The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Thomas’s men, a force of nearly 60,000, were moving through Buckhead. With his far smaller numbers, Hood needed to surprise the Yankees. He intended to strike them immediately after they crossed the east-west-running Peachtree Creek, just three miles from Atlanta, before they had time to throw up breastworks. A. J. Neal’s battery was one of those in Cheatham’s Corps assigned to fire into the gap to the right of Thomas’s army, keeping Schofield from rescuing it. Watkins was among Maney’s men hiding in the woods while thousands of other rebel troops moved up Howell Mill and Peachtree roads to attack an isolated and vulnerable force. Hood wanted to drive the federals back into the angle formed by the creek, with its steep, deep, and densely overgrown banks, and the Chattahoochee, then smash them in place with enough violence to destroy a major wing in Sherman’s army. The attack, designed by Hood overnight on July 19, was set to begin at 1 P.M. the next day.

  MCPHERSON WAS THE FLY in the ointment. Unknown to Hood, his swift-traveling 25,000-man army had reached Decatur early that morning, where it met minimal resistance from a small cavalry force. A cautious McPherson began feeling his way tentatively west along the Georgia Railroad and the Decatur Road, soon threatening the approaches to Atlanta itself. Hood learned of the crisis at his Peachtree Road headquarters in mid-morning and ordered his army to shift to his right to hold McPherson back from the city. The clumsily executed movement confused the Confederate ranks. The resulting three-hour delay in assembling the line of attack allowed parts of the thinly spread Yankee lines time to dig in on the south bank of Peachtree Creek. After marching several miles in the sultry weather, though, most of the Northern soldiers relaxed in the open fields near the creek, their arms stacked, drinking coffee and smoking. Even their commanding general felt comfortably certain the rebels remained more than a mile away within their own defenses.

  At 4 P.M. a Union soldier had wandered forward beyond his own skirmish line to pick blackberries along a ravine. He looked up to see the sun glinting off the bayonets of a six-deep line of rebels advancing steadily toward him through the woods. He raced past the federal skirmish line, which soon followed him back half a mile to the main line of lightly thrown up entrenchments. The alarm went through the startled Yankee army as Hood’s men charged yelling and firing out of the woods. At one point, Neal recounted, the Confederate army approached within fifteen feet of the Yankee works and “could have taken them,” but close-in artillery fire drove back the attackers. The fierce fighting beneath a broiling sun raged along Peachtree Creek into the evening.

  THE RELENTLESS NOISE OF battle masked something extraordinary taking place on the other side of Atlanta. Moving down the Decatur Road, one of McPherson’s batteries arrived within two and a half miles of the Five Points in the early afternoon. The battery commander, Capt. Francis H. DeGress, stopped, raised his cannons, and fired off three quick rounds of twenty-pound exploding shells into the city, “the first ones of the war,” DeGress proudly reported. A signal officer perched in a tree watched the shots explode against some buildings in the center of town.

  Inside Atlanta, Henry Lay, the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas, was staying in a large house across from City Hall next to the Trinity Church, where he continued to lead services for troops. Lay was standing on the porch of the house where he was the guest of owner William Solomon. He heard an unearthly whistling coming across the sky, followed by a massive explosion in the square directly in front of City Hall. Other shots fell on the city. One burst near the car shed. Two struck Gussie and Sallie Clayton’s old school, an easy target on its prominent hilltop. Flames, perhaps set off by an exploding shell or possibly looters, broke out in a store across from the Richards brothers’ shop, gutting several buildings. Atlanta was under fire.

  Hood had no choice. He abandoned the attack on Peachtree Creek to move more men into position to halt the Union drive from Decatur. He was not ready, however, to cease attacking.

  IN THE FIELD BEFORE Peachtree Creek lay nearly 4,800 Confederates alongside the fewer than 2,000 fallen federals. The wonder, observed Union quartermaster officer Henry Stanley from the Twentieth Connecticut, was how anybody survived such a fight. He drove his wagon down through the Peachtree battlefield after the Confederates pulled back. Tree stumps and shattered limbs showed the fury of the fight that took place there. He saw a live oak, some three feet in diameter, pierced straight through by a three-inch shell “as though it had been a straw.” He counted fifty or more balls deep in the bark of tree stumps. He could only shake his head. “It seems almost impossible that anyone could live through such a storm.”

  In his headquarters, General Sherman was disappointed that McPherson had once again not forged ahead after encountering such light opposition along the Decatur Road, but he was delighted with the day’s accomplishments. He reported to Washington the next night that his armies were now “within easy cannon-range of the buildings in Atlanta. . . . Our shot passing over [the enemy’s] lines will destroy the town.” He instructed his batteries within range of the city to “open a careful artillery fire on the town of Atlanta, directing their shots so as to produce the best effect.” Hundreds of rounds began falling on the city.

  The following day, a shot struck next to Samuel Richards’s house, tossing gravel through the windows. His wife and children spent the night bedded down on the floor behind the chimney as a shield against the shells falling throughout the city, while he completed digging a “pit” in his cellar as a bomb shelter. He was now a witness to war. “This,” he reflected, “seems to me to be a very barbarous mode of carrying on war, throwing shells among women and children.” He was not only witness, though; he was a participant. “City authorities,” presumably Mayor Calhoun, put a gun in his hands. Richards stood guard on McDonough Street through much of the night, “carrying a musket for the first time in my life.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA

  AFTER THE FIRST SHELL fired by Capt. Francis DeGress’s battery burst in City Hall Square, somebody ran into the empty Central Presbyterian Church, on Washington Street facing City Hall, to ring the great steeple bell in warning to the city inhabitants. Hearing other shells exploding nearby, he pulled the bell rope so violently that the clapper cracked the big bronze bell. It never sounded again. Soon, everyone in town knew the cause for the alarm.

  A Kentucky cavalry officer coming back through town from the Peachtree Creek battlefield “found the city in a wild state of excitement. Citizens were running in every direction. Terror-stricken women and children went screaming about the streets seeking some avenue of escape from hissing, bursting shells. . . . Perfect pandemonium reigned near the union depot. Trunks, bed clothing and wearing apparel were scattered in every direction. People were striving in every conceivable way to get out of town with their effects.”

  War had come to town, but even now some people failed to recognize the dangers they faced. A block down Washington Street from Central Presbyterian at the house of Ezekiel Calhoun, one of the doctor’s daughters stepped into the street to help a wounded Confederate soldier lying unattended in an ambulance outside her front door. While she aided the wounded man, she heard the report of cannons in the distance. A few seconds later, a shell exploded almost immediately over her head. She raced screaming back into her house. Not long after that, another shell slammed to earth in the yard, burrowing two feet into the ground. When opening fire, Union artillery batteries often launched a long-range projectile carrying a percussion fuse with their first shot. The shells exploded on contact and helped artillery men range their targets from up to two and a half miles off. They then followed up with timed or paper-fuse bombs that exploded overhead, showering lethal shrapnel on the men below. The ranging shells’ mechanical percussion fuses, though, were often duds, and the shells plowed like thirty-pound meteorites into the earth, as had happened outside Ezekiel Calhoun’s home.

  Curious about the unknown object that had fallen in the garden, a young maid took a shovel and dug it up. She proudly c
arried her prize into the house to exhibit to the doctor’s family. When they spied the detonator cap on its end and realized the shell was still live, they fled in terror. She was ordered to take the bomb back outside into the garden, where nobody dared touch it again for years afterwards.

  FACING THE EASTERN BATTLEFIELDS, Cyrena Stone had grown increasingly accustomed to the relentless sounds and chaotic sights of life near the front lines. The skirmishing along the Decatur Road was less than two miles off. She could see more and more men filling the trenches behind the earthen fortifications that ran past her property just a couple hundred feet downhill from her house. Her yard, kitchen, and porch “swarmed” with soldiers and medics. They knocked down her fences and, she lamented, “dismantled” her home. Troops helped themselves to crops out of her garden; others came to her door begging for food or cooking utensils. “Overwhelmed” by the importuning men—and probably scared after so many robberies around town—she asked an invalided officer to protect her house in return for a bed within. The Confederate told her she had made the right decision in not “running from the Yankees.” Unlike those who had fled their homes, he told her, she would prevent “immense losses & suffering” by staying.

  At noontime on July 21, she was sitting in her house when “a horrid whizzing screaming thing came flying through the air.” With a deafening blast, it exploded overhead. Bits of metal tattooed the trees and roof. The concussion shook the house timbers. She and the servants ran in fright to ask the officer, who was resting in bed, “What was that ?”

  Just an artillery shell, he responded without alarm. “There is no danger here.” In fact, he said, they were safer here than downtown. “The enemy are only trying the range of their guns,” he reassured Cyrena. She left him to his rest. But a short time later, another shell followed, and then another came “screaming” overhead. One shell fell without exploding in her yard. Terrified now, she ran to the resting Confederate, who sat up and shrugged. There was nothing to be done. As more of the “murderous things” flew over the house, he told Stone to “put your trust in God. He alone can protect us.” He returned to his nap. Having someone in the house who felt unruffled enough to sleep in the middle of a storm of artillery shells helped her to weather the cannonade, but the medical division seemed not to share his sense of security. That afternoon the order came to fall back.

  An officer informed her that “the city would soon be evacuated by Confederate troops.” She hoped to see Union forces march in tomorrow, but until they did, she and her servants were once more left alone next to the ramparts.

  FROM HER HOUSE IN DECATUR, Mary Gay, whose brother Tom Stokes had fought with Gen. John Bell Hood’s Corps until he fell sick, watched James B. McPherson’s Union Army of the Tennessee in the village square. She observed what she could about the size, arms, and apparent movements of the force. She went among the Yankees and collected the latest Northern newspapers, which carried in-depth and up-to-date battlefield reports. She lined her petticoat under her skirt with the newspapers, making what she called a “very stylish bustle.” Dressed as if she was heading out on a shopping stroll down Peachtree Street, she hiked through the sultry day some fourteen miles around the lines until she came to the McDonough Road. She advanced through the southern end of town, avoiding both armies’ pickets. Once in Atlanta, she made her way to Confederate headquarters with her newspapers and her account of federal forces gathered around her home.

  After that, she looked for what she called “our negroes.” The family had hired them out in different parts of the city. She sought out Rachel, who had rented a room in a wealthy family’s quarters on Marietta Street. Gay encountered the slave woman at the fence gate. Shells were falling about them, and cannon fire made “an unceasing sound.” Speaking to her slave over the gate, Gay asked Rachel to come with her back home to safety in Decatur. Rachel refused. She told her all-but-former mistress she “preferred to await the coming of Sherman.” Gay realized she “had no influence over her” any longer. Slavery was coming to an end. As the women walked their separate ways, as if to symbolize the violent breakup of the mistress-slave relationship, a bombshell landed by the fence gate and tore it to pieces.

  UNDAUNTED BY HIS LOSSES at Peachtree Creek, General Hood was determined to strike again quickly at the federals in hopes of slicing the ligaments tightening their stranglehold on the city. He drew in his forces from their outer defenses to the northern and eastern inner ramparts of Atlanta. At first Sherman thought Hood had abandoned the city, but the Northerners quickly fell back before the spiteful gunfire coming out of the fortresslike and virtually impregnable defenses. One of the generals leading the movement admired the earthworks—the labor of thousands of bondsmen over the course of many months—through a glass. They made, he recounted, Atlanta look “like a hill city defended by encircling well-fortified hills. Curtains, more or less regular, ran along connecting hill fort to hill fort. All the redoubts, or forts, and the curtains were well made under the direction of an excellent engineer. The slashings, abatis, chevaux de frise, fascines, gabions, and sand bags were all there and in use.” He considered the potential cost of a frontal assault. “How could we run over those things when they had plenty of cannon, mortars, and rifles behind them?” It simply could not be done without catastrophic losses. In his headquarters, William Tecumseh Sherman was now convinced that Hood would fall back into a defensive fight like his predecessor, while perhaps more aggressively deploying his cavalry to get behind the Yankee line to break up his railroad supply line.

  Sherman intended to beat Hood to the punch. Thinking he had more than sufficient force in place, Sherman detached the cavalry regiment protecting the Army of the Tennessee’s left wing to tear up the Georgia Railroad to ensure it could not be used again to resupply Confederate Atlanta. He would so isolate the city that Hood would have nothing worthwhile left to fight for. The Union horsemen traveled well beyond Decatur and began pulling up miles of track and ties, methodically heating the rails into Sherman neckties. Hood’s scouts, perhaps including Gay, informed him about the cavalry’s departure on their railroad-breaking mission. Without cavalry ranging through the countryside, McPherson’s left flank and rear now appeared vulnerable to attack. Hood saw a chance to flank the flanker.

  While skirmishing continued all day on July 21, he dispatched an entire corps under Gen. William J. Hardee, as well as a major cavalry force, under cover of darkness that night. They were to move south across the city and then swing back around to the east. The following morning, they would strike McPherson’s exposed flank by surprise, perhaps even getting on his rear.

  THE DAY BEFORE THE MOVEMENT COMMENCED, the refugee daily the Appeal predicted that “the greatest battle of the war will probably be fought in the immediate vicinity of Atlanta.” Nothing less than the entire Civil War hung in the balance. “Everything—life, liberty, property, and the independence of the South; the security of our homes, wives, mothers and children, all depend upon the endurance and heroism of the men whose toils may now be terminated with a brilliant victory.” Not only would the battle determine the fate of the increasingly besieged city, but its outcome would likely decide “the pending Northern Presidential election. If we are victorious the Peace party will triumph: Lincoln’s Administration is a failure, and peace and Southern independence are the immediate results.” While some still believed the city would be abandoned, the Appeal insisted, “Atlanta and its connections are worth a battle. . . . Georgia will be redeemed.”

  Apparently, the Appeal ’s editors did not trust their own prophetic powers. The following day, they printed their final issue, the last newspaper published in the embattled city. They packed their presses and departed town before the first shots of the coming battle were fired, heading for their fourth Confederate home since being driven out of Memphis two years earlier.

  IN THE NIGHT, as part of Hood’s movement in preparation for the assault on McPherson’s army, A. J. Neal led his battery through town. He rested briefly
along the Georgia Railroad’s tracks near the city cemetery before moving with much of Hardee’s Corps out of town on the McDonough Road. The force then planned to hike north through marshes and woods overgrown with thickets and around a large lake toward what they believed would be an exposed left flank of McPherson’s line. As Hardee’s train marched through town that night, Neal on horseback watched drunken stragglers breaking into the stores of Whitehall Street and elsewhere, leaving them, according to a reporter on hand from an Augusta newspaper, “literally gutted.” The soldiers, the correspondent wrote, “entered the stores by force, robbing them of everything and wantonly destroying what they could not bear away.” A woman owner of a store tried to prevent some men from looting her shop. She pointed a pistol at them when they broke in. The soldiers snatched it from her hand and dragged her by the hair out into the street.