The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  That was true even for candidates for governor. Not long after the 1863 gubernatorial race, a soldier walked into a Whitehall Street store and asked where Hill lived, wrongly assuming him to be an Atlanta man. He was told the antebellum congressman lived some sixty miles away in Madison.

  “That lets me out,” said the disappointed soldier. “Our company from Mississippi is here for a day, and we thought we would hang old Josh. . . . For disloyalty—he’s a Union man you know.”

  A few men in town might not have objected to seeing Mayor Calhoun hanged as well, but for most he remained a popular figure—or at least the city was reluctant to change administrations in the middle of a war. While he had lost a bid in the fall for a state senate seat, he easily won an unprecedented third City Hall term in December.

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1864, the temperature dropped to the point that pitchers of water froze even in heated rooms. Outside, the high reached only six degrees, and that night it fell below zero. The forests in and surrounding town had been denuded to meet the arsenal’s demand for charcoal. Firewood now sold for $80 a cord, well beyond the reach of most Atlantans. Supplies of coal gas were exhausted, leaving the street lanterns and church sconces dark. During the coldest winter in thirty years, people fed small stove fires with broken furniture and skipped icy church services altogether. Livestock and poultry, always in danger of being stolen, were now threatened with freezing or starving to death, so they were moved from their pens into people homes.

  The fifty-two-year-old Calhoun’s hair remained thick but had given over to gray, and his hands shook while he read his third annual State of the City speech on New Year’s Day. No traces of optimism from the previous year remained. Crime, he admitted, plagued the city. He couldn’t hire enough good officers to contain the disorder. A few dishonest ones he had had to dismiss. Smallpox and other diseases kept the pesthouse at Markham’s Farm full. He recognized the huge need for relief, resulting in an appropriation of about $40,000 for public assistance. “The drain upon the Treasury to supply the wants of the suffering poor and arising out of the increased salaries of the Officers has been unprecedented,” he intoned. His own salary, which started at $600 in 1862, had grown to $2,500 (less than the city clerk’s of $4,000 and the marshal’s of $3,500). The rapid growth of the city also made food distribution a challenge; the city market near Whitehall and Alabama streets was “altogether inadiquit [sic]” to handle its traffic. He hoped to move and enlarge it before the end of the coming year. However, the “scarcity and high price of material and the difficulty of obtaining mechanics” made any near-term solution unlikely.

  Troubled times, though, cleared the earth for planting new solutions. He knew intimately the value of an education; in his own life, the opportunity to learn had enabled a destitute country boy to rise to wealth and power. Public education might cure the problem of gangs of poor, unsupervised children who presently roamed Atlanta’s streets and engaged in petty crime. He called for the establishment of a system of public elementary schools for the children of the poor and those whose fathers were in the service. He proposed that each ward employ a teacher for its resident children. He asserted that the city could bear the cost of five teachers at $1,000 per year each. “The expense to the City would be but a trifle,” he contended, “and no one could estimate the good that would result from it.” He promised, “As a taxpayer I would always be willing to pay my part.” The notion never advanced far in the council’s deliberations.

  The day before the mayor spoke in City Hall, a depressed Samuel Richards noted that the miserable weather provided a “fit ending to a year of gloom and death.” He was spitting mad. That day he had received a telegram announcing that Richmond had banned the widely reviled practice of paying for substitutes. After receiving word that his money had gone to waste, Richards moaned, “My $2500 Substitute becomes worthless to me.” It was, he raged, a “grand Government Swindle.” “What a blessed thing it is to live in a free country!” With the New Year’s bells about to toll, he shivered in the winter night, “the fire nearly out.” “God save us from evil in the year to come.”

  CHAPTER 14

  RIVER OF DEATH

  AS HE SPOKE IN A FRIGID City Hall about Atlanta’s prospects, Mayor James Calhoun pointedly made no mention of the Union forces nibbling at the northwestern corner of Georgia just a day’s train ride away from the Five Points. His thoughts, though, probably strayed there. William Lowndes Calhoun, his eldest child, was ninety miles away in the Army of Tennessee’s winter camp among the snowy ridges and iced-over hollows around Dalton, Georgia.

  Lowndes had already survived some of the fiercest and most sustained fighting of the war. He knew from direct experience what Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman would do to win. He had rejoined the Calhoun Guards, his Atlanta volunteer infantry company in the Forty-second Regiment of the Georgia Guards, at Vicksburg on December 31, 1862, just two days after their first victorious stand against the Sherman-led assault on the Chickasaw Bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River above the town. The celebration didn’t last long. Calhoun’s command shifted from the bluffs north of the lynchpin river port to the swamps below it, where from exposure, malaria, and short rations of “blue beef and sour cornbread,” the men, he said, “became almost walking skeletons.” When a springtime renewal of the Union assault on the riverfront was anticipated, his men were moved into the city and placed as a support for the lower water batteries. Calhoun’s men were part of the rearguard against a massive, early-morning surprise attack by General Grant, then in command of the Army of the Tennessee. Surrounded Confederate forces fell behind Vicksburg’s heavy fortifications. Unable to break through its defenses, Grant laid siege to the city.

  By day, the Yankee artillery fire and mines blasted the earthworks, which the bone-weary rebels worked through the night to repair. With little ammunition, the Confederate soldiers snuck out to salvage cartridges and caps from the enemy dead and wounded lying in front of their defenses. The approaching Union lines drew within twenty-five yards of the Vicksburg works. For forty-seven days and nights, Calhoun and his men—except the dead—never left the trenches. They endured mining and countermining, the enemy approaching nearer and nearer and, when not assaulting, pummeling them with heavy sharpshooting all along the line and constant firing from their artillery and mortar fleet. Sometimes as many as two hundred guns fired at once into Vicksburg. In the meantime, meager rations kept growing smaller and were at last reduced to pea-meal bread and no meat, except mule meat carved out of animals struck down by shells. Even fouled water was scarce on the line, and many desperately thirsty men were shot down trying to obtain it. “ Worn and weak as the troops were,” recalled Calhoun, “if the order had been given” to break out of Vicksburg, “they would have succeeded, or died in the attempt; for the men who had gone through with so much fighting and hardships would have risked anything.”

  With “no hope of relief,” on July 3, General John Pemberton offered to surrender. Calhoun regretted the decision. “I felt that a soldier’s death was preferable,” he said. Vicksburg and its 31,600 defenders surrendered on a monumental Fourth of July. The Forty-second Georgia was part of a brigade that lost 42 percent of its men. The surviving prisoners were paroled just two days later. Calhoun spent thirty days recuperating at his father’s home, then reorganized survivors and new recruits for the Forty-second Georgia at Decatur. The company took the Western & Atlantic north through the old Cherokee country, whose former inhabitants his father had surveyed a quarter century before, and marched into the last corner of Tennessee still in Confederate hands. It wasn’t long before Calhoun, now captain of his guard, and his men were back in the lines.

  THE BRUTAL GRIND THAT led to the taking of Vicksburg, together with the much easier capture of New Orleans and the pushing out of Confederate forces from the Mississippi River’s banks, had un-dammed the entire valley to the unimpeded flow of federal forces and completely severed the trans-Mississippi west
from the rest of the South. On the same Fourth of July that Vicksburg surrendered, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s invading Army of Northern Virginia was pushed back and finally smashed at the town of Gettysburg in Union territory and forced to retreat back across the Potomac River into Virginia. Word of the simultaneous victories elated a war-weary Northern people, disheartened by massive casualties, heavy taxes, draft riots, suspension of constitutional rights, and deep contention over Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves. Northern voters had swung heavily in the previous off-year election away from his Republican party. General Grant and many others in the North now believed that “the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.” But Richmond and Atlanta, the head and heart of the Confederacy, remained untouched.

  General Sherman, whose Fifteenth Corps of Grant ’s army had been sent into the Mississippi countryside to hold off reinforcement of Vicksburg, was camped eighteen miles east of the invested city shortly after its surrender. Pleased with the state of affairs, if miffed that he did not personally get to march into Vicksburg, he wrote his wife Ellen’s brother, Philomen B. Ewing, “All I ask is for the U.S. to give me 10,000 Recruits and I will have my corps ready for Mobile & Atlanta by October.” Not long after, Grant would give him those men and more.

  WITH THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER valley in undisputed Union possession, Atlantans began to fear that the Yankee army would gain complete control of Tennessee and Mississippi and soon come their way.

  Meanwhile, the city council, taking stock of the meager turnout for the home guard drills outside City Hall, began to prepare for possible direct attack on the city. The members contracted for chests to be prepared “in which to pack up the City Records and papers for removal when necessary.”

  EVEN BEFORE THE FALL of Vicksburg, Brig. Gen. Marcus J. Wright, the Confederate officer in command of the Atlanta district, had ordered Col. Lemuel P. Grant, chief engineer of the Department of Georgia, to survey the surrounding area, draw up maps, and make plans for fortifications. Grant, like so many of his brethren in the leading circles of the city, was a self-made man grown wealthy off the railroads. Born in Maine, he had moved south to labor on the rail lines. He saw what lay ahead as he laid the ties and track and began buying land along the lines. Soon he was among the region’s wealthiest men. The city now put his construction and engineering skills to use building its defenses. The fortifications would be massive, encircling the entire town over a mile from its center, perhaps the largest continuous defensive perimeter to that point in the history of the modern Western world. He planned a series of seventeen redoubts, Forts A to Q , forming a ten- to twelve-mile circle. In addition, a line of battlements would need to be constructed along the Chattahoochee River, which formed a natural northeast-southwest-running moat a few miles outside the city.

  Digging out the miles of serpentine trenches and communications; building up the walls, redoubts, and palisades through the suburban fields, pastures, and woods, roads and rail cuts; chopping the trees and shaving the limbs; leveling the fields; bundling the branches into facines to reinforce the earthworks, then facing and flooring them with timber would amount to one of the largest public works projects in the history of the South—equal to, and perhaps exceeding, the building of the Western & Atlantic Railroad line itself. But who could build such an enormous great wall?

  There were few strong white hands left to lift an axe or tote a bucket of heavy clay. With the shortage of civilian and military labor, Grant and Wright turned to slave owners for their bondsmen’s muscle. Even then, there was not enough slave manpower to be had in Atlanta. Wright and Grant requisitioned a mandatory quota of slaves from the surrounding counties. Eventually, they sent an order through southern Georgia giving planters two days in which to fill the local quota and threatening that, if the call for slave labor fell short, “then . . . every male negro that can possibly be impressed will be sent to the front, regardless of past exemption.” Atlanta would defend, and be defended by, slavery to the last.

  Soon, thousands of slaves arrived in Atlanta. The laborers dug and sang while they worked, building up a ten-mile ring of fortifications, to form a nearly closed, shakily incised C with several points jutting out like small diamonds in the yawning ring around the city. The men moved millions of pounds of red clay, chopped down thousands of trees, and shaved and bound them into bristling, sharpened spike barriers before the fortifications. High earthworks linked the chain of redoubts, each holding five artillery pieces. The initial phase of the lines was completed by December 1863, but work resumed in the spring to clear the hills in front of the fortifications of trees. Up to half a mile of killing fields pocked with thousands of skirmish holes lay open to the artillery and troops within the earthworks should the enemy dare to approach them. A second line of defense behind this primary line was begun at the Confederate War Department’s suggestion. When and if a federal force came to storm the city, it would encounter a man-made wall as impregnable as any titanic storm-tossed ocean waves ever broke upon.

  AS THEY LABORED UNDER the broiling Georgia sun, hauling thousands of tons of earth and cutting and shaving foot after foot of lumber by hand, those slaves rarely ate more than a survival ration: half a pound of bacon or a full pound of beef and two pounds of cornmeal, substituted at times by rice or potatoes, on a good day. When supplies of food were exhausted and even the white soldiers were starving, the commissaries stopped issuing rations to the thousands of slaves at all, leaving Grant and Wright to figure out how to feed them. Even Confederate officials acknowledged that the little food the slaves shoring up Atlanta’s fortifications lived on was “of the most inferior character.”

  To keep from starving, work teams very likely turned to the local slave families living in and around the fortifications. Among them were the scores of slaves on the Ponder place. The fortifications’ northwest salient, known as Fort Hood, was probably the most formidable of all. Its trenches ran like a deep and rolling red cut and its palisades like a raised scar directly through the once handsomely maintained grounds. The elegantly colorful and copious gardens of flowers and vegetables had been trampled down, its fruit trees and boxwood hedges chopped out, and the facing of its many outbuildings stripped away to provide lumber for the palisades. Eventually, even the great stone, brick, and plaster house was converted into a home for convalescent soldiers. From its high vantage point, which first attracted Ephraim and Ellen Ponder, to buy the land, their briefly happy home’s observatory and upper-floor windows overlooked the lines and provided a perfect sharpshooter’s nest—or target for enemy artillery. The Ponders’ most trusted bondsman and woman, Festus and Isabella Flipper, were doting parents who probably kept a close eye on their bright young son, Henry, when he ran through the freshly dug trenches and leaped down from the earthworks to the scraped-over field below. It was a child’s red-clay playground while the soldiers remained distant. Standing atop the redoubts, he could watch the long lines of Confederates marching by on the Marietta road or standing in freight cars rolling up to Dalton. He probably took food and water to the black hands working under the hot sun in red clay.

  A few of the impressed slaves would not build the defenses for the city against the army of their freedom. Cyrena Stone took in four escaped men she hid in her cotton house. Perhaps they had been sent to her by her neighbor Bob Yancey. They showed up and told her, “We don’t want to make no fortifications to keep away the Yankees ourselves. Let our folks build their own fortifications. The black’uns they have got, are dying up like any thing, for they works ’em so hard, and half starves ’em besides.”

  WITH THE INCREASING IMPRESSMENTS of slaves and more and more runaways in the face of an advancing Union army, many slave owners’ confidence in the institution of slavery wavered. Two of Cyrena’s slaves, knowing where her sympathies lay, while Union forces were gathering in Chattanooga, were busy turfing her yard near the northeastern fortifications. “Maybe we’re fixing all this for nothing, for perhaps they’ll fight right here,�
� one said to her. The other piped up, “Oh hush such talk! I spect to wake up any of these mornins, and see this yer town just filled with Yankees.” Another slave had overheard two white men talking about the need to flee the town before the Union army arrived. The slave recounted listening in when one of the men said, “The whole country round Chattanooga was just blue—and it was no use in trying to keep ’em back—for they’d got started, and would go whar they was a moun’ to.” Bleak tidings made some whites determine to sell out. Dextor Niles, who traded slaves wholesale on Marietta Street near the Ponder place, liquidated his large holdings of slaves “all at once,” recalled Sarah Huff, who lived in the neighborhood. She went by one day, and “all the cabins were bare.” She learned that they had been “rushed to a slave market beyond the shores to the south of us and sold before Confederate money entirely lost its value.”

  Other Confederate business investments also began to appear shaky. For Samuel Richards, it was “a time of perplexity” regarding Confederate paper. From one day to the next, it depreciated a third in value. In August 1863, the Southern Confederacy’s owner George W. Adair sold out his share in the fire-eater’s favorite newspaper for $200,000 in Confederate currency. Rather than demonstrate his continued confidence in a Confederate future, he converted all his earnings from the sale to gold and had it sewn into the hems of his wife’s skirts. Many feared their life savings would soon be worthless and went quietly to see Bob Yancey, Prince Ponder, and other slaves acting as moneychangers to convert whatever they could into gold and greenbacks. These men handled illegal transactions worth thousands of Confederate dollars daily, eventually taking three hundred Confederate dollars in exchange for a single Yankee dollar and then buying hard goods like tobacco, cotton, and whisky to have for when the Union army arrived. The grateful recipients of gold and U.S. dollars buried their treasure to keep it away from the bands of robbers moving through town.