The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  When Mayor Calhoun learned of the detentions, he immediately intervened, though at first he could only get his friends and colleagues moved out of the filthy, stifling, and overcrowded jailhouse barracks, which they shared with common criminals and Confederate army deserters, to more comfortable accommodations. Several of the detainees were eventually brought before a specially convened Mayor’s Court, which handled civilian cases, to be tried for treason. Although he was aware of how dangerous Lee’s men could be, Calhoun nonetheless quickly dismissed all charges.

  His action came too late for Michael Myers, whose loyalty was considered suspect since an earlier refusal to accept Confederate money in his store. Lee’s force of club-wielding young teens took him up in the late-summer sweep of suspected Unionists and, when they got him alone in a cell, beat him to death. An autopsy supervised by Colonel Lee found no foul play involved in Myers’s death. The coroners determined he had fractured his skull in “a fall upon the floor of the room in which he was confined,” but the fatal fall “resulted from the peculiar condition of his system at the time, consequent upon his habits.” The Irish immigrant, Lee insisted in a letter to the Confederate secretary of war after questions had been raised, was “a decided victim of inebriety.” A loyal friend of Myers refused to accept the findings. After he protested to Richmond, Lee had him arrested too.

  LEE NOT ONLY WORRIED about draft dodgers and white Unionists but also shared the fears of many whites that the war would spark a black uprising. Reports circulated widely about an insurrectionary army of 10,000 East Georgia slaves led by infiltrating Yankee officers moving toward Atlanta. Would the rapacious black army descend upon Atlanta, where more and more blacks lived? White citizens had long sought to limit the place of slavery and the presence of all blacks within their town’s bounds. The army’s needs and the demands of the furiously busy factories and hospitals, though, had made slaves essential. By November 1863, slaves resident in town had increased by 30 percent over the census of 1860, to 2,534, more than half women. However, with many refugee households no longer able to support their slave families and rural slaves impressed for city projects for short periods before returning to their masters, far more blacks lived in Atlanta without ever being counted by tax collectors. Many bondsmen, including increasing numbers of runaways, lived unsupervised in camps on the outskirts of town. “We had never seen so many dark skinned people in all our lives,” recalled Sarah Huff, a young girl growing up on the Marietta road at the edges of town.

  The needs of the Confederate army that transformed Atlanta into an increasingly chaotic urban and industrial metropolis also made it a hub for black life—and set off a slow-fuse mine that would blow apart the slave foundation of the Southern rebellion from beneath. The high concentration of blacks formerly dispersed and isolated on plantations had, for the first time, exceptional access to outside news. Those few men and women who could read a newspaper discussed the war news at night in darkened slave quarters. Plantation slaves were impressed by Confederate authorities by the hundreds and thousands from the surrounding countryside for short periods to labor in military facilities. They learned from better-informed black Atlanta residents and in turn shared word about the war when returned to their rural homes. Throughout Georgia, men, women, and children caught in perpetual bondage could “hear” the tramping boots of the Union army coming nearer to the state borders. Only when Confederates were nowhere in sight, though, did they dare talk among themselves about what that meant.

  Atlanta’s teeming, transient, and often unsupervised black population knew almost instantly when President Abraham Lincoln signed his January 1, 1863, executive order known as the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in the rebellious states to be free. A war that started off as a battle of ideology, of unified national authority versus states’ rights, flag versus flag, was at that point recast as a war to end, or keep, slavery. Whites in town, recorded Cyrena Stone in her secret diary, reacted with “great apprehension” to the announcement. They knew that every slave had heard of it “and understood its import.” Remarking the slaves’ apparently unchanged attitude and behavior, she believed, “The wild joy that thrilled their hearts, when they felt that their chains were at last broken,” was not apparent to whites; their hallelujahs, she wrote, “dared not be spoken.” Despite a war now being fought to free them, most slaves “submitted quietly” to the increasingly strict regulations imposed on their lives. However, when the question of arming blacks to fight on behalf of the Confederacy came up, an Atlanta friend’s household servant told her, “Missus, they better keep them guns out of our folks hands—cause they dun ’no which way we going to shoot!”

  BLACK HOPE WAS MATCHED by white paranoia, and few people were more militantly paranoid than Col. George Washington Lee. Racist vigilantism went unpunished and uncriticized. Blacks were not merely submissive; they were made aware of the consequences of any acts of defiance or hints of revolt they might be contemplating. Word got around quickly in 1862, when, during a matter of weeks, captors beat a runaway slave to death in Thomas County, a vigilante group in Washington County hanged a slave accused of stabbing his overseer, and another group near Columbus hanged and burned to death five blacks charged with murdering their master. Near Stone Mountain in sight of Atlanta in late 1863, a black man accused of attacking an eleven-year-old white girl was hung, “his body . . . left hanging on the gallows, there to rot, as a monument of warning to others,” reported the Columbus Daily Sun. In Bibb County not long after that, two doctors castrated a slave named Melton accused of attempted rape, rendering Melton, according to the Macon Daily Telegraph, “much distressed, and [he] considered the sentence more dreadful than death itself.” The paper hoped Melton’s fate would deter other blacks as a “terrible warning and example.”

  Fearful about the swelling black population in the midst of their chaotic city, many residents organized and armed. A self-defense company of “old men” mustered, said one member, not so much out of fear of a Yankee invasion but “to keep order here at home. . . . We were really afraid of the darkies.” Colonel Lee also tightened his grip on blacks, enforcing the dusk-to-dawn curfew. As slaves streamed into town with their refugee white families, they often had to curl up at night out in the open while their owners slept in churches or other makeshift shelters because of the lack of housing. Lee began rounding up the roaming black families and penning them in “Negro yards” and otherwise keeping them from moving about except with their owners’ written permission or by his authority. Fearing a Trojan horse within the city, other ordinances ensured that blacks, slave and free, could not circulate freely or possess any “weapons” for insurrectionary purposes—which included many common tools. They could not play cards, ride in carriages, carry a cane or walking stick, or, of course, own or carry firearms or poisonous drugs. Livery stables were banned from letting a black man saddle a horse. A night curfew for blacks began fifteen minutes after the ringing of an evening bell and ended at sunrise.

  Some sympathetic whites helped blacks circumvent the rules. Mayor Calhoun’s young son Patrick, taking pity on young slave men in his household, wrote passes under his father’s name for those wishing to visit their sweethearts after curfew.

  But the mood of most of the city was bitter and afraid.

  TIGHT RESTRICTIONS ON BLACK movement and activities could not stop some forms of slave resistance from being overlooked in plain sight. Whites simply could not see the determined efforts Atlanta’s slaves were making on their own behalf to undermine the Confederacy from within and loosen the bonds of slavery. At the Ponder estate on the edge of town, also out the Marietta road, with the preoccupied mistress of the house turning a blind eye, Joseph Quarles, a Ponder slave who possessed a rudimentary education, opened a night school in one of the workshops for the many children living there. In 1864, Festus and Isabella Flipper’s eldest son, Henry, now age eight, learned to read from the first book he had ever seen, a Confederate version of the Blue Back Speller
. Slaves who once feared the loss of a finger for daring to pick up a newspaper were now making sure their children learned to read and write.

  Other hidden acts of defiance took place right under Provost Marshal Lee’s own nose. After the court-martialing and execution as spies of the first eight of the Union men captured following the spring 1862 attempted train hijacking at Big Shanty, the surviving men remained confined for months in Atlanta’s barracks prison. Lee, though, could not see “why fourteen of the engine thieves were respited while the others were executed.” Languishing in jail with only enough nourishment to keep them alive, the remaining men relied upon “two great friends,” the prison’s slave servants, John and Kate. Though unable to read or legally buy or borrow newspapers, whenever possible they pilfered a guard’s copy after he set it aside. Passing through many hands, news from the outside world arrived at the bottom of the pan in which the prisoners’ food came to their cell. The Union prisoners could keep up with war news and feel hopeful of eventual liberation as Union forces advanced. After the prisoners finished reading the paper, the servants returned it in the same manner, and then it would find its way back through the secretive slave network to the unsuspecting guard’s post.

  The grateful prisoners discovered that the kindly John and Kate knew far more about war matters than they let on. “They could not be misled by their rebel masters,” recalled one of the incarcerated Yankees, William Pittenger, “for they had adopted the simple rule of disbelieving everything told, even while professing unbounded credulity.” The black men understood well what the war meant. They whispered with the Northerners about the Union army’s movements, emancipation, and Lincoln’s plans. “I never talked with a negro yet,” found Pittenger, “who seemed to have the slightest doubt of the victory of the Union troops, and in their freedom as the result of the war.”

  In that respect, the slaves were more percipient than the majority of Atlanta’s residents. Even twelve months later, the war, however real its consequences, remained a remote event yet to puncture their state’s borders, one that still produced enough moments of heroic Southern success to fan the delusion that all was not inevitably lost. War would not reach the Gate City.

  IN THE FALL OF 1862, a few months after their comrades’ execution, Provost Marshal Lee interviewed the remaining Union raiders in his custody, supposedly to communicate their statements to the War Department in Richmond. He implied that their statements might improve their chances for a reprieve and perhaps make a prisoner exchange possible. After interviewing them, he promised to let the men know what he heard. However, apparently not satisfied with what he learned, he never followed through. Soon, the Union prisoners saw that preparations were underway to build another gallows. They needed to act, or they would join their comrades in a shallow Atlanta grave.

  On November 15, 1862, though weakened by months of confinement and malnourishment in a crowded, stifling cell, they overpowered a guard when he opened their cell door to collect an empty bread tray. “The negro waiters,” watching the escape play out, “kept perfectly quiet.” The men climbed up and over the surrounding prison wall, then fled through the streets and from there out into the countryside. Pittenger was blocked in his attempt to get out of the jailhouse and returned in despair to his upper-story cell. He watched out the barred window as soldiers charged up to the prison and alarmed and shouting men and women scurried in fright through the neighboring streets. As the city’s church bells rang wildly, he felt the crackle of the rapid gunfire he heard as if the balls had struck his own gut.

  He saw Colonel Lee ride up blustering and red-faced on horseback. He was “in a towering passion.” Lee issued orders “in a very angry tone” to hunt down the escapees. He shouted to his men, “Don’t take one of the villains alive. Shoot them down and let them lie in the woods.” A deserter being held in the same jailhouse had tried to escape with the Union prisoners but fell from the wall and broke his ankle. Pittenger saw the guards drag him back to his cell “in a very rough manner.” He died a short time later from his injuries.

  Ten men, including eight of the raiders, managed to elude Lee’s men. All the Union escapees eventually reached freedom. A few days after the mass breakout, the furious provost marshal wrote a bitterly recriminatory letter to his superior in Charleston, blaming the escape on having too few men at his disposal and “outside influences” that enabled the plot. He insisted “sympathizers outside” must have hid the men after they fled; otherwise, his men surely would have tracked them down.

  WHILE JOHN AND KATE dared assist the Union men in their escape only with their silence, Bob Yancey, the barber and currency and gold trader, took an active role in helping another Yankee break out of the same jail. With owner Ben Yancey fighting in Virginia, his trusted bondsman, now a popular local figure, regularly walked in and out of the barracks prison, where the guards thought nothing of seeing him carry his barbering tools and towels to shave prisoners and cut their hair. Within his kit, though, he hid large amounts of Confederate currency to exchange for the prisoners’ greenbacks.

  Yancey came to know several of the prisoners well. He often gave the needy men money and clothing and spent, he said, “many many days and nights . . . watching over them in sickness from exposure and wounds.” He even took off his own shirts and jackets to cover freezing and feverish prisoners.

  One afternoon, he was shaving a man he mistakenly later called “Colonel Cliff.” William Clift was a Union prisoner much prized by his Confederate captors. The seventy-year-old had been leader of the resistance in the Chattanooga region where he waged a guerilla war against Confederate forces. After the Union army took control of the area, he became a courier for Gen. William Rosencrans, then leader of the Army of the Cumberland chasing Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee across the state. Ironically, Clift’s own son, a Confederate cavalry officer, stumbled upon him on a mission and brought him in. Clift was shipped to Atlanta for confinement in the barracks jail.

  While Yancey’s razor scratched at Clift’s whiskers, he whispered, “Bob, I want to get out of this place.”

  “Captain,” Bob replied, “you know I can do nothing for you.”

  Clift persisted. “Yes, you can.”

  Bob distrusted the older white man who, he suspected, might be trying to entrap him. “Now, you want to get me into a scrape and then tell Wash Lee [Colonel Lee] about it, and he will hang me.”

  “I will die before,” Clift insisted. He told Yancey that a friend stood ready to help him once he got outside the prison walls. He pleaded with Yancey to bring him a rope. “This fellow here will pull me over the fences if you will bring me a line.”

  Yancey soon smuggled a rope into the jailhouse. He refused twenty Yankee dollars Clift offered him for his troubles.

  With the aid of his unnamed friend, Clift was pulled over to the busy streets of Atlanta and soon slipped out of the city. Eventually, he made his escape back through the lines into Union-controlled Tennessee territory.

  “Wash” Lee hauled Yancey in for questioning—but not for long. A man of means now, he had no trouble bribing his way back to working in his barbershops and trading money between the warring sides for big profits.

  UNION TROOPS PUSHED DEEPER into Tennessee and up from the Gulf coast throughout the first half of 1863. Fighting approached closer and closer to Georgia’s borders. The death toll reported daily in the newspapers grew larger. The bodies returning, together with the thousands of sick and wounded soldiers recuperating and, when they could, walking the streets, made the realities of war clearer to Atlantans. While few advocated surrender or a restoration of the Union as it had been, many longed for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

  Calhoun’s city was prosperous but in turmoil and under the thumb of Lee’s ruthless and frequently lawless men. The mayor had worked to prevent war. After so much bloodshed and carnage, and with his son deep in the fight, he hoped a peace treaty might bring an end to the fighting. In the fall’s state race for governor,
“a friend and advocate of peace from the day the war commenced,” Calhoun openly supported his fellow Constitutional Unionist and friend Joshua Hill in his race against Gov. Joe Brown. Brown wanted to fight on for independence. Hill advocated a negotiated end to the war.

  Hill swayed few voters outside the strongly Unionist mountain region. Governor Brown swept Fulton County by a three-to-one vote and the rest of the state by large margins. Georgia voted to fight on.

  HILL WAS A RESPECTED POLITICAL leader and wealthy slaveholder, a Confederate now by necessity and home loyalty. Still, some questioned his patriotism. In wartime, Steele in the Intelligencer insisted there could be no shade of gray in a person’s loyalty to the Confederacy. “We have heard one or two names mentioned in connection with disloyalty,” he wrote, “and, could we prove it, or give reliable authority for it, would certainly advocate a little hanging. This is no time for ‘palavering.’ A man must be either friend or foe; and if he is the latter, there is a proper way to get rid of him.”