The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  SHERMAN MOVED HIS LINE around further in an attempt to reach the railroad, but Hood simply extended his entrenchments until Sherman dared not stretch his lines any further from his base at the Western & Atlantic’s rebuilt Chattahoochee River crossing. He sent out two cavalry raids to break the railroad to Macon and reach the Andersonville prison; both failed badly. Now, he looked up at the Confederates’ virtually impregnable, high ridge of fortifications encircling Atlanta and concluded that the nut was indeed too hard to crack. “To assault their position would cost more lives than we can spare,” he told Ellen, and he was too deep in enemy territory, he presently feared, to move further around and away from the city, which would require him “to cut loose from our base, which is rather a risky business in a country devoid of all manner of supplies.” He had to admit that, for now, the far smaller but relentless rebel forces, fighting like “Devils & Indians,” had checked his advance.

  On August 1, he issued explicit orders to his three army commanders to commence an orderly, sustained artillery fire from their twenty-pounder Parrott gun batteries, totaling more than one hundred rifled cannons, concentrated north and west of downtown: “You may fire from ten to fifteen shots from every gun you have in position into Atlanta that will reach any of its houses. Fire slowly and with deliberation between 4 P.M. and dark.” Hundreds of shells fell into the city. On August 7, the impatient general ordered heavier rifled cannon freighted down from Chattanooga. Those four 4.5-inch naval siege guns would add thirty-three-pound projectiles to the barrage. He wired Washington that night. Using the more powerful guns, he explained, “we can pick almost any house in the town.” He intended to “make the inside of Atlanta too hot to be endured. . . . One thing is certain, whether we get inside of Atlanta or not, it will be a used-up community by the time we are done with it.”

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated engraving of Union forces storming Lost Mountain during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, June 16, 1864

  General Joseph E. Johnston,

  commander,

  Army of Tennessee

  General John B. Hood,

  Johnston’s replacement

  General William T. Sherman,

  Union forces commander

  Tennessee private Sam Watkins

  Colonel Charles F. Morse,

  Union provost marshal in Atlanta

  Militiaman and Wilkes County

  plantation owner Allen T. Holliday

  “Dearest Lizzie, ” Holliday’s wife

  remained on their plantation

  Ponder house after the siege of Atlanta looked “like a huge coal screen” to Union troops

  Ponder estate including house and other

  buildings within fortifications around

  Fort Hood

  Harper’s Weekly engraving of Union army’s destruction of Atlanta’s public and

  downtown buildings, an untouched City Hall at left

  Harper’s Weekly engraving of last Union troops leaving a burning Atlanta on November 16, 1864

  Georgia Railroad Roundhouse ruins after the war

  Fort Hood, abatis and other fortifications protecting Marietta Street on the city’s outskirts

  Huff family house on Marietta Street, where Sarah Huff spent her

  Confederate childhood, stood between the lines but survived the fighting

  Ruins of the Georgia Railroad, Atlanta Rolling Mill, and surroundings following detonation ofmunitions train by departing Confederate Army on September 1, 1864

  Postwar Peachtree Street crossing tracks, with ruins of Georgia Railroad Bank at the corner, wherethe Clayton family sought refuge, with wagon turning on Marietta Street in distance

  Car shed with wagons and freight cars loaded for civilian evacuation under

  Union Army orders in September 1864

  Union railroad demolition crew making “Sherman neckties” out of

  Western & Atlantic Railroad track in November

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated engraving of Battle of Bentonville, NC, where ConfederateJames Neal, brother of Andrew J. Neal, made his last charge

  The first black West Point cadet,

  Henry O. Flipper

  Ruins of the car shed after being knocked down

  by Union demolition crews, November 15, 1864

  VI

  WAR IS CRUELTY, AND YOU CANNOT REFINE IT

  I AM AFEARD THERE ARE FEW DIE well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING HENRY V, ACT 4, SCENE 1

  CHAPTER 23

  GOODBYE, JOHNNY

  “WE HOVER AROUND ATLANTA, and can look square into the city, as did Moses into the land of Canaan,” reported the New York Times war correspondent. “We are so close to the city in some places that our shells, destined for its center, oftentimes pass clean over.” It seemed as the hot days of August unfolded that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, like Moses, might never enter Atlanta. The same reporter wrote, “As the rebels themselves say, Atlanta is safe.” Despite the 30,000-man differential between the armies, the city’s brilliantly laid-out lines and densely reinforced earthworks could not be breached without a monumental loss of life that would very likely destroy the army Sherman had so carefully conserved through four months of continuous battle deep in the Confederacy’s heartland. “You may take this to heart—that Atlanta is beyond our reach, so far as fighting for it is concerned.”

  Settling into a siege mode, Union batteries lofted shell and shot that sailed over the Confederate ramparts and pelted the spread-out city like thousands of biting horseflies preying upon exposed flesh—unpredictable in their targets and, for most of the 4,000 or so civilians left in town, terrifying and sometimes painful yet rarely lethal. Marietta Street led out to some of the heaviest batteries firing on the city and drew especially heavy fire. Sitting on her family porch a mile from the Yankee lines at night, a young girl watched the cannon flash on the horizon, followed by a booming report. She then saw each shell flying “like a big ball of fire, making its way towards us.” It passed overhead “with a shrieking and hissing that must be heard to appreciate its diabolical sound.” That was followed soon after by the crash from a strike and then an explosion that echoed and rattled dishes and windows far into the countryside. The screams of terror—or sometimes of agony from wounds—could be heard in the lull between volleys.

  Shell and shot chased people from pillar to post about town all day and night. The same girl recalled just sitting down at the breakfast table when a shell blew a three-foot hole through the brick wall, slammed through a door across the room, and careened down the hall into another room, where it exploded near a piano, tossing it upside down and blowing out all the windows. The explosion set the house ablaze. The family fled to a friend’s house on Alabama Street that “had not been troubled with shells.” Finally settled in, at 2 o’clock that afternoon the famished family had just sat down to their first meal of the day when, she recalled, “Bang! came a shell and buried itself in the ground near the gate.” Shells, the residents had quickly learned from experience, fell in clumps. The family didn’t wait for the next to fall on the house but instead dashed off in haste until they arrived atop the Peters Street hill about a mile from the center of town.

  Relieved to be well away from the bull’s eye at the center of town, they laid out a picnic on the exposed knoll. Just as they had started to eat, a man rode up to them fast and cried out, “For mercy’s sake, get away from here. The Yanks will see this wagon and mule, think you are some soldiers camped here, and shell you.” Gen. John Bell Hood had made his headquarters on the heights there and was shelled out two days earlier. “You must leave.” They’d had enough running, though. They decided to risk more shelling and finished their picnic while enjoying the spectacle of shells streaking into town.

  THAT YOUNG GIRL AND other children found the experience of running away from home under shell fire, racing around in a covered wagon, and watching the
bombs burst in white puffs in the air “fun,” but the adults soon conveyed their terror to the young ones. Ezekiel Calhoun’s little grandson Noble Calhoun Williams and his young cousin became so used to the bombardment that they played outside and regularly climbed the grape arbor to gather baskets of grapes without worrying about the fiery balls and their showers of hot metal fragments. Noble often accompanied his grandfather, still weak but recovering from his bout of dysentery, to his pharmacy in the Five Points. Each time they heard a distant cannon’s report while they walked, they dropped down behind the nearest fence or stone wall, then rose and continued until startled by another report. As they neared the shop, they grew warier. Shells dropped frequently into the Five Points. Those projectiles scared them most. They came whistling and tumbling down and sparked off the hard paving stones. Nobody could calculate what course they would take as they skipped and rebounded along until they exploded or crashed into some wall or other object.

  Oftentimes the shelling developed a predictable-enough regularity for people to get out, shop; if poor, receive distributions of free food from the Confederate commissary; or run other errands before returning to shelter. While moving about, they could hear and see projectiles coming and generally had time to seek cover. An unearthly spinning whine and, at night, a shining thread of sparkles strung across the dark sky warned those in their path to find shelter. Ezekiel Calhoun’s grandson Noble recalled feeling “a strange fascination” at night. He couldn’t resist looking up to see traveling meteor-like through the night air “at almost any time numbers of lighted shells, which brightly illuminated the sky with their fiery trails.”

  Many buildings in the Five Points took direct hits. Samuel and Jabez Richards’s store building was shelled several times. One shot tore off a piece of cornice before flying on into the building across the street. Another crashed through the back door and exploded as it went through the floor. Yet another entered through the roof and bowled through five plaster partition walls in the top floor before finally striking the chimney flue. From there it dropped down to the ground floor, where it exploded, blowing the stove across the room. Samuel was not there for that, but he was checking in on the premises a few days later when another explosion from the floor above him coated him with plaster dust.

  A WEEK AND A HALF after General Sherman ordered the siege shelling to begin, he mentioned to Gen. George Thomas that “the inhabitants have, of course, got out.” He was being disingenuous. He almost certainly knew that thousands of civilians remained trapped within the city limits. Three days later, on August 13, a Union colonel sent a report saying that one of his officers “could distinctly hear loud cries from women and children, as if praying &c.” Sherman considered the south side of the city “of little depth or importance.” Many families, especially the poorer ones without other refuge, moved into an encampment there largely spared bombardment. However, Union gunners understood well that their charge was not only to target military installations. Posted at Fort Hood “about 100 yards from the Ponder Home on the State Road,” Confederate battery captain A. J. Neal carried on a sporadic artillery duel with a facing Yankee battery. Both batteries were so well protected within their lines, though, that the exchanged shots did as much damage “as the sledge hammer makes out of the anvil,” he penned. Whenever the Yankee batteries opened up, federal shells and solid shot first went “screaming just above our heads.” They exploded around and pounded against the reinforced redoubt within which his guns nestled. After firing their fruitless, close-in shots, the Yankees, he remarked, “then elevate their guns and send the balance into the city.”

  Riding away from his battery in the hot first days of August, Neal had inspected much of the city. He found it “considerably marked by the enemy’s shots. In some parts of town every house has been struck a dozen times.” He rode to his family’s big mansion opposite City Hall. What he saw must have depressed him and redoubled his hostility toward the federals if that were possible. “Two balls,” he found, “have gone into our house,” one destroying a room belonging to his older brother James, also a rebel soldier, while another blew into the parlor.

  Increasingly intent on rendering Atlanta uninhabitable, Sherman wrote Gen. Oliver O. Howard, whom he had appointed to replace James B. McPherson in command of the Army of the Tennessee, to redouble the pace of the bombing. “Let us destroy Atlanta and make it a desolation,” he declared. Neal could see Sherman’s command was working. According to Neal, the Yankee bombardment had “ruined [Atlanta’s] value to us in a great measure.” Even as the siege shelling heated up, though, he believed the enemy would never drive them out. He was pleased to see more militia enter the line and also knew Hood intended to send cavalry out to break Sherman’s crucial railroad supply line. Despite the Union pickets having dug their forward positions to within an easy shot of his works, Neal never lost the general conviction that “the enemy will [not] get any nearer Atlanta.”

  Andrew Jackson Neal would not live to see the battle’s end. A few days later, while moving through the Fort Hood redoubt, he exposed himself to a Yankee sharpshooter. His men buried him in a shallow grave alongside dozens of others on August 10.

  Within two weeks, word of A. J. Neal’s death had reached his older brother James, a colonel at the head of the Nineteenth Georgia Infantry, also holding off a siege—Grant’s against the Petersburg fortifications in Virginia. When James heard about Andrew’s death, his “heart,” he told his mother, was “too full to utter words of consolation.” He thought of the happy days they had shared at the family’s handsome Washington Street house and found it impossible to accept “that we will not all meet again at home after this war is over as I have so long anticipated, hoped and prayed for.” James Neal would have his chance at revenge, eventually returning south to confront Sherman’s armies.

  THE CLOCKWORK SHELLING limited civilian casualties. Citizens dug their own or shared so-called bombproofs or gopher holes, deep pits extended out within existing cellars, such as Samuel Richards added to his house, or freshly constructed caverns beneath household gardens. The chambers were typically eight feet or more high. Some were opened up enough to accommodate large families and their servants, small cooking areas, and tables to eat at. Heavy beams supported the ceiling, which was lined with boards or tin to keep out seeping rain, then covered with three to five feet of earth. Even a direct hit could not blow in the subterranean shelters. A small, exposed entry to the ground led to a covered ditch that ran through a double right angle to the bombproof space, shielding the doorway to the shelter against a blast.

  Prominent buildings and residential streets that stood high enough to be seen by Yankee signalmen perched in treetops drew especially close fire. Sited on high ground and topped by a handsome and very visible bell cupola, the Clayton girls’ former school, the Female Institute, was a favorite target. Virtually every house—except, by luck, that belonging to Robert Webster and his wife—along the rise up Houston Street, including Cyrena Stone’s, was destroyed during the bombardment or taken apart during the Battle of Atlanta or later on. Most houses along Marietta Street lay beneath the pathway shells took toward the center of town; they were torn to pieces. Church steeples provided inviting targets, and the concentration of churches around City Hall Square attracted heavy fire. Above all, Sherman wanted to “demolish the big engine-house,” the car shed where the unabated arrival of trains announcing their presence with their whistles infuriated him. He directed that one of the four-and-a-half-inch navy siege guns concentrate its fire on the depot. Those four heavy guns alone fired more than 4,500 shells into the city—at least 75 tons of iron and gunpowder. The smaller guns, though, caused untold damage. On August 9, Sherman ordered all his cannon to open fire with fifty rounds each. A paroxysm of Union shells “burst immediately over all parts of town,” some 5,000 solid shots and exploding artillery shells fell that day. Federal lookouts reported seeing “great commotion” by people under the hellacious bombardment.

  To l
eave the city “used up,” Sherman’s army tried to inflict as much damage as possible by setting it on fire. Batteries kept furnaces stoked near their cannons to experiment with heating up shot enough to ignite fires when they struck. An officer deemed “the experiment . . . a perfect success.” His lookouts reported, “Large fires were visible in the city every night hot shot was used.” When flames were spotted within the city, the artillery concentrated their shelling on the area—to keep away the three remaining fire companies in town and to spread the conflagration. The Atlanta correspondent for the Intelligencer, now relocated to Macon, recounted their efforts, writing, “The shells were flying thick and fast around the burning buildings, but the firemen stood to their posts without flinching.” Most nights, Mayor James Calhoun moved through the city with his fire companies. The Intelligencer ’s editor John Steele had refugeed to Macon; however, he still had his knives out for the mayor, blasting him for being, he falsely claimed, “absent.”

  During one night’s particularly fierce bombardment, a fire leaped through large parts of downtown. Against the flames licking up into the night sky, shells fell at a rate of about one every two minutes. It didn’t help the companies battling the blazes under the shell fire that the summer heat had dried up all the city cisterns. The fierce fire grew into a holocaust fed by hidden stores of cotton warehoused illegally by many downtown merchants. The Intelligencer’s correspondent expressed surprise, either mock or true, to discover that so many “good loyal citizens . . . have cotton stored away in Atlanta.” When the bales of cotton went up, small fires touched off by the hot shot flared into firestorms. “And,” asked the newspaperman, “if the city is to fall who will be benefited by the cotton and tobacco left in the city? Certainly not the Confederacy!”