The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  THUMBING THEIR COLLECTIVE REBEL noses at Sherman, amid the siege, Atlanta’s party life went blithely on. Distillers sold corn whisky to soldiers, and prostitutes serviced the troops behind the lines. Officers went to festive balls, where bands played even while the fiery exploding shells passed overhead. On the night of August 12, the Medical College Hospital physicians took a break from their grim labors to attend a ball. Among those cavorting with the officers and surgeons was Sarah Collins, a beautiful young widow of “high position in the first circles of this city,” noted a correspondent in town. She had come to Atlanta more than a year before as a refugee from her former Memphis home and quickly found her place among Atlanta’s leading socialites. The Medical College ball was her last society outing.

  The day after the festive gathering, in what the Intelligencer proclaimed “the most horrible crime that has ever been committed in this city,” she was found strangled to death in her bed. The reporter breathlessly described, “Her throat was perfectly black where she had been choked, her arms were bruised, and her body terribly mutilated; her clothing was torn and muddy as though she had been dragged through the mud by some villain who had violated her person.” An inquest supposed “that she came to her death at the hands of those who had her in charge at the ball.” In the chaos of the siege and with no city marshals left to investigate Collins’s rape and murder, nobody was arrested.

  IN THE WAR’S TUMULT, crime was only one of the many dangers people faced. The federal artillery terrorized the population stranded within the city. Samuel Richards noted after a particularly severe shelling that commenced at midnight and lasted until dawn, “Our humane foes allowed us to get well to sleep before they began their work of destruction.” The cannon fire mostly damaged property, but people died, too. In the first days of the siege, a shell came whizzing down at the corner of Whitehall and Alabama streets when the ironically named Solomon Luckie happened to walk out of his nearby barbershop. The popular barber was among the handful of free blacks in the city. The shell bounced off one of the long-extinguished cast iron gas lampposts on the corner and ricocheted off the street before exploding. Fragments shot out around the crowded corner. One ripped into the unfortunate Luckie’s leg. Several passersby picked up the badly wounded man and took him to a hospital, where, despite a surgeon’s cutting off the mangled leg, he soon bled to death.

  John Warner, the superintendent of the defunct Atlanta Gas Works, had remained a Union loyalist, despite having briefly been forced into Confederate service. During a furlough home, he deserted. Now the widower hoped to hide out from the conscript officers looking for him until he could flee north with his eight-year-old daughter, Lizzie. A woman who helped take care of the girl recalled, “The officers were then threatening his life.” To hide from them, the well-to-do industrialist installed a secret brick crypt entered through a trapdoor beneath his bed. The woman watched a conscript officer search the house until he stood almost directly over Warner in his hiding place. Storming away, the frustrated Confederate warned the woman that he would be back. “I will fix him when I get him,” he said.

  The fierce Union cannonade quickly drove the Warner household members underground, forty-eight feet down a ladder in the well to a nook Warner had carved into its side. Out of fear that conscript officers would come looking for him in the night, he descended at sunset into the underground space with his daughter while the servant members of the household slept in their own beds. In the first week of August, though, little Lizzie fell ill, and Warner, fearing the dampness of the well would further sicken the frail girl, decided to return to his own bed with his daughter beside him. In the middle of the night, the woman helper awoke with a start to the sound of groaning coming from Warner’s room. She rushed in to find the room demolished and a still hot shell lying unexploded on the floor. The bomb had plunged down through the bed, killing the little girl instantly. Her father lay there with both his legs severed. He had a few minutes to write out his will before he died.

  A heavy bombardment commenced shortly after that. With “the missiles of death . . . flying in every direction,” the distraught servant left the pair lying in their blood-soaked deathbed. She grabbed her own young son sleeping soundly in bed and dragged him down the ladder to the shelter deep in the well. Once there, she fell apart. “I sat down and wept, crying at the top of my voice, but there was no one to come to my relief, or even to hear me.”

  THE TERROR FELT BY those under the siege fire came to have an existential cast to it. The shells dropping down from the sky destroyed property and snuffed out lives like an arbitrary hand of fate. “It is,” observed Samuel Richards, “like living in the midst of a pestilence, no one can tell but he may be the next victim.” By the last week of August, a correspondent speculated that Northern artillery had wounded 601 and killed 487, though he did not distinguish between civilian and military casualties. The numbers, particularly the proportion of wounded to dead, seem unlikely. More reliably, on August 21 Samuel Richards noted in his diary, “It is said that about twenty lives have been destroyed by these terrible missiles.” A surgeon in town reported that 107 citizens required amputation of limbs. Even those relatively small numbers mark the highest civilian casualty toll of any siege bombardment in American history.

  AFTER A QUICK RECOVERY from his Battle of Atlanta foot wound in a Montgomery, Alabama, hospital, Tennessee private Sam Watkins returned to the Army of Tennessee. He walked out Marietta Street to rejoin his regiment stationed near what he called “a fine concrete house,” the Ponder place. From within the formerly much admired mansion, Watkins fired out the windows at the Union batteries half a mile off in the woods across the open field beyond the fortifications. His Ponder house post, though, proved an easy target for the Yankee gunners. When federal quartermaster Henry Stanley made his way forward, he could see it was “perfectly riddled with balls and shell.” The whitewashed walls drew so much fire that more than a ton of shell fragments and spent bullets was later collected from within it. Stanley thought it “looked for all the world like a huge coal screen,” but astonishingly, the stone, brick, and plaster house withstood the continuous fire like an aboveground bombproof blockhouse. Those nearby viewed the battered, but still standing, white structure as a symbol of diehard Confederate resistance.

  Watkins fought alongside Gov. Joseph Brown’s Georgia militiamen. He ridiculed what he called a “double-ringed circus” put on by Joe Brown’s Pets, “dressed in citizen’s clothes . . . the knock-kneed by the side of the bow-legged; the driven-in by the side of the drawn out,” many still carrying their double-barreled shotguns. After he led a militia company on a charge that captured a Yankee squad, though, he commended “many a gallant and noble fellow among them.” Militiaman A. T. Holliday from Wilkes County shared Watkins’s mixed feelings about the motley company he fought alongside in the trenches. “The old men looked sad and desponding; they looked as though they never intended to laugh again,” he told his wife. “It was exactly to the contrary with the little boys or as we call them Joe’s [Brown] babies. . . . They are as brave soldiers as we have in the field and if the Yanks want to save their bacon they best keep a good distance from them. They are not old enough to fear danger. . . . Some are nothing but babies.”

  CONFEDERATE BATTERIES AND PICKETS kept the federals from approaching. Massachusetts captain Charles Morse in the woods opposite Fort Hood admired “the very obstinate defense” his men faced. He shared the universal belief that the works “can never be taken by assault.” He, too, saw long faces, but they were among the Union siege force. Rations were short. Most men had been in the fight for four months without relief. “Everyone looks thin and worn down,” he observed; “large numbers of sick are sent to the rear every day.” Even hunkered down, casualties mounted. He stood in front of his tent watching enemy shells burst, when he saw one come “through a tree in front, strike the ground and ricochet.” He knew it would bounce through camp. “It was a twenty-pounder with a disagreeable whiz
and end-over-end motion,” he noted, “and it went into a squad of three men, breaking the thigh of one of them.”

  WITH MEN CONTINUING TO die or fall out every day and his progress halted, Sherman came to view the siege as a personal affront. He was losing his detachment and now wanted vengeance on the city. “This city has done and contributed more to carry on and sustain the war than any other, save perhaps Richmond,” he raged. “We have been fighting Atlanta all the time, in the past: have been capturing guns, wagons, etc., etc., marked ‘Atlanta’ and made here all of the time: and now since they have done so much to destroy us and our government we have to destroy them.” He understood as well that culmination of the siege—and the eventual conquest of Atlanta—had become a political imperative. He was about the business of convincing the rebel soldiers that the federal army could outlast them and that they faced utter destruction should resistance continue here. He shared his sentiments with Ulysses S. Grant, still besieging Petersberg: “Any sign of a let up on our part is sure to be falsely construed and for this reason I always remind them [Confederates] that the siege of Troy lasted six years and Atlanta is a more valuable town than Troy.” He would outlast them and outfight them down to the very last man.

  DESPITE THE TONS OF shot and shell poured into the city day and night, Confederate resistance did not falter—or at least the words in its support continued to embolden. The Intelligencer declared,We are very certain that the Yankee forces will disappear from before Atlanta before the end of August, and that a tremendous movement against him [Sherman] will almost destroy his army. . . . The prospect to us has never been without the beautiful sunlight of prospective victory lighting our hearts through the gloom and the dark shade of defeat through which we have traveled these many weary months past. Our confidence in the prowess of General Hood and his invincible army of veterans is unabating and with such firm belief we wish to imbue the spirit of the people and the army. So long as the feeling that all will end well enthuses us, we are unconquerable and we will be successful.

  Hope provided the fuel for the Confederate war engine. Every day the siege continued pumped up those hopes.

  A siege, too, was not Sherman’s style of war. “I am too impatient for a siege,” he wrote Washington in frustration. He worried, too. The longer his men remained in the trenches, the greater the risk his forces faced, particularly for attacks on his supplies and the hard-to-defend rail line down from Chattanooga. “We must act,” he decided. “We cannot sit down and do nothing because it involves risk.” He also resented that Hood’s inferior force held his army in place. “I feel mortified that he holds us in check by the aid of his militia. . . . It seems we are more besieged” than the Confederates.

  National politics, too, weighed on the shoulders of the men fighting to conquer and defend Atlanta. The Democratic Party was set to hold its nominating convention, postponed from the spring, starting on August 29 in Chicago. Peace Democrats hoped to capture the party there and, with the popular Gen. George McClellan as the party nominee, take the presidency from Abraham Lincoln in November. Two stalemated battlefronts poisoned national political sentiments, already appalled by the costs of the war. Even with Union armies battering and besieging the rebels, many believed the war remained unwinnable. The Intelligencer summarized the growing hopes that Sherman could not hold out much longer. A victory by the Army of Tennessee here, declared Steele, “will end the summer’s campaign . . . so disastrously to Lincoln that we shall look confidently to his defeat in the coming presidential election, and the triumph of the peace party in the North. Under such circumstances no more armies could be raised in the North to prosecute the war.” The North would lose the war before the ramparts of the citadel of the Confederacy.

  And then, amazingly, it seemed that Atlanta had won.

  ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, Atlantans woke up startled. They listened intently to something they had not heard in months: silence. No gunfire. Not a single cannon report. “Everything is as still as death in our front this morning and has been since 3 o’clock this morning,” a stunned T. Holliday penned in wonder. “The shelling ceased altogether,” recorded Samuel Richards not long after. Rumors flew “that the enemy was retreating and . . . have deserted their camps around the city.” Gray-coated scouts felt their way forward, expecting shots to ring out at any instant, until they scrambled into the empty Union lines. Finally, an ecstatic Holliday confirmed the rumors. “Sherman is compelled to fall back for the want of supplies for his army!” he elatedly reported. “The Yanks are gone now and they are not likely to return soon.”

  Baffled, stunned, delighted, Atlantans streamed out of their bombproofs and shelters and walked and rode to the lines. Thousands of tourists quickly ventured through the fields to inspect the Yankee camps and pick up souvenirs. Holliday scoffed when he saw them “riding in buggies with white linen coats on.” “Where, where oh where,” he asked, “were they in their holes in the city?” The fight apparently won, he began to dream of going home. “I am coming home,” he mused, “and play with my wife and babies before a great while and sleep on a feather bed too. Now won’t that be a great luxury after I get used to it? I am reminded of eating strawberries and cream with plenty of sugar mixed.”

  Over the next two days, the Intelligencer’s correspondent in Atlanta explored “all over the Yankee works . . . and I did not see a Yankee in all my rambles. It is said the enemy has massed his forces on our left, but I doubt that very much. I am of the opinion that the whole Yankee army is now on the western bank of the Chattahoochee River.” Atlanta was reborn. “The city,” he reported, “has already begun to fill up. Today the streets are crowded as they were of old. Officers, soldiers, citizens, women and children and negroes are crowding on the streets, and everybody wears a smile on their countenance.” Walking through the desolate Union camp, he found a note written “in a large bold hand with coal on the headboard of one of the Yankee bunks.” It read, “Goodbye, Johnny. We are going to see you soon, and when we come to Georgia we will remember Kennesaw.” It was signed, “YANK.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE FIRST BONFIRE

  MILITIAMAN T. HOLLIDAY now skipped about the lines and through town with a light and even joyous step. Yankee cavalry deserters told their Southern hosts that soldiers in the Union lines had “been living on one cracker a day for four days,” explaining to Holliday why the invaders had been driven to backtrack across the river. The militiaman ignored those who returned from the abandoned federal camp carrying armfuls of hardtack and bacon. Some even found unheard of treats, according to one scout, “feasting on sardines and lobsters, canned fruit of every kind, candies, cakes and raisins, besides many other good things their stomachs had long been strangers to.” Strange leavings for a starving army, yet Holliday shared the thrilling optimism infusing the city. “I feel more confident and hopeful this morning about the salvation of Atlanta than I have since I have been here,” the militiaman cheerfully related. When relieved, but still unsure, citizens came to see the lines, several asked him, “Where are the Yanks gone?” He answered, “Gone up a spout.” He was going home. “I think we will not be out but a short time now,” he reassured his wife.

  Gen. John Bell Hood kept part of his forces on alert, leery of trusting that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman really had gone. On the evening after the Union men disappeared, though, he telegraphed the Confederate secretary of war in Richmond to tell him that the Northerners had indeed withdrawn from his eastern and northern fronts. “Last night,” he conveyed, “the enemy abandoned the Augusta railroad, and all the country between that and the Dalton railroad.” The sense of vindication and, indeed, rebirth for the cause could be felt from Atlanta to Richmond. “The prevailing impression” in Hood’s headquarters, recorded a staff officer, is that Sherman is “falling back across the Chattahoochee River.” Added another, the prospect of Sherman’s “speedy destruction” infected Hood and his staff with “high glee.” Military bands played in the streets, while jubilant reside
nts danced in step behind them.

  Walking through the battered town three days after the Yankees’ withdrawal, a euphoric Holliday gushed, “Everything looks brighter and brighter to me every day.” He believed he had accomplished his historic mission for his land, “one of the noblest acts of my whole life.”

  NOT EVERYONE WAS CONVINCED that Sherman was indeed falling back. Soldiers around Holliday jumped about “in such high spirits,” he reported, yet at the same time he had never “seen them so anxious before.” Even if the signs pointed to a hasty, forced evacuation under the cover of darkness, the regular army knew Sherman too well by now not to suspect some new flanking trick. The veterans he called “the old soldiers . . . have a great anxiety to know where the Yanks have gone and seem anxious to follow them.”

  Despite the rumors of Sherman’s retreat that reanimated the moribund city of Atlanta, even Samuel Richards, who never once entered the trenches—though he had shouldered a musket as part of the toothless home guard—distrusted Yankee intentions. The issue gnawed at him. They “are going somewhere,” he fretted, “but what is their design it is hard tell. I fear that we have not yet got rid of them finally, but that they have some other plan in view to molest and injure us.”