The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  He recorded shortly before the first anniversary of his move to Atlanta, “Our sales continue good and our profits also good.” But he also admitted, “I would willingly go back to old trade and moderate profits if we could only have peace and independence. We live now in a state of feverish excitement and disgust that gain cannot render bearable or desirable.”

  AT LEAST RICHARDS HAD his gains. Many citizens had only the “feverish excitement and disgust.” The porous and wavering boundary between loyal and rebellious states and the enduring need for Southern cotton in the North encouraged extensive quasilegal trade via Memphis and other Mississippi River cities until mid-1862. Finally, due to hardening army and governmental outlooks about commerce between the warring sides, coupled with Yankee military successes in the West, nearly all shipments of western crops into the South were cut off. The lack of rolling stock and the government demand for the rail lines also sharply curtailed food reaching Atlanta. Less than a year after the taking of Fort Sumter, shipments into the city of flour, hogs, sheep, and corn had declined between 30 and 80 percent from what they had been in 1860—while the population had more than doubled.

  In addition, the Confederate army began seizing farmers’ harvests for the military. The Richmond government passed an impressment statute, requiring farmers to turn over to the government 10 percent of everything they raised, from livestock and grain to vegetables, tobacco, and cotton. Impressment agents, accompanied by armed soldiers, confiscated their 10 percent levy and very often took anything else they wanted. When the woman of the Atlanta Hospital Association tried to sell sugar to finance an “invalid ladies” home, the Confederate army impressed the sugar. The roving government officials—and bandits masquerading as Confederate authorities—commandeered farm wagons traveling to Atlanta, with promissory notes for future payment in return. With the army impressing civilian property and thieves ready to make off with anything not tied down, Atlantans started hiding their most valuable items, even going so far as to bring their horses and buggies up the steps and into the house. When the Army of Tennessee ran desperately short of shoes, leaving much of the army to march barefoot in the frozen hills, General Bragg seized every boot in town not being worn. Citizens howled at the confiscations by “high officials who set the example of lawlessness by appropriating what did not belong to them,” in the words of a Southern Confederacy correspondent.

  Afraid of further confiscations, farmers squirreled away their harvests in bulging granaries and corncribs and stayed clear of the roads and Atlanta’s markets. Mayor Calhoun wrote to Confederate president Davis about the legality of such seizures and to what extent the city could expect to face continued impressments. Davis replied that the practices were indeed legal. He offered to investigate unauthorized seizures—to no effect.

  WITH BASICS IN SHORT SUPPLY, inflation spiraled out of control. By December 1862, the wholesale price index in the South had increased seven times above that of the heady days of spring 1861. Contributing to the inflationary spiral, the counterfeiting of so-called shinplasters—illegal currency issued by private corporations and individuals after silver change disappeared from circulation—and Confederate dollars was rampant. Numerous deals fell apart after currency and notes proved worthless paper. Jabez Richards discovered that $1,000 in cash he’d put up in partial payment for a slave were counterfeit, forcing him to fight against returning the slave to the previous owner. The Fulton County Superior Court tried 136 counterfeiters in a single year. Few issuing false notes were ever apprehended. In the summer of 1862, the Southern Confederacy reported that illegal shinplasters were “as thick as the frogs and lice of Egypt.”

  The Richmond government added fuel to the inflationary fire by printing government paper as quickly as its presses could operate, without any backing except a promise to redeem it at face value two years after the war. Prices stepped up and up, reaching a 12 percent per month rate of increase by the end of 1861. A bag of salt costing $2 before the war went for $60 in the fall of 1862. Goods were “changing hands,” reported the Southern Confederacy in early 1863, but only “at big figures that are unquotable.” Soon a street laborer could earn $2.50 a day, the pay for a skilled laborer before the war, but that was still a starvation wage. Eventually, inflation soared to ninety-two times prewar prices, the highest rate in American history.

  Cyrena Stone recorded prices from her account book “for the amusement of future generations.” They would remain the highest ever paid for such goods. A pound of pepper cost $10; a ham, $54; four pounds of butter, $40; fifty pounds of coffee, $500; a Merino (wool) dress, $400; “a green silk ‘love of a bonnet,’ with pansies & plums $150.” She concluded, “No purse is large enough to hold all the ‘needful’ that is needed to make more than one purchase.”

  The once thriving newspapers began to look threadbare themselves. Merchants found little cause to promote the goods they had for sale, other than tobacco, corn whiskey, and slaves. A few ads boasted of the arrival of European goods by blockade runners via Nassau. Numerous ads called for the apprehension of runaway slaves and army deserters—all described and named. Long lists of the wounded filled columns, as did lists of those who had distinguished themselves in battle. Some notices detailed captured slaves brought to jail and waiting for their owners to pick them up. The occasional house or land was offered for sale. Many more ads solicited housing. Owners needing cash put up household items for sale, especially pianos. Publishers themselves were forced to scramble to find sufficient newsprint and ink for their runs, eventually resorting to printing issues on half sheets and even wallpaper.

  POVERTY STRUCK WOMEN, whose men were gone to war, hardest. Gaunt mothers dressed in burlap came to Cyrena Stone’s Houston Street door everyday, seeking sewing or begging for food. One evening three barefoot women came by, their husbands having long since departed for war, all now left destitute. Stone recorded, “They said their rich neighbors persuaded their husbands to volunteer in the first war [sic], promising that their families should never suffer. But the promise was forgotten, & the little sewing they could get, hardly kept them alive.” Each woman beseeched her aid with “the same cry—‘How can I get bread for my children!’” Another mother of five children stopped at her house on her two-mile walk to the Army of Tennessee’s Quartermaster Department to take home government sewing, at the going rate of $1 for a pair of pants, $1.50 for a coat, and 50 cents for shirts. According to Stone, she at least did not have far to go for the work. “Many a woman walks eight or ten miles to town to get sewing.” This woman “was so delighted” to show her sympathetic friend the new pair of shoes “she had been sewing for months to get.” The well-to-do secret Yankee Stone did not suffer so, but she wondered, “Is it any marvel that crime and prostitution are so common?”

  Newspapers published advice on ways a woman like Cyrena Stone could make do without her past luxuries. These included recipes for brewing coffee out of beets or sweet potatoes—“those who give it a fair trial will be unwilling to go back even to the best Java.” To the fashion-minded lady, the Southern Confederacy suggested, “You can cut up your last fall dresses, and out of the skirts make the children nice new dresses; and, rather than miss doing a good thing, you can wear some of them yourself this fall and winter. You can ‘take in’ your hoops (to suit the hard times—shorten sail in this storm) and save several yards in making a new dress for yourself. There are a thousand little plans which a thrifty house-wife can adopt to save money, and look well too.”

  ATLANTA’S FAST-GROWING and transient population, exceptional access to goods through its superior transportation network, and wealth from manufacturing made conditions ripe for a speculative economy. Its individualistic, get-ahead commercial spirit drove men to seek quick profits—sometimes at the expense of neighbor and nation. “Atlanta,” complained John Steele, who took over from Jared Whitaker as editor, in the Intelligencer, “is now made headquarters for itinerant speculators in gold, bank notes, Confederate currency, meat and bre
ad.” An Alabama soldier’s wife, Mrs. Wellborn, watched store-keepers stash inventory under counters “to get it out of reach of the city authorities” to be sold later at a higher price. Such practices demoralized people who could ill afford the higher prices and led Steele to proclaim, “These men are greater enemies to the Southern cause than the foe in the field.”

  Many in Atlanta resented the traders they branded as speculators. Those who drew some of the sharpest rebukes were erstwhile slaves. One of the most enterprising traders in the city came from the sixty skilled bondsmen on the Ephraim Ponder estate on the outskirts of town. All of the Ponders’ slaves were more or less free to contract out their labor. Several took advantage to pursue opportunities denied to nearly all other slaves. A few saved up enough to become traders. Little held them back after their master left his wife, Ellen, alone on their big estate. Fourteen years her husband’s junior, Ellen had long been admired as “beautiful, accomplished, and wealthy.” Ephraim was devoted to her and trusted her enough that “in consideration for the great love and affection he bore,” he placed his entire estate, including his slaves worth an estimated $45,000, in trust for her. He came to regret his generosity.

  Not long after the couple moved to their new Atlanta home, scandal rocked the household. Others had long whispered about his wife’s “dissolute” ways and frequent adulterous liaisons, but Ephraim did not learn of them until 1861. Ellen, he declared in his divorce deposition, had been cheating on him at least since 1854. He accused her of being unable to refrain from “illegitimate pleasures,” drunkenness, abusive language, and the “utmost disrespect,” even threatening him with a gun.

  While the shocking divorce proceedings dragged on, Ephraim, “brokenhearted,” left Ellen to live alone at their beautiful Atlanta dream estate and returned to Thomasville. Alone in her house, the chatelaine’s “only thought or care was to remember when [her slaves’] wages became due and then to receive it,” recalled her most trusted slave, Festus Flipper’s young son Henry, who grew up in the teeming Ponder slave quarters. After the master’s departure, Henry recalled his childhood in the midst of slavery being “virtually free.” With no white overseer on the estate, he and the other young children even began to receive reading lessons from another slave on the property.

  Henry’s cobbler father and the other men and women living on the estate hired out their time in town. One Ponder slave, Prince Ponder, a wainwright by training, tried to ply his craft, but the local white mechanics resented the competition and would not let him practice his trade. He saw other opportunities in the war for a black man. Although subject to harassment by the patrollers, he had his mistress’s written permission to travel and trade “anywhere” in Georgia. With some savings, he took the risk of buying and selling “on anything there was any money in.” He made some money, speculated in gold as Confederate money lost its value, and with the profits bought more items to sell. Soon he had enough to rent a house in Atlanta, which he used as a warehouse, and opened a grocery store where he sold corn, rye, hops, flour, bacon, whisky, tobacco, boot leather, and “anything else,” he said, “on which I could make any money.” He moved his wife and children to a farm outside of town belonging to his friend, the wealthy Unionist builder Julius Hayden. He even lent money to Hayden at times.

  The underground economy open to anyone daring enough, even a slave, proved astoundingly lucrative in a time of scarcity. Though he may have exaggerated his success in accumulating money, Prince Ponder claimed he “often” took in $5,000 to $6,000 in a single day. He estimated that while still a slave, he earned a total of $100,000 in inflated Confederate currency and had as much as $50,000 tucked away at any one time. Inflated money or not, he was as wealthy as some of the richest men in town. He purchased a pair of mules, two horses, a buggy, and a wagon. He had cows, hogs, and poultry. Each month, he made his way back to the Ponder place to turn over a few dollars to Mrs. Ponder. In return for his freedom to hire out his time, he at first paid her $40 per month. As the war continued, his rent coming back to her eventually reached $100 monthly. She had no idea how much money he was making for himself.

  Prince Ponder invested some of his money in gold, likely purchased from his friend and fellow slave-entrepreneur Bob Yancey. In his barbershop and out of his Houston Street house, Yancey, too, traded in anything he could move at a profit. He continued to loan money to gamblers but also bought Yankee dollars and bits of gold, often purchasing them from Union prisoners he met when he went into hospitals or when they were in transit through Atlanta on their way to the Andersonville Prison. The army guards paid little attention to him, a barber and slave, while he shaved Yankee prisoners. That gave him time to dicker over the price of greenbacks, the Yankee paper currency; the Union men in turn hoped to use Confederate dollars to escape. Yancey then went into the Confederate barracks where he shaved rebel soldiers’ beards and exchanged Confederate money in return for prized Northern currency.

  Yancey showed the Unionist industrialist William Markham two thousand-dollar bills he’d purchased from Yankee prisoners for $8,000 in Confederate money. He turned around and sold those U.S. dollars at a rate reaching three hundred Confederate dollars to one green-back, “though,” noted a Confederate deputy provost marshal who had tried to stop him, “it was a dangerous thing for a man to do.” The Confederate Congress made dealing in greenbacks a crime punishable by up to three years in jail and a $20,000 fine. Few thought of the possibility that blacks could be among the most prosperous of the moneychangers, and the law did not provide additional penalties for slaves or other blacks caught dealing in greenbacks. According to one local white businessman, Yancey was “about one of the biggest traders we had here,” white or black.

  Atlanta seemed unable to contain the growing population of slaves in town who lived in a state bordering upon freedom. John Steele of the Intelligencer was no friend of the mayor, John Calhoun, and accused him of ignoring laws governing slave labor and conduct. In a long list of shortcomings he hoped to see corrected during the Calhoun administration, Steele editorialized,The next thing desired is to stop this habit of negroes hiring their time and making contracts with white men for the performance of work and charging the most exorbitant prices they can think of. Such conduct is against the laws of the State and should be severely punished. It is absolutely shameful to see the liberties that negroes are taking in this city. . . . If the negro slaves of this city are to be allowed their own way and to continue in the same course they have been hitherto pursuing, we shall very soon have the same abolition curse that caused this war, started in the State. Slaves should be treated as such and not allowed the rights and privileges of white men, and we shall insist that if any responsible white man gives information of any violation of the laws respecting slaves that Mr. Calhoun will listen to the charge and promptly investigate it, without thinking such an act on his part a disgrace to his magisterial dignity. He was put there to do it and he has a right to attend to it.

  THE MAYOR AND OTHER ATLANTA officials tried without success to rein in speculators of all colors. They had few tools at their disposal. The DeKalb County grand jury, which in addition to its judicial role acted as a kind of citizen’s council, blamed “the unnatural and implacable war waged against us by the North” for “the scarcity of money and the enormous high price of the necessaries of life.” But the “enemies without” were “enhanced by enemies within.” The jury sent a message calling upon the state legislature to apply its powers against “those capitalists who are using their means to speculate and reap immense profits upon the necessaries of life.” The Georgia General Assembly quickly criminalized speculation, but the laws were easily circumvented and rarely enforced.

  With resentment building against Atlantans “riding in their four-thousand-dollar carriages, dressed in thousand-dollar silks and two-thousand-dollar cloaks, and at night attending the theatre or joining in the dance[s],” simmering anger at speculators inevitably boiled over into violence. An Atlanta woman ra
cing through town in a buggy ran over what she thought to be a soldier. She pulled up in horror and turned back to look at the prostrate man. When she recognized him as an “extortioner,” she whipped her horse on, “regretting that her buggy wheels had not run over his neck.”

  Food thefts were rampant in Atlanta. Cows and chickens, even vegetables and fruit, disappeared from family plots. Whitaker reported burglars struck his Commissary Department’s food warehouses so often, they had depleted his inventory—mostly of bacon—to almost nothing. Police did not bother to investigate robberies of private gardens and livestock, as well as of household goods and tools, so many were reported. Citizens stopped bothering the city marshals with their troubles.

  In a notorious incident that made headlines even in the North, a dozen or so women barged into a Whitehall Street store on a late winter mid-afternoon in 1863. “A tall lady on whose countenance rested care and determination,” according to newspaper reports, asked the clerk the price for bacon. He answered $1.10 per pound. The woman told him she and the others were wives and daughters of soldiers. They could not afford that price and wanted the government price for bacon. The grocer refused. At that, she drew “from her bosom a long navy repeater, and at the same time ordered the others in the crowd to help themselves to what they liked.” The women walked away with nearly $200 worth of bacon.

  Many people in town stood up for the “mob of ladies.” The Intelligencer ’s portly, fire-eating editor, John Steele, intoned that the “scene moved the sympathies of his soul.” But in a follow-up to the incident, his leading daily rival’s editor, the now hardnosed Confederate G.W. Adair, was not so sympathetic in the pages of the Southern Confederacy . He insisted that these were no starving wives and daughters of soldiers but greedy exploiters of public sympathy for personal gain. “The tall female with determination in her eye, and who had elicited so much sympathy as the ‘boss’ of the seizing crowd, is the wife of a shoe-maker in this city who had not been to the army and is receiving very high wages for his labor, and in comfortable circumstances.” The identities of the ladies involved were never fully resolved. Perhaps for fear of arousing further public ire, none of the women was arrested. The Confederacy urged any truly hungry women thinking of following their example to “let their wants be known—if they will go to the Clerk of the Council and register their names and place of residence their wants will be supplied.”