The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  The hospitals could not keep up with the growing river of wounded and sick coming off the trains. Mayor Calhoun was charged with identifying more structures to be commandeered for hospitals and sites where new ones could be built. The army pressed to convert the large council and courthouse rooms in the City Hall into hospital wards, but Calhoun refused, insisting that maintaining a civic and administrative center for “the County, State, and City is a matter of great public necessity.” In the summer, plans were drawn up to construct forty buildings on the fairgrounds on the south side of Fair Street near the Georgia Railroad and the army’s munitions laboratories.

  Soon, even those facilities were not enough. Tent hospitals and a two-hundred-bed “wayside” hospital went up near the tracks to distribute the wounded and to handle overflow from the more permanent facilities. Specialized hospitals were also erected, including one devoted to contagious diseases such as pneumonia, venereal diseases, measles, and smallpox that covered 155 acres of what was called “Markham’s Farm,” property seized by the War Department from the known Unionist William Markham. As long trains of cattle cars returned from the Tennessee front with their cargo of sick and wounded soldiers—up to 10,000 wounded men after a single battle—the passenger depot became a scene of crowding, odors, flies, and moans. The overfull hospitals could not handle the waves of new patients, and many were carried off the train and laid out on the depot floor or beneath the trees shading the neighboring City Park to await a physician’s attention or triage. The stretchers became a maze through which departing and arriving passengers, often bewildered and exhausted refugees, needed to work their way. Townspeople crossing the city would walk blocks out of their way to avoid the terrible sights.

  SALLIE AND GUSSIE CLAYTON helped darn socks with the older women and pulled lint together to make bandages for the wounded. Each morning they prepared bundles of food, clothing, and supplies to take to the hospitals. Now considered a woman, though, Sallie was frequently turned away from visiting the convalescing men. Only the younger Gussie was permitted to attend to their needs. For Gussie, this chance to help would one day prove tragic.

  The girls had to leave their beloved Female Institute schoolhouse overlooking the city when the army took that as a hospital as well. They now met their classmates and teachers for school at the Neal house across Washington Street from their home. The inseparable Clayton sisters were drawn to their old schoolhouse when, out for a stroll one afternoon, they found themselves nearby. They decided to pay a visit. They entered quietly through the doors they had opened countless times. The girls looked about in stunned horror. The chapel, music room, and classrooms where they and their friends had once filled pews, chairs, and desks were now lined with rows of groaning, bandaged, and mutilated men. The odor was overwhelming. They ventured to look downstairs into the raised basement but quickly turned away from the sight of stacked corpses. Piles of amputated arms and legs lay there as well. It was now the “Dead House,” where the remains of the dead and debris of surgeries awaited burial or shipment home.

  Sallie could not comprehend such a transformation of a place she formerly thought of as filled only with the ringing laughter and playful voices of young girls dancing, singing, and reciting their lessons. “The change was so like a play,” she recalled. “First, the ringing down the curtain on a picture of Life, and Joy, and Mirth, and raising it again to present one of Gloom and Sorrow, Suffering and Death.”

  THE TENS OF THOUSANDS of sick soldiers and the crowds of refugees, many exhausted from their long journeys, carried contagious illness with them. It didn’t take long to spread to the wider population. Scarlet fever and smallpox swept the city starting in the fall of 1862 and continuing on into winter, despite a largely ignored, mandatory vaccination program for whites. Red quarantine flags marked out houses with smallpox cases within. Mayor Calhoun established a quarantine hospital with armed guards. Patients with mild cases still wandered off from quarantine, spreading the disease and setting off epidemic outbreaks in the city. Finding people to nurse the sick was nearly impossible. Few whites would work the low-paying contagious-ward jobs; nor did many owners want their costly slaves exposed to smallpox, typhus, and other virulent diseases. Soon, however, Confederate seizures of hundreds of bondsmen and women led to their comprising almost half the hospital workforce, including 80 percent of the attendants caring for the sick and wounded.

  Their health care ignored, blacks, crowded in slave quarters, fell ill in large numbers. In December, the city ordered the complete isolation of infected blacks on a farm a few hundred yards from the army’s Markham’s Farm quarantine hospital. Christmastime 1862 was a somber one in Atlanta as people had little to celebrate and feared visiting friends and neighbors, whose homes might harbor smallpox, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and other terrible diseases. A few weeks after his infant daughter Alice’s death, Samuel Richards was “quite anxious lest [contagious illnesses] come into our fold.” To keep any contagion at bay, he placed bags of herbs around his remaining children’s necks “as haply it may do some good.” Such protection could not prevent illness entering the Richards brothers’ shared household, though. Jabez’s young wife died of consumption in the early days of 1863.

  CHAPTER 13

  ENEMIES WITHIN

  THE FIRST CONFEDERATE DRAFT in April 1862 included men up to age thirty-five. By October, the upper limit had reached forty-five. It eventually included all able-bodied men from ages sixteen to fifty, and Georgia men up to age sixty faced state militia service. The effects of the draft transformed Atlanta, forcing every man to choose: Was he for the Confederacy or not? And if he was for it, was he prepared to die for it? On an afternoon in 1862, not long after Col. George W. Lee’s installation as provost marshal, Samuel Richards and his brother, Jabez, were working in their Decatur Street store when two young army officers barged in. The men, whom the brothers knew because one of them owed on an account at the store, were not looking for books or paper. The two bookstore proprietors, the soldiers said, had been “watched for some time.” Their support for the war was “unreliable.” As they left, the officers warned the merchants to watch their step. They were now considered, a shaken Samuel Richards shuddered, “unsound.”

  “Insulted,” Richards protested his loyalty to the rebellion, declaring, “I pray God that we may not have to submit to the rule of the hated Yankees again,” but his warlike statements and the Confederate flag hanging in the store window were literally window dressing. The officers were right: He and his brother were entirely “unsound” when it came to making war on the northern people Richards referred to as “atrocious vandals.” Despite his righteous words, he had “not the slightest intention” of joining the fight. “My whole nature revolts at the thought of going into this war,” he wrote. The church deacon and bookman was no fighter. He felt nothing but “loathing and horror” at the thought of witnessing “scenes of blood and carnage.” He also disdained the foulmouthed, illiterate soldiers he saw on drunken binges in the Five Points. He would never willingly condescend to spending “months or years perhaps in . . . the company of such men as form the greater part of our army—to be ordered about by incompetent, drunken officers.”

  When the draft’s upper age limit included him, Richards “stuck to his room and the back streets, afraid to go about town now or to the store as I hear that the officers are about, taking up the conscripts vigorously.” He frantically cast about for a draft-exempt profession, trying his hand at shoe making, a skilled and muscular craft about which he knew nothing except that he had spent $1,000 to open a soon-failed cobbler’s shop over the bookstore. When that didn’t work out, he was elated upon landing his part-time job as a proofreader and typesetter in a printing house—in return for an investment in the business. Seeing both a business opportunity and a draft exemption, he and Jabez bought out the house’s religious periodical, the Soldier’s Friend, which was distributed among the troops. They could work for it as editor and proofreader, exempted trade
s.

  Still nervous in March 1863, Richards decided to take out an added “insurance” policy by paying $2,500 for a substitute to fill his place in the army. By the following summer, the combined fear of inevitable combat service and inflation drove the price of substitutes to levels beyond the reach of even the very wealthy. Jabez risked conscription when he couldn’t find a replacement for less than $8,000 to $10,000. Desperate to stay out of the fighting military, Samuel paid $500 for one of many shares in another publishing business that provided him an excuse to join a home-defense company comprising exempt pressmen. At the first muster, he idly chatted with another man who summed up their new mission: “Our object,” he said, “is to have as little to do as possible.”

  SUSPICION AND ANGER AGAINST men like Richards, who “dodge round corners when the enrolling officer comes along,” now spread with the virulence of smallpox. Everyone could see plainly who was conniving, wrote the Southern Confederacy, “to fix up some plan to keep out of the army.” The newspaper condemned men “opening up shoe shops, tanyards, turning blacksmith . . . scrambl[ing] for every little office—Militia Captain, Justice of the Peace, Judge of the Inferior Court . . . rush[ing] into the ranks of companies that are called for to mind some public building where liquor is convenient and Yankees scarce.” It decried the “skulkers, shirkers, and home staying grumblers” and suggested that authorities do what was necessary “to make this class of men do their duty.” If they didn’t, defeat would not come in the field but at the hands of “the people at home.”

  Atlanta was estimated to contain as many as 10,000 draft dodgers, men on extended furlough and out-and-out deserters. Few could fault them after even the city government gave itself a Christmas present on December 25, when Mayor James Calhoun petitioned that he as mayor, the city council, and all employees, plus the officers and forty members, of each volunteer fire company be declared exempt from military duty. One dismayed observer counted around 3,000 firemen who were otherwise healthy and eligible to enlist now placed beyond the reach of a desperate army.

  THE ATLANTA GOVERNMENT’S self-recusal from taking part in the war was another salvo in an increasingly open conflict with Col. George W. Lee. Mayor Calhoun insisted publicly that “no clash or difficulty has ever arisen between the military and civil authority here,” but since his collision with army officials over the declaration of martial law and his short-lived, spurious appointment as “civil governor,” relations between the city and Lee’s nearly 700-man personal army continued to deteriorate.

  Though not a slaveholder, Lee was an ardent Confederate. He had been one of the city’s earliest backers of secession, a fire-eating minuteman, and although ravaged by tubercular fits that left him debilitated and ultimately unable to continue in the field, he immediately volunteered as an infantry officer at the head of a company when the first fighting broke out. He had strong backers in Richmond, politically influential friends in his hometown, and far more firepower at his disposal than did city officials. A millwright by trade and saloon keeper on the side, he had struggled before the war to sustain his middle-class status in a town where so many country and working people had managed to become wealthy practically overnight. Atlanta’s high society, which included disproportionate numbers of educated former Yankees, may have resented a consumptive saloon keeper and possibly illiterate mechanic holding a position of near-absolute authority over their city. He regularly sent out what one businessman harassed by his guards called his “second class set of cow bred Confederate officers” to intimidate, arrest, and even beat opponents among the local citizenry. Lee, for his part, thought ill enough of his Atlanta neighbors to describe the town “since the commencement of the revolution [as] a point of rendezvous of traitors, swindlers, extortioners, and counterfeiters.” The Five Points teemed with, he color-fully snarled, “a mixture of Jews, New England Yankees, and of refugees shirking military duties.”

  Gen. Braxton Bragg, commander of the Army of Tennessee and, as such, chief of the Atlanta military post’s many hospitals and other installations, could not bring Colonel Lee to heel. He complained about Lee to Gen. Joseph Johnston, the commander of the army’s western department and his superior, shuddering at the thought of Lee at the head of a personal army “of nearly 500 men in Atlanta, more than half conscripts, ‘home guards,’” whom he had assembled “by misrepresentation and downright falsehood, and by evading and misconstruing orders.” The situation in Atlanta had become “disgraceful.” The provost marshal kept prisoners “confined for months, even without charges,” made “expenditures most lavish,” and used his command to employ men “by the dozen, able-bodied and without occupation,” loyal to him and nobody else.

  John Steele’s Daily Intelligencer rarely criticized wartime officials outside Mayor Calhoun’s City Hall office, but he found enough fault with Lee’s men to warn, “We will very soon have nothing but a rabble, instead of a body of organized men to protect us.” Lee himself had trouble controlling those among his men who were drunken looters and arbitrary lawmen. When one of Lee’s patrols heard reports that a farmhouse close to town harbored robbers, the officers approached through the nighttime darkness and, without announcing their identity, smashed the windows and burst into the house. The startled farmer grabbed his shotgun and fired on the intruders, mortally wounding the first officer who came after him. In their fright, the other guardsmen began shooting wildly around the house, barely missing the farmer’s cowering children and wife. Retreating, the officers then attempted to burn down the house with all its occupants still inside. The farmer and his family managed to escape the flames, but he was soon arrested and charged with murder. The state supreme court threw out the case, holding instead that the lower court should have found the guardsmen guilty of “aggravated riot.”

  Such rebukes did little to slow Lee’s drive to control the town and bring in what he regarded as criminals, draft dodgers, and suspected traitors. And he was encouraged by the War Department in Richmond, which ignored Bragg and applauded his aggressiveness. In January 1863, the army placed him in command of its conscript bureau covering a vast swath of northern Georgia and southwestern North Carolina and gave him command of a combined cavalry and infantry regiment charged with filling out the necessary manpower quota for the army—and punishing those who refused to do their duty. Little matter that Lee himself was eventually charged with selling draft exemptions. He was also expected to stamp out the anti-Confederate insurrectionist wildfires spreading through the up-country region. Lee set to it, promising Gov. Joseph Brown that “those who violate[d] the laws of the State or Confederacy [would suffer] retribution due the crimes of which they [were] guilty.” He posted and published stern broadsides around town to “all malcontents,” including “deserters, tories, and conscripts resisting the laws,” warning, “I will pursue them into their fastnesses, and use all the power and means at my control, to arrest and bring them to condign punishment.” His men would “fire upon them, and, at all hazard . . . capture the last man.”

  Composed in part of his provost marshal forces, Colonel Lee’s conscript bureau army was even more high-handed and violent when it struck out into the countryside to enforce the draft laws and suppress resistance. Antidraft and Unionist guerilla bands operating in the northern parts of the state attacked conscription agents and militia units. Lee’s men were soon embroiled in an anti-insurgency war. Twice in 1863, they invaded Lumpkin County, the center of up-country resistance. Lee’s soldiers traveled through the hollows and remote backwoods, beating the bushes for “Tories” hiding in the Blue Ridge foothills. They rounded up as many as a thousand deserters, whom they forced to return to their commands, and, in the course of the two campaigns, brought another four hundred men in chains back to Atlanta. Critics charged that many of those prisoners were severely beaten and that some of those in chains were too old for conscription but had been held by Lee until they agreed to join the army.

  Those who refused to surrender faced swifter justice.
Lee’s army and local vigilante backers summarily shot or hanged many of the men they caught. By 1864, they were dispatching as many as fifteen in just two months, often leaving the bodies where they fell as warnings to other would-be resisters.

  LEE KEPT A CLOSE EYE on people moving through Atlanta. He considered his hometown a crossroad for the worst sorts to be found anywhere in the Confederacy: Tories and speculative extortionists, draft dodgers, and actual traitors and spies. He set out to hunt down the members of what he called the “Jacobin Club”—even men like Richards who proudly and loudly sung out their support for the Confederacy. Lee assigned men from the provost marshal guard to trail suspects and goaded his officers to “arrest them if they did anything to be arrested for.” Before leaving on his blockade-running expedition, attorney Amherst Stone described Lee’s pursuit of dissenters as a “perfect reign of terror.” He employed his martial law powers to detain without charges several suspected Unionists, particularly people from the North, nearly all of whom were among the city’s upper class. His men brought six men and three women in shackles from their homes and businesses and locked them into the barracks jail, according to one of the jailed men, “in a room with all the rebel ‘roughscuff, ’ the dirtiest, filthiest set I ever saw.” Foundry owner James Dunning was among the jailed; so were the successful dry goods store owner Michael Myers and Stone’s wife, Cyrena. Even Mayor Calhoun’s closest aid, James Crew, a prominent railroad official, was detained for a period. They were put through long and intimidating interrogations about rumors of “a Union organization, of three hundred white men, and of a plot for the negroes to rise, the prisoners to emerge from their confinement, and all to unite in rebellion against the Southern Confederacy.”