The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  TO HELP KEEP ATLANTA’S Confederate engine and hub of war making on track, Mayor Jared Whitaker resigned his office in late November 1861 to become commissary general for the Georgia State army, setting up his headquarters downtown. City councilman Thomas Lowe filled in for Whitaker for the month and a half before the next election. With nearly all hope for a brief war dashed and the conflict assuming an all-consuming gravity and awesome violence, in January the electorate jettisoned political ideology and turned to a steadying and moderating hand to guide the town. James Calhoun remained perhaps the best-known Atlanta citizen opposed to secession. Moreover, he had never turned his back on friends or professional associates who had remained avowed Unionists and, in some cases, been harassed and even attacked as traitors. His own politics, though, were now in alignment with the needs of his regional home. Said his son Patrick Henry, his father still “thought that our differences should be settled peaceably, and not by war.” But the war had come, and though his father would later contend that he, too, had remained a Unionist all along, his youngest son insisted, “There was no better Confederate than he.”

  In running for City Hall, he benefited from swiftly changed voter demographics. Many of the men eligible to cast ballots, including many of the most militant secessionists, had already departed for military service. The electorate left in town comprised primarily older and wealthier men more likely to favor the fifty-year-old Calhoun’s good government and pragmatic brand of politics. He won the election, handily defeating T. L. Thomas by 530 to 256 votes for his first one-year term in office.

  In stepping into his City Hall office, Calhoun faced a burgeoning and unprecedented set of challenges, perhaps more daunting than those faced by any American mayor ever, to govern his still-young municipality. All that expanded and new industry brought jobs. Jobs and the Union army nibbling sharply at the slave states’ frontiers brought new people to town in droves. The population doubled in a year to fill the needs of the factories and shops. Refugees and wounded soldiers arrived by the thousands. A backwoods railroad transfer stop and regional market town instantly became a substantial small city, the fourth largest in the Lower South, after only New Orleans, Charleston, and Mobile. While most towns diminished in the face of Yankee threats, Atlanta just grew and grew.

  Those who knew Atlanta best found it practically unrecognizable from prewar days. Observed one frequent longtime visitor a little over a year after the war began, “The car shed was there, the people were there. . . . The faces I had usually met were no longer visible, but strange people in strange costumes met me at every corner.” Another visitor watched as “all day long and even during night, it is ‘clang, clang, clang,’ as the cars arrive or depart—filled to their utmost capacity with the crowd of floating population going somewhere, or returning from that direction.” This mounting tide of opportunity and need overwhelmed every aspect of town services. Thrust into its leadership, Calhoun worked to keep Atlanta functioning, believing that City Hall should do all it could to ameliorate conditions. He was soon forced to manage the city with little help from the city council as more than half its members shortly resigned to enter military service.

  At home, his life was merely an extension of his day’s labors. Calhoun’s law partner and son, William Lowndes, watched the heavy traffic of men passing through their Washington Street house. He would shortly depart for the army, but while still living in his father’s house, Lowndes recalled “scarcely a day or night that it was not visited either by confederate officers, civil officers or citizens, and many times wounded and sick soldiers were cared for therein.”

  ALL THOSE OLDER, wealthier Atlanta citizens, refugees arriving daily, skilled railroad mechanics and others exempted from military service, needle women with their meager earnings, thousands of convalescing soldiers well enough to walk around, and troops in transit or on leave carried more or less cash with them. They made ready customers for the Five Points’ profit-sniffing merchants. The shopkeepers of Whitehall, Alabama, and Peachtree streets, too, saw war as a chance to expand their businesses like never before. With Northern manufactures no longer to be had, shopkeepers needed to extend their reach to find goods to sell this vast new clientele. Atlanta, along with the rest of the South, would have to shrug off any lingering provincialism to become an international city. The local chamber of commerce traveled far beyond the South, dispatching representatives across the Atlantic to find new trading partners, and forwarded weekly editions of local newspapers to European manufacturing cities with ads for local importers.

  In the early fall of 1861, the chamber addressed a boosterish circular to its London counterpart in which the pint-size city’s merchants audaciously proclaimed their hometown, symbolically “located upon a granite or primary formation at a high elevation” and standing at “the geographical centre of the new Confederacy,” now rivaled New York City. The Gate City opened its doors wide to new trading partners, while, declared the chamber, the great Northern metropolis and trading hub was “from various causes already becoming inoperative.” Blithely ignoring the federal naval blockade of the entire southern seaboard, Atlanta merchants invited English producers to ship their goods without fear or tariff. “Our whole coast is thus open to the commerce of the world.”

  When the New York Times’ editors read the Atlanta pamphlet, they sneered at “the ridiculous cockerel circular of a Chamber of Commerce of a little wooden village in Georgia.” But the Gate City put potential business partners on notice that it “want[ed] the freest possible trade with all the world.”

  Atlanta aimed to become a world trading hub for the new Confederacy, and wealthy Atlantans wanted to profit from that overseas trade. Leading city merchant partners Sidney Root and John Beach secured Atlanta’s largest interest in the trade by establishing a large fleet of ships and a port warehouse in Charleston. Beach moved to England, where he set up a prominent import-export office in Liver-pool. Soon the Root & Beach firm had as many as twenty-one steamers running at any one time. Besides their warehouse in Charleston, Root & Beach had eleven in Atlanta. Other Atlantans envied their enormous profits. “Almost everybody who had any money was anxious to go into a blockade company,” recalled Amherst Stone, who would soon leave the city and his wife, Cyrena, behind in hopes of acquiring a ship to bring “considerable cotton” out for trade. Scheming to put his northern contacts to use, he collected tens of thousands of dollars from business associates to finance a move north, where he hoped to win official permission to bring cotton to the Union. He quickly found himself locked up in a prison in the New York Harbor.

  Root & Beach ships got through the blockade often enough, and as a result of ships eluding the blockade, by the summer of 1862, the Southern Confederacy reported, as much from aspiration as fact, “our own city is getting to be full of English goods.” Traders overseas appeared eager to expand their entry into the Southern market. Before secession, most trade passed through Northern ports before making its way south. “Soon,” crowed the Confederacy, “we shall have plenty of English goods here, which have not been polluted by the touch of Yankee fingers, and which have not greased their palms in passing through; but they will have come direct to us from England.” The present “sufferings, inconveniences and privations” boded well for the future of an independent and self-sufficient Southern republic. “The blockade and the high price for goods have accomplished, and will accomplish, more for us to introduce and establish direct trade than twenty years of diplomacy.”

  IN THE EARLY MONTHS of the war, the New York Times could still disparage “the great centropolitan Atlanta,” which it dared “Mr. Bull” to find on the map “if the stupid chartographer has not left it out.” But by the end of the second year of fighting, the Times needed to acknowledge a new center of gravity in the rebellious states. The newspaper reported,Atlanta is really the heart of the Southern States and therefore the most vital point in the so-called Confederate States. [The region’s towns] manufacture one-third of the horseshoes,
guns and munitions of war made in the South. The machinery for the production of small arms has been taken to Atlanta, which place has extensive foundries. . . . Besides it is a flourishing city, an important railway centre, and extensive depot for Confederate commissary stores. Atlanta to the South, is Chicago to the Northwest, and its occupation by the soldiers of the Union would be virtually snapping the backbone of the rebellion.

  Yankee boots marching on distant battlefields remained far from the Confederacy’s industrial and commercial heart, but strategic planners considered it a future target.

  THE CONFEDERATE SUPERINTENDENT of armories, Lt. Col. James Henry Burton, was drawn to Atlanta, or so he thought when he came looking to secure a site to build his massive new armory for manufacturing Enfield model rifles in the summer of 1862. He was dismayed by the reception he received. The land was “so broken and rolling” that finding even “an acre of perfectly level ground” proved nearly impossible. He finally chose the old racetrack as the best spot, next to the fair grounds where the arsenal’s munitions laboratory buildings were going up. The property’s absentee owner was renting the site for the labs. He was willing to sell land for the new armory outright to Burton and the Confederacy, but, as a journalist noted, “the value of property [was] advancing with railroad velocity.” The land’s owner knew the value would only increase with time. He asked $15,000 for fewer than fifty acres, at least a twentyfold markup over the prewar rate for land outside the city limits.

  Burton might have negotiated further but ultimately felt rebuffed by “the prevailing feeling of the people of this place generally towards the Govt.” Atlanta, he discerned, was in the Confederacy but not entirely of the Confederacy. City council officials delegated to assist him met his offer to build one of the largest industrial enterprises—and one most vital to Confederate military success—with “indifference.” He angrily concluded, “Speculation in real estate seems to be the sole object in view by the citizens of this place.” Business was booming.

  Fortunately, other, less prosperous inland Georgia towns were more than happy to take what Atlanta spurned. Macon’s town fathers offered him “a free gift” of “an ideally suited” thirty-acre tract of land. “The citizens of Macon are most anxious for the location of the Armory at that place . . . whilst quite the contrary seems to be the prevailing sentiment here.” Burton chose Macon. “Now,” he scolded his hosts, “here is a good opportunity of accomplishing, without cost, what it seems I cannot accomplish at this place at any cost.” He saw little chance for Atlanta to become “a thriving place” in the new nation without a change of heart. He could only shake his head. “I am disappointed in Atlanta,” he wrote the Confederate chief of ordnance in Richmond.

  OTHER VISITORS TO ATLANTA may have shared Burton’s discomfort with the town’s money-first attitudes, but few shared his predictions for its future. A Tennessee reporter surveyed the Five Points not long after Burton gladly left for Macon. He observed many of the same traits Burton did but from a different perspective. War had not changed the town; Atlanta had merely become more of what it had always been. The Tennessee journalist reported, I strolled up the streets, and there was the same hurly-burly confusion of business-men as heretofore. Everybody wanted money—everybody made money. The Jew and the Gentile were found whispering together for a bargain. The milliner declared that ‘this cannot be bought elsewhere for less than such a price.’ The auctioneer from the stand was astonished as usual that his crowd would not bid more for this article, as the stores would charge double what they were bidding. Brokers had gold and bills scattered profusely upon their counters, ready to give you as clean a shave as any one of the many barbers that line the principal streets. . . . The engines whistled, cars were shifted hither and thither, and people passed the crossing as usual without being run over. I concluded that Atlanta, in point of business, was unchangeable, and that she has felt the shock of war less than any of her sister cities.

  By contrast, many other Southern cities and towns withered. On a stopover in the Black Belt market town of Americus a few months later on, book and paper goods seller Samuel Richards found the once thriving Sumter County seat “dried up, the stores nearly all closed and most of the men gone to the war or somewhere else.”

  Prior to the war’s advent, Richards had fretted in his languishing hometown of Macon. Even the prospect of the massive new armory’s construction gave him little cause for optimism. Meanwhile, his brother Jabez had all he could do to handle customers at their Atlanta store. Those in Samuel Richards’s Macon circle who knew Atlanta were “much pleased with it,” he noted; the city was “no doubt a more healthy and salubrious place than Macon.” It was also a healthier place to do business in those days. With “our stocks . . . decreasing and the prospect of supply very unpromising,” Samuel Richards finally packed up the Macon store and closed up his house on the first day of October 1861. He crowded his wife and three children, including a new baby, and all their possessions into two rooms in his brother’s small place off Washington Street.

  It was an auspicious moment for him to move on. The Confederate Congress had just confiscated all Northern goods and debt. The $5,000 the brothers owed Northern wholesalers for purchases on credit “will never reach the hands of those to whom we owe it.” Among his creditors was his “fanatical” and “renegade” older brother William, gone north in location and outlook. He, too, would have to lose out. Shrugged Richards, “We shall have to treat our brother William as we do other ‘alien enemies.’” In fact, he lamented, “What I most regret in his case is that he is an alien enemy.”

  Once in Atlanta, Richards found that business was good, very good indeed. On the last day of 1861, he noted that the brothers’ stock was “getting low in quantity but pretty high in price!” With paper goods growing scarce—and families corresponding more than ever with their far-flung soldiers—Richards wished only that their stores carried exclusively difficult-to-source “paper and envelopes. We could make a small fortune out of it.” Less than a year after Samuel Richards’s arrival, the brothers’ “profits [continued to be] splendid.” Though some sales did not exactly enrich them—for instance, “for books in general we only get double former prices”—others brought astronomical gains. “Some of our profits are enormous truly,” he recorded when well settled in Atlanta. “Today Jabez sold a bill of pens & holders for $28 which cost originally 75¢!”

  Before long, “money,” he celebrated, “comes in so fast that we hardly know how to dispose of it to advantage.” With their business earnings and the thousands of dollars they saved when the rebel government wiped out their debts to Northern creditors, the Richards brothers joined the investor class in town. They bought several building plots and houses within and just beyond the city limits. They diversified, backing a shoemaking shop, putting a couple thousand dollars into Amherst Stone’s ill-fated blockade-running scheme and a thousand more into the Confederate Insurance Company, briefly operating a grocery store until shortages caused them to sell out, and acquiring a religious-tract printing house. Jabez also bought several bondsmen for household servants and to work a farm he purchased outside town.

  Finally, Samuel, now an ardent secessionist who “rejoiced[ed] to hear that our invading cruel foes are being destroyed,” achieved a long-standing milestone of his own: He “committed the unpardonable sin of the Abolitionists in buying a negro.” For the past two years, he could afford only to hire the time of Ellen, a slave girl “13 years old, healthy and ugly,” whom the family brought with them from Macon. With his newfound wealth, he drove a hard bargain before concluding a deal with her former Macon owner, buying her for $1,225, “$275 less than [he] priced her at three months ago,” Samuel gloated. He was satisfied he had purchased “a pretty good girl,” but he ignored the “good whipping” he had lately given her after catching her using his wife’s “toilet articles.” It wasn’t the first time he had beaten her; nor was it the last. A few months later, he took a lash to her again, this time for
a spool of thread missing from his wife’s drawer “and other misdemeanors.” Despite such transgressions, he believed her to be worth nearly double what he had paid, and expecting “when we come to a successful end to this war that negroes will command very high prices,” he purchased another entire slave family.

  THE MONTH BEFORE ELLEN became a chattel member of the Richards household, his infant daughter Alice got terribly sick. The benefits of Atlanta’s “salubrious” climate proved short-lived. The city’s small-town sanitation system struggled to support its swelling citizenry as well as the people passing through by the tens of thousands. Privies overflowed; people relieved themselves in open toilets; army horses hauling supplies and men added to the fouled water supplies. Mayor Calhoun’s court began issuing fines for owners of privies the Board of Health deemed in an “unfit condition,” and the city council hired laborers to “put in healthy condition all privies used by the Authority of the Confederate States of America.” The city government sold lime for privy use at cost to residents, though the supply was so limited that there wasn’t enough to blunt the stench or contain the swarms of flies.

  A physician diagnosed Alice with cholera infantum, a catch-all term for a childhood gastrointestinal disorder accompanied by fever, but she likely had typhoid fever, a diarrheal disease, increasingly common among warring troops and in overcrowded urban areas, spread through feces-polluted drinking water. The child lingered for a painful week before the disease wasted her away. “Distressed and troubled,” Richards found, “one thing however gave me some comfort.” He was desperate to avoid being called up for military service. A local printing shop was on the verge of hiring him, giving him one of the few jobs the Confederate government considered crucial enough to “exempt me from conscription.”