The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Prince Ponder, too, had done much to help prepare the way for the Union army, while hiring out his time as a slave from his owner, Ellen Ponder, to trade in currency and whatever else he could sell through his grocery store in Atlanta for the past three years. He had made around $100,000 in Confederate money and still possessed a storehouse of valuable goods. He hoped to profit from them after the war. Before the Battle of Atlanta, he moved his remaining goods and personal property a mile and a half out of town for safekeeping on the plantation of fellow Union loyalist, wealthy builder and industrialist Julius Hayden. The conquering Union army camped on the land. While there, the bluecoats confiscated nearly everything Ponder owned, among which he listed 175 bushels of corn and 60 of wheat, 600 pounds of flour, 425 pounds of bacon, 15 hogs, a cow and geese, two mules and a wagon, plus a dray and a bay horse, a buggy and harnesses, and 14,000 bundles of fodder. He was promised repayment for the requisitioned items he valued together at nearly US$3,700—enough to make him one of Atlanta’s wealthier men after the war’s devastation, no matter what his color. He believed, “If the government knew how much service I did for them they would pay me without a word.” It would take more than a decade pursuing his claim, though, before he received barely fifteen cents compensation for each dollar he claimed to have lost.

  AS BLUECOATS AND TOWNSPEOPLE alike went on their looting sprees in the first hours after Atlanta’s fall, the Second Massachusetts Infantry from Slocum’s XX Corps marched past the two Calhoun brothers’ houses on Washington Street and into City Hall Square. Once they moved into their camp there, they set about taking charge of the city. Charles Morse, now lieutenant colonel of the Second Massachusetts, was named provost marshal. He appointed Capt. Henry Newton Comey officer of the day for the first twenty-four hours of the city’s occupation. Comey’s initial—happily performed—official duty was to pull the Confederate flag down from the City Hall pole and run up the Stars and Stripes. “Oh!” he exclaimed, looking up at his handiwork. “It has been a glorious victory.”

  He and Morse entered City Hall, which Mayor James Calhoun had locked behind him that morning. Their only “depredations” came when they broke the doors open into its main hall and courtroom, the scenes of so many events in the city’s now ended Confederate life. As provost marshal, the twenty-five-year-old Morse was now the “‘Mayor’ and answerer of all questions to the citizens of a good-sized city.” He was quickly “overrun with business,” dealing with the distribution of provost guards, handling irate citizen complaints, getting the hundreds of Confederate prisoners under guard, and stopping the pillaging in town. He took the county courtroom as his office and assigned other rooms for guard functions. Comey moved about town the rest of his first day and night in Atlanta, returning order to the city and “trying to protect the citizens and their property from the depredations of the vandals of our army.”

  The provost guard seized and confiscated all tobacco for distribution to the troops and also every drop of wine and liquor that could be found. According to Morse, spirits of sufficiently good quality went to the medical department, while the “‘benzene’ variety of whiskey” went “into the gutters.” By the following morning, the last looters had been driven off and Confederate prisoners taken in, and Samuel Richards grudgingly admitted that after the terrifying rampage of the first day, “The enemy behave themselves pretty well.” He saw the “sad sight” of nearly 2,000 rebel prisoners lined up in the street under guard from his Baptist church all the way to Whitehall Street. After four years of graycoat rule, he found it “strange to go about Atlanta now and see only Yankee uniforms.”

  WHILE THE POINT OF all attention fell into Union hands, on September 2, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman moved about a battlefield some twenty-five miles below the city. He did not yet know the fate of Atlanta and awaited clear pronouncements on the situation well to his north. General Slocum had already telegraphed Washington to announce, “General Sherman has taken Atlanta,” but the man himself did not know that he had finally captured his prize. Willing prisoners fallen out of Gen. John Bell Hood’s columns told of the city’s evacuation and even detailed the route of march, but Sherman distrusted the reports and made no move to cut off the retreat when he could. Instead, he spent the day watching the repulse of his assaults by Gen. William Hardee’s barely 10,000-man rebel corps outside Lovejoy’s Station. That evening he decided to hold off further attack. Not “until we hear from Atlanta the exact truth . . . ,” he explained, “will [I] determine what to do.” Finally, early the next morning, a dispatch from Slocum confirmed the taking of Atlanta. Sherman called a halt to the destruction of the railroads, “our present task . . . well done.”

  From his headquarters half a day’s ride south of Atlanta, he sent off a courier to carry his message to the city, from where it was telegraphed to Gen. Henry W. Halleck, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff in Washington. It described the efforts of the past few days that had broken up Hood’s last supply line and placed the Union army between the Confederate commander and “a considerable part of his army,” compelling him to blow up his magazines stranded in Atlanta and leave the city for Yankee occupation. “So,” he concluded, “Atlanta is ours & fairly won.” Those few restrained words would be repeated and hailed again and again in reports about the fall of the Gate City throughout the North.

  Sherman immediately dashed off a letter to his wife, Ellen, relaying the news. He was more boastful in telling her, “My movement has been perfectly successful.”

  He had already decided not to “push much further”—or complete the task of destroying the Army of Tennessee now struggling to regroup somewhere below and to the east of him. “Since the 5th of May we have been in one constant battle or skirmish & need rest,” he informed Halleck. He would pull all his armies back into a fortified city. It was time to rest.

  IN WASHINGTON, President Abraham Lincoln had hovered near the War Department telegraph office for days, anxiously waiting for reports to come in from Georgia. He breathed a profound sigh of relief when Slocum’s first word clicked over the line. For the first time, he confidently knew that the war had not been fought in vain. He wrote to Sherman in gratitude, “The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations that have signalized the campaign, must render it famous in the annals of war.” He called for the firing off of a one-hundred-gun salute in Washington. Still stalemated in Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant ordered shots from “every battery bearing upon the enemy” fired “in honor of your great victory.” The salutes echoed in towns large and small throughout the North, in Albany, Buffalo and Oswego, New York; Lynn, Massachusetts; Belfast, Maine; New Haven; New York City; Philadelphia; Cleveland; and hundreds of other places where the name of Atlanta had not existed until six months before, particularly in the West, home to most of the men campaigning with Sherman. By the hundreds ceremonial cannon went off in celebration, accidentally blowing off the hands of two men in Lewiston, Maine, and one in Boston; bells rang out, flags flew, and local infantry companies paraded before crowds of cheering townspeople. Rochester, New York, reportedly held some of the grander celebrations, firing two hundred guns and pealing every church and civic bell, while fireworks burst overhead, bonfires blazed, and “an immense throng” of citizens paraded rejoicing through the streets. A city now widely understood to stand second only to Richmond in the Confederacy—the heart to the brain—was in Union hands.

  In Chicago, too, a hundred-gun salute went off, and bells rang all over the city on September 3. The delegates to the Democratic National Convention, gathered there for their final evening of deliberations, listened to the reverberations echo through the hall and understood their national hopes were now defeated, even if two months remained until the November elections. They completed their nomination of Gen. George McClellan as candidate for president and ratified their peace platform. The planks called, “after four years of failure to restore the Union,” for “a cessation of hostilities” and negotiations among the states that “peace may be
restored.” A week earlier, their man McClellan had reportedly proclaimed, “If I am elected, I will recommend an immediate armistice and a call for a convention of all the states and insist upon exhausting all and every means to secure peace without further bloodshed.”

  A few days after leaving Chicago to start his half-hearted campaign for president, McClellan owned up to the implications of Atlanta’s fall. The Democrats’ candidate repudiated his own party’s “four years of failure” platform plank. Peace would come only, he now declared, on the “one condition” of Union.

  The blood spilled for Atlanta had indeed been appalling. Union forces had suffered 31,687 men killed, wounded, or missing during the campaign; the Confederates, 30,976. More than two-thirds of the rebel losses came after Hood took command from Gen. Joseph Johnston. After the greatest city siege in the nation’s history, though, the surrender of Atlanta erased any doubt that the terrible war would be fought to its conclusion.

  REVELING IN HIS CITY police chief duties some seven hundred miles south of Chicago, Officer of the Day Captain Comey of the Second Massachusetts understood precisely what his presence in Atlanta’s City Hall meant for the future of the war and the nation. “A glorious victory,” he exclaimed at the end of his first full day in the Gate City, “just at the correct time too. . . . It knocks McClellan into pie (as the soldiers say), and every soldier rejoices.” He was shocked, however, that the Confederate city official he and Colonel Morse, the Yankee “mayor,” dined with that day did not seem particularly dismayed by the turn of events. That man was Mayor James Calhoun.

  According to Comey, the mayor of the city, whom he incorrectly believed “a nephew of John C. Calhoun,” made known to the U.S. officers that he had “always been opposed to seceding.” He told them about his service as a delegate “to the Bell and Everett Convention.” With most diehard Confederates gone from the city—or dead—Comey realized that large numbers of those remaining, like the city’s mayor himself, “represent a strong Union sentiment.”

  Now publishing in Macon, the Intelligencer got wind of Calhoun’s dinner guests. The newspaper decided to publish a calumnious and false report that Calhoun and other Union sympathizers had attended an orgiastic ball at the Trout House with General Sherman and his staff on September 5, though the man and his officers remained more than twenty-five miles distant at the time. According to editor John Steele, though,About a dozen women of the town, not a decent lady amongst them, attended the thing. But what was wanting in white was made up in niggers. They mingled, oh! how they mingled. . . . Billy Markham brought two nigger women to the ball, and looked on the scene with grinning admiration. . . . The negro women were feted and toasted and monopolized the attention of the entire crew of the Yankees; and in fact some of the sympathizers who have affiliated. They waltzed, schottisched, and polkaed and danced until everybody was tired and drunk and the stink became unendurable. . . . Mayor Jim Calhoun was present, toasting and congratulating the Yankees.

  Calhoun refuted the story in a letter and even challenged the unnamed author “for the purpose of claiming personal satisfaction,” but the paper stood by its reporting, even citing a Union newspaper’s correspondent’s report from the occupied city that Calhoun, “himself a professed Union man, avers that nine-tenths of the present inhabitants are loyal, and remained to welcome the entrance of the Federal army.” More than a few Confederates thought the mayor deserved to be strung up with the rest of the Tories.

  While the press besmirched Calhoun’s Confederate reputation and endangered the lives of open loyalists like William Markham, the Yankee colonel Morse felt welcomed across the square from City Hall in the handsome home of William Solomon and his family, where he took quarters. It was the same house on Mitchell Street from which Bishop Henry Lay had witnessed the first Yankee shell burst across the street in the park nearly a month and a half before. Morse, trained as an architect, appreciated the gracious proportions of the large Italianate mansion. “The family,” he believed, “were very glad to have us occupy the house for their own protection; they are very fine people, and I think have very little sympathy with the South.”

  Morse and others charged with ferreting out active Confederates and providing vouchers for federal government repayment for property seized from loyalists soon learned who the truly loyal people in town were, going in particular to William Markham, James Dunning, and Thomas Crussell to confirm their claims. When former Confederate provost marshal Col. George Washington Lee learned of their cooperation with the Yankees, he called Markham in particular “low and pusillanimous,” describing him as a man with “no small quantity of the canine in his composition.” He wished that others had not interfered with his earlier pursuit of the “traitors” of the “secretly organized . . . Union Circle.” The same people were now “the identical ones who remained in the city and have resorted to every hellish design imaginable in securing the destruction of loyal Southern citizens’ property.” He hoped to have at them before the war was over.

  With his architect’s eye, Morse inspected his new town. “Atlanta is a very pretty place,” he remarked, “and less Southern in its appearance than any I have seen.” He was pleasantly surprised by what he found. “Quite a new town,” he remarked, and its “depots are the best I ever saw for railroad accommodations.” He noted the “large numbers of elegant residences . . . many deserted. Our shells destroyed a great deal of property.” Upon reflection, he regretted the past month’s largely indiscriminate shelling of the city. He was “sorry now that a single one was thrown into the city.” He did not think “they [had] hastened surrender by a day. They did not harm the rebel army, the only casualties being twenty harmless old men, women and children, and two soldiers.” Targeting a civilian population seemed wrong to him. “There are differences of opinion about this kind of warfare,” he understood, “but I don’t like it.”

  LIKE IT OR NOT, the man who ordered the siege was not finished with its residents. Without any martial fanfare, on September 7, five days after General Hood’s departure, still wearing his dusty field jacket, General Sherman rode into the conquered city. He and his other officers chose their headquarters and residences from among the mansions and finer homes around City Hall and the square. Gen. John W. Geary, who commanded a division in Slocum’s XX Corps, and his staff moved in with Mayor Calhoun on Washington Street. Gen. John M. Schofield took the house up the street at the Mitchell Street corner where the Clayton family had lived. Right across Washington Street, General Sherman chose the grandest and best-situated house of all for himself—the big, brick, white-columned mansion now abandoned to another owner by the family of artillery captain A. J. Neal, whose body lay in the ground somewhere near the ruins of the Ponder place a mile or so out Marietta Street.

  Sherman wasted no time. He set in motion a shocking first and unprecedented step of what would become the most controversial military measure in American history.

  He “had thought much and long” about what to do with Atlanta once he possessed it. The day after he learned of the city’s fall, he proposed to General Halleck “to remove all inhabitants of Atlanta.” He would send “those committed to our cause to the rear & the Rebel families to the front.” He intended to empty the city of all civilians, turn it into a “pure Gibraltar,” a fortified military camp, leaving the “entire use of the railroad” for military purposes. Not since the removal of the Indians—and never comprehending white inhabitants—had a major North American settlement been deliberately and systematically emptied by a conquering army. Now he proposed to remove a large modern city’s entire population. Atlanta was to cease to exist as a home for civilians.

  Sherman saw many advantages to such a move. He would be freed of the need to police and feed the destitute thousands in Atlanta and for miles around. Poor white women and children, elderly men, and former black slaves had fled the desolation of the warred-over countryside and gathered into the city region, where they faced overwhelming hardships, even starvation. Three
days after Atlanta’s fall, James Comfort Patten marched into town with the Fifty-eighth Indiana Volunteers. While passing through the fortifications, the army surgeon was struck by “the most pitiful sight I have ever yet witnessed.” Ignoring the troops marching along the road, a young mother skinned a dead cow at the roadside. Her daughter, “some six or seven years old,” stood next to the carcass with “a piece of the raw bloody meat in both hands devouring it with the eagerness of a starving dog.” It was nothing others had not seen repeated throughout the area.

  In a city off-limits to civilians, Sherman and his men would not be troubled by such heartbreaking scenes or have to worry about providing for the hungry and homeless. His men could carry out their occupation of the town without the tensions and occasional terrorist activities his investing armies had endured in every other hostile city taken so far. There was also important symbolism to his cruelty. He wanted the harshness of his actions to broadcast a message even louder than his artillery batteries’ report. The South, he expected, would draw “two important conclusions” from his self-described “barbarity and cruelty”: First, if any doubted him before, his expulsion order made perfectly clear that he acted “in earnest”; second, if civilians and soldiers were alike “sincere in their common and popular clamor ‘to die in the last ditch,’ that opportunity would soon come.”