by Marc Wortman
Ever-confident of the reward for boldness in battle, the crusading Hood hoped for reinforcements—or if need be, martyrdom. He edged forward toward Nashville. Yankee general George “Slow-Trot” Thomas, behind the city’s fortifications, took his time preparing to attack the last of the Army of Tennessee. Finally, on December 15, he sent his men out. Rebels outnumbered better than two to one held off the assault for nearly two full days. Watkins lived through “a hail storm of bullets” only because he was stationed in a flank skirmish line. Nonetheless, the war was over for him. He left the field perforated with eight bullet holes in his coat, two in one hand, a wound in his thigh, and a finger shot off. Blood from his many wounds sloshed about in his boots. The last Confederate stand in Tennessee turned into a rout. He watched as “nearly every man in the entire army [threw] away his guns and accoutrements” and gave up. Half awaited capture; more than 10,000 gray coats were taken prisoner. The rest ran to the rear and kept on going. Over the next weeks, thousands of soldiers filtered south into Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
The battered and bloodied Watkins went to Hood’s headquarters for a wounded furlough. He saw the long-haired general pulling at his blond locks with his one useable arm and crying at the shattering of his army. The Tennessee corporal bemoaned the fate of the Confederate army after four years of hard fighting. “The once proud Army of Tennessee had degenerated to a mob.” Out of Watkins’s original 3,200-man regiment, just 65 were left to surrender.
THE LAST DAYS WERE UPON the Southern rebellion. Sherman’s army started its march north from Savannah through the Carolinas, intent, if need be, upon reaching Virginia, where Ulysses S. Grant had yet to break through Robert E. Lee’s defenses. President Jefferson Davis had enticed Joseph Johnston back to command an undermanned eastern army reorganized in late February in a last ditch effort to hold off Sherman’s northward advance. In March, Col. James Neal, older brother of artilleryman A. J. Neal, now lying in a shallow Atlanta grave, commanded the Nineteenth Georgia regiment brought to North Carolina to reinforce Johnston’s thin army. He must have hoped for a measure of revenge against the army that killed his beloved younger brother. At Averasboro, North Carolina, on March 16, Neal and the Nineteenth were caught up in heavy fighting with a portion of Sherman’s forces, which included the Second Massachusetts Infantry, of which the promoted colonel Charles Morse, former Yankee provost marshal of Atlanta, had recently taken command. Johnston retreated, but the war ended that day for Morse. He caught a ball in the shoulder that forced him off the field.
That wound kept him out of the most severe resistance Sherman’s army faced since it had taken Atlanta six months earlier. On March 19, the badly outnumbered Confederates managed to surprise a wing of Sherman’s army near Bentonville, North Carolina. Fighting continued for two more days. When James Neal led his Georgia regiment racing and yelling forward into the Yankee lines, as part of the final full-on rebel charge of the war, a bullet pierced his eye killing him instantly. Sherman eventually brought his second wing into the fight, pitting a large component of his 60,000 men against Johnston’s fewer than 20,000. Ever reluctant to risk losses in battle, Sherman let the rebels who did not lie wounded or dead in the field fall back in the night. He admitted afterwards, “I committed an error in not overwhelming Johnston’s army” that day.
Little matter, though, as Johnston’s army was now a largely toothless remnant. Sherman did not want to be delayed in his planned northern movement to where the last great Confederate army remained entrenched in Virginia. On April 1, however, Grant flanked Lee’s army, and the next day Petersburg and Richmond fell. A week later, Lee surrendered at the Appomattox courthouse. Sherman personally accepted Johnston’s formal surrender on April 26. Not long after that, John Bell Hood surrendered himself to federal forces in Natchez, Mississippi. Abraham Lincoln knew the Civil War had ended by the time he was assassinated on Good Friday, April 14.
AFTER THE SOUTH’S FORMAL surrender in April 1865, paroled or deserting former Confederate soldiers—hungry, destitute, defeated, embittered, and wounded—hobbled and hiked their way home through Georgia by the thousands, most traveling hundreds of miles barefoot and in the tattered remains of their uniforms, still carrying their guns. Many of these men came through Atlanta, a city they knew for its wealthy speculators and hired slaves, its complex loyalties and sometimes outright opposition to the Confederate cause, and its rich storehouses of food and other supplies. In early May, rioting and gunfights broke out as mobs of former troops smashed open the state and Confederate depots and looted private stores and houses throughout Atlanta. The new goods, food, and money coming into town went off into the countryside. The footsore men, according to the Intelligencer, also took “by force the horses and mules belonging to the Quartermaster’s department, the only means for transporting supplies of meal, corn, &c, to provide for the brave men, the wounded and sick, who are daily arriving here and to furnish supplies to the sick now in the hospitals of the city.”
On May 4, Union military forces moved back into Atlanta, taking its surrender from Luther Glenn. His cause crushed, Intellligencer editor John Steele quickly turned cheek and counseled reconciliation and an end to belligerence. Any “further resistance to our fate,” he declared, “is both unwise and unpatriotic—unpatriotic because that which is not directed to the public welfare is not patriotism; and unwise because it is folly to resist. Hence it becomes our duty to conform to what now exists, and to our future American citizenship. . . . Let the sword return to its scabbard! LET THERE BE PEACE!”
The futility of further resistance was driven home when Jefferson Davis and the remaining members of his entourage, including his family, in their flight south were captured near Irwinsville, Georgia. On May 15, the prisoners were brought by train to Atlanta. With the Confederate president imprisoned in town, the American flag was raised on a large pole in the public square in front of the U.S. post commandant’s headquarters. It was the same place where hundreds of horribly wounded Union prisoners had laid for days without relief after the Battle of Atlanta. The flag flew at half mast to mark President Abraham Lincoln’s death. Resigned to his American fate, Steele looked at the flag out of his office window and ruefully declared, “We are reminded as we gaze upon the victorious banner that floats in the breeze of the return of Georgia to the national union, and of the duties consequent thereon.”
QUICKLY ASKING FOR AND receiving a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, Mayor James Calhoun took the lead in ushering Atlanta back into the Union. He organized a public meeting for June 24 at City Hall “for the purpose of considering the great questions of the day and of expressing their honest and loyal sentiments towards the Government of the United States.” Never the firebrand, always plainspoken, Calhoun nonetheless opened the meeting with a rare burst of eloquence. He told the gathering of men who had witnessed and participated in the rise of the Confederacy and its defeat,For one I can truthfully say, and am proud to say, that it was not my desire to destroy the old Union, the Union of our fathers; and I can say that it is the desire of my heart, honestly and in good faith, to return to it. On returning to the Union of our fathers, while it will be our right to claim the protection of the Flag of our Country, the Stars and Stripes, emblematic of the Union of the States, and of our nationality, it will be our solemn duty to protect and defend it, and that with our lives if necessary. Under it, in times which have past and gone, many of us have fought the enemy of our common country, and let us again resolve, should it ever become necessary, that we will do so again. And if, as a people, we have erred in the past, let us try to make compensation for it in the future, and let us not cherish, or keep alive, any unkind feelings for the people of any section of our common country, but let us rather cultivate feelings of kindness, friendship and confidence.
Calhoun’s voice for reconstruction of the Union quelled many calls for violent resistance. He appointed a committee to draft a resolution for the meeting to approve. The committee members included bo
th leading Union loyalists, such as Alfred Austell and James L. Dunning, and active Confederates, including Jared Whitaker and George W. Adair. The resolution declared, “ We . . . have thus convened to express our anxious solicitude for a speedy restoration and return to our original status in the Union, hopefully anticipating that the day is near at hand when the sun of our former prosperity and happiness may again shine upon us with undiminished and increased splendor; when each one may sit under his own vine and fig tree with no one to ‘molest or make afraid.’”
The gathering counseled “a ready and hearty obedience to the laws of our country.” It contended “in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, we gaze upon a deed horrible and horrifying. We hold it up to universal execration.” Those in attendance expressed “full confidence” in the administration of Andrew Johnson and “tender the President our firm attachment, fidelity and support, and trusting, that in all time to come, we shall be known, and only known, as one people, sharing one destiny, having one interest, one liberty, one Constitution and one Flag.”
The resolution was adopted “unanimously and warmly.”
EPILOGUE
SHERMAN’S RETURN
WHAT THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS coursed through William Lowndes Calhoun’s mind as he stood in Atlanta’s depot at midday on January 29, 1879, cannot be known. He surely must have felt nervous. He waited at the front of a large jostling crowd gathered in the ornate vastness of the still fresh-feeling Union Station. The vaulted brick and iron depot had been built eight years earlier on the site of the old car shed. It was far grander and more ornate than the one the very man he now came to greet had knocked down and burnt back in the fateful fall of 1864. Rumors rippled about the city that fifty-nine-year-old William Tecumseh Sherman’s return to Atlanta, originally set for the day before, had been delayed as a security precaution. In fact, General Sherman took an extra day in North Georgia so he could tour with two of his daughters through the old Cherokee country he had first encountered as a tourist himself thirty-five years before.
As the 12:45 puffed slowly over the Western & Atlantic tracks into the station, Lowndes Calhoun probably felt some concern over how his city would receive its special guest. He still felt the hobbling effects and lasting ache of the bullet he took in the hip while fighting with Joe Johnston at the Battle of Resaca in May 1864 to keep Sherman out of Atlanta, but today he wanted the general to feel the warmth of his city’s welcome. Nothing could better symbolize to the rest of the nation that a new Atlanta had risen out of the ashes of the old.
The recently elected first-term mayor of Atlanta did not need to worry. A friend had invited Sherman to town five years earlier. “No,” replied the general then, “the time has not yet come for me to visit Atlanta.” In the words of a reporter on hand this day, “We suppose the times have ripened now.” They had. Few people in Atlanta remained ill disposed toward Sherman—or, at least, few bore him enough hatred to do much more than crack off-color jokes about the man’s past behavior toward his “host” city. Somebody in the crowded station called out to Mayor Calhoun to ask if he intended to offer Sherman “the freedom of the city.” A riposte came from the crowd: “He made too free with it when he was here before.” The talkers carried on with their gallows humor. Somebody else proposed that in mock imitation of the days of war when the fair young women of Atlanta used to turn out all in white to send off the soldiers at the car shed, widows in black mourning clothes bearing bundles of kindling should form a procession preceding the general “to facilitate his work.”
As the train sighed to a halt, somebody called out over the big W&A locomotive’s steam release and clanging bell, “Ring the fire bells! The town will be gone in forty minutes!”
BUT THE FIRES OF WAR were out. Atlanta’s phoenixlike rise from the literal ashes made it the regional center to which enterprising people, black and white, came to build a new future and gave the city a reputation as the center for those in the South ready to move beyond the defeated Confederate cause. The four original railroads returned; a new one to Charlotte planned since before secession went through. Atlanta’s geographic destiny as a hub of transport and commerce forecast so long ago proved true—this time for good. Within months after the surrender, people again marveled at Atlanta’s spark and lust for business, comparing it to northern and western cities on the move. In 1868, a visiting northern merchant repeated the frequent antebellum praise of his Atlanta counterparts for being “more like New York merchants than any he had met outside the metropolis.”
Most Southern cities languished as moribund shells in their first postwar decades, but Atlanta (along with Richmond and Nashville) was one of the very few larger cities to grow significantly. In 1868, Atlanta got its wish for recognition as Georgia’s premier city and became the new seat of the state capital and its government. Elected mayor a month earlier, the forty-one-year-old Lowndes Calhoun now stood at the head of a fast-growth city with a population of 37,409, marking a nearly fourfold increase since 1860. Between 1860 and 1870, real estate values had plummeted in once-prosperous Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston, while they had risen in Atlanta by 40 percent—and gone up since then.
Lowndes Calhoun, James’s eldest son and law partner, had followed his family’s century-long tradition of public service. His election as mayor came after four terms in the state legislature. He was the first Calhoun to occupy City Hall since his father’s wartime tenure had ended in December 1865. James Calhoun had hoped his brother Ezekiel might succeed him, but the city, awash in fractious debate over the terms of its return to the national union, passed over the elderly physician. James himself had tried one more time for national office—a bid for a U.S. congressional seat from the district comprising Fulton County in 1866. In support of his candidacy, he recounted his long political and personal engagement with the politics and society of the South, beginning with his strong antebellum opposition to secession and his belief “that the South ought to exercise patience and forbearance and to trust the ballot box and the power of reason and justice for a redress of our grievances.” When the state’s voters determined otherwise, he felt “bound by the act of the State . . . to go with the people of the South . . . although I had so conscientiously differed with them in opinion.” Once the permanence of the national union was decided for all time, he worked to win support for restoration of Georgia’s full rights within the Union. Though “opposed” to what eventually became the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the right to equal protection under law for all races, if it were passed, he “would no longer oppose it, but would endeavor to give effect to [the General Assembly’s] decision.” He remained as he was from the first, a man committed to democratic and constitutional principles.
In Calhoun’s accounting of his life—which spanned his boyhood departure from a distressed Abbeville plantation, his fighting leadership in the last frontier battles with Creek and Cherokee tribal remnants, his role in building Atlanta and managing a city through its unprecedented changes during a uniquely devastating war, one in which the city itself eventually became a great battlefield, and finally the foundations he laid for its rebuilding—he took justified pride. He had not asked for those challenges, but he had met them forthrightly and without flinching. “I find nothing . . . to regret or condemn,” he concluded, “although I may have been in error, in some instances, in the judgment of others, and even in fact. At all times, and in every emergency, I did what my conscience dictated was right, and if I had the same trying ordeals to pass through again, I do not know that I could pursue a line of conduct more satisfactory to myself.”
He lost. Moderate voices urging accommodation with the federal government’s emerging reconstruction program lost their races for office throughout the South that year. The election’s outcome radicalized Republicans in control of Congress. Over President Andrew Johnson’s objections, they passed a reconstruction act imposing strenuous federal military authority over Southern civil life and governance, taking the vote away from
ex-rebels and enfranchising the region’s new black citizens. James Calhoun would have to content himself with the fact that his portrait would hang in City Hall, even if he had been ejected from it. After losing his last Congressional race, gray-haired and increasingly shaky-handed, he withdrew from politics and devoted himself to his legal practice as well as dabbled in real estate development. Ezekiel, too, left Atlanta politics to focus on his large medical practice’s patients. Ezekiel died of pneumonia in March 1875 at age seventy-six. The brother whom he helped to educate and saw grow to fill a central role on the world’s stage suffered a paralyzing stroke less than seven months later and died on October 1. He was sixty-four years old.
