The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  Despite such claims about the ready availability of charitable and public assistance, Calhoun’s city government in fact could do precious little to meet the citizens’ needs. At $4,062.67 in 1862, the city budget for relief for the poor was the third largest item behind city salaries and street and bridge repairs. In the next year, relief for soldiers and aid to the poor had become the city’s single largest expenditure, at $16,200 for the year. But with inflation jumping manyfold faster and the number of indigent people increasing daily, that amount was nowhere near enough. Calhoun’s government did what it could to alleviate the spreading misery. “In view of the almost impossibility of procuring the necessaries of life, food & fuel,” the city council set up a committee chaired by the mayor “to devise a plan by which such articles shall be furnished at their cost when distributed.” Calhoun tried, with rare success, to jaw merchants into holding their prices down or even donating or selling at cost basic foodstuffs. One grocer donated 1,000 pounds of rice to the needy to much acclaim; salt donations were made to stem the cries of “salt famine.” The Intelligencer ’s John Steele called on City Hall to open Atlanta’s treasury “to purchase large supplies of fuel to be held for the use of those who will be unable to pay the high prices for fuel demanded.” With the winter of 1863 approaching, the mayor persuaded the railroads to carry firewood from the countryside free of charge to distribute to the poor. Only a few sticks ever made it to the cold hearths of the needy.

  1760 Long Cane Creek Massacre Stone

  at the South Carolina site where

  Indians attacked Calhoun settlers

  Senator John C. Calhoun, the

  voice of Southern states’ rights

  Senator Daniel Webster,

  “the Godlike Daniel” or “Black Dan”

  Atlanta Mayor James M. Calhoun,

  cousin of John C. Calhoun

  Historical artist Wilbur G. Kurtz’s bird’s eye view rendering of Atlanta in 1864 prior to the siege

  Crawford, Frazer & Co. slave market on Whitehall Street where buyers made

  “their selections just as they would have a horse or mule at a stockyard”

  Looking north on Washington Street: the Neal family home at the corner of Mitchell Street,where General Sherman made his headquarters, the Second Baptist Church beyond,and the Calhoun house in the distance

  Train rolling into the car shed, Peachtree to Whitehall Street crossing visible

  Downtown Alabama Street from the corner

  of Whitehall, near the Five Points

  Bookseller and diarist Samuel P. Richards ran a

  thriving store with his brother on Decatur Street

  Plantation owner and

  politician Benjamin C.Yancey

  Mayor and Intelligencer owner

  Jared I. Whitaker

  Southern Confederacy owner

  George W. Adair

  Intelligencer newspaper offices on Whitehall Street,

  over liquor store and next to railroad tracks

  Atlanta City Hall and Fulton County Courthouse with

  2nd Massachusetts Infantry camp in City Hall Square

  Sarah “Sallie”

  Conley

  Clayton

  Clayton family house on Mitchell Street

  Colonel George W. Lee,

  Atlanta provost marshal

  Captain and future

  Mayor William Lowndes Calhoun

  and wife Mary Jane Oliver

  CHAPTER 11

  STREET THEATER

  CONTENDING WITH RISING CRIME dominated James Calhoun’s days at City Hall. As the city’s chief elected official, he not only headed the city government but also served as judge of the Mayor’s Court, doling out justice in petty criminal cases. The court’s docket exploded, more than doubling to 427 cases of disorderly conduct, illegal liquor sales, prostitution, slave-code violations, and misdemeanors within his first year in office. Trying to contain the disorder, Calhoun doubled his police force, but it still numbered just twenty-eight and could do little to curb offenders. Serious criminal cases increased even more quickly than those reaching the Mayor’s Court. In 1863, the city experienced a fourfold rise in larceny cases tried before the Superior Court of Fulton County; attempted murders doubled and arson tripled, while there were six trials for “fornication” when no such cases had been tried in the two prior years. Convictions for bigamy and adultery rose sharply.

  Atlanta was spinning out of control, and drunk soldiers were responsible for much of the trouble. Calhoun shared his neighbors’ desperation to get drinking in town under control. He pleaded with the government in Richmond to find a constitutional means to keep liquor out of soldiers’ hands. “I hope & believe,” he wrote Confederate secretary of war George W. Randolph, “there is some legal way in which the retail of spirits can be prohibited at such a time, in such a place, as this.”

  The Confederate army soon realized the scale of the problem and tried to take control of cities considered militarily vital “to preserve the efficiency of the army and to maintain its discipline” at a time when “civil administration is everywhere relaxed, and has lost much of its energy.” On May 1, 1862, Gen. Braxton Bragg made Atlanta a military post. The War Department turned to Col. George Washington Lee to serve as provost marshal for the city. Lee, a son of the city, quickly set out to take control of his streets. Taking control for Lee, though, did not necessarily mean enforcing the law. The co-owner of a Decatur Street bar, the Senate Saloon, seemed to have trouble at times deciding which side of the law he was on. Lee’s background was shady: Though the charges may have been unfounded, he had been forced to resign his commission in the Confederate army after it was said he stole from his men, and General Bragg described him as “a man without education or character.”

  When Lee came back home, though, Jared Whitaker ignored his friend’s troubles with Confederate higher-ups. The pages of the Intelligencer wrote glowingly about the “gallant Georgian,” now on “furlough,” who had “made a considerable reputation during his service.” The then mayor’s newspaper went so far as to pronounce the disgraced Lee “a great favorite” of General Bragg’s.

  PROVOST MARSHAL LEE QUICKLY conscripted his own private army. With most able-bodied men of military age now serving in the regular army, he enlisted a ragtag force of 683 men consisting mainly of unemployed teenagers too young for formal military service and paid substitutes. They took it upon themselves to enforce order in the city, check up on suspicious characters, and ensure citizen loyalty. They were posted as guards around town, in the car shed, and at depots full of valuables. Just as often, particularly as inflationary prices for goods spiraled upwards, Lee’s gang of, in the main, ruffians and hoodlums used their official powers to steal for themselves and to harass those who opposed them, frequently with clubs and fists.

  In mid-May 1862, Lee took the unprecedented step of issuing a general order requiring all soldiers—and soon all citizens—to carry passes at all times, forbidding the sale of alcohol to soldiers, placing a strict nighttime curfew on blacks, and threatening to toss drunk and disorderly troops into the brig. He summarily established his own drumhead court, ignoring habeas corpus rights, to arrest and jail suspected traitors. His men filled the army prison barracks. The city had become, Lee wrote to the secretary of war in Richmond, “a point of rendezvous for traitors-swindlers-extortioners-and counterfeiters,” with an especially insidious “predominant element” in its population of foreigners, Northern immigrants, and other transients, of suspect loyalty. His force would “untiringly . . . watch, direct and consign to suitable punishment these miscreants.”

  Lee’s actions often overstepped the line and infringed on the powers of the civil authorities. To ease strained relations with Calhoun, he “earnestly invite[d] the aid and cooperation of His Honor, the Mayor . . . in preserving good order and sobriety in the city.” The town was now, considered the thriving paper goods merchant Samuel Richards, “under Martial Law.” He carried his pass wit
h him constantly “to prevent our being taken up at night and put in limbo.” Lee’s provost guard began shuttering offending barrooms, seizing whisky barrels off wagons, and taking axes to them in the streets.

  General Bragg in his Chattanooga headquarters formally declared martial law in Atlanta and its surroundings in August 1862, but he did not empower Lee. Instead, Bragg sent Mayor Calhoun a letter appointing him “civil governor” with the city council members as his “officers.” He urged close cooperation with Lee’s military authorities. Calhoun was stunned. He had no idea what his new title meant, what duties it entailed, or what additional powers he now exercised. In reality, the man who had always believed in the rule of law and constitutional doctrine was outraged by what he considered a grave and unconstitutional abuse of power. He wrote to his friend in the Confederate Congress, Georgia senator Benjamin Hill, to protest the fact that he could invoke martial law as the city’s governor. Hill passed his letter along to Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens.

  Stephens wrote a public letter back to Calhoun. “I am not at all surprised,” he wrote, “at you being at a loss to know what your powers and duties are in your new position, and your inability to find anything in any written code of laws to enlighten you upon them. The truth is your office is unknown to the law. General Bragg had no more authority for appointing you civil governor of Atlanta than I had; and I had, or have, no more authority than any street walker in your city.”

  Stephens did not stop there. He assured Calhoun that as long as “we live under a Constitution . . . there is no such thing as martial law.” As such, Bragg’s act and naming of Calhoun as civil governor was “simply a nullity. You, by virtue of it, possess no rightful authority, and can exercise none.” Stephens recognized that a principal reason for imposing martial law was to keep soldiers from drinking while in Atlanta. But only an act of the Confederate Congress could prohibit liquor sales. “Until this is done,” he declared, “no one has any authority to punish in such cases; and anyone who undertakes to do it is a trespasser and a violator of the law.” He added particularly harsh words for military men who sought to impose their authority over civilians. He clearly had General Bragg and Provost Marshal Lee in mind when he intoned, “Neither generals nor provost marshals have any power to make, alter, or modify laws, either military or civil; nor can they declare what shall be crimes, either military or civil, or establish any tribunal to punish what they may so declare.” Even in the midst of war, Atlanta remained a city of laws.

  By early September, opposition to the arbitrary decree reached the point where the Confederate War Department felt compelled to reverse Bragg’s act and issued instructions forbidding military officers from again declaring martial law without express authority from the president. Calhoun and the city councilmen returned to enforcing the civil law. John Steele’s Intelligencer overlooked Calhoun’s objections to the whole affair and archly proclaimed, “‘Governor Calhoun’ is therefore defunct in our city as well as his corps of aides-de-camp by whom he is surrounded, and we trust that General Bragg will make no more appointments of like character, which confer only temporary titles, and give the distinguished recipients nothing to do.”

  FOR HIS PART, Lee ignored the public controversy and the government’s repudiation of his power in Atlanta’s city affairs. His armed henchmen kept the barrooms closed. However, dry men encountered little trouble wetting their whistle. A year after Lee’s order closing the bars, the Intelligencer reported, “We do not know where the liquor comes from, but there is evidently a large quantity of it sold in this town, from the number of drunken men we have seen upon the streets, in the hotels, and at the theatre.” For those who wanted their whisky by the glass, raucous “dramshops” opened up like night peepers to draw off the shut-out drinkers from Atlanta. Not long after Lee’s men lost their martial law powers, it became known that “thirsty members” of Lee’s own militia force used their authority and guns “to force themselves on the train” to Marietta, where they enjoyed no jurisdiction, “when all other expedients to get drink here have failed.”

  The issue came to a head when four provost guardsmen bullied their way onto a crowded night train to Marietta. They went on a binge that ended only when the quartet got into a barroom brawl. When the fight started to go against them, the young men pulled their pistols and began “shooting at the crowd in the most reckless manner.” After shooting up the place, the four fled into the darkness. On the floor lay two wounded men and a dead soldier, “a fine looking, noble young man, of good family and standing,” killed by a “ball [that] entered his face near the mouth and passed out at the back of his head.”

  WITH SALOONS CLOSED, some of Atlanta’s raucous street theater moved indoors nightly to the Athenaeum. Performances by traveling musicians and acting troops and the local Shakespearean dramatic company filled the eight-hundred-seat auditorium with crowds of townspeople eager for relief from their daily cares. Local residents often sat next to young men who, reeking of whisky, heckled the performers and called out to the young women in the crowd. Complaints flooded Calhoun’s office about “boys and disorderly soldiers . . . smoking . . . and drinking liquor . . . making use of language not at all fit for . . . hearing” in the hall. City residents and respectable “ladies of Atlanta [were] kept away by the rude conduct of a few men in the habit of visiting it.” Calhoun placed a police officer in the hall, but, finally, unable to quell the mobs, the mayor refused to renew the Athenaeum’s license and forced it to close.

  John H. Steele at first railed in the pages of the Intelligencer against Calhoun’s “usurpation of power.” Though Steele had asked Calhoun “to issue an order regulating the theatre,” he now accused the mayor of seizing dictatorial power. “The people of Atlanta are not under an absolute city government,” he wrote. “The Mayor is but their servant, and must abide by the laws framed by them, and given to him for the purpose of enforcement.”

  Calhoun defended himself. He disingenuously claimed to have closed the theater not to stop the misbehavior of the few rowdy young men but because the dark days of war were no time for frothy public entertainments. “As our country was involved in a civil war, and as it needed all the recourses [sic] of men and means,” he insisted, “this was no time for fun and frolic.” Calhoun also made note of the strong opposition to him voiced continuously in the Intelligencer, leaving him damned if he did act and if he didn’t. Steele responded tartly, “The assertion of the Mayor that we have always been opposed to him, is in the main, correct, the reason for which is, that we have been unable to find any action on Mr. Calhoun’s part that we could approve.”

  Calhoun sarcastically noted that the paper “seem[ed] to be the special champion of the theatre.” The Intelligencer’s condemnation of his closure of the theatre, he asserted, had more to do with money than concern over any possible abuse of his authority, because “such companies . . . are generally full of money, and may pay liberally for advertisements.”

  With the December 1863 election approaching, Steele sneered back, “Of one thing we feel certain, that unless the duties of the Mayor are performed in a more efficient manner than they have been heretofore, we might as well abolish the office and save so much salary from the city treasury.” However, without crediting Calhoun, the paper noted the reopening of the Athenaeum a little more than two weeks after its closing. “Ladies can now attend with perfect safety, as no noise or unruly behavior will be tolerated.”

  The tranquility didn’t last. A few months later, the Athenaeum was closed for good. Its stage was converted into a slave auction house.

  AS QUICKLY AS ATLANTA was growing and industrializing, it was rapidly slipping back into its frontier ways of unpunished crime and vigilante justice. Mayor Calhoun, who had previously fought lynch mob justice in town, resorted to appointing a twenty-five-member Vigilance Committee to bolster the police. The Intelligencer suggested that the city give out shotguns to law-abiding citizens for self-defense—to protect themselves not a
gainst any impending threat of Yankee invasion but from criminals lurking in dark corners of town.

  Finally, an enraged mob grabbed two men accused of pilfering from guest rooms at the Trout House hotel. The crowd shaved, tarred, and feathered the woeful pair before parading them through the downtown streets with signs pasted to their backs declaring “Trout House Thieves.”

  A WEEK BEFORE THE 1863 ELECTIONS, the Intelligencer used the chaos in Atlanta to attack Calhoun’s mayoralty:Will our very efficient and worthy Mayor look over the municipal laws, and see whether he has the power to close the barrooms or not?—Mayor Calhoun is very anxious to close theatres, when he has not got one shadow of authority for so doing, but (so it appears to us) does not think it any harm for liquor to be sold to the soldiers, and for them to be marching intoxicated over the town, making an uproar and disturbing the peace, while our very efficient and law keeping police are looking on with a complaisant smile on their venerable countenances. We request the voters of Atlanta to make a small note of the above for reference on election day.