The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Thieves spirited away nearly every single hen, turkey, and duck in the coops in the City Hall neighborhood where Mary Mallard lived with her children while her husband, a preacher, ministered to the Army of Tennessee near the front. Feeling “besieged by robbers,” a growing fear consumed her. “Things are coming to a fearful pass in this city,” she worried to her mother in a letter. “The exceptions are those who have not been robbed.” Nothing was safe, not even a man’s shoes. The nervous young mother stayed inside at night after she learned a man walking nearby on a previous evening had been knocked unconscious. “When he came to himself he was in his stocking feet.” With shoes selling for a year’s salary and many of the soldiers barefoot and in rags, even “gentlemen,” she shuddered, “consider it unsafe to be much out at night.”

  On June 10, a city councilman put up a toothless resolution “in disapprobation of outrages on citizens by stragglers not worthy the protection of such a noble army.” His motion was defeated.

  THE CONFEDERATE ARMY EMPTIED its depots and hospitals nearest the lines. Long wagon trains of munitions and supplies lined the Marietta road and jammed into the center of Atlanta. Many Atlanta residents—mostly women, children, and old men—gathered their belongings while refugees took to the road once again. The Intelligencer practically begged the women in particular not to leave. “Lay aside your fears,” editor John Steele wrote, “forget your panic, dismiss all thoughts of running.” Instead of departing town in fear, consider the needs of the fighting men, he urged, and the shortage of people willing to help. “Can you, in this hour of peril, hesitate to come forward and render what assistance you can to your brave defenders?” However, his appeal also pointed to what might befall those who remained behind: “Look at the desolated fields, ruined homes and insulted women of those sections where the enemy has passed, and learn what your fate will be if we are defeated.”

  The refugee daily the Appeal painted a far more sinister picture of what awaited. Although there was almost no evidence of rape or civilian murders committed by Union army soldiers, the newspaper conjured up horrifying images of berserkers attacking local women. The writer claimed that women, young and old, were “subjected to outrages, by the bare recital of which humanity is appalled.” Everywhere the Union army overran, local woman were “made to minister to the hell-born passions of . . . fiends.” After such violations, by blacks and their fellow “madmen” out of the battlefield, “insanity, in some instances, came to the relief of sufferings such as never before were inflicted upon human creatures by remorseless fiends in human shape.” Rather than stay to make a stand against such a hideous foe, most ran.

  Many people claimed that they intended to remain in town to help but packed in secret and snuck away. Others, particularly Union loyalists, determined to remain. Neighbors asked Cyrena Stone what she planned to do when the Yankees came. She wanted to greet her liberators. “My answer is invariably,” she penned, “I have no other home to go to & shall stay in this one—if permitted to do so.”

  Mary Mallard knew of the “very great” panic going on in Marietta near the front, where the crowds in the smaller town were so large that families waited days on end at the depot to get a seat on a train to carry them away. A number of her acquaintances had already left Atlanta, but she did “not think there has been anything like a panic” here. She remained convinced “that General Johnston will be successful in driving them away from the city” but, just in case, set out things for a quick departure.

  THE BRIEFLY GRACIOUS PONDER house on its once beautifully manicured hilltop now served as a convalescent center for the wounded. Construction of the fortifications around it, particularly the salient artillery emplacement known as Fort Hood, had torn the landscape apart and finally driven the residents away. Militiamen now manned the ramparts. The Marietta road running through the property served as the major highway to and from the front. The trains on the Western & Atlantic Railroad line ran past so continuously that they seemed to form one long line of cars stretching all the way to Marietta. Ellen Ponder, the dissolute mistress of the estate, left for Macon. Festus and Isabel Flipper, her most trusted slaves, went with her, along with their sons. Twice the Confederate authorities had tried to impress Festus Flipper into the fortifications, but his owners had succeeded in keeping him at home. They were desperate to have a trustworthy and capable man on hand. As with much else in the war, the refugee experience broke down the divisions between master and slave and especially, with most men at the front, between mistress and slave. In Macon, the Flippers moved into a spacious house where they stored away Mrs. Ponder’s valuable dishes and furniture, which she left under their care while she fled further south. “Here,” Flipper’s young son Henry recalled of his family’s new home, “all was safe.”

  When still living in Atlanta, their mistress had threatened to sell into worse servitude her costly bondsmen, which she otherwise left free to hire their time, menacing them frequently with her intention to “send you to Red River” or some other far-distant countryside hamlet. Henry’s parents and the others could now laugh off her toothless threat. Her many slaves regarded her as “perfectly harmless, for all knew, as well as she did, that it was impossible to carry it into execution.” A substantial portion of the Ponder slaves ignored the household’s departure, choosing to see what the Yankees brought. Her wealthy slave Prince Ponder stayed at his profitable store and sent his wife and valuable goods acquired as a trader during the war to the farm of his friend, Unionist Julius Hayden.

  Bob Yancey, the barber and trader grown rich during the war, was the slave of a man fighting for slavery’s permanence, a man whose brother had laid the foundations for secession. In his forty-four years, he had known five owners and never had a proper surname except that of the men who claimed him as human property. More and more often, he now insisted that he be called by his full name, Robert Webster, the name he proudly carried from the man he claimed as his father, Daniel Webster, the senator. Robert Webster kept two escaped Union soldiers hidden in his attic and moved about uneasily under the wary eye of the provost guards. The guards would have stopped him immediately had he attempted to leave town. He, too, had stored up so many valuables and other property in his house that leaving seemed impractical in any case. He took it upon himself to begin organizing blacks in town and some of the more daring Unionists to aid the Yankee wounded.

  Even with the fate of the Confederacy far from determined, emancipation had begun.

  DESERTION AGAIN PLAGUED THE Army of Tennessee, increasingly demoralized by fighting constantly on the defensive and, even after bleeding the enemy by the thousands, withdrawing deeper into home territory. Men threw their guns aside and hid themselves, waiting to fall into Yankee hands. “The men is all out of heart,” a Georgia soldier wrote home, “and say that Georgia will soon have to go under and they are going to the Yankees by the tens and twenties and hundreds a most [sic] every night. Johnson’s [sic] army is very much demoralized as much as a [sic] army ever gets to be.”

  If personally popular with his soldiers, who trusted that the general valued their lives, Johnston’s defensive strategy did little to encourage their faith in ultimate victory. Wary of his critics and mistrustful of his corps’ commanders, who continued to deal with Richmond behind his back, he shared little of his strategy with others, even President Jefferson Davis. Fear spread in Richmond that he would abandon Atlanta rather than risk his army. In the capital, criticism grew that his retreat from Dalton to the horizons of Atlanta put the Confederacy itself at risk. Many in the War Department clamored for Johnston to take the offensive, to move a force around Sherman’s flank to get upon his vital railroad artery. Sherman’s army in the field now totaled around 112,000 men. Nearly everyone believed that such a huge force could not survive long without freight cars running all day and night down from Chattanooga. Rations in the Union camp were now limited; Sherman ordered that ammunition be fired sparingly. The general termed the single track line “the delicate
part of my game” and kept guards posted along its hundred-mile length and at his depot in Dalton, but he could not spare enough men to protect it adequately against frequent small-scale guerilla raids. A full-scale attack tearing up track, blowing up bridges, or destroying the long, irreplaceable passage through Tunnel Hill would deliver a serious, if not fatal, blow to Sherman’s army swimming deep in a hostile Confederate sea.

  Richmond urged Johnston to do just that. The ever-conservative commanding general insisted that he needed additional cavalry reinforcements to undertake such a raid or risk his army’s being flanked to death. He pleaded with Richmond to send Nathan Bedford Forrest’s freebooting cavalry, now causing havoc in Tennessee and Mississippi, down on Sherman’s North Georgia lifeline. Davis, though, was unwilling to pull Forrest away from his brilliantly murderous work, which kept those states in play and drew federal troops away from other battlefields. Compared to the similarly beleaguered Confederate army in Virginia, he believed Johnston had sufficient force to turn to the offensive. Georgia senator Benjamin Hill, an emissary between the increasingly dyspeptic president and the equally dejected Johnston, telegraphed the general in desperation, “You must do the work with your present force. For God’s sake do it.”

  NOT TRUSTING ENTIRELY IN JOHNSTON, Atlanta now asked for divine intervention. On the same day the city council offered up its disapproval of the army’s stragglers, Mayor James Calhoun declared a citywide day of fasting and prayer, asking for God to spare them. “The voices of prayer are heard in every church in the city,” Cyrena Stone noted. Richards listened to a chaplain visiting from the Army of Northern Virginia who preached from a pulpit in uniform and with a “pistol in his belt.” The supplicant voices tried to rise above the distant metallic crash of the cannon. The following day Mary Mallard wrote, “I trust the prayers offered yesterday will be answered, and our city spared.”

  Rumors of victory and defeat swept back and forth through the town. It was said that “Johnston had turned upon the Yankees, and they were retreating as fast as they could.” Newspapers assured, “Atlanta will never be taken by our ruthless invaders.” In the absence of reliable information, prayers and such boasts raised the hopes of some among the thousands still in town that “all will yet be well.”

  Cyrena Stone was certain, though, that “the truth is kept from us.” Watching the troops rushing through town, the stragglers, deserters, wounded, and dead arriving, and the despondent militiamen “dressed to kill” in their starched shirts and bowlers, carrying umbrellas and walking sticks, literally cannon fodder marching in wavering lines to the front, Cyrena Stone did not know what to believe. Like all in the city, no matter what their allegiance, she was tossed about like a boat awash on a stormy sea, its sails long blown out. Her spirits rose steadily with the news of Sherman’s forward advance, but then “some terrible news will come to crush them.” She feared that “this suspense and anxiety [will] take away our reason.”

  MANY CIVILIANS, ASTOUNDINGLY, had yet to lose their naivety about the dangers of war. Northern soldiers looked on in amazement as parties of women stood together on the tops of the ridges above Marietta from where they showered down curses upon the “vile Yankees.” Sharpshooters would have no trouble dropping them, though one Union officer, feeling “a sort of admiration” for such brazen defiance, was sure nobody in his lines “would attempt deliberately to shoot” the women. Despite his faith in his men, battlefield tourists did die. Nonetheless, Sallie Clayton, who had breathed a sigh of relief when her viewing party had sped away from the Chattanooga battlefield, learned that from Kennesaw Mountain there was to be had “a finer view of [the armies] than at Missionary Ridge.” She regretted that after “a party of us began to make preparations to go on another viewing expedition,” orders went out banning civilian visits when “another civilian was added to the list of those who had been killed.”

  She was fortunate to have stayed away. On the morning of June 10, Sherman began his advance on the Kennesaw line. That day, the clouds again unleashed intense rain storms, which continued almost without let up through most of mid-June. Sherman sent his three armies “to develop the enemy’s position and strength, and so draw artillery fire from his entrenched works.” He expected it wouldn’t take long before the works were evacuated. The outmanned Johnston would, he trusted, back away again.

  Instead, in the rain, the Yankees managed a forward advance of only three miles over the next two weeks. Men who had during the previous month’s fighting covered ground on some days as quickly as a soldier could charge ahead while firing his rifle now had to grind out each foot in the mud. A war of attrition began.

  FOUR DAYS INTO THE drive on the Kennesaw Ridge line, the sun broke through the clouds. Sherman came out to make a personal reconnaissance of the field. In the late morning, he peered through his glass up at a group of Confederates standing indifferent to his artillery’s prowess in the open on the top of the Pine Mountain salient in their line. “How saucy they are!” he spat. He told an officer in the battery nearest him to make the Pine Mountain party jump. He didn’t know that gathering amounted to much of the Army of Tennessee’s top brass, including Generals Johnston, William Hardee, and Leonidas Polk, the “Fighting Bishop.” Polk had won many soldiers to his religious cause in the Army of Tennessee, even baptizing Generals Johnston and Hood in the field. Sherman closed his glass and turned away as the Union battery sent three successive, three-inch-solid shots screaming from a Parrott gun a third of a mile up toward the men on Pine Mountain. The first projectile scattered nearly all the men. General Polk, though, refused to take cover. Instead, he walked to the very edge of the hilltop and crossed his arms while gazing down on the valley below. A second shell flew up. Somebody shouted in horror, “General Polk is killed!” In Atlanta, the Appeal reported the following day that the direct hit had struck Polk’s “right arm and passed through his body, severing the spinal column and almost tearing off both arms. He fell backwards and expired immediately.”

  His mangled body was brought back to Atlanta, where his death turned into an event of religious and patriotic grieving on a citywide scale. For hours mourners filed passed his bloodless, flower-encased body lying in state in Saint Luke’s Church.

  JAMES CALHOUN AND HIS FAMILY attended Polk’s funeral and then returned home. He had seen enough. The mayor helped with the packing and then sent all of them, including his grievously wounded son Lowndes, to his wife’s family plantation sixty-five miles south in Thomaston, Georgia. He gave his slaves a choice about their own future. About thirty went north toward freedom or disappeared into the growing shantytown on Atlanta’s outskirts, while twenty traveled south with the family. Watching the cars depart from Atlanta with all those most dear to him, James Calhoun understood he was seeing the end of the world he had built up over the course of nearly forty years since riding out as a destitute teen from the Calhoun Settlement. He returned to City Hall to do what he could to save his dying city.

  THE RAIN RESUMED AS THE Union forces moved on three fronts toward Marietta. Sherman’s expectations for a quick sweep of the Confederates from the Kennesaw Ridge line proved wildly optimistic. The slog through the driving rain and mud went on for days and then weeks. During the fierce, close-in fighting at the southwestern end of the lines, A. J. Neal waged an intense artillery duel from behind his lines and then leveled his guns against a charging Yankee line. His cannon fire drove back the enemy, who came close enough to leave their bodies in stacks on the outer walls of the breastworks. Bullets had flown so thickly and accurately that after the battle he counted thirty-one holes through the regimental flag still flying over the parapet. The flagstaff, though “not much larger than my thumb,” was hit seven times. The horizontal storm of lead through the gun embrasures, as intense as the rain falling from above, riddled and splintered anything to the rear—wagons, canteens, tents. “To look one moment over the works,” he penned in astonishment afterwards, “was to draw one hundred bullets around your head.” Even his h
at was pierced. Large trees were shattered by balls. He couldn’t resist counting the lead in the remnants of one “little sapling.” He picked out around eighty bullets.

  Frustrated that retreats invariably followed “victories,” Neal regretted he was not battling Grant in Virginia. All hammer, Grant rammed his huge army against Confederate fortifications relentlessly and head-on, losing men by the thousands, day after day, with almost no gain to show for the casualties. The foxlike “Sherman,” Neal fumed, “will not give us a chance.” The Yankees were “outgeneraling” the Georgia defenders and taking ground “by mere weight of numbers.” The Confederates never broke, never gave up a line without determining of their own accord to retreat to a more defensible location. Neal hoped for a smash up collision between the two armies. “When [Sherman] marches his men up to the assault, God have mercy on the poor wretches.” Neal and his comrades, “never more sanguine and confident of success,” would show no such pity.

  AFTER A WEEK AND A half of steady fighting, Johnston drew back from both his eastern and western salients at Brush and Lost mountains. The Union forces gained the heights and began firing down on the Confederate lines, forcing them to pull back further still to the Kennesaw Mountain line. There, Johnston could concentrate his troops’ firepower within eight tight miles of heavily fortified trenches covering Kennesaw Mountain and extending to the south around Marietta and the Western & Atlantic tracks. As the first rays of the sun broke through the clouds on June 22, the men on both sides delighted in the return of sunshine that began drying out the mud they had lived in for nearly the entire month. The torrential rain and life lived continuously in muddy, blood-drenched trenches, where excrement fouled the water, had caused far more casualties from sickness than had flying lead and exploding shells. However, with the return of the sun, Sherman determined to challenge the heights of Johnston’s Kennesaw stronghold. Despite his vow not to run directly against the Southerners’ “immense line of works,” by June 26, he had grown impatient with the slow grind of a war of attrition. So Sherman changed his mind. “We must attack direct or turn the position,” he decided. The Union attack began at dawn the following day.