The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  The South was confident that its economic power would persuade the North not to risk the consequences of a Douglas or Lincoln victory. The sectional split that would ensue would deprive the North of supposedly indispensable Southern commodities—sugar, rice, tobacco, and above all cotton—its economy depended on for trading, shipping, and manufacturing. Yancey’s arguments were widely repeated: If the South were forced to secede, it would come out on top. A united South acted from a position of strength. “We are independent of the world,” Yancey boasted. Any foes would quickly be forced to capitulate, but it would never come to that, he claimed. “We have the great peace-maker, King Cotton, within our midst,” clothing the world. Whitaker in the pages of his newspaper followed the Yanceyite argument to conclude similarly, “Dissolution of the Union would involve the North in commercial ruin, from which we see no means of her recovering. The South would be very much inconvenienced by dissolution, for a time at least, but the fearful effect, the national disaster, the permanent bankruptcy, would be to the North.” As such, support for Breckinridge would work to the advantage of those who hoped to see minority Southern rights permanently enshrined within the nation. Or, as Yancey more vividly laid out the issue, “Unless these people, therefore, want to go naked, and show their nakedness, they had better come and solicit the support of our cotton planters.”

  TOGETHER WITH MANY OLD Whig Unionists, James Calhoun watched the city hotheads with deepening unease. He doubted their argument and questioned the legality of secession talk. A slaveholder and cotton planter, yet he remained a “Union man . . . in favor of peace all the time.” This position put even the most respected of Atlanta men at risk. Still, he spoke out against those driving a wedge between the national sections—and local political factions. His friend Joshua Hill, whom he had known since their Abbeville childhood, now a Georgia piedmont congressman, voiced his and other former Whigs’ fears in Washington when he wrote, “the Union . . . cannot be preserved in my honest opinion, unless these ultra opinions are surrendered upon the altar of our country.” Hill and Calhoun would try to build that political altar. They joined others out of both the South and North, a small group of figuratively old men—many of them literally old as well, Calhoun being one of the younger at forty-eight—whose Whig memory encompassed a time when country stood above party and personal interest. Calhoun made the three-day train journey to Baltimore in the first week of May 1860, where he served as vice president of a convention calling together former Whigs and oppositionists of all stripes into the Constitutional Union Party. The delegates wished to turn back the clock by choosing a presidential ticket that stood for nothing except its opposition to the sectional ideologies cannibalizing the nation. (They also secretly hoped their candidate might prevent any more radical candidate from gaining an electoral majority and force the election back on Congress, where a compromise president might be more likely to emerge.)

  In Baltimore the convention delegates pointedly made no effort to draft a real platform, declaring, “Platforms adopted by the partisan Conventions of the country have had the effect to mislead and deceive the people, and at the same time to widen the political divisions of the country, by the creation and encouragement of geographical and sectional parties.” Instead, the men on hand pledged “to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution . . . the Union . . . and the Enforcement of the Laws.”

  Mocked by Georgia newspaper editorials as “shifting, halting, ambiguous, Delphic,” the party without an ideology nominated a white-haired Whig ticket—both men were born before 1800 and remembered well the spirit of the young Republic—with Tennessee senator and slaveholder John Bell at its head and former Harvard University president and classics scholar, famed orator, and Cotton Whig, Massachusetts senator Edward Everett as his running mate. One Kentucky newspaper derided as quaintly nostalgic the Constitutional Unionists’ call for the nation to leap off the trains rushing headlong down the same track toward each other by launching a “party which shall ignore the slavery question. That issue must be met and settled.” National politics assured that indeed it would be.

  THE CONSTITUTIONAL UNION’S Baltimore convention took place a week before the Republicans met in Chicago to nominate Abraham Lincoln. A man from the Old Northwest whose humble origins gave him some of Andrew Jackson’s common man’s appeal, his dislike of slavery, yet his willingness to countenance its continuance on constitutional grounds within its existing slave state boundaries, lent him an air of moderation appealing to Union-leaning border-state residents. He also was unlikely to control Congress, and the Supreme Court was stacked heavily in Southern Rightists’ favor. His hands would be tied. Little matter, Southern Democrats and even many Constitutional Unionists declared that a Black Republican victory would tear the Union apart. “Let the consequences be what they may,” warned a Georgia secessionist editor, “whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies . . . the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.”

  With November’s election just days away, the New York Times reprinted a warning from Hambleton in the Southern Confederacy: “The Southern masses, almost to a man, regard the simple election of Lincoln as an ‘overt act,’ and it is the solemn determination of the eight cotton states to secede immediately on his election . . . and we tell our Northern brethren that the South is dreadfully in earnest for once.” But there had been many previous calls stretching back to the Nullification Crisis and beyond to drive the Northern wolves from the Southern henhouse. Few Northerners, Lincoln included, took the latest threats seriously.

  The electioneering infused Atlanta. Yancey campaigned widely for Breckinridge, including a stop in Atlanta with his brother, Ben, now back from Buenos Aires. More than 1,200 people turned out to hear W. L. speak in front of City Hall. They responded, as they did throughout the South, with the “wildest enthusiasm.” A few days later, he warned another gathering that if the Republicans won, Southerners would be no better than slaves to Northern masters. They “intend to make us hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he proclaimed. Before that would happen, though, his land would, he vowed, fight. Southern patriots would “take the banner of liberty and plant it on the mountains of [Virginia], and there we will entrench ourselves as a body of freemen.”

  Not long after Yancey’s stop in town, on October 30, one week before Election Day, the Northern Democrats’ candidate, Stephen Douglas, held a campaign rally in Atlanta. He, too, was introduced to a roiling crowd. While a twenty-one-gun salute welcomed the Illinois senator, the enormous gathering threatened to turn violent when Douglas repeated a warning he had made at other stops that “secession doctrine is revolution.”

  As the leader of the local committee in support of the Breckinridge Southern Democratic ticket, Intelligencer editor Whitaker submitted a questionnaire to Douglas designed to undermine any claim he had on wavering Southern voters. He asked whether, “upon the election of Abraham Lincoln,” each state had “the sovereign right to decide to withdraw,” and “what shall be sufficient cause for a withdrawal from the Union?” If the Southern states did secede, would he support the federal government in “coercing” them back into the Union—and would he regard their citizens “as rebels and traitors” to be punished? Douglas didn’t answer, but he had already made clear that, as he had just told a North Carolina crowd, he would “hang every man higher than Haman who would attempt . . . to break up the Union by resistance to its laws.”

  The Breckinridge supporters let voters know where they stood in the event of a Lincoln victory. “States’ Rights men of Georgia,” they asked, “will you sustain the abominable Federal government? Are freemen of the South slaves of the Federal government? Are you to be punished as rebels and traitors, when acting under the sanction and mandate of our own State?”

  Those questions needed no reply, but in answer, the next day eighty-five men took up the mantle of
the Revolutionary War, declaring themselves a minuteman association. A few days later, they passed a series of resolutions proclaiming their readiness to take on the United States—a new war for independence—should the Black Republican win. The resolutions concluded with a vow “to unite our people as a band of brothers in resistance to Northern aggression, and in defense of ourselves, our property and our firesides.” Ben Yancey, who had released his slave Bob to hire his time and live virtually as a free man in a city readying itself to go to war over their eternal master-slave relationship, called for approval of the resolution, “not as a partisan addressing partisans, but as a patriot addressing patriots.”

  UNLIKE THE MINUTEMEN WHO published their views and their resolve to fight, if it came to that, a self-styled Union Association met “very privately often at night,” according to Amherst Stone, a member of the group. The men, totaling more than twenty but with a core of fifteen or fewer, moved their meetings from place to place among their offices and homes, entering and exiting two or three at a time to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Stone said, the “confidential friends” sought “to sympathize with each other all we could” and to promote the cooperationist cause. A local attorney and well-off property owner, Stone had moved from Vermont to Georgia in search of opportunity before finally settling with his Vermont-born wife, Cyrena, in Atlanta in 1850. With their growing savings, they built a comfortable home with quarters for their six slaves and two white servants on a hill overlooking the downtown. The property was sold to them by their neighbor, the Intelligencer’s Southern Rights publisher, Jared Whitaker. Both the Stones’ and the Whitakers’ houses were within sight of Bob Yancey and his wife’s small home. All knew their prominent black neighbors well.

  The Unionist circle was almost an alternative, if clandestine, chamber of commerce, uniting some of the town’s wealthiest and most respected businessmen. Among its adherents were William Markham, mayor of Atlanta a few years earlier and co-owner of the Atlanta Iron Rolling Mill, second in the South only to Richmond’s massive Tredegar Iron Works; foundry owner James Dunning; Nedom Angier, a city councilman, physician, and real estate developer; Michael Myers, coproprietor of the city’s largest dry goods store with twelve clerks in his employ; and Julius Hayden, president of the Atlanta Gaslight Company, which illuminated the downtown with coal gas, and owner of a thriving construction and brick manufacturing firm. These men had also come south from New England, grown rich in Atlanta, and, no matter their political outlook in the current crisis, acquired numerous slaves. While many were Northern transplants, several in the group did come from the South, including real estate magnate and banker Alfred Austell, perhaps Atlanta’s wealthiest citizen, and his fellow Tennessean, local schoolmaster Alexander Wilson.

  Not surprisingly, there were no black men on hand, though Markham knew Bob Yancey, among other leading blacks in the city, was “heart and soul a Union man.” They could not possibly attend Union circle meetings, which would have served to confirm the abolitionist paranoia. Had Yancey wished to attend the nighttime gatherings, he would have needed a permit from his owner, the fiercely secessionist Ben Yancey, to move about after curfew in any case.

  There’s no evidence that James Calhoun attended the Union circle’s meetings, but he was the city’s foremost defender of cooperation with the incoming national administration and counted many of the Union Association’s members among his longest-standing business associates and closest friends. He almost certainly knew of their clandestine gatherings and very likely joined in from time to time. Amherst Stone was his former law partner, and both men, along with several others in the group, were part of the syndicate behind the much-ballyhooed Georgia Air Line railroad, chartered by the state in 1857 to run through to Charlotte, North Carolina, connecting on to Virginia. Although the first shovel of dirt in the line’s construction had been turned earlier in the year, work was now suspended following the fiscal collapse set off by secession fears. Most of the men meeting that summer were also former Whigs, and certainly all supported Calhoun in his campaign on behalf of the oft-belittled Constitutional Union ticket of Bell and Everett.

  Few in the group were willing to go public with their opposition to those calling for a secessionist reaction should Breckinridge lose, as appeared likely. However, another Tennessean in the group, James Stewart, a prosperous flour miller, published a letter in the Intelligencer in the early days of summer with an apocalyptic warning should “the low mutterings of disunion fire give vent to the pent up flames.” Those who spoke of secession needed “to complete the sum of horrors which must inevitably result from the consummation of your frenzied schemes.” He urged readers to envision the undoing of Southern civilization that would follow. “Clip the telegraph wires,” he wrote, “pull up your iron rails—stop the transportation of our mails—compel non-intercourse between the North and South—involve our now peaceful inhabitants in civil war—close up our workshops and factories—abandon our plantations and farms—neglect the education of our children, and let famine and pestilence ensue.” In the political firestorm, such dire predictions appeared as another attempt to undermine Southern unity and were quickly discounted.

  The mounting political crisis had also turned economic. A local Unionist newspaper aligned with Fillmore’s former American Party and now Calhoun’s Constitutional Unionists, the National American noted that “the bare prospect” of disunion and consequent disruption of trade had crushed the price of cotton on the Atlanta market. More importantly, worried bankers no longer accepted bills of exchange for cotton, the South’s major credit source, sending the rest of the economy based on King Cotton into a tailspin. Adding to consumer woes were unprecedented jumps in basic food prices caused by fears about a cutoff of access to the big northwestern producers of grain and bacon. All this anxiety arrived before a shot was fired.

  The National American’s editors soberly reminded readers that “disunion is civil war.” If the secessionists carried the day, the prospects for Atlanta, together with the whole South, could not be bleaker: “All who are in favor of civil war, starvation, ruin, desolation, robbery, arson, murder, and the utter destruction of the South, should go for disunion if Lincoln is elected.” War, the American jabbed its finger at the ultraists, would impoverish Southern society, leading to anarchy and crime.

  In the heat of the polarized election season, few voters in the Lower South were in any mood to heed such Cassandras. Except in Atlanta. Bucking the tide, many Atlantans stepped back to take a second look at what lay ahead.

  THE ELECTION’S OUTCOME IN GEORGIA, the South, and the nation as a whole was never in real doubt. Breckinridge won handily in Georgia, as he did throughout the entire Lower South, capturing nearly 49 percent of the state’s ballots, followed by Bell’s 40 percent, and Douglas’s 11 percent—though that did give a Georgia majority to the Unionist candidates. In a heavily Democratic region that favored Breckinridge by as much as 70 percent in some nearby counties, Atlanta continued its contrarian ways, choosing Bell over Breckinridge. Bell received 1,070 votes, Douglas, 345, and Breckinridge the secessionist, 835. Combining the votes for Bell with those for Douglas, voters here demonstrated a decided readiness to compromise for the sake of the Union.

  Lincoln was not on the ballot anywhere in the Lower South. He failed to win a single slave-state electoral vote, but with slightly less than 40 percent of the national votes cast, he nonetheless won the election. “With the election of the Black Republican Lincoln,” harangued the city’s Daily Intelligencer, “the irrepressible conflict is upon us.”

  IF A LAND ALREADY STRAINING to its utmost to thwart abolitionist sentiment could become further aroused, Georgia did. Lincoln’s election sparked a racial backlash unlike any seen before. Gov. Joseph E. Brown owned few slaves and was regarded as an up-country Unionist, but he held deeply racist views about the need to keep black “inferiors” enslaved. Now, he sounded the alarm about the impending threat to the white man’s place. On November 7, he address
ed the legislature on its opening in Milledgeville just hours before the expected election results were confirmed. He warned that once the Republican administration took office, a “hungry swarm of abolition emissaries” would arrive to “eat out our substance, insult us with their arrogance, corrupt our slaves, and engender discontent among them; while they flood the country with inflammatory abolition documents, and do all in their power, to create . . . a war of extermination between the white and the black races.” As he spoke, rumors flared of a slave insurrection in the nearby countryside, lending credibility to his inflammatory words.

  Mobs in several communities responded by attacking blacks and Northern whites of whatever stripe. The gibbeting of blacks the pamphleteering slave Berry warned against had begun. “The Anarchy [I] predicted . . . some eight months before the election,” he wrote, “stating that the election of a sectional man to the Presidency would inevitably bring about the state of things which stands before us in a monstrous form at the present time, may be conceded to me as a good guesser, at least.” Little imagination was needed to predict that worse lay ahead.