic of conversation, Richards rarely concerned himself with the day’s controversies—except as they interfered with sales. Now, with “people . . . too much engrossed in political matters to think of buying books,” politics did matter to him. He feared that the national crisis sparked by the election would force the brothers to shut their doors. “Disunion . . . will prove ruinous to our business,” he moaned. “No business doing, no money coming in and nothing heard but ‘Secession,’ ‘Secession,’ until I am tired and sick of the word.” He blamed the belligerent secessionists in town for his business falloff. He scorned the rabblerousers as “professional men and young squirts who have but little or nothing to lose in any event, or politicians who aspire to office in a Southern Confederacy.”

  The die now cast for Southern separation and independence, though, he knew which way the wind was blowing. At present, he rented two household slaves, but even as he taught biblical injunctions against covetousness, he observed his neighbors’ fine liveries and their large landholdings and many slave hands outside town. He aspired to all the wealth the South offered, and here that equated with ownership of land and slaves. He watched minutemen parading past his storefront and heard the local Mercantile Association call for a boycott of the Northern dealers whose wholesale goods he retailed. He ordered larger shipments on credit. He agreed that the time had come to “form a Southern Republic, a ‘White Man’s Republic’ . . . and leave niggerism and ‘free dirt’ proclivities to the North, and the Abolitionists upon whom surely the curse of a just God must rest for they have destroyed our Country.”

  He set sail on the rising secessionist tide. A dire letter from his brother William, a minister in New York, did not dissuade him. William warned him that “the [secession] measures we are taking [are] suicidal in the extreme as well as unjust,” but that same evening he rehearsed “a Southern Marseilles Hymn” that his choir would sing at a public demonstration called by the minutemen to celebrate slave-state independence. Who among those walking past the lamp-lighted church’s open doors could hear the rousing chorus of rich voices echoing out and continue to question the grandeur of the South’s future as a new, independent land? If Richards could not yet “sympathize” with the radicals’ enthusiasm for what lay ahead, he now accepted that secession had become “a stern necessity for us in the present crisis.” Failing to take this final step toward state sovereignty would give “aid and comfort to the Abolitionists in their fell designs of making war upon the South.”

  IN THE HEAT OF THE SECESSION CAMPAIGN, the necessity for a breakup of the United States and the bright prospects for a united South seemed certain. The future lay through the unifying, daring, and forward-looking choice of secession, contended Atlanta print opinion leaders like Whitaker and Hambleton.

  A small number of men, including many in a position to know, spoke out against such excessive optimism. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had come to love the South during his army years in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia, burst into tears when he learned about South Carolina’s vote to secede. He recognized immediately that secession meant war. He told his closest Southern friend, David French Boyd, that he would have to fight “against your people, whom I love best.”

  Cump had left the army in 1853 after his military career reached an apparent dead end. He was not much good at other professions either, failing first as a San Francisco banker and railroad investor and then as a territorial lawyer. In 1859, he accepted a job as the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy in Pineville. Now, Sherman paced about and sputtered with tears of rage, while Boyd, a fellow faculty member, listened in. “You don’t know what you are doing,” he bellowed. “I know there can be no such thing [as peaceable secession]. . . . This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows where it will end. . . . [The people of the North] are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too.” He predicted disaster for the South.

  You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

  Less than a month later, the governor of the seceding state of Louisiana sent arms seized by the state militia from the U.S. arsenal in nearby Baton Rouge to Sherman at the Pineville academy. He refused to accept the munitions, resigning his post instead. He departed for St. Louis, not knowing when he might return south again.

  AS IF THE VERY GROUND beneath the Southeast was trying to signal the splitting of the nation in two, on a cloudless day following Georgia’s secession vote, the earth literally cracked. A minor earthquake lasting ten seconds rattled Atlanta and its surroundings. Such seismic events typically shook the region once every twenty years. The superstitious might have viewed the temblor’s timing as a warning sign; secession’s ardent backers claimed just the opposite. The absence of damage was an auspicious omen that the fracturing of the Union into two nations would shake things up while causing little harm. Jared Whitaker in the Daily Intelligencer thought it prophetic. “May not its coming and passing away so easily,” his newspaper related, “with the clear and bright sky, be symbolical of the present political convulsion in the country, which in the South will pass away so easily, leaving the spotless sky behind.”

  Just to be clear, he added, “So far as civil war is concerned, we have no fears of that in Atlanta.”

  CHAPTER 9

  NEVER! NEVER!! NEVER!!!

  WITH THE STARS AND STRIPES no longer flying over Atlanta, the city voted for town officers two days before the Milledgeville secession convention. Some still hoped the city might return to being a moderate bastion against the rising radicals, but it was not to be. The agenda-setting secessionists now held the stage and would fight to stay there. James Calhoun’s older brother, Ezekiel, the physician, militia captain in the Creek War, and one of the region’s earliest white settlers, ran for mayor. Even finding a soapbox from which to speak his mind was difficult. “Every Union man was muzzled,” said the Unionist builder Julius Hayden. The white-haired physician had doctored a goodly number of the town voters at one time or another, but, like other Unionists, “could not express any opinion at all unless he expressed it in favor of secession.” Opponents questioned Calhoun’s manliness and readiness to stand up to the Black Republicans, labeling him and several city council candidates “submissionists.” They withdrew in protest two days before the vote. Intelligencer publisher Jared Whitaker, who had beaten the drum for secession, was no moderate, but he was in fact less radical than his opponent, a former mayor, William Ezzard. Whitaker won the office he had long had his eyes on.

  Confederate Atlanta now assumed the cause of nation building with the same boosterish fervor it brought to its own rise. Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, named president of the Confederate States of America, resigned his Washington seat
and traveled to the government’s temporary capital in Montgomery, Alabama. Once there, the triumphant overlord of the rebel government, William Lowndes Yancey, introduced his man to the cheering crowd turned out to greet him, declaring in the words that would become the best remembered of his life, “The man and the hour have met!” During Davis’s journey south, on February 16, two days before his own inauguration and two weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in Washington, he stopped over for a night in Atlanta. Militia units paraded and fired volleys in his honor. Five thousand people gathered to hear him speak outside the Trout House hotel. Meeting in his room, city leaders urged him to build the new government’s capital in Atlanta. They touted the city’s healthy air, central location, unmatched rail access, seven hotels, and abundance of fresh seafood, meat, and vegetables, “including,” wryly boasted the Gate City Guardian newspaper, “goobers, an indispensable article for a Southern Legislator.” The Southern Confederacy newspaper proclaimed its hometown would gladly serve, being “par excellence the most suitable point within the limits of the Southern Confederacy for the locating of the Capitol and other public buildings.” Rising in the distance, Stone Mountain contained more than enough granite “to construct the public buildings of a thousand Southern Confederacies.”

  SOON AFTER THE DAVIS VISIT, the city dispatched a trio to Montgomery to promote those same advantages to the new government’s assembly. The chosen men were Mayor Jared Whitaker and former mayor William Ezzard, both widely known secessionists, and one prominent former opponent, James Calhoun. Whatever his resistance to secession and fears about the future, Calhoun felt bound to the course the South had determined upon for its future. His heritage, family, wealth, social standing, personal ties, and loyalties made this his land. He was a Calhoun. Moreover, much of his personal wealth was tied up in his more than fifty slaves. He “sympathized with the cause of the South.” The vote had been taken, the state had seceded, and now, he believed, “it was my duty to go with the South.”