The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  A man near the Tennessee private in Gen. George Maney’s brigade of Gen. Benjamin Franklin Cheatham’s division answered, “What do you want?”

  The Union soldier proceeded to tell him that their general, Joseph Johnston, “is relieved and Hood appointed in his place.” He taunted, “You are whipped, aren’t you?”

  The Southern soldier refused to believe him. “You are a liar,” he shouted and threatened to shoot the “lying Yankee galloot.”

  The affronted Northerner called back, “That ’s more than I will stand.” He challenged the Southerner, “if the others will hands off,” to fight a duel right there. The two men stepped out onto the banks across the river from each other. Watkins watched as each fired off seven rounds until the Confederate fell, “pierced through the heart.”

  THE YANK HAD NOT only shot straight; he spoke the truth. On the previous night, General Johnston had been in his new headquarters, a Marietta road house where the young girl Sarah Huff had watched a neighbor run a wholesale slave yard before he fled. A quarter mile back toward Atlanta, her mother sat out on her porch with some soldiers while others strolled in her gardens. The moon hung silver and near full in the hazy night sky, illuminating all around them in a magical, melancholy white light. A dance was on outside the headquarters house; the officers and their ladies had come out from the city to enjoy the evening. Sarah’s mother listened in the distance as a military band played “Dixie” and other tunes. She thought the music on that night “the sweetest she ever heard.” Sarah wondered why several soldiers at her house seemed to be crying.

  Those men, like many in the Army of Tennessee, loved their commanding officer. They knew that while outside headquarters up the road all was gaiety, inside Gen. Joe Johnston was being relieved of his command. He had received a telegraph from Confederate president Jefferson Davis condemning his failure “to arrest the advance of the enemy to the vicinity of Atlanta” and relaying his lack of “confidence that you can defeat or repel him.”

  The downcast Johnston was stunned by the transfer of command. He should not have been. A short while later, Gen. John Bell Hood, just thirty-three years old, a veteran field officer little experienced in handling a large army, got his wish: Davis had chosen him to replace Johnston as commander of the Army of Tennessee.

  FOUR DAYS EARLIER, Braxton Bragg had returned from Richmond to visit the army he had left in disgrace six months earlier. He came this time as Davis’s chief of staff. The president had dispatched him to confer with Johnston to see if he could be made to go on the offensive and save Atlanta—and with it the Confederacy. Bragg’s mission was largely predetermined. Johnston had telegraphed Davis on the evening of July 16 that as long as he was so vastly outnumbered, he was intent on continuing his strategy of waiting out the enemy, preserving his army while “watch[ing] for an opportunity to fight to advantage.” Bragg’s charge became helping select Johnston’s successor.

  General Hood met with Bragg shortly after he arrived and provided him with a memorandum for President Davis. The fighting West Pointer, his eyes ablaze for battle and perhaps with the searing pain of his amputation, declared that the only way to stop Sherman was to “attack him, even if we should have to recross the river to do so.” Hood told Bragg to tell the president that he had “so often urged that we should force the enemy to give us battle as to almost be regarded as reckless” by his fellow officers. He viewed the failure to fight it out “many miles north of our present position” as “a great misfortune to our country.” The crusader Hood might be reckless, but Davis concurred wholeheartedly with his assessment. In telegraphing word of his elevation on the night of July 17, the president urged the new leader of his army, which had been driven back deep into the heart of Dixie, “Be wary no less than bold,” but the time for caution had passed. He expected Hood to move promptly to the attack.

  A. J. Neal knew something was afoot with General Bragg’s visit, even before the “woefully outgeneraled” Johnston’s removal had been announced to the army. “I do pray,” Neal wrote that day while awaiting word, “we may never move with our faces turned southward again.”

  THAT VERY DAY, five hundred miles to the north, two peace advocates from the Union side passed through the battle lines between the armies of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in Virginia, traveling with President Abraham Lincoln’s permission though not his official support. They reached Richmond where, in the evening, they met an irascible Jefferson Davis and his secretary of state, Judah Benjamin, in Benjamin’s office. The pair of peace emissaries carried the same reconstruction terms Lincoln had offered the seceding states six months before. Except for the abolition of slavery, Lincoln’s terms would forgive and forget the previous years of secession and bloodshed, providing for reunification of the states in a renewed federal union, emancipation throughout the United States and its territories, and amnesty for the rebels.

  Davis’s anger boiled up as he listened. He finally exploded. They were not criminals, he informed the visitors, but patriots battling for their freedom. “We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE,” he declared, “and that, or extermination, we will have. . . . You may ‘emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free.” He must have been thinking about Johnston and Hood absorbing the news of the transfer of command on the very outskirts of Atlanta when he vowed, “We will govern ourselves . . . if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”

  WORD THAT JOHNSTON WAS GONE—he departed town with his wife by train soon after losing his command—and “Old Peg Leg,” as the soldiers styled Hood, had taken his place reached Atlanta immediately. The storekeeper Samuel Richards had managed to remain with his pressman’s home defense company and free of orders to report to the lines. With the ferocious former provost marshal Col. George Washington Lee now at Georgia state militia headquarters in Macon, in the present crisis few men in Atlanta not already in the service felt compelled to report for duty. Thousands of soldiers, militiamen, and stragglers moved about town, making it easy to get lost in the crowd. That seemed likely to change. Richards understood what lay ahead the night Johnston was relieved. He knew, he penned, there would be “a fight before Atlanta is given up, as Hood is said to be a fighting man, if he has only one leg.”

  The news ran like electricity through the remaining residents. The streets, reported a newspaper correspondent, were “crowded with wagons piled high with household effects, and every train of cars, freight or otherwise, was loaded to capacity with refugees struggling to leave the city.” The editor of the Southern Confederacy had already packed his bags but didn’t hesitate to urge readers to “exercise . . . a little philosophy and reason. . . . The chances are in many instances that removal may not be necessary at all.”

  The city council exercised itself a little as advised and quickly decided it was time to go. The members met for the last time the next day and asked Mayor James Calhoun to prepare to send city records, mules, and fire engines out of the city. The city police force, never able to bring order to the streets in any case, effectively ceased to exist. The courts halted all proceedings. Even churches, except Trinity Methodist, kept open by army chaplain Henry Lay, and the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception under Father Thomas O’Reilly, shuttered their doors. Mayor Calhoun still had men who remained in his fire departments, exempted by his orders from military service, and he organized any other home guards he could find to patrol the streets. He had little else at his command with which to manage a much diminished and nearly unrecognizable city of women, children, old men, bondsmen, and former slaves, as well as the wounded thousands, supply corps, sutlers, and increasing numbers of deserters and stragglers of a battered army on its outskirts.

  Calhoun visited neighboring families to offer them what assistance he could. His brother Ezekiel lay in bed at home, recovering from the army’s most common, debilitating, and sometimes deadly ailment, the bloody flux, or dysentery, a parasitic infection acquired du
ring his stint as a regimental surgeon with the Sixtieth Georgia outside Savannah. He was too weak to leave town even if he wanted to. In fact, he intended to remain with his brother.

  James Calhoun also looked in on the Claytons at their big house across from City Hall. The situation there was alarming. The first floor served as a hospital for four of the Clayton girls, Julia, Mary, Kate, and Gussie, gravely sick with typhoid fever. (Sallie and her sister Caro were now safely in the Alabama countryside.) They likely contracted the bacterial infection drinking the fouled Atlanta water. Their worried parents dosed the patients with quinine and pepper tea, hoping they’d sweat the infection out. Three of the girls, after several days and nights of tremors and delirium, were now well enough to sit up. Not fifteen-year-old Gussie. She may have contracted the disease during her frequent visits to bring food and drink to the army hospital sick wards. Severe fever and stomach cramps tortured the fifteen-year-old. A Confederate army surgeon broke away from his around-the-clock duties to the wounded being off-loaded at the car shed to check in on her. After his examination, he told her stricken parents that “all was being done that could be.”

  CALHOUN’S FEVERISH CITY HAD its own brand of infection. People rose before dawn after barely sleeping, eager for news from the previous night. They remained jumpy all day, easily startled by the roll of carriage wheels or the clatter of wagons over the stones of the street. The slap of a fallen bale or a box hitting the floor sent passersby scurrying in panic. People wondered whether any sudden noise was a shell falling on some part of town. And, always, there were the rumors: “The news,” according to an Augusta newspaper’s frontline correspondent, “comes in shoals of falsehood, barely sprinkled with fact.” Atlanta, he witnessed, had become “a perfect shell.” The booming of the guns on the horizon hollowed it out, though thousands remained hidden within. “Houses are deserted. Gardens are left to their fate.” The city had become an armed camp, even as the arsenal, factories, commissaries, and hospitals moved to Macon and the railroads ceased to run for anybody outside the military. “No place,” wrote the reporter, “is quiet or uninvaded by the stir of war.” Wagons lined the streets, soldiers slept in gardens and on the sidewalks, and the City Park and any available floor space became hospital wards, while surgeons operating on commandeered porches and makeshift tables sawed off the wounded soldiers’ destroyed limbs, tossing the amputated leg or arm aside.

  Fear of a rapacious enemy stalked the city, though the federals remained outside its boundaries. Atlanta’s present invaders were the hundreds of men slinking away from the fighting. The uproar and chaos within the city provided easy cover for robbers who smashed open and looted houses, depots, and stores in the darkness. “Cavalry robbers” broke into nearly every shop in the Five Points on the night of July 21 and “stole everything that they took a fancy to,” Samuel Richards discovered the next morning. His store was “stripped” of all its paper and cash on hand. A. J. Neal rode across the city from end to end that same night. He felt “sad to witness the ruin and destruction of the place.” Army stragglers and hungry residents were smashing open and looting stores, leaving “scattered things over the streets promiscuously.” He noted the crush of people and “the same noise and bustle on Whitehall, but instead of thrift and industry and prosperity it is hurried scramble to get away, fleeing from the wrath to come.”

  Neal looked over the riot in the Five Points and turned away from the shameful scene in disgust. He scorned Atlanta, the city where his parents, now fled to their Pike County plantation, had built their charming dream palace. He considered the Gate City’s fate, in a measure, divine justice. “If Soddom [sic] deserved the fate that befell it,” he proclaimed, “Atlanta will not be unjustly punished for since this war commenced it has grown to be the great capital place of corruption in official and private circles. While I regret the loss of Atlanta . . . I can scarcely regret that the nest of speculators, thieves, etc., is broken up.”

  Many others, of course, had long shared his disdain for the upstart cosmopolitan city; with “its detestable hotels, Jews and high prices,” wrote the Augusta reporter at about the same time Neal surveyed Atlanta’s collapse, “there has seemed little good in it.” However, the correspondent felt only pity now for the expiring metropolis, a “city . . . growing in importance and population, that . . . has gradually become the theatre of events in this department, the reservoir of every species of enterprise, until it had reached a census of fifty thousand souls, and a versatility of society and interest which comprehended every class, from the wealthy refugee and native to the most squalid of outcasts, and every trade from the eminent journalist to the least consequential artisan of apple beer and peanuts.” He called for open-mindedness in his readers: “Let any, I say, reflect upon these metropolitan features, and he will be ready to believe what I assure you is the truth, that no city has afforded so much health, pleasure and occupation as Atlanta.” The great, growing, and all-welcoming Gate City, made by war, now belonged to the war.

  The reporter declared boldly, though, that all was not yet lost. Reviewing the implications of Hood’s replacement of Johnston, he wrote, “If it means anything it must mean this: Atlanta will not be given up without a fight.”

  ALONE IN HER HILLTOP HOUSE, Cyrena Stone could hear beneath the booming guns the commotion and falsetto shattering of glass in the Five Points down the hill from her. She now had the company of Robert ( Yancey) Webster, the money-changing barber, and his wife, Bess. Stone sheltered the black couple in her barn, where they had taken refuge. They were no longer safe in their “cozy home . . . filled with many comforts” a few hundred feet from Stone’s property. A few nights earlier, soldiers had burst through their door “pretending to search for runaway negroes.” Clearly aware of Webster’s wealth, they put pistols to the couple’s throats, turned the house upside down, and took “everything of value they had—silk dresses—jewelry, watches & spoons.” While the men walked away with their stolen booty, Webster raced to alert some cavalry who passed nearby. “They were negroes,” a sympathetic Stone penned, so his appeals for help were “in vain.”

  She listened to the guns drawing closer to her house. “The clash of arms sounded so near” Stone thought Union army soldiers might reach her property at any moment. Confederate soldiers who moved by told her they did “not expect to make a stand here.” Few defenders filled the earthworks in front of her house. The way seemed open to Sherman, or so she “hoped each day & night, until the last has come & gone,” yet her prayers went unanswered. Instead, the cautious Sherman appeared sure to choose to “wait until breastworks are erected, over which brave men must march on to death—before victory.” She grasped more clearly than most what lay ahead.

  HOOD AWOKE ON THE morning of July 18 in command of an army in a desperate but well-fortified position. He seemed to have few options available to shift his army from its defensive posture to an aggressive fight. Sherman had begun his grand wheel to his left around Atlanta the day before. Gen. James B. McPherson had crossed most of his men in the Army of the Tennessee over the Chattahoochee at Roswell, and they now started to move eastward to strike the Georgia Railroad between Decatur and the distant hump of Stone Mountain. Hood would shortly learn the distressing news that a Union raiding party far to the southwest of Atlanta had already torn up the Montgomery & West Point Railroad at Opelika, cutting off hope for additional reinforcements from Alabama. With McPherson on the Georgia railroad, three of the four rail links that made Atlanta the transportation hub of the Lower South and the citadel of the Confederacy would be broken. The Macon & Western remained the last iron lifeline between Atlanta and the rest of the rebel world. Atlanta’s Confederates defended an all but isolated island fortress.

  Atlanta was now more an object of Confederate prayers than the living heart of the Confederate nation, but that symbolism mattered immensely to the nation’s survival. So, too, did halting Sherman’s army from tearing beyond Atlanta and further through Georgia. If unimpeded, his hor
de of 100,000 plus could turn south and west toward Mobile and Montgomery, en route freeing the 30,000 Union prisoners now held on a few acres under the broiling sun in Andersonville about one hundred miles south of Atlanta. That army unchecked could slice apart the Lower South, devastating its agricultural heartland and depriving the Confederacy of its few remaining military industrial resources. Sherman would deliver a lethal blow to the last, best hope for Southern freedom.

  Despite Hood’s numeric disadvantages, he had to attack and deliver a blow sufficient to drive Sherman back across the Chattahoochee River. Once there, Hood could move on Sherman’s one rail line to cut his armies off from their supply bases. The fighting general was one to deliver slashing blows, and the ponderous and over-stretched Yankee army, if struck in a vulnerable place, could bleed out its strength within the hostile rebel territory. A bold and effective attack might turn all those apparent federal victories into a historic, devastating defeat. An unexpected stroke of luck opened up the very opportunity Hood sought.

  Scouts reported to Hood that in sending his forces sweeping out in a grand fiery wheel around the city’s eastern flanks on July 18 and 19, Sherman had inadvertently allowed a gap to spread between his lines. The vanguard of McPherson’s army swung far to the east toward Decatur, with Gen. John M. Schofield’s Army of the Ohio following inside it to the east, while Gen. George Thomas crossed his Army of the Cumberland over the Chattahoochee at Paces Ferry and then marched in a more direct southern line via Buckhead toward Atlanta. Sherman had intended for his armies to move in concentric circles, their flanks overlapping and remaining in contact, leaving their wings protected and ready to move quickly to reinforce their neighboring armies if attacked. However, Atlanta’s landscape deceived. Where its approaches appeared level except for a few small humps on the plateau, the country all around it remained rolling and thickly forested. The creeks cut deep and ran crooked. Despite the city’s growth and the extension of its suburbs, roads were few, narrow, and enclosed by woods and dense undergrowth that could shelter an attacker. A commander could order an attack or prepare a defense, but neither attacker nor defender could anticipate precisely the place or the time of battle. And now the scouts informed Hood that a gaping hole had opened between Thomas’s left and Schofield’s right wings, leaving the Army of the Cumberland especially vulnerable as it felt its way south through the field. This was a strategic mistake on Sherman’s part, which the younger general had to try to exploit.