The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Hood finally ordered five cavalrymen caught looting executed and, perhaps worse, threatened to send others out of the cavalry into the infantry, but his measures amid the distractions of war did little to stem the spreading riot. Hearing the commotion, residents from the countryside came in to grab their share of the spoils.

  THE NIGHT MARCH IN ROUGH COUNTRY—and the pillaging in the Five Points—confused and delayed Hardee’s men. McPherson shared Army of the Ohio commander John Schofield’s assessment that their West Point classmate Hood was a “brave, determined and rash man.” McPherson disagreed with Sherman’s conviction that Hood would not move to the offensive again. He saw defenses being strengthened to the south of his own lines. He was convinced that a major battle was in the offing and, trusting his instincts, placed infantry along his vulnerable southern flank. Hood’s men, exhausted by their all-night march and what Tennessee private Sam Watkins called “one of the hottest days I ever felt,” once again stumbled in coordinating their lines. Not until nearly 1 P.M. did the first of Hood’s uneven lines shamble forward and finally charge. They met up with McPherson’s protected, not exposed, flank. Hood shifted the attack more toward gaps at the center of McPherson’s lines. The battle was close enough to the city that shells and even minié balls cracked into houses.

  Through the afternoon, the rebels advanced several times against Yankees entrenched on and around a treeless knoll known as Bald Hill. Watkins was in a line that rushed forward into “seething fire from ten thousand muskets and small arms, and forty pieces of cannon hurled right into our faces, scorching and burning our clothes, and hands, and faces from their rapid discharges, and piling the ground with our dead and wounded almost in heaps.”

  The first charge was repulsed. Another charge followed, with “one long, loud cheer.” Soon, Confederate and Union officers and men were tangled in hand-to-hand, -sword, and -bayonet combat. “Blood covered the ground” around Watkins, “and the dense smoke filled our eyes, and ears, and faces.” He could hear the “groans of the wounded and dying . . . above the thunder of battle.” McPherson rode out to rally his men at about the same moment Private Watkins fell, shot in the ankle and heel. Unable to continue, he watched the pitched, close-in battle from behind an embankment. Artillery and musket fire raked the field. A cannon ball shot out, decapitating a soldier in front of him, splattering viscera over the Tennessee soldier. He saw “cannon, caissons, and dead horses . . . piled pell-mell. . . . Blood had gathered in pools, and in some instances had made streams of blood.”

  Hunkered down, he watched a lone ambulance emerge from the Yankee line, pick up a single dead man on the edge of woods beside a road, and gallop back. He didn’t know then that the wagon carried the body of General McPherson off the battlefield. The general had ridden along a road he thought safe directly into Confederate skirmishers, who called for him to halt. He turned and started to ride away. The rebels fired. The commander of the Army of the Tennessee continued in the saddle a few feet and then slumped to the ground.

  A. J. Neal’s battery pulled back below the city cemetery not far from the rise from where General Hood observed the battle. Neal’s artillery and nearby infantry were “having a hot fight.” He was holding his horse by the bridle when a shell flew in between them. The explosion knocked him over, stunning him. When he regained consciousness, he saw his horse lying dead beside him.

  The close-in fighting continued all afternoon and into the evening. Finally, at 7 P.M., the Confederates abandoned the attack.

  GUSSIE CLAYTON, Sallie’s typhoid-ravaged fifteen-year-old sister, had died in the predawn hours of July 22 while the wagons and troopers clattered through town toward the coming day’s battle-grounds. Her devastated parents searched for a coffin in town but had trouble finding one. Then, the battle exploded near the city cemetery. With shells and balls flying, the Claytons could not bury her there. They hastily dug a grave in the garden of their Mitchell Street house opposite City Hall Square. Even there they found no respite from the war. Shells fell nearby while they held a graveside funeral forcing them to take cover.

  The Clayton house was hit by the cannonade. One shell burst through a servant’s quarters and exploded while two infant slave children slept, setting their bed on fire. Somehow, Sallie’s father wrote her, the children “escaped unhurt almost miraculously.” Another shell flew through her mother’s bedroom window and slammed into a wall without exploding. With Gussie’s three ill sisters now well enough to sit up, the family shut their house up and moved downtown to the Georgia Railroad Bank building, where Mr. Clayton worked, on Whitehall Street, further away from the front. They set up mattresses on the floor of the stone building, hoping they were now safe against further artillery strikes.

  Amid the family tragedy, Mr. Clayton felt heartened by the battle fought on the day his daughter expired. It proved “Atlanta will not be given up. This is general belief. It will be defended at all hazards.”

  MANY IN TOWN BELIEVED by the end of the day’s fighting the Confederates could claim victory. A. J. Neal declared the bloodiest single day’s combat in and around any American city in history, known ever after as the Battle of Atlanta, a “redemption” for the Southern cause. He believed the Yankee casualties “amounted to more than twice our own.” Hood telegraphed Richmond to proclaim he had “routed the enemy in the neighborhood of Decatur” and claimed many thousand enemy prisoners taken along with scores of artillery pieces and stands of battalion colors. McPherson’s death capped the triumphant announcement. Braxton Bragg, who visited Hood shortly after the battle, wrote President Jefferson Davis that Sherman was “badly defeated” and that victory produced an “admirable” “moral effect” on the troops. In fact, Hood lost an estimated 7,500 men or more that day, while Union casualties totaled a little over 3,700, including 1,700 prisoners. In four days under Hood the Army of Tennessee’s offensive had already cost more men than Gen. Joseph Johnston had lost in the course of his entire command.

  Militiaman T. Holliday held a position in the redoubt known as Fort Hood in front of the Ponder house. He was not as confident about morale among his fellow militiamen as Bragg. “A good many of the Regt. try to play out when they think a fight is on hand.” He was not prepared to call it quits, he told his wife, for “who would not be a soldier and fight for his country?” But he had to admit, “I think we will soon disband and come home.”

  SAMUEL RICHARDS HAD, like many in town, expected the city to fall that night. Instead, he watched “dark crowds of prisoners” marched into town, “taken in a successful flank movement.” He, too, understood now that General Hood “intended to hold the city.”

  A stricken Cyrena Stone also heard reports of a “glorious victory” at the end of the day’s fighting. The Union partisan felt bereft of hope. “The heart-sickness that comes over us, when we hear such tidings, none can know,” she confessed. The day’s fighting had finally forced her to abandon her home. Soldiers had rushed about her property before the battle. Dark cannon were drawn into her gardens, pointing out toward the distant Yankee emplacements. A slave ran to her and insisted, “I tell you Miss Abby [the name she used for herself in her secret diary], we’ve got to git away from here now, for the men are falling back to the breastworks, & they’re going to fight right away!”

  She cried and rushed about from room to room, “not knowing what to do, or where to go, or what to save,” before finally gathering things to move with her to a friend’s house away from the front lines. “With this horrible pall of battlesmoke hanging over us” and the “minié balls . . . whizzing by so fast, & the shells screaming over the house,” she told her remaining slaves they, too, should go. Their enslavement was at an end. She did not look back at the house and gardens, “for I felt as if leaving those pleasant scenes forever,” and she did not want to mar her happier memories. The fighting that day very likely destroyed her property, to which she would never return.

  BENEATH THE TUMBLING, screaming, whizzing, and sparkling shells, Robert W
ebster made his way down the hill from Stone’s barn to the Five Points. The scene he came upon at the car shed was horrifying. Thousands of wounded men lay on the floor within the vaulted station, under surrounding tents, or out in the open. Surgeons operated without anesthesia; amputated limbs were piled on the ground. Physicians, medics, and women relief workers moved among the sea of bloody, perforated, and torn bodies, offering food and water in the intense summer heat and directing litter bearers and ambulance drivers to deliver those who could be moved to the various hospitals and many houses with beds and cots around town.

  Sarah Huff, the young woman who had seen so much of the workings of the war from her Marietta Street home, was now forced by fighting near there to move into a Decatur Street house in town. She watched endless processions of “ominous black covered ambulances” with swarms of flies hovering over them carry the wounded past. She could see “the blood trickling down” to the dusty street after spilling out of the wounded men who lay suffering within those wagons.

  Large numbers of other grievously wounded soldiers in blue were carried separately to the City Park neighboring the car shed. They were the wounded Union prisoners. Orderlies left them out on the dusty ground, where they moaned and shifted about in agony, without water and unprotected from the intense summer sun and stifling heat. The living sprawled alongside the stiff and bloated corpses of the dead. With “no one to attend them,” said one witness, the wounded men suffered “intolerable” pain and appeared “in a dreadful condition.” Many lay there for two days, some even longer, without water or assistance. Men were missing legs; others had arms blown off. The stench of gangrene rot hung in the air. Nobody dared come to their aid. One man admitted, “People feared to go among them” because of what he called “the excitement in the city”—the heavily armed Confederates clattering past on horseback, foot, and wagon.

  Ignoring the obvious danger to anyone, particularly a black man, Webster waded in among the wounded Yankees. He got water, gathered whatever cloth he could find, and began washing and dressing their wounds. There were too many men in need. According to a witness, he “took charge of the whole matter himself.” He called to other black people looking on. Many hesitated. Webster pulled out his wallet and offered to pay them to help. He gave other men money to purchase food to feed the starving men. Prince Ponder heard about the suffering federal prisoners. The Ponder slave, who like Ben Yancey’s slave Robert Webster had grown wealthy through his currency trading during the war, ran down to the City Park. He brought water to the parched men and tried to see to their needs and comfort them in their misery as best he could. It was not long, he said, before “all the colored people did the same thing.”

  During that day, James Dunning, the foundry owner and Unionist once arrested by Provost Marshal George Washington Lee’s men, looked on, perhaps fearing the consequences if he ventured to help the Union wounded. He watched Webster kneel down alongside one young man clearly in terrible pain. The soldier scratched furiously at his mangled hand, which was wrapped in bloody bandages, as if he wanted to tear the hand off his arm. Webster cut the bandages away. Dunning blanched at the sight. “The maggots fell out as grains of wheat would fall from the hand,” he said. He looked around the field of moaning, bloody, filthy, mauled Yankees. Suddenly he realized that their open wounds quivered with life. “There was hardly one wound that was not stirring with maggots,” he said.

  Ignoring the horror, Webster organized the men into companies to carry the wounded to the Roy Hospital, which was taking in Union prisoners. A white businessman watched the black teams carrying away the wounded on litters and on their shoulders to the hospital. He knew that “many of the wounded would certainly have died if it had not been for the attention of these men.” Through the rest of the afternoon under the broiling sun and on throughout the entire night, while bombs whistled in and occasionally burst in lethal fireworks in the dark sky overhead, Webster and his team of fellow former slaves worked on the wounded. By morning, they had dispatched all the wounded men to the hospital for treatment.

  IN HIS HEADQUARTERS, Sherman was distraught over the death of his protégé general. He wrote his wife, “I lost my right bower [anchor] in McPherson.” In McPherson’s death, stumbling into an enemy outpost, Sherman saw his own, “for with all the natural advantages of bushes, cover of all kinds, we must all be killed.”

  He ignored his own misjudgment of Hood’s intentions, which had contributed to his friend’s death, and his even graver failure to make good McPherson’s accomplishments that day. The Army of the Tennessee had held off an attack that sent the bulk of Hood’s own army out beyond the protection of his impregnable earthworks. Rather than counterattack the army while it was exposed in the field, the ever-cautious Sherman had held back nearly 50,000 men idle in reserve, close enough to the battlefield to reach it in less than an hour’s march. Had he sent them in, they very likely would have obliterated Hood’s army. Instead, when his two other army commanders urged an advance, he had insisted, “Let the Army of the Tennessee fight it out!”

  THE CONFEDERATES DREW BACK into Atlanta. Sherman decided to leave them there. “The forts,” he wrote his wife, “are really unassailable.” For those inside the city, it seemed as if Sherman intended to lay siege to the town. T. Holliday believed, “They can’t take Atlanta unless they make a Vicksburg scrape of it.” That seemed Sherman’s intention. A reporter on hand estimated some five hundred shells fell into the city over the next few days. He noted many houses, churches, hotels, railroad installations, and other buildings “bear marks of recent visitations of round shot and shell.” Remarkably, he knew of few casualties among the civilian population. “Several members of a family up town were wounded by fragments of an exploded shell,” he reported, “and one little child was killed.” The slight civilian death toll was surprising, given the continuous fighting. The newspaper correspondent heard “a constant clatter of muskets . . . night and day around the city circle of fortifications, with a running heavy bass accompaniment of twelve and twenty-four pounders.” Nights were “singularly picturesque and startling in effect. The rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in the air, with the flash of guns, like heat-lightning on the horizon, presents a panorama at once exciting and wildly beautiful to the uninitiated in war.”

  In the federal lines along the abandoned Western & Atlanta tracks to the northwest of town, Massachusetts infantry captain Charles Morse also noted, “Operations now bear the character of a siege.” He could not leave the protection of the trenches, with cannons firing back and forth day and night without halt. His company covered Marietta Street, from where he could see “a fine house in plain sight,” the former home of Dexter Niles, the Bostonian slave wholesale dealer and the same house where Johnston had made his headquarters until he had been so recently relieved. Morse’s men moved forward along Marietta Street, assaulting and taking a rebel picket line. That left them exposed to close-range artillery and musket fire from the fort next to the Ponder house, which was now a sharpshooter’s nest and target of the Yankee guns. “I had a whole chapter of wonderful escapes” during the assault, Morse recounted. “One shell burst within ten feet of me, throwing me flat by its concussion and covering me with dirt.” He took time to eat breakfast, but a sharpshooter thought he didn’t need the meal. “A rifle bullet struck the board on which was my plate, and sent things flying,” he penned, “but it seemed that my time to be hit had not come.”

  SHERMAN, TOO, WAS NOT yet resigned to any fated siege of the city. His strategy, he informed his wife, was to “gradually destroy the roads which make Atlanta a place worth having.” Just one operating railroad line remained to supply the Confederate army. Trains ran continuously on the Macon & Western in and out of town to the southwest. The artillery batteries aimed to land their shells on the car shed, puncturing it and other nearby structures, but they did little to slow the arriving freight cars. Train engineers blew their locomotive whistles in defiance of Sherman. He, in turn, hoped to
cut Atlanta’s last lifeline to rebeldom, forcing its defenders to abandon their citadel.

  Starting on July 26, he sent out his favored Army of the Tennessee, still flush and stinging from the fight four days earlier and the loss of their commander. They swept back around Atlanta, aiming to move to the west and then down to the southern outskirts of town, where they would break the railroad. Aware of Sherman’s maneuver, Hood sent two corps out to meet the Yankee army. At around noon on July 28, the opposing forces encountered each other near a meeting-house known as Ezra Church, about two and a half miles west of Atlanta. The Confederates had the advantage again of moving to the attack through rough country that hid their advance against a force not fully entrenched. But again, the initial rebel assault was uneven and piecemeal. The federals threw up barricades of logs, planks, and church benches as the enemy lines approached.

  Several times the rebel attackers reached within twenty feet of the Yankee lines, only to be repulsed. Soon the Yankees could see that many of the charging soldiers had lost their heart for the fight. Henry Stanley, the Connecticut quartermaster, heard afterwards that many entire regiments simply fired their muskets off “in the air,” instead of at the enemy in front of them. Feckless, rebel soldiers stumbled forward. They were drunk, he recorded, and “many of the pensioners we captured were so under the influence of liquor that they had to be led off the battlefield.”

  The Confederate dead lay in piles where the fiercest fighting occurred, swept down in whole ranks at a time. Once again, Hood’s bold moves devastated his already thinning army. Confederate losses totaled around 3,000 or more men; the federals’ about 630.