The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Soon it was readily apparent, though, that the Army of Tennessee was leaving, this time for good. “Then,” recorded Samuel Richards, “began a scramble among the inhabitants . . . to get away.” Anyone who still doubted Hood intended to abandon his base, their city, understood the truth when the commissary depots’ stores of grain and food, which could not be loaded quickly enough into the bulging army wagons, were thrown open to hungry citizens. Hundreds descended upon the depots to carry off supplies of bacon and hardtack, grain and corn meal, recounted Richards, “by the sackful and the cartload.”

  THE UNION FORCES WERE expected to take possession of the city at any moment. The night was cool and starry. After what he described as “a day of terror,” Richards needed to decide what to do. Orders came for his militia battalion “to be on hand to go out with the army.” He did not want to go, “so,” he recorded matter-of-factly that night, “I thought I would resign.” In the middle of “a night of dread,” with cavalry racing around the city streets and the tramp-tramp of soldiers marching in long columns out of town resounding near his house, he and another militia company member who “had backed out” went down to a commissary depot along the Macon & Western Railroad. Richards loaded three sacks of corn meal into his buckboard. As the men started off, a “terrific” blast “jarred the ground and broke the glass in the windows around.”

  Tongues of flame, visible nearly two miles off, erupted skyward. The “incessant discharge” of explosions large and small continued for the next four hours, shaking houses and shattering glass in every direction.

  THAT NIGHT GENERAL SHERMAN was bivouacked in the field below Jonesboro. At the end of a day’s fighting, he was “so restless and impatient” for the next step in the action that he couldn’t sleep. He paced about his camp until, around midnight, he heard shells exploding and other sounds “like that of musketry” coming from the direction of Atlanta. The noises from twenty miles off were so intense he couldn’t tell if they were the sounds of battle or of magazines going up—a sign that Hood was leaving the city. He walked to a farmhouse next to his camp. He called the farmer to come listen with him to the blasts still reverberating from the direction of Atlanta. Sherman asked the man if he had resided there long enough to be familiar with such sounds. The farmer said they sounded like battle noises to him. Sherman went back to his camp. At about 4 A.M., more explosions like the first shook the countryside.

  He still remained in doubt whether Hood was engaged in blowing up his own munitions as part of an evacuation of Atlanta or the Union forces outside the city had felt their way forward and become engaged in a real battle. As late as the following evening, he was still not sure. He informed his army generals not to attack “until we hear from Atlanta the exact truth.” He saw no reason to “push . . . your men against breastworks.” Instead, he wanted them to “destroy the railroad well up to your lines.” But General Hood’s army was already long gone as the flames of Atlanta lit up the night’s darkness throughout the region, and the explosions echoed as far off as Macon. Only a cavalry regiment remained behind as a rearguard to slow the Union army’s entry into the wrecked city.

  GENERAL HOOD HAD SENT word early on August 31 to empty out the army’s remaining stores in Atlanta before the Macon railroad was cut off. He still had a plentiful supply of munitions and other materiel on hand for the fighting to come. Five locomotives and eighty-one boxcars stood lined up in a double row on the Georgia Railroad tracks running out along the eastern edge of the city. Most cars were loaded with food and medical supplies, but hundreds of gunpowder kegs, hand grenades and shells by the thousands, thirteen pieces of heavy artillery, 5,000 rifles, and 3 million cartridges filled twenty-eight of the cars. The trains idled next to many of the industrial shops and factories that had propelled Atlanta in its dizzying ascent to becoming the citadel of the Confederacy, including the Atlanta Rolling Mill—the former Scofield and Markham Mill that the two Unionists had been forced to sell to Confederates—the Western & Atlantic Railroad roundhouse, arsenal shops, a cannon foundry, and the Atlanta Machine Company. Many homes and warehouses packed with cotton bales fronted the yard.

  The chief quartermaster officer assigned to send the trains out of Atlanta failed to act, too drunk according to Hood to carry out his orders. The troops began their outbound march the following night. At that point, the precious military cargo sat stranded on the tracks, prevented from rolling out of town by the severing of the rail line. The munitions could not fall into Yankee hands. Home guardsmen alerted people living near the tracks to flee. Staff officers torched the boxcars and hurried off to join their departing troops. Sixteen-year-old Mary Rawson, asleep in her father’s mansion on Pryor Street, was startled awake around midnight by “a most beautiful spectacle.” The sky was “in a perfect glow,” as “flaming rockets” burst overhead and “sparks filled the air with innumerable spangles.” In another direction she saw “bright light” come from stores of cotton that went up in flames.

  The exploding trains leveled every structure for hundreds of yards almost instantly. Only a few chimneys and the wheels of the obliterated rolling stock hinted at what once existed there. Bricks, shrapnel, shot, unexploded shells, fragments of machinery, chunks of track, and boilers, flywheels, and smokestacks from locomotives, along with millions of bullets, shot out, perforating buildings more than a quarter mile off. Even days later, nobody dared approach too close as hot shells strewn far and wide continued to explode. Four days after the blast, one sightseer came upon what he called a scene of “perfect destruction.” He was stunned at the blast’s power, seeing rails “twisted into the most curious shapes imaginable and the heavy timbers on which they rested . . . torn into splinters no larger than matches.”

  That night hundreds of people went to high ground to watch the display of munitions fireworks; hundreds more fled underground. “Language falls short,” recorded Rawson, “in expressing the suspense and anxiety experienced by everyone.” Atlanta was being consumed by the war-making weaponry left behind by its former defenders, who had deliberately touched off the city’s first great bonfire.

  ALLEN T. HOLLIDAY WAS in the column marching out of town when the first explosion went off. “I thought I had heard a noise before,” he penned, “but never anything to equal that. The noise continued all night.” He marched and marched, sleepless, never stopping to eat for twenty hours, one foot in front of the other without pause. “I thought I had been tired but I never knew what it was to be tired,” he wrote when he finally stopped at 4 p.m. the next afternoon. “The bottoms of my feet are worn out to a blister.”

  As the morning light broke, more than ten miles out of town, marching with Atlanta’s departed defenders on their way to meet up with the rest of Hood’s army at Lovejoy’s Station, Holliday could still see the light of the fires burning on the horizon. A last big blast went off shortly before dawn.

  THE SUN ROSE THAT morning with an unearthly glow, looming red within the smoky sky. Not long after sun up, Mayor James M. Calhoun left his house. The city was deathly quiet. Only about seventy-five cavalrymen under Brig. Gen. Samuel Ferguson remained behind. Other than Ferguson’s men, some soldiers too badly wounded to move, and hundreds of stragglers, for the first time in more than three years soldiers did not fill Atlanta. Also, for the first time in his four years as mayor, Calhoun was Atlanta’s unchallenged leader. Now, he desperately wanted to save his ravaged city and its few thousand remaining inhabitants from total destruction. Around 7 o’clock that morning he went out Marietta Street to see General Ferguson. He found Ferguson’s brigade formed up in a line of battle behind barricades they’d thrown up in the road. He went to the general and pleaded with him “to withdraw his brigade and make no further resistance.” Even a token defense, he feared, would bring down a final fury of violence upon the badly wounded city from the Union invaders.

  Hood’s orders to Ferguson, though, were clear. He told Calhoun he was “to defend the City to the last, which he would do.” Knowing what th
is meant, Calhoun returned home to await the worst.

  OVER THE NEXT THREE HOURS, expecting the Union army to move forward at any instant, General Ferguson must have reflected on his grim situation. Late in the morning, he sent a courier to Calhoun asking him to meet. The last Confederate officer in Atlanta agreed now, the mayor recalled, to “comply with my request and withdraw his forces and have no battle in the city.”The general assigned the civilian leader “to notify the United States forces” after his withdrawal that Atlanta was theirs.

  Despite his personal loyalty to the Confederate cause, Calhoun still considered himself a Unionist. He had never abandoned his friends who remained committed Union loyalists over the past three years of war and came to their defense even at risk to his own life. He now turned to them. He invited all he could find among the city’s leading citizens left in town, most of them Unionists in any case, to meet him in his City Hall office. They decided to ride out—at Calhoun’s insistence unarmed—with a white flag to where the Union army remained entrenched along the Chattahoochee River. They figured they would find General Sherman there. A crowd of five hundred stunned people gathered quietly amid the perforated stores and buildings surrounding the Five Points. They watched the surrender party ride up to the artesian well. The men on horseback included Alfred Austell, Thomas G. W. Crussell, Julius Hayden, Thomas Kile, William Markham, E. E. Rawson, and J. E. Williams, all of them among the town’s wealthiest and most established citizens and several among those hounded for their Union fealty over the past four years.

  The crowd must have been shocked to see Mayor Calhoun welcome a black man into their midst. Atlanta’s mayor requested Robert Webster to ride out with the group. Even if they were Union loyalists, most of the men were slaveholders. Now, all set off together. A black man, perhaps the son of Daniel Webster, a slave belonging to one of the foremost Confederate families who had both made a small fortune from the war and done all in his power to help break the Confederacy’s back, rode alongside the white fathers of the city. They felt their way out up Marietta Street, past houses reduced in many cases to piles of splinters.

  For Calhoun the journey marked the end of the world that he and the other Virginians of old had fought the Indians to carve out of the Georgia landscape. For Webster the ride felt like the beginning of a new world.

  THEY ENTERED THE EMPTY fortifications near the blasted shell of the Ponder house, its walls pulverized by thousands of pounds of shell and shot. Spiked and abandoned artillery pieces sat mute in Fort Hood. The limbs of the dead in their shallow graves poked up through the ground nearby. Somewhere around the fields lay the body of A. J. Neal, beloved son of the mayor’s dear friends, just one among the tens of thousands fallen in the fight for Atlanta.

  About two miles past the ramparts, they encountered a few Union troops led by Indiana captain Henry M. Scott, along with a cavalry escort who came forward to meet the white flag. Calhoun explained their purpose, and Scott told them to wait there. He soon returned with Col. John Coburn. Mustering as much authority and dignity as he could, the exhausted, gray-haired Mayor Calhoun said, “Colonel Coburn, the fortune of war has placed Atlanta in your hands, as Mayor of the City I came to ask protection for non-combatants, and for private property.” Coburn had Calhoun write out a surrender note to deliver to his commander, Brig. Gen. W. T. Ward.

  The city now formally surrendered, Captain Scott’s cavalry moved forward down Marietta Street. As they did, he heard “loud reports” from the explosions still bursting around the Georgia Railroad. Scott’s men had not gotten far when shots rang out. A few Union men fell dead and wounded. Scott warned some people he saw that “if the Rebels continued to fire from behind houses they need expect no protection.” Alerted to the firing, Calhoun rode ahead of the Yankees. He found a few drunken stragglers and demanded they stop. The last Confederate fighters in Atlanta threatened to shoot the mayor dead. Union infantry came forward and in quick order cleared the city, taking more than one hundred prisoners, including wounded men left behind by the Confederate army.

  The very last fighting for Atlanta took place in front of Mayor Calhoun’s own house on Washington Street. Soon the Union forces reached City Hall, where regimental flags from Pennsylvania and New York were hoisted atop its cupola. Not long after that, James Dunning, the Unionist once arrested by Col. George Washington Lee’s provost marshal force, ran the first U.S. flag to fly in Atlanta since 1860 up a pole on Alabama Street.

  AT ABOUT NOON, Samuel Richards glanced out his window. His mouth dropped. There, “sure enough,” five or six Yankees rode by. They were among the advance Union men moving across the city. Once the stragglers were cleared and the city secured, Colonel Coburn led the first in a long line of soldiers marching down Marietta Street into Atlanta. As they went, some residents looked on “with apprehension”; a few jeered; others hid. According to Coburn, though, “Many of the citizens ran gladly out to meet us, welcoming us as deliverers from the despotism of the Confederacy.” Cyrena Stone was among them. She stood for two hours on a downtown corner as the long line of her liberators marched by. She waved a silk American flag that she had secretly harbored for the entire war. According to a friend’s postwar account, “She was a splendid looking woman about thirty years old, and the whole army cheered her and her flag as they went past.”

  CHAPTER 25

  THE SECOND BONFIRE

  AT MIDDAY ON SEPTEMBER 2, Noble Calhoun Williams, Ezekiel Calhoun’s grandson, and two friends went out to collect hardtack from the abandoned Confederate commissary for animal feed. Dr. Calhoun’s slaves had had a laugh at the young boys’ expense by terrorizing them with colorful descriptions of the approaching Yankees “as beastly and bloodthirsty monsters, whose delight it was to catch men, women and innocent children for no other purpose than to murder them.” As the trio gathered the biscuits hard as stone, Noble and his two friends spied the first bluecoats approaching. They let out a yelp of fright and raced home without stopping. The young Calhoun darted under his grandmother’s bed and refused to come out. His grandparents finally coaxed the boy out from his hiding place. The family went out together onto the porch. Soon they saw a federal officer and his staff riding down the street in front of the house. An hour later, Noble recalled, came “the tramp, tramp, tramp” of thousands of soldiers marching down the street by the doctor’s house. Even this small initial wing of Sherman’s army—the first-arriving XX Corps—was so enormous, it took hours more for it to pass. Finally, the command went down the line to halt and rest.

  No sooner had the bluecoats broken ranks than Noble saw scores of faces peering over the fence separating the street from the garden. They reminded the boy of a flock of hungry bluebirds. The Yankees looked longingly at the grape arbor, brimming with plump purple grapes. The soldiers’ rations for the entire four months of campaigning had been nothing but hard bread, bacon, coffee, and sugar, plus the occasional slice of beef. For the past four months, none had seen even a piece of fruit except blackberries they picked in the ubiquitous brambles. Before long, they flew over the fence into the garden, fluttered about the arbor, and gobbled down every last grape.

  SMALL GRAPES COMPARED TO the losses suffered by town shopkeepers. Samuel Richards heard that Gen. Henry W. Slocum, whose XX Corps troops led in the Union investment of the town, promised to respect private property. Richards was pleased to see that “private houses were not molested by the soldiers.” He thought the same would be true for other property and, after visiting the store downtown earlier in the day, “left it all quiet.” When he returned late that afternoon, though, his heart sank “to see armsful and baskets full of books and wallpaper going up the street in a continuous stream from our store.” He entered the shop, and there saw something beyond his worst imagination: “Yankees, men, women, children and niggers were crowded into the store each one scrambling to get something to carry away.” The looters took anything and everything, “regardless, apparently, whether it was anything they needed.” The downtown stre
ets were in an uproar. Doors were being smashed down, windows shattered, boxes and papers tossed out windows into the street. Throughout the Five Points, soldiers broke open stores and offices “in their mad hunt” for tobacco and whisky. “The rabble,” lamented Richards, “had then ‘pitched in’ thinking it a ‘free fight.’”

  Overwhelmed, he looked on “almost resolved” to let them empty out his store, but then finally roused himself to shoo the mob out the door. He stood guard until nightfall. The next day, he went to get his mule to haul home whatever was left, but the mule was gone from the shed, probably stolen. Richards managed to borrow a friend’s and went downtown to box his goods up. While he carried packages out of the store to the wagon, Union soldiers, “who looked like gentlemen,” walked in and stole books “before our eyes.” Several others, he did note, picked up books “and paid for them.”

  Even so, the Confederate Richards was much more fortunate than loyal Union man Robert Webster, as the former Bob Yancey now proudly called himself. The wealthy former slave’s luck seemed at first remarkably good: The storm of shells from the Battle of Atlanta and the city’s eventual occupation had demolished or heavily damaged every house on Houston Street; yet his came through largely unscathed. The Yankees even buried forty of their dead on Jared Whitaker’s neighboring property—“to desecrate” the staunch Confederate former mayor’s land, claimed the Intelligencer, the secessionist paper he once guided. Webster had done so much to undermine the Confederate cause and aid Union soldiers imprisoned in Atlanta throughout the war. He now watched in dismay as the Yankees went after the large cache of tobacco in his house as well as his livestock. Their victory rendered his remaining Confederate currency holdings from his arbitrage between the sides all but worthless. The boxes of tobacco he stored away represented a good portion of the wealth he had left from his enormous wartime earnings. Joseph Blood, another black man in town whose property Union soldiers had plundered, went to commiserate with his friend. Webster exclaimed to him, “My Lord, I thought they had come here to protect us, but they have taken everything I have got.”