The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  The battle for Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain raged for two days until the routed Confederates finally fell back into Georgia. The federal forces tried to chase down the rebels, but they pulled back into the rugged ridgelines that sliced through the northwestern Georgia corner. The bluecoats were turned back at Ringgold Gap mountain pass, where under a withering fire from previously heavily fortified highpoints, the far-outnumbered Confederates mowed down Yankees charging up the slopes. After the battle, Pvt. Sam Watkins described ascene unlike any battlefield I ever saw. From the foot to the top of the hill was covered with their slain, all lying on their faces. It had the appearance of the roof of a house shingled with dead Yankees. They were flushed with victory and success, and had determined to push forward and capture the whole of the Rebel army, and set up their triumphant standard at Atlanta—then exit the Southern Confederacy. But their dead were so piled in their path at Ringgold Gap that they could not pass them.

  IN ATLANTA, the crushing implications of the defeat at Chattanooga and the retreat into Georgia by the Army of Tennessee were starting to sink in. The Army of Tennessee was now driven out of that state, and the Union pursuers had crossed Georgia’s borders. “I am less hopeful for a speedy end of the war than I was a year ago—much less,” Samuel Richards fretted. “The foe encroaches upon us so, holds on so constantly to whatever he does gain and seems so determined to subdue and exterminate us.” In the Intelligencer, even John Steele could not escape the changed nature of his city. He recalled previous Sabbath days marked by “peace, happiness, contentment and prosperity . . . a few years ago.” All had changed. “The Sabbath day comes enveloped in gloom and sadness. The Churches are filled with gentle women all clad in black.” Their husbands and sons were no longer there to lean on. From the hospitals and houses filled with the wounded, “the wail of the dying breaks the solemn stillness of the Sabbath day. . . . Poverty walks abroad in her worst forms and the Sabbath day is broken upon by the starving widow and her children in an appeal for charity. All, all is changed.”

  He urged his readers, though, to fight on, not to believe the rumors about the “partial defeat” at Chattanooga. He called the accounts of Confederate losses “exaggerated” and was dismayed that “our people who, credulous as they are, eagerly swallowed every word of it, and half believed that our army has suffered an overwhelming defeat.” He condemned those who now openly criticized General Bragg’s leadership. “We detest such creatures who go about criticizing the actions of Gen. Bragg and his army, when they have never done a soldier’s duty, for one day of their worthless lives.—Bragg wants more soldiers; which of those now censuring will go up to the front, and aid in keeping the enemy out of Georgia?” That very day, President Jefferson Davis accepted General Bragg’s resignation. Not long after, he appointed Gen. Joseph Johnston, an officer far more popular with the troops, to command the Army of Tennessee.

  Johnston worked swiftly to resurrect his broken command. He rid it of Bragg’s fatuously rigid roll call, drills, and incessantly harsh discipline. He granted furloughs and released food, clothing, shoes, and other supplies to the desperate men. Desertions, which had been taking place by the hundreds every night, slowed. Johnston was the “very picture of a general,” according to Sam Watkins, one who had driven back Union forces in Virginia and intended to do the same now. The men loved him. “The private soldier once more regarded himself a gentleman and a man of honor,” Watkins recalled. “We were willing to do and die and dare anything for our loved South, and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.”

  On Christmas morning, the Intelligencer reported on the great revival of the Army of Tennessee under its new commander. The renewed army was no longer hemorrhaging men but still needed fighters. “The people’s time has now come—every man is called upon to take up arms in his country’s defense, if he would win Liberty and Independence.” In the same issue, the paper published news that its demand for every man now to take up arms had become law. The state legislature’s new Militia Act now authorized the enrollment of all white males not otherwise exempt, ages sixteen to sixty, in the district’s militia. Anyone refusing enrollment would “be tried and punished as a deserter.” Col. George W. Lee’s Confederate Conscript Bureau army gathered young boys and old men alike. With Grant likely to move on Georgia sooner rather than later, Gov. Joseph Brown placed the colonel in command of a 6,550 state militia battalion Lee ordered into Atlanta to prepare for its defense.

  TWO BATTERED ARMIES HUNKERED down for the winter. The Confederate army kept pickets on their new lines through to Ringgold, while the main body, William Lowndes Calhoun’s Forty-second Regiment of the Georgia Guards among them, withdrew to its winter encampment at Dalton, Georgia. Grant pulled his army back to Chattanooga. Both sides knew what lay before them in the spring. The whole of Tennessee was now in federal hands, and Yankee troops had tasted the promising sweetness, if briefly, of Georgia’s piney air. A few days after the Union army had pushed the Army of Tennessee down into Georgia, Col. Charles Fessenden Morse of the Second Massachusetts, now part of Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Corps in the Army of the Cumberland, looked toward Atlanta, within four days’ march. He had been fighting with the Union army since the early days of 1861 and knew victory and defeat with the Army of the Potomac at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Among the few north-easterners in the western Union army, the twenty-five-year-old Boston architect recognized what the entire nation had come to understand: “Atlanta is our important point now. Get that, and we have again cut the Confederacy in two, and in a vital place.”

  A short march away from Morse’s camp, the twenty-seven-year-old small-town Florida attorney turned artillery battery captain A. J. Neal sat down amid the lengthening shadows of early December. He dashed off a letter to his sister ninety miles south in Atlanta. The Yankees would not have an easy time of it, he wrote. When the fighting renewed in the spring, he was certain Confederate forces would redeem themselves. “This army will fight with all the desperation and valor displayed at Chickamauga for they are heartily ashamed of their conduct at Missionary Ridge. When we next meet the story of the conflict will be appalling.” He gave up on the idea of coming home for Christmas. “I never want to leave this army till we have punished the Yankees who drove us from Missionary Ridge.”

  IV

  THE HUNDRED DAYS’ BATTLE

  WILD AS A SWOLLEN RIVER hurling down on the flats,

  down from the hills in winter spate, bursting its banks

  with rain from storming Zeus, and stands of good dry oak,

  whole forests of pine it whorls into itself and sweeps along

  till it heaves a crashing mass of driftwood out to sea—

  so glorious Ajax swept the field, routing Trojans,

  shattering teams and spearmen in his onslaught.

  —HOMER, THE ILIAD, 11:580-86,

  TRANS. ROBERT FAGLES

  CHAPTER 16

  RAILROAD WAR

  THE DEPLETED AND OFT-DEFEATED Army of Tennessee could muster around 40,000 ragtag soldiers in tatters by the end of 1863. Before Gen. Johnston’s revitalization of the army, deserters slunk away from camp by the hundreds each day. Although the Confederates enjoyed the advantage of fighting for their home territory, the numerical odds looked so desperate that a once unthinkable idea was broached. In January 1864, Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne at Dalton sent off a proposal to enlist and train “a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves,” potentially a new 300,000-man army. Those who served would be guaranteed their freedom at war’s end—along with other slaves who remained loyal to the Confederacy. A war fought to preserve slavery would, if the Confederacy emerged victorious, serve as the vehicle of black freedom.

  Atlanta’s Southern Confederacy newspaper came out strongly against any move to arm slaves, which would inevitably lead to their emancipation and “sacrifice . . . the principle which is the basis of our social system.” The “cornerstone” was cracking under the weight of modern warfare. But
the South was not ready for such a radical notion. The idea soon died.

  MANY OF THE TROOPS who had deserted did so out of concern for the well-being of their wives and children. Letters from home told the men of their destitution. The heartsick soldiers felt powerless to help them. An Atlantan silenced the women in town. Their own pens, he told them, squeezed the firing squad triggers. “You had better let the last crumb of bread disappear from your table,” he advised, “and then pray to God and trust Him for more, than to write anything to your relatives in the army that will make their lot harder to bear, and by your continual complaints at last lead him in very desperation, to desert from the army and bring upon themselves dishonor and a disgraceful death.” He called upon the women to sacrifice their own lives before condemning their men to a worse fate. “If needs be, you had better die, even by starvation, than bring dishonor and an ignominious death upon those you love.”

  Such calls for silence were galling when the contrast was so great between the wealth of Atlanta’s merchant and industrial aristocracy and the grinding poverty of its vast pool of poor laboring women and children. The letters continued.

  Many of deserters from Dalton filtered down the Western & Atlantic line into Atlanta. Former U.S. secretary of the treasury and speaker of the U.S. House Howell Cobb now commanded the Georgia State troops from his headquarters on Whitehall Street. Walking out of his offices and traveling into the surrounding region, he could see “men enough at home able to be in the field to make another army.” Col. George Washington Lee’s men tried to round up as many deserters and shirkers as they could. Accusations that he and two other enrollment bureau chiefs were selling exemptions did little to encourage conscripts to report.

  Many men facing conscription chose instead to form up brand-new companies. General Joseph Johnston complained that he never saw the new regiments. Often they were shams gotten up, he said, “ostensibly under authority of the War Department,” but the apparently patriotic men “never complete their companies—having no other object than to keep themselves and a few friends out of service.”

  Samuel Richards mustered from time to time with his pressmen’s home guard company gotten up with just such a purpose in view. He knew, like all people in town, that “the avowed intention of the enemy is to march upon Atlanta this spring.” The paper goods merchant, though, did not want to be among those holding back that onslaught. “Somebody certainly must fight,” he recognized, “but I never was a fighting boy or man and never want to be.” In early January, however, it appeared he, too, would have to join the battle.

  President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress understood the terrible effect substitutes and other wealth-based exemptions produced on morale and reluctantly announced the end of the substitution policy. Not only was paying for a substitute no longer a permitted exemption, but a Conscription Bureau agent told Richards he was now under specific orders to “enroll all who had put in substitutes” as retribution for buying their way out of the war. Richards’s earlier decision to take out an insurance policy against military service now put him in greater jeopardy of conscription. A few days later, though, much to his relief, he learned that his printer’s exemption stood up. Money and connections continued to enable loyal Confederates to stay away from the army. The enrolling officers left him alone—for the moment.

  AT ALMOST THE SAME TIME Richards learned he could depend on his tenuous exemption, an old farmer rolled up in his wagon to Cyrena Stone’s house, where she greeted him from her porch. The gray-haired man stooped over as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. He offered to sell her his wagonload of fodder. This, he said, would be “the last fodder or anything else I shall ever bring you. . . . They’ve got me in this war at last.” No longer age exempt or permitted to continue raising desperately needed food crops on the farm, he sighed and said, “They’ve got me now, and I s’pose there’s no getting away from them.” He shared the view of many in the region: “I didn’t vote for Secession—but them are the ones who have to go & fight now—and those who were so fast for war, stay out.” The effectiveness of Lee’s men in bringing in resisters and the insurrectionists’ corpses hanging from trees made the futility of resistance clear. Although desertions plagued the army, it was increasingly a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

  Stone could do little more for the man than to buy his fodder. She had already bumped up against Colonel Lee and, like many Unionists, was kept under watch. So was her Houston Street neighbor, the slave barber and money trader Bob Yancey. Yancey, though, continued to employ the “invisibility” of his skin to move among the Union prisoners of war without suspicion. He often comforted the wounded men—and exchanged currency with them at rates very much in his favor. He must have told two Northern soldiers he met in the convalescent prison camp where to find his home. After the pair escaped, they worked their way through town and up the hill to his house on Houston Street. Despite risking a hangman’s rope around his neck—and, as a black man, likely worse torture—Yancey did not turn them away. He secreted them in his cramped attic. He brought them food and news about the war, waiting for the time when it would be safe for them to return to the Union army.

  Even some of Lee’s own men assisted Union prisoners. When Stone felt courageous enough “to challenge watching eyes and bitter threats,” she ventured into the prison barracks hospital to tend to wounded Union prisoners. During one of those visits, while another woman distracted the Confederate guard on duty, Cyrena whispered with a Union soldier working as a nurse in the prison. He told her that he and another nurse on duty there hoped soon to be exchanged and returned to their army. She was stunned when he told her that the night before, in anticipation of their return to Union lines, a Confederate guard had loaned a rebel uniform to the other nurse. Then, the real Confederate and the disguised Union prisoner had walked calmly out into the streets of Atlanta together. With the Confederate soldier as his guide, the Union spy spent the night exploring the city’s perimeter defenses until returning to the prison barracks before dawn. “[I] saw every ditch, every fortification and preparation which has been made to meet our army,” the prison nurse whispered to Stone. The soldier said if Grant and his army “had any idea how matters stand down here—I’m sure they wouldn’t stay around Dalton much longer.”

  ATLANTA CARRIED ON ITS own secret internal civil war while the two warring armies were making preparations for the coming campaign. Gen. Ulysses Grant, now in his divisional headquarters in Nashville, learned soon after the new year’s arrival that President Abraham Lincoln had decided to elevate him to overall command of the Union army. The forty-two-year-old Grant understood, as did few others, that he faced two great opposing armies and two prime targets for the spring: Virginia and the Army of Northern Virginia commanded by Robert E. Lee, and Georgia and the Army of Tennessee now under Joseph Johnston. To date, Northern military leaders had focused more on conquering and maintaining their hold on rebellious states than on crushing those two principle forces of resistance to federal authority. In doing so, they often ceded opportunities for aggressiveness to their foe and gave away their massive size and force advantages. The Confederates exploited the Yankees’ lack of coordinated strategy by shuttling corps between zones to reinforce points under attack. Railroad lines made whole armies mobile. For the first time in history, masses of men and munitions could transfer quickly from a quiet front to an active one, even hundreds of miles distant, within a matter of days or just hours. Union advances simply placed rebel armies closer together, enabling them to shift and concentrate men yet more rapidly.

  Confederate leaders exploited their troops’ mobility to launch bold, if largely nuisance, raids back behind Union army lines into conquered territories of Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and even Ohio. During the winter lull in fighting between the major armies, Southern forces had achieved several sensational, if strategically insignificant, battlefield victories. Those moves bolstered the South’s popul
ar hope that the Confederacy’s losses on its borders were merely temporary setbacks. The enemy was in control only where he stood. All around him was hostile ground. The need to control and guard conquered but hostile territory, where guerilla bands cut rail lines, fired from banks on gunboats, and attacked outposts, further negated the federal army’s overwhelming advantage in numbers and firepower.

  Grant ’s Army of the Tennessee commander William Tecumseh Sherman was so frustrated by the difficulty of operating in Tennessee that he advocated removing the entire rebellious Southern population—or killing them. “Don’t expect to overrun such a country or subdue such a people in our two or five years, it is the task of half a century,” he warned his brother John Sherman in the U.S. Senate. “To attempt to hold all the South would demand an army too large even to think of. We must colonize & settle as we go south.”

  SHORT OF KILLING OR removing the entire rebellious population, the North needed to overcome its inept leadership and put its tremendous advantages into the fight against the Confederate army. Only simultaneous defeat of the two main Confederate forces, perceived Grant, would win the war. Slight and stooped, lacking the spit, polish, and charisma of several of his failed predecessors, Grant did not exude the brashness or killer instinct of a field commander ready to destroy an enemy in the field. But he could boast of having done it several times now. Lincoln called him in from his Nashville headquarters to Washington. He slipped into town with little fanfare on March 8 and met Lincoln in the executive mansion. Grant presented him with a plan to attack the Confederate head in Virginia and its heart in Georgia simultaneously, or as he wrote the following month, “to work all parts of the army together.” This would turn the ponderous weight of the massive Union army to its greatest advantage. A war of attrition waged everywhere at once would descend upon the South like a rock-slide down a mountainside. Lincoln believed he had found the man he could trust to finish the task. He promoted Grant to lieutenant general—he was the first to hold the title since George Washington—and named him general in chief of the Union army. The president fulfilled his ebullient declaration of faith made the day after Vicksburg fell to his fighting general: “Grant is my man, and I am his the rest of the war.”