The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta

by Gary Ecelbarger

  As the Democrats completed their Chicago convention, Sherman and Hood waged a two-day battle for control of the Macon Railroad south of Atlanta. The Battle of Jonesboro, commenced between the railroad and the Flint River, was the first battle where the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Cumberland together fought Hood’s army. General Hardee’s desperate assaults on August 31, the first day of fighting, against Logan’s XV Corps proved a disaster, suffering more than 2,200 casualties to Logan’s 154 (plus 18 others from the rest of the Army of the Tennessee). Although crippled by the losses, the Army of Tennessee survived the second day of fighting on September 1, losing the battle but able to retreat southward. Sherman had control of all railroads and roads and had the bulk of his army between Hood’s men and Atlanta. The campaign was over as the first Union troops entered Atlanta on September 1, and continued unopposed over the next three days. Triumphant over the success of his hard-fought campaign, Sherman trumpeted a telegram to Lincoln on September 4, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”33

  The timing of the message could not have been more beneficial because it arrived on the heels of the Democrats’ war-is-a-failure platform released from Chicago. The Atlanta campaign victory not only ridiculed the Democratic platform (the entire event in Chicago was denigrated as the Copperhead Convention), it immediately breathed life into Lincoln’s reelection. His supporters reveled in the game changer. John Nicolay, Lincoln’s secretary, crowed that Atlanta “ought to win the Presidential contest for us,” and the Union campaign victory had caused “a complete revolution in feeling.” Joseph Medill hailed the victory in his Chicago Tribune editorial, “Union men! The dark days are over.… The Republic is safe!” George Templeton Strong said essentially the same thing in private, telling his diary, “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!” Noting the political timing, Strong declared it “the greatest event of the war.”34

  Indeed it was. The capture of Atlanta two months before the election was tailor-made to boost Lincoln’s prospects as the news carried throughout the North. It also allowed for some of the heroes of the campaign to be excused temporarily from service to campaign for the administration in some of the more disaffected regions of the North. General Blair and General Logan, both War Democrats, as well as other commanders were ordered to the home front to campaign for Lincoln in their respective political spheres of influence or to suppress antiwar violence and intimidation. Logan in particular provided superlative service for Lincoln in his former Congressional district of Southern Illinois, a region where the president had received only 17 percent of the popular vote in 1860. Southern Illinois, nicknamed “Egypt,” was and always had been synonymous with Jacksonian Democracy. Arriving in early October as the region’s most famous citizen and hailed as “the Hero of Atlanta,” Logan brushed away death threats and tirelessly delivered two dozen speeches in five weeks. His singular and unusual effort—a Democrat stumping for a Republican—helped turn Egypt into a pro-Lincoln region (albeit by less than 1,000 votes) and put Illinois safely in Lincoln’s corner in November.35

  The Shenandoah Valley turned from Lincoln’s three-year bugaboo into another positive referendum on the war. Major General Philip Sheridan united three armies previously working independently and proceeded to defeat Jubal Early in three battles in four weeks between mid-September and mid-October. By itself, the turnaround in the Shenandoah Valley was unlikely to sway voters to support Lincoln’s war effort in the face of stalled campaigns everywhere else on the continent. In conjunction with Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, the second-front victory enhanced Lincoln’s popularity and assured his victory in November.

  The election results were not very close. Lincoln won by 10 percentage points over Democrat George McClellan in the popular vote and crushed him in the Electoral College: 212 to 21. For Lincoln, who was so certain he would lose as to author the “Blind Memorandum” in August, the swift turnaround and election results were his mandate to carry out his prosecution of the war on his two terms: the return of the Southern states into the Union and the end of slavery. Although he was assassinated before the official end of the war, the successes in the field—observed after his second inauguration—assured him that his two goals would be achieved.36

  Union successes beginning in September reversed Lincoln’s fortunes and won his reelection. Had Lincoln lost, states of the Confederacy could still have been restored to the Union, but based on the Democratic platform the re-formed United States would have continued with slavery intact. Under Lincoln’s terms, the South would survive but slavery would not. The postwar passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution wiped out slavery throughout the land, a byproduct of Lincoln’s victory.

  Several campaigns certainly had an impact on the war’s outcome. The Maryland campaign of 1862 is such an example, famous for the Battle of Antietam (fought on September 17, 1862) that effectively drove the Confederate army from Northern soil and back into Virginia. The results of the Maryland campaign opened the door for President Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation; it added the freedom of Southern slaves as a major war measure and assured that the South would have to fight the war without significant aid from antislavery Europe. The devastating Confederate setbacks in the Vicksburg and Gettysburg campaigns together and simultaneously (both campaigns produced Union victories in early July of 1863) put an end to the prospect of the South conquering the North, but none of those Union campaign victories signified an end to the war on Lincoln’s two terms.

  By the summer of 1864 the overmatched South could still win the war without carrying the conflict to the North and without European intervention. The strategy to defend its territory against simultaneous Union operations was unlikely to enable them to destroy any of those invading Federal armies, but it provided the opportunity to resist them long enough to change the course of the war. The change would come from the ballot box stuffed with papers of repudiation of the administration by a war-weary populace that saw no end in sight unless they ousted their commander in chief. By August no one felt this outcome as inevitable more than President Lincoln himself.

  The Atlanta campaign caused the death of Dixie. It was the most important military effort that assured the end of the Confederate States of America (a nation Lincoln refused to recognize in any of his public utterances) and the return of the South to the United States without the institution of slavery. Only Lincoln’s reelection made both of those outcomes possible. Had the other late-summer and autumn Union advances and victories still transpired with a stalemate around Atlanta, Lincoln’s prospects for reelection would have appeared very dim. Conversely, if the Union campaign victory at Atlanta occurred without resounding victories in the Shenandoah Valley and other theaters in the autumn of 1864, Lincoln’s election victory in November would still have been considered probable instead of possible.

  All campaigns have a turning point—a moment or a day (or sometimes longer) where the tide turned inevitably in the direction of one side over another. In some instances those campaign turners were perceived almost immediately during the campaign or by the close of it. When General Robert E. Lee ended his Maryland campaign by crossing his army over the Potomac River back to Virginia in September of 1862, the Battle of Antietam was nearly universally recognized as the cause of it. Likewise, one would have to be hard pressed to find anyone during the war or after who could not recognize the Battle of Gettysburg as the reason why Robert E. Lee retreated from his Pennsylvania campaign in July of 1863.

  Other military campaigns have turning points that seem impossible to identify. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland campaign of 1864 was noteworthy for its behemoth, blood-stained battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, North Anna, and Cold Harbor. Although those clashes rank as some of the largest in Civil War history, none of them was decisive in itself to force Robert E. Lee back to a siege defense at Petersburg, Virginia. Perhaps the true turning point of the campaign was Grant’s de
cision to turn southward at the Wilderness crossroads the day after his army suffered reeling losses in the two-day Battle of the Wilderness (all previous Union generals had turned tail in the years before rather than continue to press General Lee in Virginia as Grant had decided to do).

  Other campaigns did have true and recognizable turning points that could only be detected in hindsight. The Atlanta campaign serves as an example. One day and one battle stood above all others as the decisive day of the campaign—the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864—although few could perceive this at the time it was fought or even during the remainder of their lives. They went to their graves recognizing this battle as the largest and most dramatic one of the campaign, but their surviving letters, diaries, and memoirs fail to reveal that they held it in the highest regard as the day that assured Union victory for the entire campaign.

  Perhaps the only man who recognized this day as the immediate turning point was General John Bell Hood. He refused to admit it in his writings or his utterances but his hopes and expectations for the day confirmed this day as the watershed for the campaign. General Hood awoke on the morning of July 22 realizing his ambitious plan to whip Sherman’s three armies with one grand battle could make or break his campaign. Rout all three and Hood wins the campaign; roll up and severely wound two of the armies and he still could claim a decisive advantage over Sherman; destroy the Army of the Tennessee and Hood would significantly weaken Sherman and delay the outcome of the campaign indefinitely.

  None of that happened. The two “Tennessee” armies fought each other in an eight-hour bloodbath throughout that wickedly hot and just plain wicked Friday. By not removing the Army of the Tennessee from its entrenched position 2 miles east of Atlanta, Hood lost the Battle of Atlanta and all of his proclamations as to the number of men and cannon he captured could not change that outcome. His men would spend the rest of their lives hailing their hard-fought efforts that day but those efforts were in vain, for the stubborn hold of the Union Army of the Tennessee to their positions at the end of the day meant that Hood’s bold plan had failed. He was too weak in numbers and experienced officers and Sherman was too wary for Hood to undertake such an offensive again. Sherman could tighten his grip as he encircled Atlanta and sought control of the remaining rail lifelines into the city. After the close of July 22 it was only a matter of time. No one could have understood and appreciated this more clearly than General Hood.

  John Bell Hood succumbed to yellow fever in an epidemic in 1879. By the time of his death the site of one of his grandest battles as commander of the Army of Tennessee had begun to slowly dwindle to extinction. By the early 1880s the scars of the Battle of Atlanta were still apparent 2 miles east of the Gate City but the landscape, which still bore the 1864 trench lines and covered remnants of the battle, had already begun to change as suburban communities—including new houses and roads—had begun to grow around it, while most of the homes that dotted that landscape at the time of the battle were already gone. Other major battlefields of the Civil War were also under threat of encroachment. The federal government recognized the importance of battlefield preservation in other contested theaters of the Civil War and would establish five battlefield parks in the 1890s to commemorate the battles of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga (the latter two preserved in the same military park). The Atlanta battlefield would not be saved by the U. S. government.

  It was instead preserved by foreigners. In October of 1885 a team of German artists arrived in Atlanta and struck out to visit the battlefield. They erected a 40-foot wooden platform south of the Georgia Railroad on Moreland Avenue (a north-south street that did not exist during the war). For several weeks they studied the landscape of the battlefield and collected as much information as they could through military reports and reminiscences from citizens and veterans who relayed their information to an interpreter for the Germans. The artists created detailed oil sketches of all the features of the Atlanta battlefield. They were aided by an American artist—Theodore Davis—who bore witness to the battle and created several sketches of it as a staff artist for Harper’s Weekly; he served as a special advisor to this project.37

  After several weeks of work on the battle site, the artists returned to the studios of the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee. Throughout the winter and spring of 1886 they created an immense oil painting of the battlefield, one designed to be displayed as a cyclorama by wrapping it inside a circular stage to be viewed from the center. The artists were experienced at creating those works, having created cycloramas of the Franco-Prussian War and—most recently—completing a glorious image of the Missionary Ridge portion of the Battle of Chattanooga. For the Atlanta battle a group of four artists worked on the landscape; four others created the soldiers; and two others were specialized to paint horses. The cyclorama was completed early in the summer of 1886. The oil painting stood 50 feet high, stretched out 400 feet, and weighed over 9,000 pounds.38

  The Atlanta Cyclorama was as awesome as it was immense. It was first displayed in a specially designed building in Minneapolis in July, just in time to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the battle. The painting captured Cheatham’s corps breaking through the XV Corps defense near the Georgia Railroad; it stopped the clock there at 4:45 to 5:00 P.M. of the battle day, just as Union reinforcements were rushing to the scene to restore the breached line. It was a spectacular scene: depicting Manigault’s troops lined behind haystacks at the Troup Hurt house to repel the counterassault, General Logan galloping toward the maelstrom on his coal black charger while leading a line of staff officers, a line of Confederate troops attempting to storm Bald (Leggett’s) Hill from the west, and opposing scenes of soldiers Blue and Gray aiding each other and slaying each other. The cyclorama included General Sherman, the ambulance bearing the body of General McPherson, several division commanders from both sides as well as distant views of Atlanta, Kennesaw Mountain, and Stone Mountain. Completely missing from the vantage point of the cyclorama was the southern half of the battlefield where Hardee’s corps assaulted the XVI and XVII corps and where General McPherson was killed in the wooded gap between the two Union corps.39

  Veterans of the battle mingled within crowds of citizens born before and after the Civil War to gaze at the brilliant recreation of the battle on canvas. The cyclorama sparked battle and war reminiscences from the soldiers while the glorious image captured the imagination of civilians young and old. From Minneapolis, the cyclorama went on tour as it was displayed for weeks in various American cities beginning with Detroit in the winter of 1886–1887. It was advertised as “Logan’s Great Battle” in tribute to General John A. Logan, who had died the day after Christmas 1886.40

  Veterans completed well planned trips to visit the cyclorama and the battlefield of Atlanta. In the first week of February 1889—nearly a quarter century after the battle—General Grenville Dodge met his former division commander, General John Fuller, in Atlanta and rode out with a sightseeing group of veterans, family members, a photographer, and at least one reporter to visit the contested grounds of yesteryear, a field that had already been commemorated by previous veterans. According to a Cincinnati reporter:

  The party started to explore the battlefield in carriages and on horseback.… McPherson’s monument was the first point visited. It is simply a cannon pointed heavenward, the muzzle closed by a huge ball and the base resting on a block of Georgia granite. An iron fence encloses it. The monument was erected by the Society of the Army of the Tennessee to mark the spot where General McPherson fell. There is no inscription. The woods about it remain untouched since the day the General … yielded his life in this lonely thicket. A tall pine tree stands near. Through its rough bark are several deep cuts, where relic-hunters have searched for bullets. Even the corners of the granite base have been chopped off as mementos of the dead hero.41

  Dodge, Fuller, and the rest of the party visited Leggett’s Hill and the Georgia Railroad, but their main
objective was to find the earthworks that had protected their XVI Corps troops, after they were surprisingly attacked by Bate’s and Walker’s divisions during the first hours of the afternoon of July 22, 1864. The old line was discovered fairly easily and the two completed a task that was interrupted at the start of the battle—they sat down in the field and ate a fried-chicken lunch. Nothing and no one disturbed them this time.42

  Georgia newspapers reported on statewide attempts to preserve the battlefields of the Atlanta campaign, but the century closed with this plan dying on the vine. Veterans from both sides made their mark on those fields by placing key monuments on the battlefield. The McPherson monument was improved by the U.S. Army Engineers and Confederate veterans erected a monument to commemorate the spot where General William H. T. Walker was killed early in the battle. (Walker was more likely killed one mile northwest of where his monument stands.)43

  The gradual erosion of the battlefield failed to stop the veterans from visiting Atlanta. Beginning in 1892 those trips were enhanced by the “homecoming” of the Atlanta Cyclorama that arrived from Chattanooga and was essentially swapped with the Missionary Ridge painting that had been displayed in Atlanta and was subsequently sent to Nashville. A tornado swept through central Tennessee and destroyed the Missionary Ridge Cyclorama. The Atlanta Cyclorama was also damaged by fluke weather when a heavy Georgia snowstorm collapsed the roof of the Edgewood Avenue building that housed it and caused significant damage to the valuable work of art. The cyclorama was moved to Grant Park where it was displayed again in 1893. The damage from the roof collapse was eventually repaired—at a cost of $4,000—and the refurbished painting was up again in time for the thirty-fourth anniversary of the battle in 1898. (Surviving more damage and repairs but remaining on display for public viewing for all but two years since the 1890s, the Atlanta Cyclorama entered its third century as the largest oil painting in the world and it is billed as “the longest running show in the United States.”)44