The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  His strategy for the war that lay ahead also figured in the decision to remove the civilian population. He wrote his wife, Ellen, ten days after reaching Atlanta that his work of crushing the rebellion throughout the South was not done. “Far from it,” he confided. “We must kill these three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.” Though badly mauled, demoralized, and disorganized, the enemy still lay armed in dug-in positions outside Atlanta. Other Confederate forces continued to fight in Tennessee, Mississippi, and even Kentucky. Their supporters would provide for them. After the period of rest, Sherman would need to pursue the Army of Tennessee and other foes throughout his department. Emptied of civilians, Atlanta could be fortified and defended by a comparatively small force while serving as a base for the future operations he envisioned would be needed to kill the last Southern resisters.

  He knew just what sort of reaction to expect. He was sure the people of the South would “raise a howl against my barbarity & cruelty.” He had his response to their criticisms: “I will answer that war is war & not popularity seeking. If they want peace, they & their relations must stop war.” For his part, he believed with “absolute certainty . . . [in my] policy’s justness and . . . wisdom.”

  THE DAY SHERMAN ARRIVED IN TOWN, he called Mayor Calhoun to the Neal house on City Hall Square that the town leader knew so well. The red-haired Northern general handed the circumspect, gray-haired town official a letter addressed to General Hood and asked him to designate two men to pass through the lines to deliver it. Calhoun read the letter in shock. In it, the Northern general announced that the population left in Calhoun’s city must go, choosing whether to head north for repatriation within Union-controlled areas or to travel by train or wagon to Rough and Ready, where, under flag of truce, Hood’s Confederate army could transport them without interference through the lines and south.

  When General Hood read the message, he was thunderstruck. He wrote back, not seeing “any alternative in this matter,” that he would carry out the truce terms. In closing his letter, though, he protested that “the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.” He appealed to his opposite “in the name of God and humanity” not to expel “from their homes and firesides the wives and children of a brave people.”

  Sherman’s policy hit its mark. Sherman wanted to make sure that others heard the message. He responded with deep scorn to Hood the following day by pointing to the blond general’s own disregard for civilian lives during the warring in and around the city. He noted that the Confederate army had burned and otherwise destroyed scores of houses throughout their fighting—fifty in Atlanta he had seen just that day alone—“because they stood in the way of your forts and men.” He further pointed to Hood’s positioning his army’s lines so close to town that inevitably Union cannon and musket fire “overshot their mark” and flew into civilian areas. Sherman ignored his express wish to employ his siege guns to “destroy the town.” In any case, he scorned Hood’s invocation of God in such an ugly business as war, telling him, “In the name of common sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner.” He found it laughable that Hood should condemn him when, he wrote referring to the Confederacy, “You . . . in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war—dark and cruel war.” He concluded, “God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and the families of a brave people at our back, or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people.”

  It was Hood’s turn to answer scorn with scorn. He wrote back a several-page letter in which he mocked Sherman’s notion that his batteries “for several weeks unintentionally fired too high for my modest fieldworks, and slaughtered women and children by accident and want of skill.” He proudly acknowledged that his independent nation had waged war on the “insolent intruders” from the Union who “came to our doors upon the mission of subjugation.” He derided Sherman’s claims that any Confederate actions, toward the United States and in the war, were less than legal and moral for a sovereign nation to undertake against its enemy’s “hateful tyranny.” He concluded, “You say, ‘Let us fight it out like men.’ To this my reply is—for myself, and I believe for all the true men, ay, and women and children, in my country—we will fight you to the death! Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your government and your negro allies!”

  Wanting the last word, Sherman, who was probably as much a racist as his enemy, had no desire to see any black soldiers under his command, and noted in his brief reply, “We have no ‘negro allies’ in this army; not a single negro soldier left Chattanooga with this army, or is with it now.” He also pointed out that he was “not bound by the laws of war to give notice of the shelling of Atlanta,” since it was a fortified town replete with magazines and industrial centers of war.

  As Sherman surely intended, their bitter exchange quickly became public, published within days in newspapers throughout both sections of the country. In the South, it confirmed Sherman’s stature as “the brute.” For those in the North, Sherman not only sealed his reputation as a military strategist of the first order but won fame as a political thinker who understood precisely the tragedy of civil war and the surest route to victory. And he could knock the hell out of his opponent on both the battlefield and the page. “What a ‘buster’ that [Sherman] is!” wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr. to his brother Henry. The Adams brothers were grandsons and great-grandsons of presidents. “No wonder they said in the early days of the war that he was either a drunkard or a crazy man. How he does finish up poor Hood!” Sherman was now widely touted as a future president, though he scoffed at such notions, wanting nothing to do with politics. Comfortably situated in Atlanta, he wrote his foster brother, “The people of the U.S. have too much sense to make me their President.”

  Charles Morse saw Sherman every day after that, often sitting out with the general and other officers on the same balcony where the Neal family watched the first Atlanta companies parade in the City Hall Square. The new occupants listened to the Second Massachusetts band playing in the “pleasant shady” square in front of their houses. Of Sherman’s brilliance, Morse had no doubt. He found the man’s indifference to military order and chain of command confounding at times but declared, “He is the most original character and the greatest genius there is in the country, in my opinion.”

  MAYOR CALHOUN LOOKED ABOUT Atlanta and saw destitute people, many of whom had no place to go and no means to get to safety. A large portion of those left in the city remained because they were too sick or too old to travel. Together with the last two city councilmen left in Atlanta, Calhoun, as “the only legal organ of the people” of the city, asked Sherman to reconsider the expulsion order. The genial mayor penned a letter in which he appealed to the general’s sympathies for the bereft population. The move would cause “consequences appalling and heartrending.” Calhoun asked Sherman to consider the “many poor women [who] are in advanced state of pregnancy, others now having young children, and whose husbands for the greater part are either in the army, prisoners, or dead.” People traveling through the Southern army’s lines would face terrible hardships because “the country south of this is already crowded, and without houses enough to accommodate the people, and we are informed that many are now staying in churches and other out-buildings.” Surely, after consideration of the “awful consequences” of such a measure, the likes of which had never before been carried out against white people in the United States, Sherman would allow the civilians to remain—for, the three city burghers asked, “what has this helpless people done, that they should be driven from their homes, to wander strangers and outcasts, and exiles, and to subsist on charity?”

  General Sherman read the Calhoun letter “carefully” and answered at length the
next day. He drew on arguments he had previously made in letters to other Southerners but expanded and elaborated them in a way that would serve as a justification for his actions and for those of many future wars that swept up civilians in their destructive path. He understood “the distress that will be occasioned” by the expulsion order. But he had a far larger perspective than the “humanities of the case.” The war needed to be pursued to its end as quickly and definitively as possible. “We must have peace,” he insisted, “not only at Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war. . . . To stop war, we must defeat the Rebel armies. . . . To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses.” Knowing “the vindictive nature of our enemy,” he envisioned “many years of military operations from this quarter,” which would make Atlanta unfit “as a home for families.” What happened now in Atlanta affected the entire nation. He intended to “prepare for the future struggles in which millions of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest.”

  Sherman wanted to tell Calhoun and the people he represented that his actions were fully considered and not wantonly vindictive exercises in cruelty. He knew what he proposed would inflict pain of the worst sort on people who had not fired a weapon in the conflict. So be it. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” he wrote. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” He, though, was not the culprit. He pointed at “those who brought war into our country [who] deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” Should the United States accept “division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.” The alternative to constitutional union for all Americans was endless chaos in his view. He wanted order, and once order was restored, its blessings would shine down on the Southern people. Only return to the Union, he admonished, “and, instead of devoting your houses and streets and roads to the dread uses of war, I and this army become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may.”

  Once the South chose secession, what had happened to Atlanta became “inevitable.” He preached fire and brimstone as if standing in the church pulpit that otherwise held no interest for him. He rode hard on an uncontainable, destructive force brought forth by others. “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war.” For its hand in perpetuating the war, Atlanta had brought on its own demise. War and its desolation may once have taken place far off, but “now that war comes home to you, you feel very different.” At this point, “the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war.”

  He wished the city’s inhabitants to understand that once they stopped the war, he would be their countryman and, more, their protector. “But my dear sirs,” he closed, “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you my last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.” Until the coming time when “the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta,” he was immovable: “Now you must go.”

  Passages from Sherman’s letter to Mayor Calhoun would in time become nearly as recognized as those of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address of a year ago. It was perhaps the greatest explanation for the causes and consequences of civil war ever written. The words became public and heartened the North for the hard fighting that remained. For Calhoun and his neighbors, they struck like a knife in the heart.

  SHERMAN ASKED CALHOUN TO pull together a list of the remaining residents in Atlanta, indicating their direction of choice, north or south, together with their portable property. Over the next week, his office, reported a war correspondent, was “continually besieged with anxious faces enquiring for advice and instruction.” Drawing on Dunning, Markham, and Crussell, Union officers drew up a list of the known loyal Unionists in town, Cyrena Stone among them, and about fifty families from the list received permission to stay. Sherman strongly advised them not to. He acknowledged their “service” “in the very highest degree” but urged them, “Do not judge from appearances at this instant of time, but rather with a knowledge that the future will make Atlanta an important battlefield.” Any resident whose family members had already gone south seeking refuge, however, was required to head in that direction. As provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Morse was responsible for putting together the lists of people and their baggage destined for the North or the South.

  Like many in town, Samuel Richards faced a dilemma. Although his brother Jabez waited for him and their boxes of books at Rough and Ready, he hoped to go to New York City, “want[ing] to get away from the war and the fighting if we can.” He worried, however, that the Unionist citizen committee might blackball him. He met a Union officer come to purchase some of his furniture. The two men turned out to have mutual acquaintances. The sympathetic officer wrote a letter on Richards’s behalf, and he received a passport to join the exodus north. He and thousands of others packed up their belongings and personal items, he moaned, “to start forth from our homes exiles and wanderers upon the earth with no certain dwelling places.”

  The slaveholders among the departing people packed without their bondsmen to shoulder their loads. They were no longer slaves. The former bondsmen, penned Richards, were “all free and the Yankee soldiers don’t fail to assure them of that fact.” On the streets and even at home, Richards and every other Atlanta slaveholder now confronted what he regarded as “the impudent airs the negroes put on, and their indifference to the wants of their former masters.” They were “as independent as can be.” He sold off furniture and only “wish[ed] I had the value of our city lots and negroes in gold at this juncture.” His war gains were now of no value to him at all. “So,” he acknowledged, “our negro property has all vanished into air.”

  Over the course of ten days, from September 12 to 22, an estimated 3,500 people departed Atlanta. Some 450 families—709 adults, mostly women, 867 children, and 79 willing “servants,” along with 1,651 parcels of furniture and household items—went to Rough and Ready by rail and wagon, where they transferred to Confederate army wagons to continue their journey into the hospitable or unwelcoming arms of what remained of the Confederacy. Three hundred of the refugees ended up in a hastily erected log-cabin camp set up under Gov. Joseph Brown’s orders 150 miles to the southwest in the village of Dawson, Georgia. Although the northern-bound refugee records disappeared, virtually as many people are believed to have headed north, traveling by rail with vouchers issued to them by Lieutenant Colonel Morse to their destinations.

  After a month and a half hopscotching across the country, Richards and his family arrived in New York City. Living off his gold savings for a period, he soon found work as a low-paid clerk in a Broadway bookstore; they were now “sojourners,” he wailed, “in the land of the enemy and invader so many hundred miles from our Southern home!” Not long after reaching New York, he reunited with his brother William, whom he had formerly reviled as an “alien enemy.” On Christmas Day, Samuel reacted with wonder and gloom “that we should spend this day in the Yankee Gotham!”

  BEFORE JAMES CALHOUN LEFT to rejoin his family at their plantation on September 17—with thirty pieces of luggage—he wrote General Sherman a letter thanking him for the civility shown during the civilian transport. Sherman felt touchy, yet proud of a process that sent thousands into exile—with few hitches. “Instead of robbing them not an article was taken away,” he boasted to his wife, “not even their negro servants who were willing to go along, and we even brought their provisions which I know to have been Confederate stores distributed to the people at the last moment, and were really our captured property.” Fulfilling Sherman’s vision, Atlanta now became, he told his wife, “a real military town with no women boring me every order I give.”

  His men now enjoyed life within their fortified urban camp,
free from fear of being shot at any instant, enjoying three regular and full meals a day and taking time to relax by the fireside and stroll through the town’s blasted streets. Tens of thousands of Union troops built comfortable camp homes for themselves. They took planks off house and barn walls and pulled up fences to erect siding and lay floors; bricks removed from toppled factories went to build small chimneys for their cozy little residences, which filled all the open fields and meadows. Soon, remarked the provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Morse, the men were “living on the fat of the land.” Every other day, the army sent a vast forage train of seven or eight hundred wagons out from the city to scour the countryside for twenty miles around. The “fattened” train returned after three or four days replete with corn, sweet potatoes, flour, chickens, hogs, cows, and whatever else the quartermasters confiscated.

  In the cool fall evenings, Morse sat on his balcony with fellow officers, listening to the regimental bands playing in the square. “Isn’t a soldier’s life a queer one?” he wrote home. “One month ago, we were lying on the ground in a shelter tent, with nothing but pork and hard bread to eat; now we are in an elegant house, take our dinner at half-past five, and feel disposed to growl if we don’t have a good soup and roast meat with dessert; after that, we smoke good cigars on the piazza and have a band play for us.”

  THAT SYBARITIC MALE EXISTENCE within the city walls was of course temporary. Sherman was already plotting “another still more decisive move in war.” Even as the last trainload of civilians was pulling out of Atlanta’s car shed, President Jefferson Davis, not one hundred miles away in Macon, exhorted an audience of refugees and soldiers to rekindle their fighting spirit after the “disgrace” their army had just experienced. “Our cause,” he insisted to a packed church, “is not lost.” He contended, “Sherman cannot keep up his long line of communications, and retreat, sooner or later, he must.” When he did, the Confederate president proclaimed, the fate of the French empire’s army retreating from conquered Moscow would be his. “Our cavalry and people will harass and destroy his army as did the Cossacks of Napoleon, and the Yankee General, like him, will escape with only a bodyguard.”