The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  IN A TEMPESTUOUS ATLANTA, “the busiest people in town were speculators and rumor mongers working almost every downtown street and shop,” observed a refugee daily newspaper, the former Memphis Appeal . The Intelligencer tried to keep spirits up and ridiculed the doubters. “On the street, every minute, the ravens are croaking. Do you hear them? There is a knot of them on the corner shaking their heads, with long faces and restless eyes. . . . But we have no fear of the results, for we keep it constantly and confidently before us that General Johnston and his great and invincible satellites are working out the problem of battle and victory at the great chess board at the front.” The Appeal noted Johnston’s assurances “that Atlanta will be defended to the last extremity.”

  Most people accepted Johnston’s word and trusted that he was falling back “in order to gain good fighting ground,” explained Mary Mallard, the coastal refugee living in Ezekiel Calhoun’s place while her preacher husband ministered to the troops. Even as Johnston retreated, the series of running battles repulsed Sherman’s men, Mallard crowed, “with great slaughter.” However, the retreating army’s casualties were all too apparent: Some 2,500 wounded had already reached the city even before the worst fighting of the last week of May. Mary Mallard worked with the relief women to comfort the wounded. The surgeons termed the wounds they were contending with “slight,” but to Mallard’s eyes, “they all seem terrible.” At the car shed, she saw rows of men on stretchers “wounded in all portions of their body.” One man who had lost a leg conversed with those around him “as cheerfully as though nothing had happened.” She reported calmly on her search for old sheets to spread over the groaning, filthy wounded now spilling out into the open, unpaved streets around the car shed. Blankets wouldn’t do, for “when limbs are amputated and the clothing cut off a foot or two above the place, something cooler and lighter” needed to be thrown over them.

  In passing through the depot, the passionate, secret Unionist Cyrena Stone had a different, if still ghoulish, impression of the scene. The floor of the station was crowded with the wounded, and “rough boxes with somebody’s loved [ones] in them—were scattered around.” A black man with a fiddle sat on top of one of the pine coffins and began to tune up. The “living” soldiers begged him play “a good lively chune.” They blithely shoved the heavy wooden boxes aside to make room for dancing. Stone watched as “‘the light fantastic toe’ was tipped, until the cars came along, which was to take them to the front—& death.”

  Stone read through the daily news reports from the front. She quoted one: “Johnston is only falling back to get a better position; and when he does make a stand—dead Yankees will be piled up higher than Stone Mountain.” She remarked on the style of the reporting. “The vandals,” she mocked, “were mowed down without number. No loss on our side. One man killed, and three slightly wounded. Retreats invariably—We fell back in good order. No straggling, and no loss of artillery.” The truth would eventually come out, she trusted. To keep up her faith in the face of what she believed—hoped—to be falsely optimistic reports, she visited a fellow Unionist. The two women shared a laugh. “Sherman is falling back,” the woman said to Cyrena, “but he is falling this way.” Even Cyrena’s driver, Dan, a slave, told her, “It stands to reason that our folks ain’t whipping as they say they be, when they’re coming this way all the time.”

  Something else also demonstrated to her that her prayers would soon be fulfilled. The news of federal advances, she noticed, went hand in hand with a seeming change of heart among those who formerly were among the most ardent Confederates. People who had snubbed her for so long now sought her out and welcomed her into their homes, where they had long rebuffed her. “I shall look to you for protection,” one woman beseeched her. “Others,” Cyrena observed, “have attempted to make friends with those they have abused & persecuted untiringly for being suspected of Union sentiments, & showing kindness to prisoners.” The Confederate grip on Atlanta, where loyalties were always suspect, began to slip.

  THE TUBERCULAR COL. GEORGE Washington Lee’s health forced him to resign his Confederate commission and disband his provost guard battalion. Secret Yankees like Stone could begin to breathe easier. Despite Lee’s ill health, he went to Macon as Georgia governor Joseph Brown’s aide-de-camp organizing his state militia hurriedly being assembled for Atlanta’s defense. Atlanta’s secret, inner Civil War was a more violent and complicated front in a long-running and more open dispute between Governor Brown and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Many among the state’s political elite disdained Brown as a “mountain boy,” a largely self-made lawyer from Cherokee Georgia who had leaped over the entrenched powers in Milledgeville to win and retain the governorship for the past seven years. Known to his admirers as “Young Hickory,” Brown resembled the Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson, only in his humble origins and populism. He despised federal power while in the Union and remained the most zealous states’ rights militant in any Confederate capital. When Richmond passed its first conscription act in April 1862 to bolster the flagging army, Governor Brown declared it an unconstitutional usurpation of state power. He similarly attacked the national government’s suspension of habeas corpus rights.

  Rumors flew that Georgia’s foremost political men, including Brown, Robert Toombs, and even the Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, were seeking a separately negotiated settlement with Washington. The arch-Confederate John Steele at the Intelligencer , declared, “We want no ‘peace parties’ or ‘State action’ in the South. All that we desire are men who have determined to achieve independence or perish in the attempt, while of those who hesitate or act the traitor in this hour of peril, we need only say, that the hour which sees their vile carcasses swinging from the branches of a tree, should be hailed by the South as a sign of approaching success and the herald of deliverance.” The governor might not swing from a tree, but any who failed to heed the call to step into the defense forces would.

  Brown urgently appealed to the president to devote more men to the city’s defense. “Atlanta is to the Confederacy almost as important as the heart is to the human body,” he wrote Richmond. But the dual Union army campaigns left Davis with few options or men to spare. Brown, for his part, had embraced the historic Georgia militia, the same citizen-soldier force that had mustered from across the state for each of the previous Indian wars. He created new regiments and placed all conscription-age men, aged sixteen to sixty, on their enrollment lists without exemption. Much to Davis’s chagrin, he shielded the militia’s officers from the army draft. The anti-Brown faction derisively called the Georgia militia “Joe Brown’s Pets.”

  In May Brown issued an urgent call-up for the entire militia and commanded all eligible men to report to Atlanta. Whether or not he was forced, as before, by order of Col. Marcus J. Wright, the arsenal head who also commanded the defense of the city, and Brig. Gen. Henry C. Wayne, Governor Brown’s inspector general, Mayor James Calhoun issued an urgent call of his own, requiring “all male citizens of Atlanta . . . without regard to occupation” to report for duty. Any “not willing to defend their homes and families” he requested to “leave the city.” Their continued presence “only embarrasses the authorities and tends to the demoralization of others.” Calhoun was at least polite toward those who refused; Governor Brown issued a broadside authorizing local marshals to “use all force necessary,” even “to take life . . . to overcome resistance” by “those who attempt to skulk . . . and to hide under exemptions, or details not known to the laws,” rather than report to Atlanta. Though still defending himself against charges of selling exemptions, Colonel Lee drew together a several-thousand-man militia force destined for his hometown.

  The Georgia militia remained a safer place than the Confederate front line, as Toombs, now a militia general, remarked, for “all the shirks and skulks in Georgia trying to get from under bullets.” As the militiamen came into town, a reporter joked about the “gray beards” arriving with bulging valises holding “c
lothes sufficient for two or three men . . . [toting] a gun in one hand and a walking stick in the other.” Many had no guns at all but drilled with ten-foot pikes. Having no gun suited Samuel Richards just fine. He and his brother Jabez were now officially members of the printer’s company enrolled in the militia for the city’s defense. “I trust,” prayed the pious and very unwarlike Samuel, “we may never be called into action. I hate the sight of a musket. May God deliver us from our blood-thirsty foe.” God had no such plans.

  CHAPTER 20

  PRAYERS

  WHILE SAMUEL RICHARDS “bunked” in his feather bed at home, the main body of Joe Brown’s 1,500-man militia that came into Atlanta from the rest of the state slept in tents and on the ground. They camped within sight of Cyrena Stone’s house. At night, from her porch, she watched the flickering light of the campfires play against the bushes and trees. By day, the men, mostly “past the conscript age,” drilled. Few carried more than a shotgun. Many came by regularly to drink from her well. “I see only sad & dejected faces,” she observed. One told her he wanted to cross the lines but feared state troops would hang his two sons and burn his house down. After a week she heard the cry go out: “To the front!” Joe Brown’s Pets, “many of them actually in tears,” broke camp to take up positions in the fall-back lines beyond the Chattahoochee River. A few came by to say goodbye. “I don’t want to go and fight the Yankees,” one told her. “I’d much rather fight the people who have brought this war upon our country, and forced us to leave our homes to murder & be murdered.” By May 26, Allen T. Holliday, a thirty-five-year-old militiaman who had camped under a bush near Stone’s house, lay in his tent near the Chattahoochee writing to his wife, Lizzie, at their plantation home in Wilkes County. “The roar of cannon is distinctly heard,” he penned anxiously. “We are here without a gun and a Yankee raid is at every moment expected.”

  The next morning, Cyrena, now thirty-four, stood on her porch in the quiet of the evening. With the flowers that survived the record cold winter blossoming by her house and the early vegetables and oats ready to harvest in the garden, she breathed in the springtime freshness. Her ears perked up to an unfamiliar sound. She heard low, deep hammering she could barely make out; then she was sure she heard the distant collisions, now relentlessly. “O that music!” Cyrena rejoiced. She was among the first in town to make out “distinctly” the echoing boom of the big guns firing twenty-five miles to the northwest. It was not long before most people in Atlanta heard the rolling cannon thunder and blanched with dread. For Stone, after three years, the cannons were, she secretly jotted, “the first notes of our redemption anthem. Never fell upon my ear any sound half so sweet—so grand; nor on earth, will any sound so thrill my soul again.”

  The next day, a friend, a fellow Yankee loyalist, came by to listen with her. “Come, boys!” the woman cried out, beckoning toward the unseen source of the booms. “Come on! We’re waiting for you!”

  IN HIS HEADQUARTERS AT ACWORTH, a rail-stop town about ten miles north of Marietta, in early June, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was infused with fierce optimism. He was as impatient to get to Atlanta as Cyrena’s friend was for him to arrive. Nonetheless, he gave his men a few days to recover from the constant fight while waiting for his engineers to rebuild the railroad bridge another ten miles to the north over the Etowah River, which the retreating Confederates had destroyed. He would soon be resupplied and expected the arrival of more reinforcements. He rode down to survey his next hurdle. Once again, his army faced an enemy embedded along a ridgeline rising as much as eight hundred feet above them in the plains. He looked up at the heights of Lost Mountain, a Confederate salient on his right, and, next to it, Pine Mountain, closer to Marietta. Gen. Joseph Johnston’s men on Brush Mountain at the eastern flank of his line overlooked the Western & Atlantic Railroad tracks before they swept in an s, first to Brush Mountain’s west and then back to the east around Kennesaw Mountain. The two-mile Kennesaw Mountain ridge loomed in the distant haze before Sherman now like a sleeping giant lying directly in front of Marietta. Deep in their fortified trenches, fewer than 65,000 rebel warriors, many of them now in the fight for the entire three years, ranged over those commanding heights and in the lines stretching down into the plains.

  Even as Sherman studied the enemy lines, they were being steadily strengthened. General Johnston had ordered “every able-bodied negro man that can be found” to work on both Atlanta’s outer defenses and the Kennesaw line. Union scouts could see gangs of black men digging and building up trenches and gun emplacements. They overheard engineers order the work crews, “This way with your axes. This way with your spades,” while the entrenching parties sang.

  Within the Confederate ramparts, artillery captain A. J. Neal mailed his letters home. Had the army been able to furlough him, he might have carried a letter to his family’s big house on Mitchell Street in a day’s march. His battery fired on federal emplacements from the western side of the line close to Lost Mountain. He wondered what Johnston planned to do. The enemy, he was sure, “cannot stay where he is long and to drive us from our entrenchments he is not able.” Sherman, though, did not think it would be necessary. “I will not run head on his fortifications . . . an immense line of works,” he informed Washington on June 6, though he also knew more hard fighting was in the offing. He felt certain that Johnston intended to pull back toward the wide Chattahoochee River, crossing where “T.” Holliday and his raw fellow militia recruits filled the lines. On June 9, Sherman assured his wife that he would “dislodge” Johnston from the hills and ridges within a day or two. He wanted to get into Marietta by the following day and then “feel down to the Chattahoochee.”

  The “great battle” he long anticipated with Johnston would take place soon after that on the Chattahoochee River, “the passage of which he must dispute.” He expected to destroy the Confederate army there. Some Union soldiers felt so confident of Uncle Billy’s strategic genius—and his ability to move forward without the massively cataclysmic battles which Civil War armies had grown used to—that they counted on drinking corn whisky on Peachtree Street by July 4. They were wrong on all counts.

  THE DAY BEFORE SHERMAN wrote Ellen so confidently, the Republican Party nominated President Abraham Lincoln for a second term at its convention in Baltimore. As the war entered its fourth year, the North remained badly split over Lincoln. The Democratic New York World called him an “ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyer” unequal to “a crisis of the most appalling magnitude.” His one-time chief supporter, Horace Greeley’s radical New York Tribune, “accepted” Lincoln’s nomination but made clear that other candidates would have been preferable for concluding the fight and imposing the Union’s authority on the former slave states. At home, the Intelligencer spared no venom for a man spawned “from foul and putrid stock . . . low, vulgar and unprincipled.”

  Atlantans shared the convictions of many in the South, a view even Lincoln in the executive mansion held, that what happened on the horizon to their north would determine the ultimate success or failure of their cause—in the court of Northern public opinion. The Appeal in Atlanta reported on the Democratic Party’s postponement of its nominating convention until the end of August, apparently awaiting the outcome of Sherman’s drive on Atlanta and Ulysses S. Grant’s presently stalled move to reach Richmond. If the present Union army campaign, it stated, “is not positively or apparently successful, they may adopt straight-out peace resolutions, and make the fight on a candidate who has consistently opposed the war.” That appeared likely to be Gen. George McClellan, Lincoln’s ousted former general in chief, who favored a truce and discussions with Richmond—almost certainly prelude to a negotiated breakup of the warring sections.

  Most Atlantans, hearing the cannon fire that now sounded above the street noise in the Five Points, expected that McClellan, if elected, would immediately propose “an armistice, with a view to final separation” of the South from the Union. The longer Yankee footsteps were kept
off Atlanta’s streets, the likelier the city’s survival grew—as did the Confederacy’s. Samuel Richards took heart in the common view that if Sherman’s efforts “prove[d] abortive,” “a peace candidate” was in the offing, and slave state independence would be won.

  IN THE FIRST DAYS OF JUNE, Richards and his fellow Atlantans strained their ears to hear the sharp, spiteful crackle of musket fire. The “tug of war” dragged them down, too. War, so long a source of prosperity, took over the life of Atlanta and began to sap it dry. Deserters and stragglers fleeing south overwhelmed the city. “They respected the property rights of no one,” recalled Sarah Huff, who as a young girl watched them raid farmyards around her family’s Marietta Street home. Households and stores, left unprotected by men now in the field, were “at the mercy of robbers who claimed to have a right to whatever would aid maintenance or supply individual craving.” Samuel Richards’s Decatur Street store windows were smashed. A cash box stuffed with $2,500 disappeared. Huff ’s mother tried to keep “army scalawags” and others “calling themselves soldiers” from making off with the family’s last two hogs. The men replied that if they “didn’t take them, the Yankees would.” They killed and skinned the pigs in front of her. To protect their honeybees from thieves, the family moved them into the attic. A wounded soldier convalescing in the home stole the honeycombs before he went off into the night.