The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Through the open windows on College Hill, the students could hear the shunting trains and crowds jamming the car shed, where company after company from up-country towns piled out of cars to reassemble in the neighboring open field of trees, mud, and grass known as City Park “amidst stirring martial music and firing of cannon.” Local women were always on hand to greet the young men, “all recognizing,” shared Clayton, “in every soldier a father, husband, brother or son and all were anxious to aid each one of them in some way.” The chaos and emotion around the station sometimes proved dangerous. After many hours packed together on trains—even the car roofs were filled—spirited young soldiers in the making leaped from cars slowing into the car shed and began firing their revolvers into the arching ceiling, stampeding the throng of panicked well-wishers on hand to welcome them.

  Neighboring streets also filled with wagon trains and long lines of uniformed men moving through. Walking home one afternoon, a demure Sallie needed to cross Marietta Street as one company after another filed past. As she waited at first patiently, “the opportunity for a little fun . . . more than they could resist,” the soldiers began taunting her, calling her their “personal property” in words that put a “crimson hue” into her cheeks. Unable to get across the street, she was forced to walk the entire length of the long marching columns of men, accompanied by “shouts and laughter” the whole way. Only “with the utmost difficulty” did the blushing young woman keep a “dignified pace” before finally reaching her door.

  While in town, the soldiers camped in the new Confederate barracks built on Peachtree Street toward the outskirts of Atlanta near the spot where townspeople used to ride the early version of the Ferris wheel and eat ice cream on hot summer nights. On April 1, 1861, “the greatest gathering that was ever witnessed in this city took place” to salute the seventy-five Gate City Guards under its captain, former mayor William Ezzard, debarking along with companies from the Cherokee County towns of Ringgold and Cartersville to join with A. J. Neal’s and the many other regiments assembling in Pensacola for the assault planned on the resisting federal garrison there. Cheering onlookers filled the balconies and windows, even the rooftops, of the Trout House, the Atlanta Hotel, the Athenaeum, and other neighboring buildings and depots, even straining to see from the tops of rail cars parked in the yard. “Every available space was crammed with living masses,” reported the Southern Confederacy.

  The entire Atlanta Female Institute student body lined up along the Atlanta Hotel facing the file of soldiers. Each young lady dressed in white carried a small version of the new “Stars and Bars” Confederate States flag in her gloved hand. The carefully rehearsed line of girls moved across the street and handed a flag to each soldier opposite. Inscribed on the back of the flags, turned over by the doe-eyed girls for the young men in their fresh uniforms, were the loin-stirring words, “From the Young Ladies of the Atlanta Female Institute. None but the brave deserve the fair.” As it pulled out whistling, the thirteen-car train holding the flag-waving men bound for the army was accompanied by “the booming of cannon and the cheering and shouting of the unnumbered throng, and waving handkerchiefs by the ladies from the windows and balconies contiguous.” Each departing soldier felt the warmth of a pretty girl’s hand linger in his own as the train carried him off to the front.

  DESPITE THE PREDICTIONS THAT not a shot would be fired to win Southern independence, Lincoln made clear that the Union was indissoluble—and war came. South Carolina forces opened fire on Fort Sumter outside Charleston on April 12, 1861. Lincoln had a tiny 16,000-man army at his disposal and a small navy. The South, with its state militias, enjoyed an actual manpower advantage over the Union when the first shots rang out. On April 14, the Confederate flag rose over Fort Sumter. A day later, Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen for ninety days’ service to suppress the insurrection “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

  Atlanta’s streets erupted in what were now becoming routinely boisterous and pyrotechnic displays of support for the Confederate attack. Two days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, a “citizens committee” threatened to visit all Northern merchants to insist they hang Confederate flags over their stores. If they refused, they would “be accommodated to a coat of tar and feathers.”

  The town’s high society enjoyed more refined displays of patriotic ardor indoors. Sallie Clayton and other students of the Female Institute held a floral pageant beginning with the raising of the American flag, at which the young women on stage tossed floral “bombs,” bringing the Stars and Stripes to the floor, followed by a bouquet bombardment of a floral model of Fort Sumter. The performance shook “the house with stamping feet and . . . wild shoutings and cheers,” according to a witness.

  With many of Atlanta’s leading citizens on hand for the pageant, the school’s founding trustee, Amherst Stone, and his wife, Cyrena, were almost certainly in the audience. Even more than her Union-leaning husband, Cyrena was troubled by slavery and deeply opposed secession. A local writer and essayist of some note, she fought against the radicals’ ascendance as she could, pseudonymously with her pen. Probably reflecting on the girls’ floral desecration of the American flag, writing as “Holly,” Cyrena lamented in the city’s “lively evening paper,” the Commonwealth, the dying of “our country, so long the boast of every one proud to call himself American!” She dreaded what might lie ahead. “The [‘late United States’] fair corse [sic] still ‘lies in State,’” she declaimed, “for it is yet unknown whether her burial should be as her baptism—in the crimson life-blood of thousands—or whether they shall wrap around her . . . the Stars and Stripes that have waved so long over our Washington’s grave—as fitting drapery for the death-sleep of the fairest, the noblest Republic upon which ever shined the Sun.” In the privacy of home, she hoped for a better outcome, “nerv[ing] ourselves against despair, and believ[ing] yet, that this Strife between Truth & Treason must soon end—triumphantly for Truth.”

  ON A “BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY,” the second after Samuel Richards learned of the taking of Fort Sumter, the book merchant went to church, where his inspired choir “made a greater display than our church has ever before seen or heard in the musical line.” His objections to secessionists vanished. He sang out boldly for the new Southern republic’s rise. In spite of his spiritual exaltation, he could not help feeling “sad to think that our country is actually at war brother against brother.” The war of brother against brother was, in his case, more than just a phrase. Samuel Richards decried “our traitor brother,” William, who had gone north to preach, and now “his sympathies and his hopes are with the despotic government that is doing their utmost to destroy us and make slaves of freemen.” At this point, he wrote, “I pity him for his blindness and infatuations.” His anger at William built as the gathering violence played out on the coasts and in Virginia. “Our family hitherto has been united in feeling and affection if not in bodily presence, but now we are widely separated indeed and have nothing in common.” He claimed to have formerly been “a strong Union man” as the two sides drew apart with the approach of the election, “but now it has got to have a stinking savor since I have seen what measures are taken in order to save [the Union].”

  A week later, he announced he would muster with the Silver Grays, Macon’s new home guard battalion composed of men “whose locks are turning gray with age, as myself,” but with all arms already consigned to other companies, the militia company shortly disbanded. His longtime clerk Asa Sherwood, though, departed for Virginia to join the army.

  With gunfire and death came venom and ambition for conquest. On April 24, 1861, Atlanta mayor Whitaker addressed a public letter to Mechanic Fire Company No. 2 accepting their offer to serve voluntarily as a home guard militia for the city. He assured them, “We will teach Mr. Lincoln and his cohorts before this war is over that the South never surrenders, and that the people of the South will never be satisfied until the Capitol at Washington is rescu
ed and our flag raised upon it; and the Confederate States acknowledged to be free and independent of all nations.” The city council soon seconded his sentiments, with a resolution denouncing “one Abraham Lincoln of certain nonslaveholding States of the late old United States having announced its determined policy to subjugate the Slave States.” The council members asserted that “the people of the Slaves States are determined never to be subjugated by such demons as long as there is an arm to raise and a God to rule and to sustain the cause of the Confederate States of America.”

  THE HOPE THAT THE WAR wouldn’t last long derived from the smallness of both professional armies. Some believed the Union would let the Confederacy go in a negotiated divorce. The Southern Confederacy called for military restraint, declaring a readiness for a quick end to the conflict. “Justice,” a columnist temperately admonished, “does not require, and no one desires to wage an offensive war against our enemies. We all want peace as soon as it can be obtained on honorable terms; therefore, every indication of it is hailed with pleasure.” The newspaper suspected that the Yankee people could not “fail to discover the utter hopelessness and futility of prosecuting this war” and would soon abandon the fight or vote out their warmongering rulers. While hailing peace rumors, the editors warned “our people” against being “lured from their place of safety on account of it. Don’t, for a moment, slack your zeal—no matter what may transpire, until peace is not only proclaimed, but established. Continue to organize, equip and send out your companies.”

  Just to make sure that nobody doubted the sincerity of their support for the Southern nation, the editors urged the Confederate Congress to anticipate peace by “pass[ing] such laws as will prevent too great an influx of Yankees among us after the war. We are now cut off from them—we hope forever.”

  The violence needed to sever the ties of union became clear soon enough. Not long after the Southern Confederacy published its recommended peace terms, the first full-scale clash of Confederate and Union armies took place at Bull Run, near Manassas Junction, Virginia. The Confederate forces routed the Yankee army within a short ride of Washington, D.C. The electricity of the telegraphed news crackled through the South. Still in Macon, Samuel Richards, who had no doubt that “our cause is a just one in His sight,” now shared the “universal” rejoicing in “the direct interference of God, for our force was not half as great in point of numbers as theirs.” When word of the rebel army’s “complete triumph” reached A. J. Neal’s camp, he listened as the news traveled from campfire to campfire and “regiment after regiment took up the shout and hurrahed for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy.” He exclaimed to his mother, “I have never seen anything to equal the enthusiasm created.” He envied the Georgia companies who had “covered themselves with glory” at Manassas and shared the widely embraced view that this “most decisive victory ever achieved . . . ought to put to an end this wicked and unholy war.”

  But word also soon reached Atlanta that sixteen of its citizens had fallen. The victory heartened the town, but the first shipment of coffins arriving at the car shed, followed by funerals and mourners’ clothes, brought home the full measure of what lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 10

  SPECULATION

  ATLANTA WAS THE NEW Confederate nation’s turntable. The rebellious South had fewer than half as many miles of railroad track as the North, but a third of all lines traversing the Lower South, and just about all the 1,400 miles of track within Georgia, met up in the car shed. For thousands of soldiers, soon to be tens of thousands, and their equipment riding the rails from the Lower South to practically any front in the slowly developing continentwide civil war—Virginia, Tennessee, the Mississippi Valley and beyond, the Gulf or Atlantic coasts—the fastest route ran through Atlanta. The iron rails that gave birth to Atlanta also set the town’s factories and industrial workshops on a wartime fast track. The South had less than 20 percent of the Union’s industrial capacity. Atlanta’s industrial base had been created to service railroad needs and now offered a ready foundation for Southern military manufacturing. President Jefferson Davis’s military advisors urged him to move swiftly to put “the whole population and the whole production . . . on a war footing, where every institution is made auxiliary to war.” No place in the South was more prepared to benefit from a policy of total militarization.

  Atlanta had long resisted secession, and few rejoiced at the prospect of civil war, but once it came, the city’s citizens rode a warhorse, and many thought they had picked a winner. Even before the first shots were fired, the Gate City offered up all it could to meet its new land’s military needs—and to boost the city into its next, explosive phase of growth. The Daily Intelligencer could soon boast with some merit, “Atlanta . . . is destined to be a great manufacturing city.” In their exuberant pursuit of that destiny, few in Atlanta suspected they might also be pursuing their own destruction.

  “PERPETUAL MOTION DOES EXIST in this city, whose seal might well be a mammoth child directing a locomotive at full speed,” exclaimed an awed journalist on a visit from Columbia, South Carolina. Industrial fumes and the rhythmic clanging of ironworkers’ hammer blows blended with locomotive smoke and chugging engines as a steady and mounting flow of rich Georgia State and Confederate army contracts kept trackside factory forges blazing and machinery in motion: Win-ship’s Foundry and Machine Shop produced desperately needed freight cars and railroad supplies, along with bolts and plating for armoring ships; the Stewart and Austin flour mill produced hardtack troops came to curse; James McPherson’s match factory sold products to both army and civilians; numerous saddle and harness makers produced goods under government contract; Hunnicut and Bellingrath filled orders for alcohol, vinegar, and spirits of niter; High, Lewis, and Company distilled close to 80,000 gallons of liquor for the Confederate army annually; the Empire Manufacturing Company produced railroad cars and bar iron; a percussion cap factory opened in the first year of the war; W. F. Herring and Company and Lauishe and Purtrell Company turned out uniforms, knapsacks, and other cloth goods; gunsmiths milled and rifled gun barrels; the Peck and Day planing mill produced rifles and, without enough machinery and skilled mechanics to meet firearm requisitions, also contracted for 10,000 ten-foot-long medieval pikes; the foundries of Solomon and Withers Company forged brass and iron implements and “C.S.A.” belt buckles, spurs, and horse tack; the Confederate Iron and Brass Foundry also specialized in military accoutrements; and second only to the Tredegar Works in Richmond, the Atlanta, later the Confederate, Rolling Mill produced cannon, rails, and armor plate, including iron sheathing used on the Merrimac and other ironclads. The Atlanta Sword Manufactory turned out 170 finished swords for Confederate officers per week.

  The Confederate army, too, set up its own operations in Atlanta. The general of the western Army of Tennessee, Braxton Bragg moved his Quartermaster Department’s headquarters here. In February 1862, he transferred the threatened Nashville arsenal to the buffered safety of Atlanta. Soon, thirteen separate shops were in production in scattered buildings, including a machine works, arsenal, and tannery. Munitions laboratories went up at the old fair grounds racetrack, where many of the nearly 5,500 yellow-skinned arsenal men and women—more than the entire town’s population less than a decade earlier—hunched over benches, packing percussion caps and artillery and small-arms ammunition, as many as 25,000 rounds and 150 artillery shells per day by August 1862, eventually churning out 23 million musket and pistol caps and 4.1 million rounds of small-arms ammunition. The Army of Tennessee’s Quartermaster Department employed a small army of some 3,000 “needle women,” or seamstresses, most hauling home heavy bolts of flannel to sew into jackets, pants, and shirts. One hundred cobblers in a government shoe factory turned out as many as five hundred pairs of boots a day on those rare days when enough leather could be secured.

  In the wartime frenzy, houses and barns became workrooms and factories, making it “impossible to detail at this time the numerous establishments fo
r manufacturing purposes in Atlanta,” noted the visitor from Columbia. “They are daily increasing.” At her Marietta Street home, a young Sarah Huff watched in astonishment not only as the men in her life departed but as “the wheels of industry, the spinning wheel, the reel and the winding blades moved swiftly in my mother’s wartime household,” as they, too, began producing clothing, tents, blankets, and uniforms. Much like everywhere in town, “decided changes . . . [took] place very early in the war,” and her neighborhood filled with workers and their machines. “Right there in sight of us,” her industrious Scots neighbors built “a factory [that became] . . . the most extensive button factory in the south.” She and her friends looked through the doorway in awe at the “wonderful sight” of powerful cutting machines banging out thousands of cow-bone buttons for soldiers’ uniforms.

  AN UP-COUNTRY TOWN not to be found on a map fifteen years earlier soon became the South’s second most important war materiel production center, after Richmond itself, where Jefferson Davis moved the Confederacy’s capital in May 1861 as a direct affront to nearby Washington, D.C. To many minds, given Atlanta’s location in the heart of the rebellious states, its importance exceeded even the capital city’s. Few people in the North or among Union military officials had heard of Atlanta before the outbreak of the rebellion, but most soon recognized that “the Citadel of the Confederacy” lay nestled beyond the fastness of the lower Alleghany ridges and hills. On distant battlefields, Union soldiers began to make mental note of the “Atlanta” stamped on captured Confederate wagons, artillery pieces, and ammunition boxes—calling cards from the Gate City. The Yankees would remember the name of the town as they marched south.