The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Among those who had not lost confidence in his nation’s future was Colonel Lee, who took up partial ownership in the Southern Confederacy after Adair sold out.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1863, the federal Army of the Cumberland’s Maj. Gen. William Rosencrans had driven Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee out of western and much of central Tennessee, forcing the Southerners back to their main southeastern base at the railroad-crossing town of Chattanooga, just a few miles from Georgia’s northwestern corner. The land around them was stripped to the point where even the horses could find nothing to graze on. The rebels were reduced to foraging for green corn and roasting rats. On September 9, Rosencrans’s forces circled to the south of the town and severed the rebel supply lines from Atlanta into Chattanooga altogether. Without firing a shot, the Confederate army fell back to high ground and entrenched positions in the dark woods and tangles of vines covering the rolling landscape around Chickamauga Creek.

  Perhaps encouraged by his easy triumphs, Rosencrans determined to drive the apparently badly weakened rebels out of Tennessee altogether and deep into Georgia. On September 19, he attacked them amid the virtually impenetrable woods and tall stands of corn, where each man could see only a few paces around him. Lines quickly became entangled and separated and entire regiments lost. The battle raged without a clear victor until the afternoon of the second day, when Rosencrans, believing he was filling a gap in his line, actually opened a mortal hole in it. The Confederates saw their chance.

  A. J. Neal, the Floridian attorney and battalion officer whose parents now lived in Atlanta, commanded a battery that was part of a concentrated artillery fire on a portion of the Yankee line. Neal wrote his father in his mansion opposite City Hall Square that the half hour of continuous and deadly fire was “the most terrible bombardment I ever witnessed.” The shattered enemy army broke and ran in panic, dropping guns, knapsacks, even boots and jackets, in its terror. Thousands of dead and wounded comrades remained behind. With terrified men sweeping past his headquarters, a distraught Rosencrans soon joined the rushing retreat. The Confederate infantry rushed into the field after them, capturing thousands more men and driving the remaining Northerners “back steadily several miles over breast works through field and wood,” a proud Neal reported. The entire Yankee army would have fallen without the heroic stand made by the men who gathered around Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas. The phlegmatic Thomas, known as “Slow Trot Thomas” for his slow gait and methodical manner, steadied enough panicking men and broken units to organize a rearguard to hold off the furiously charging Confederates at Horseshoe Ridge. He earned a new nickname, “the Rock of Chickamauga,” as he held on long enough to allow the army’s survivors to crawl to shelter in Chattanooga. The slaughter at Antietam is known as America’s bloodiest single day, but the bloodiest two days of the entire Civil War were those contesting Chickamauga. The Yankees left behind 16,179 killed, wounded, and captured men. However, the hooting rebel army, much less able to withstand heavy losses, sustained 18,454 of its own in victory.

  The scene left behind on the field was terrible. Stunned by the hurricane of violence in which he had participated, A. J. Neal wrote his parents, “The dead and wounded [are] lying thick around me. . . . Their groans and suffering is [sic] awful.” A rebel infantry private, Sam Watkins from Tennessee, surveyed the same gruesome field. “Men,” he wrote, “were lying where they fell, shot in every conceivable part of the body. Some with their entrails torn out and still hanging to them and piled up on the ground beside them, and they still alive.”

  Ten days later, the Yankee dead still lay thick. Nobody was in any rush to bury them. An Intelligencer correspondent recounted his walk throughout the devastated Chickamauga area where the entire countryside “for miles” remained deserted, the corn fields flattened, and most trees shot to splinters—“no beasts, no birds, not even a buzzard, can be seen anywhere.” At one Union artillery emplacement stormed by the rebels, he saw, “a hundred dead horses, broken caissons, dismounted cannon, broken ammunition, torn clothes, broken knapsacks, empty haversacks, bullet-torn canteens, broken gunstocks, hundreds of torn shoes and hats, bloody bayonets, broken sabre scabbards, broken cartridge boxes, dead Yankees in piles of four, five and a dozen; a cord of cannon rammers, ropes, torn harness [sic], numerous graves.” He came upon what had been a corn field occupied by the Yankees until a Confederate corps had stormed from the neighboring woods, their rifle fire scything through man and cornstalk with equal effect. He surveyed the remains splayed out now on the red earth of “a large number of dead Yankees, whose black and swollen bodies glistening in the sunlight, are not either pleasant to the eyes, nor is the odor they omit a delightful perfume, except as an incense to our gratified soul that they are destroyed.” He reminded his readers, who might take pity on the dead, “They are our mortal enemies. . . . They are all glossy and black as their own hearts or the gloomiest of ebony Ethiopian whom in life they pretended to love so well. It may be some consolation to know they turn to that color for which they are fighting, the blacks on earth, black in death, black in hell.”

  THE APPALLING BATTLE SENT a “River of Death,” translation of the Indian name for Chickamauga Creek, on the rails back to Atlanta’s hospitals. In September 1863 alone, 10,000 wounded men were admitted to the army hospitals in Atlanta, but there were only beds for 1,800. Thousands of horrifically wounded men arrived by freight car and were off-loaded in the depot to be triaged when beds became available in city hospitals. Many families opened their doors to the wounded. While out walking on a peaceful, late-September Sunday morning in 1863, Sallie Clayton, the teenage belle who lived across the street from the Neals’ house, ran into two men carrying a wounded man in a litter on their shoulders. The man’s arm hung down limp from the bouncing stretcher. She called the other men’s attention to it. They lowered the litter. She recognized the wounded man. It was Daniel Pittman, her neighbors’—the Neals—son-in-law. He was too weak even to lift his own dangling arm.

  “We have only to press them to reap the fruits of victory,” wrote Pittman’s brother-in-law A. J. Neal, hoping for a decisive endgame to the clash of the western armies. “The army is confident . . . we will be in Kentucky soon.” Victorious on the field, but like a boxer who leaves the ring as bloody, bruised, and woozy as his defeated opponent, General Bragg instead chose to lay siege to the demoralized 50,000-man Union army isolated in Chattanooga. The Confederate Army of Tennessee established new positions three miles outside town.

  From the valley in front and on top of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, highpoints above the town, the rebels partially encircled the Union forces. They lobbed shells and sent off raiding parties but never launched a full-scale assault on the federal troops. Bragg hoped to starve out the Yankees. The rebels, though, suffered just as badly—with poorer shelter and little food. The weather was constantly cold and rainy, and the valley full of standing water. The men in their butternut flannels, little better than wet matting on their bare skin, stood picket duty in ankle-deep mud and, without tents, slept partially submerged on the open ground. Rations fell short, and when the roads became impassable, as happened often, they got nothing to eat at all. Neal’s men’s mess was five miles away on the other side of Missionary Ridge. Deliveries of their small portions of cornbread and beef became sporadic. Neal conceded, “This service is rougher than any I have seen.” Neal’s men at least were sheltered behind rocks. Infantry private Watkins in the valley’s cold swamp knew far worse. He recalled, “Never in all my whole life do I remember of ever experiencing so much oppression and humiliation. The soldiers were starved and almost naked, and covered all over with lice and camp itch and filth and dirt. The men looked sick, hollow-eyed, and heart-broken.” They lived on parched corn, “which had been picked out of the mud and dirt under the feet of officers’ horses. We thought of nothing but starvation.”

  Much of the time soldiers marched, and they marched barefoot by the thousands. In October 1863, General Bragg had se
ized all shoes and horses he could find in Atlanta, where shoes now cost as much as $500 a pair, but that still left many in his army with rags or nothing on their feet when they and slave teamsters pulled caissons and limbers over the rocky ridges.

  IN ATLANTA, residents were disconcerted by the seizures but, like A. J. Neal, remained confident that the Army of Tennessee would keep the Union forces at bay. The Intelligencer called on all citizens to take heart at Chickamauga’s stunning and sudden reversal of the summer’s defeats:Viewed in any light, it must be apparent to all parties, both at home and abroad, that never has the South shown so much her ability to maintain her independence than the present time. Never has the fire of patriotism shone with a brighter light than since the first wearing off of the gloom that overcast our community after the disasters of June and July. . . . While our cause is brightening in its aspect, that of our enemy is becoming daily more desperate.

  In Atlanta, as throughout the South, people fed on hope. The significance of the victory at Chickamauga, wildly inflated in newspaper reports, renewed optimism that European nations would shortly recognize the Confederate government and that Lincoln would either be forced to negotiate peace or, in the next election, driven from office.

  The same Atlanta newspaper, though, reprinted a New York Herald story for its readers to consider: “Atlanta is the last link which binds together the southwestern and northeastern sections of the rebel Confederacy. Break it and those sections fall asunder. . . . The present campaign . . . aims at nothing less than the military isolation of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, from the remaining States of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.” Any Gate City resident reading those words in his office or home had to swallow hard and wonder. Atlanta was the inevitable strategic target for the Union campaigns to come. If it fell, the South would be splintered. Who knew what a Union army, presently licking its wounds and still standing up to siege on the battlements of Chattanooga, was capable of accomplishing after weathering such a hellacious storm of exploding gunpowder, fragmenting iron, flashing bayonets, and whistling sheets of lead?

  CHAPTER 15

  A DAY’S OUTING

  IN MID-OCTOBER 1863 Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Military Division of Mississippi and fired Gen. William Rosencrans. He personally came to Chattanooga to assume overall command of the besieged Union army there. His arrival sent a shudder all the way down to Atlanta. The master of mass warfare surveyed the Confederate foe. The rebels were dug so deeply into the natural and man-made rises in the earth overlooking Chattanooga that anything short of a volcanic eruption would not shake them from their position. Grant was not a particularly imaginative strategist. He believed in increasing the weight of the army he brought to bear upon the enemy’s defenses until they snapped like an overburdened shelf. He plotted the eruption of men he would need to overflow the landscape. He promoted his friend and protégé Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to command of the Army of the Tennessee and brought his new force up to help the Army of the Cumberland’s new commander, Gen. George Thomas, in breaking out of Chattanooga. While Grant amassed the armed weight he needed for almost two months, the warring sides engaged in artillery shooting matches, lines of men shifted, and sharpshooters took out any poor skirmisher who dared show his head. The picket lines were close enough for soldiers to converse about their shared misery as Confederate and Union soldiers mostly left off shooting and kept one another company.

  A month later, at the front on November 20, A. J. Neal reassured his parents, “Prospects continue dull.” With the armies likely to camp in position for the winter, he told his mother he hoped soon to receive a ten-day furlough and eagerly looked forward to a Christmastime reunion with his family in their big brick mansion on Washington Street. Delighted, the Neals shared their son’s encouraging letters with their neighbors. That undoubtedly sparked an idea that quickly took root in the Clayton household. War still held a fascination for citizens; they recalled the glory and pageantry attending Atlanta companies each time they departed from the car shed. Their much-missed sons and brothers wrote of victories or, if pushed back, stable fronts and readiness for tomorrow’s battles. The upbeat reporting in the newspapers and encouraging rumors in some circles heartened diehard Confederate supporters.

  The Clayton family wanted to see for themselves what they imagined to be the romance of the battlefield. The impregnable Confederate heights outside Chattanooga seemed a perfect grandstand. In the crisp fall days of November, Missionary Ridge on the far side of Chickamauga offered “a beautiful view” of Chattanooga and the surrounding countryside. Sallie Clayton’s mother’s cousin, Anne Semmes, too, was visiting the Clayton family in Atlanta for a family wedding. She was the beautiful wife of Adm. Raphael Semmes, already legendary for the scores of Union vessels his CSS Alabama had captured and burned. Their son Spencer Semmes, a captain in the Confederate navy, was also on hand. Demonstrating an appalling naivety or a cat’s ignorance of curiosity’s dangers, Anne Semmes suggested they take a family outing. With Spencer and some other officers on leave on hand to serve as guides, they should know how to stay clear of any danger. Soon, a twenty-member party was made up, among them several children, including Sallie, now a young woman, and three of her little sisters and two brothers. They boarded a Western & Atlantic Railroad train at the car shed on the evening of November 21, 1863, and traveled overnight through the old Cherokee country.

  ARRIVING ON A CLEAR, bright morning, they alighted at a stop four miles from Gen. Braxton Bragg’s headquarters on Missionary Ridge. The festive party boarded ambulance wagons that carried them the length of the ridge. On this perfectly clear fall morning, they feasted on an autumn view of the entire seven-mile front, the Union camps and entrenchments across the valley, and the invested Chattanooga three miles distant. Reaching Bragg’s headquarters in a small plank house on the crown of the ridge, they walked about and enjoyed a pleasant afternoon dinner. They could see the distant spark of the skirmish rifles and watch cannons flash along the ridge flanks. Smoke drifted up like quick cigar puffs.

  The group planned to return home that evening, but the solicitous General Bragg convinced them to stay in the headquarters compound overnight with the promise of a musical serenade and a visit to Lookout Mountain, which stood directly opposite the town, the next day. There they would have the chance, for “those who wished to do so, [to] fire cannon.” It would all be very entertaining.

  The following morning, the group started out for Lookout Mountain in the ambulance wagons fitted out for a picnic. The artillery exchanges, though, seemed to be heating up. They watched as shells began falling and bursting about a wagon train heading up the road in front of them. When a shell landed near them, an officer accompanying them decided to turn back, which Sallie Clayton thought sensible. “I did not want to be one of the dead women to roll out of one of the ambulances when it was struck by a Yankee shell,” she recalled. They traveled back along Missionary Ridge and, nearing Bragg’s headquarters, saw him and several others looking anxiously through field glasses towards Chattanooga. They joined him to watch the “long rows of soldiers” marching outside the town. The general enjoyed parade reviews. Here, he thought the advancing blue masses, regimental banners flapping and bands playing, were marching in a display intended for Grant. The rebel lines had not been reinforced when the parade began to move forward en masse. A staff member near Bragg soon noticed a litter corps following behind. “That,” he said, “is not done for dress parade.” The soldiers were intending to fight. Grant’s parade was camouflage for an attack.

  Sallie’s mother called for the visiting party to be on its way, but General Bragg still urged his guests to stay. There was time for dinner, he assured them, and asked the group to join him in his quarters. At the same moment they took their seats at the table under a big tent, Sallie heard “the sound of a volley of musketry from the valley below.” Feeling like so many Cinderellas who “had overstayed [their] time at the ball,” the visitors leaped up and h
urried to their waiting wagons. As they took their seats, word came that the picket line had already been pushed in, and the hungry and weary men, with little confidence in their commander, were scrambling up the ridge for safety among the rocks. The Atlanta party raced down the rough and steep road toward the railroad station. They went without an escort. On the way, they passed through the main camp, where “wild confusion” had broken out. “The men,” recalled Clayton, “were seizing their arms, and were almost running over one another, in their hurry to reach the front.”

  As the Atlanta party neared the station behind the ridge and out of artillery range, the sun was setting. They waited for their train back to Atlanta and “had a splendid view of the beautiful light above the trees caused by the cannonading which we employed ourselves by watching.”

  THE “BEAUTIFUL LIGHT” BROUGHT death to thousands. A. J. Neal was “amazed to see our troops steadily driven up the mountainside.” His rapidly firing cannons were giving the advancing Yankees “fits,” but the weight of the Union army’s eruption out of Chattanooga and elsewhere across the Tennessee River drove in the Confederate front lines. Neal watched the panicking infantry retreat until they “rushed over us pell-mell & we could do nothing” to halt the enemy charge. “My men . . . would have stood with me to the guns until we were bayoneted,” he insisted, but “valor was vain.” His battery brought up the rear of the retreat. As he helped drag a munitions limber back, he grabbed at a sickening hot flash of pain in his shoulder. He was now doubly grateful for the heavy overcoat his parents had recently sent him. A minié ball had blown a “huge hole” through it, but the thick wool had muffled the bullet’s impact enough that it only stung and bruised his flesh. Still, he could barely lift his arm enough even to write about its miraculous salvation.