The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Choosing a course of continued resistance would place the proud former legislator outside the constitutional bounds set by the new government in Montgomery. The Southern legislature quickly passed laws “defining treason,” he said, “to obey [to] which every citizen was bound at the peril of life, liberty, and property.”

  The peril became quickly apparent. Under a headline reading, “Loyalty to Government the Duty of Every Good Citizen,” James P. Hambleton’s Southern Confederacy recognized that some might question where their duty lay, and “regardless of the authority of this Government, and their obligation to support it, have turned their longing eyes towards the Black Republican fleshpots of Lincoln, Greeley [the influential Republican New York Tribune’s editor] & Co.” The newspaper condemned all Union partisans and urged that they “be summarily dealt with as traitors. There should not be among us any man who is so base, and treasonous . . . [as to] recognize the authority or laws of the United States as extending over us.” The new government should wield its power to exile or punish any who undermined the rule of its law.

  “REGULATORS OR INVESTIGATING COMMITTEES,” an extension of the minutemen’s Committee of Safety, applied other, more direct means to bring former Unionists in line. They went from house to house, meeting with known Unionists. After the encounters, most dropped their public opposition to the new order. Hayden trembled as he watched the committees do their work. “Every Union man they could find who expressed Union sentiments was ordered to leave the State and a good many were whipped or lynched,” he said. Some still resisted. A local committee rode up to Harrison Baswell at work in his farmyard outside his house on the rich bottomlands he worked along the Chattahoochee River just outside Atlanta. The men demanded he support the Confederate cause and join a military company they were forming. If he did not, right then they would string him up as “a traitor and Tory to his country.” Baswell retreated into his house and came back out, pointing his shotgun at them. “Gentleman,” he said, leveling his gun, “I ain’t got but one time to die, and before I will go off with you, and fight against the Union, I will die in my own yard.” The men turned out of his property, but he hid out after that. When he discovered his son J. T., not yet sixteen, had joined the Confederate army, his nephew recalled Baswell spitting out angrily that he would have shot his son rather than “see him go off like he did to fight against the Union.”

  Inside the Atlanta town borders, secession leaders had subtler means of silencing opposition to the new national government’s authority. Outspoken Union supporter James Stewart could no longer get his views published in local newspapers. He did find a Nashville newspaper willing to print a letter in which he declared, “I may be coerced to obey but will never acknowledge the government de facto of the seceding States.” He was unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of Confederate authority, but he called for peaceful resolution of the sectional dispute. He hoped “the incoming [Lincoln] administration will not countenance or recommend war upon the erring people of the South.” He roundly criticized the seceding states’ seizure of U.S. arsenals as “stupendous farce,” yet urged moderation, calling for the defeat of the radicals, North and South, through ballots and not bombs. The Intelligencer ignored his pleas for peace and reprinted the Nashville article for its readers as an example “bristling with rank treason.” The editor fulminated, “ We cannot live with incendiaries and traitors in our midst,” and then, invoking an ancient city ultimately destroyed from within, urged the swift expunging of such men. “If the Greek horse is among us, let us cast him into the sea.” The newspaper would not let the matter rest. A few days later, it branded Stewart as “dangerous” and decreed that “all such men as this Stewart is must leave this community ‘peaceably if they may, forcibly if we must.’”

  Finally, two afternoons later, Intelligencer publisher and now city mayor Whitaker, acting “at the invitation of a highly respectable Committee of [unidentified] gentlemen,” called privately on Stewart. Stewart emerged clearly shaken by what Whitaker told him. He now contended that his words were “misapprehended.” In a public statement printed in the Intelligencer, he swore his loyalty to the new government and vowed to “support with all my power any war measure necessary to resist coercion, by the Federal Government, or the invasion, by any other power, against the Confederate States of America.” He never published another word challenging secession or questioning the legal authority of the Confederate government. Not long after that, his flour mill won a rich contract to produce hardtack for the Confederate army.

  IN LIGHT OF SUCH FORCED CONVERSIONS, Calhoun and nearly all of his many Atlanta neighbors who had once spoken out for, or at least voted in favor of, cooperation and compromise threw their lots in with the Confederate cause. The editors of the Southern Confederacy likely had Calhoun in mind when the paper admitted “that many of our best citizens were opposed to secession.” Such men, in the heat of the crisis, “were honest, and we have not the slightest word to say against or fault to find with them on this account.” The newspaper welcomed their newfound readiness to accept the revolution, praising each former opponent who had “since manifested his patriotism and fidelity to his country, by yielding a cordial and cheerful obedience and support to its policy.”

  Such generosity toward former oppositionists had its limits, however. “We do think it is the bounden duty of every good citizen to defend his country in every measure she may adopt,” the editors averred, “or leave it at once. It is wrong and wicked to remain among us, opposing our government, and stirring up strife and dissensions among our people, in opposition to the established order of things; and no good man will be guilty of it.” Those who remained in Atlanta should now declare and show their loyalty or leave—or face other, more serious consequences.

  IN THE SPIRIT OF REVOLUTIONARY patriotism infecting the city, there were practically endless opportunities for Atlanta residents to demonstrate their zeal for the new order. The city’s rail hub location made it a frequent layover point for government and military officials and troops in the newly forming rebel army traveling among the seceding states. On March 12, the new Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, spoke to several thousand people outside the Atlanta Hotel. Little Alec had dropped his long-standing opposition to secession, even competing with fellow Georgians Howell Cobb and Robert Toombs for the Confederate presidency. He could hardly have failed to catch the irony of where he now stood and looked out over a sea of beaming faces. On these same steps, thirteen years earlier, he had run into Judge Francis Cone, who had refused to retract his “traitor” charge against Stephens, then in the unequal ensuing fight, nearly stabbed him to death. Now, Stephens—“his withered hands in gloves much too large—a face like a mummy—except the bright black eyes—and when on the stand . . . look[ing] like a little boy”—stood one rung below the top of the new Southern national government.

  His words to the crowd have not survived, but he probably rehearsed the argument he would famously deliver in Savannah less than two weeks later, his widely reprinted and much discussed “Cornerstone Speech” on the basis for the new Southern republic. In that speech he insisted that responsibility for the collapse of the national union rested with those who did not accept “that slavery— subordination to the superior race—is [the negro’s] natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” The Confederacy’s “cornerstone,” he intoned, “rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Those in the North who clung to ideas of equalitywith a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind—from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal
, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just—but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. . . . They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

  The new nation’s people had much work ahead of them. With state militias moving against federal arsenals and military facilities, Alexander Stephens told his Atlanta listeners to expect the surrender of Charleston Harbor’s Fort Sumter any day now. He assured his audience that war was not in the offing but urged them to secure the peace by preparing to fight.

  Georgia was ahead of him. As well as federal Fort Pulaski, Georgia militiamen also seized some ships from New York docked in Savannah Harbor, holding them hostage until shipments of arms ordered from New York factories before the secession vote were released. Georgia forces grabbed the Augusta arsenal as well.

  The two standing Atlanta militia companies, the Gate City Guards and Atlanta Grays, were the first to muster for the new Confederate and state armies. Other units formed swiftly, often sponsored by wealthy citizens who took captaincies or made sure their sons were elected officers. With bounties and the inducement of colorful and dashing uniforms for those who could afford them, hundreds of privates joined the Safe Guards, the Free Trade Rifles, and ten other new companies that came together before the year ended—along with cadet corps and home defense guards made up of those too young or too old to enlist. Six of Atlanta’s volunteer fire companies transformed themselves into military organizations that spring. In June, Ben Yancey formed up the Fulton Dragoons, a cavalry company, which joined the Georgia Legion, whose officers included Thomas R. R. Cobb, Howell’s younger brother, and former Atlanta mayor Luther Glenn, who was married to the Cobbs’ sister. The following November, when Cobb the cadet took a seat in the Confederate Congress for a period, he placed Major Yancey in command of his famous legion already winning battlefield fame in Virginia as part of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Although Fulton County had long resisted the cry for secession, with Atlanta at its center, its citizens provided the largest number of volunteer companies of any county in the state in this first call to arms, together with 150 enlistees in the regular army. By the following October, more than a thousand Atlanta men had joined forty Georgia regiments leaving for the battlefields. By the end of the war, Fulton County had provided the Confederacy with 2,660 soldiers.

  Like the militia of earlier wars, the citizen soldiers assembled into motley bands, making up in spirit for what they lacked in professional training. Soon they gained a measure of discipline and order. The tread of marching boots in the streets now competed with the sound of clattering train cars. Parks and squares were turned into drill grounds. Fife and drum bands filled the air with martial music. Despite the seizure of federal arsenals and forts, the city and state had few munitions to offer or spare; men marched with their personal revolvers and bowie knives or shouldered shotguns and old muskets left from the Mexican-American War and the Indian Wars. Those without long guns even carried fence posts instead. Officers rode their own horses. Crowds of women and men too young or too old to serve gathered to cheer the parades on. An Atlanta mother beamed with pride as her young son, enthused by the passing lines of men, assembled the family slaves together into a company and marched them about the house yard.

  The city turned out its pockets and purses in support of the incipient military buildup. Wealthy citizens donated cash, valuables, and household items to benefit the new companies. The Atlanta Amateurs dramatic group held regular fund-raising performances at the Athenaeum. Many evenings, men’s voices from political meetings rang out from City Hall where town ladies also came together in adjoining rooms to form support societies, sewing regimental flags, uniforms, and socks for the new companies. When Sarah Huff ’s father and uncle prepared to join Yancey’s Fulton Dragoons, entering Cobb’s Legion, her “weeping” mother and aunt “began basting and fitting the uniforms.” After they were uniformed, Ben Yancey’s men started off on the road to Virginia. It would be four years before the Huff women would see them again. Soon, they and other women formed associations to make bandages for the wounded.

  AMONG MANY TOWN FAMILIES busied with making their sons and husbands at least look like soldiers were John and Mary Jane Neal. Their eldest two sons, Andrew Jackson, or A. J., Neal and older brother James, were among those who mustered at the earliest call. James, became captain of an Atlanta company known as the Jackson Guard, also known as the Irish Volunteers for its large contingent of Irish-born volunteers, which was quickly detached as part of the Nineteenth Georgia Infantry to the new Confederate army in Virginia. The twenty-four-year-old A. J., an attorney, had only recently opened his first office in the swampy inland Florida town of Micanopy. When the state seceded, he promptly enlisted. He was now a mounted lieutenant with the Marion Light Artillery in its first encampment near Pensacola. The rebel troops there were preparing to move against the large federal garrison on an island across the harbor. First, though, the company needed to uniform its men. A. J. wrote to ask his father to search out merchants in Atlanta able to supply “uniforms, swords, sashes, shoes, clothing, etc.,” everything to outfit the battalion. In a few days his company’s Captain Powell would arrive in Atlanta with “plenty of money” in hand. A. J. Neal knew it would be impossible to find enough “cadet gray” cloth uniforms, but with the need to fight still uncertain, he assured his father that “flannel shirts and cheap pants” would do.

  The Neal family had moved just the year before from its large plantation in Zebulon, in Pike County, south of Atlanta, into its new house, a block down Washington Street from Calhoun’s place. The Neals lived at the corner of Mitchell in a brick Greek temple of a mansion admired as perhaps the grandest in-town house yet built in Atlanta. It had two-story white Corinthian columns supporting a pediment roof extending over the length of a front porch from which the parents, their three girls, and another son still at home cheered on the men marching past or drilling in the shady square in front of the City Hall and Fulton County Courthouse. With guests such as the Calhouns or the Claytons, who lived on the opposite corner of Mitchell Street and whose young daughters and sons were playmates of the younger Neal children, at their table, the Neals shared their sons’ letters from the developing front.

  For now, the family anxiously awaited the arrival of Captain Powell, who would carry word about “how affairs stand . . . and what are the prospects of war.” The lively dinner table companions enjoyed the bountiful provender from their farms, never imagining that the violence of what would surely be a short-lived war, if it came to that, could directly impinge on them. The same things that made Atlanta so attractive to them and increasing numbers of new residents, though, would one day bring the leader of the enemy forces to eat at the very same table they presently shared.

  LARGE CROWDS ROUTINELY gathered to watch newly commissioned regimental officers receive their new command’s flags at elaborate patriotic ceremonies in which a young local beauty committed the flag to the regiment’s designated color bearer and called upon him “to guard it with his life.” At the ceremony for the Confederate volunteers, the Athenaeum’s eight hundred seats were jammed as Ben Yancey’s daughter presented a flag she had sewn for the departing company. As she transferred the colors to the regiment’s protection, the loud rhythmic bass voice of the receiving sergeant resounded through the hall with his promise that “Never! Never!! Never!!!” would he “allow its folds to trail in the dust.” The house went wild, refusing to quiet until the orchestra launched into a rousing martial tune.

  On hand for this and many other patriotic displays, sixteen-year-old Sallie Clayton watched and shared in the events that had transformed her adopted hometown into a military camp. “Everything seemed to be preparing for active service,” she recalled, “and on all sides the cockade was visible.” She and her more than two hundred fellow students from the Atlanta Female Institut
e now drilled and trained for elaborate ceremonies to honor their male neighbors forming up to defend their new nation. While the city had as yet no public schools—despite the urging of many leading citizens that some alternative be found for the many poor children running unattended in the streets—the Female Institute opened its doors in 1860 to those daughters of families able to afford the $36 half-year’s tuition. Sallie walked nearly a mile each way—four times daily, counting her return home for lunch—to and from the brick and stone building on Ellis Street near Houston, overlooking the city. The Female Institute’s dome atop what came to be known as College Hill was visible from nearly any vantage point in town. Though the walk left Sallie and her younger sister and constant playmate Gussie weary, “and it was never known at what moment a cow would dispute the passage of a street with us,” they loved sharing in morning religious services in the buildingwide first-floor chapel, followed by Latin, French, oratory, reading and arithmetic recitations, calisthenics, dancing, and music in the upper-floor classrooms. She felt, “No building in the place could have been the scene of more joy and happiness.”