The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  On the morning of June 27, “one of the hottest and longest days of the year,” soon topping 110 degrees in the shade, at three different points along the ridgeline, after a blistering artillery barrage on the Confederate defenses, blue-clad soldiers moved out of the cover of woods, rifle pits, and trenches and began their uphill charge. The lines broke apart as the men, by the tens of thousands, clambered over rocks and ran up the open slopes. The very air they moved through erupted, so full of bullets that they felt, remarked one soldier, as if they were “moving . . . against a heavy rain or sleet storm.” Those who survived leaped into the rebel forward posts or took cover behind rocks and tree stumps or hugged the ground. A few squeezed through the abatis of sharpened trees and drove on toward the Confederate lines. They scrambled over and into the trenches, where they were shot down or killed, fighting gun butt to gun butt, or captured. The rebels threw everything they had at the Yankees, even rolling boulders down the hillsides. The result for Sherman’s men was the type of carnage they had not known until that day.

  The worst fighting took place during this endless day at the Dead Angle salient on Cheatham’s Hill, as it was known forever after because of the stand made there by Gen. Benjamin Franklin Cheatham’s division. In the thick of it, Tennessee private Sam Watkins and his mates killed, he was sure, between twenty and a hundred men each. To kill, “all that was necessary was to load and shoot.” Yankees climbing the parapets were shot down, and those who followed behind climbed on the fallen bodies and were shot down in turn. The ground in front of Watkins was “piled up with one solid mass of dead and wounded Yankees . . . in some places . . . like cord wood, twelve deep.” The two sides stalemated, but the firing continued so hot gun barrels glowed red, keeping men hugging the ground or at their gun embrasures for three days of continuous fighting. The woods where many dead and wounded lay caught fire. Watkins could hear the screams of the men when they saw the approaching flames—until the fire silenced their pleas for help. In the sun-baked, fire-scorched air, “a stench, so sickening as to nauseate the whole of both armies, arose from the decaying bodies of the dead left lying on the field.”

  Two of the Union attacks left hundreds of men to be buried, yet did not dislodge the defenders. A brigade under Gen. John M. Schofield’s Army of the Ohio, though, broke through against minor opposition at the left fringes of the rebel line. They swiftly crossed around Johnston’s flank and to the south, where they secured a position closer to the Chattahoochee than the drawn-in left side of Johnston’s army. With his rail line and back door threatened once more, the Confederate general again had no choice. By July 2, the Army of Tennessee had left its ridgeline redoubt and withdrawn back toward the Chattahoochee.

  Four days later, T. Holliday, the Wilkes County militiaman, was in the fight for the first time. The militia moved forward to help fortify and hold the lines while Johnston’s main army drew back. The barely trained men were learning in the unforgiving school of war to hunker down as the minié balls from sharpshooters raked the earthworks, and cannon balls flew overhead. “To have to gain honor by facing bullets and cannon balls doesn’t pay very well,” Holliday protested. “Some of the boys think we will all be at home soon but I will believe it when I get ” there. On July 8, the Union army had a bridgehead on the far side of the Chattahoochee. The last major barrier before Atlanta had fallen.

  SHERMAN HAD FLANKED Johnston’s lines again. The price his men paid was terrible and perhaps unnecessary: The Northerners suffered 3,000 casualties in the June 27 Kennesaw battles; Johnston counted only 750 men killed, wounded, or captured. Entire Union brigades were wiped out, often with few corresponding casualties on the Southern side of the lines. After reviewing the condition of his badly mauled Army of the Cumberland, Gen. George Thomas warned Sherman that “one or two more such assaults would use up this army.”

  Sherman wrote his wife on the last day of June to tell her the news that he would shortly be across the Chattahoochee, an unprecedentedly swift and deep advance through enemy territory. But he, too, was appalled by the violence he herded over the landscape before him. He feared “the whole world [might] start at the awful amount of death and destruction that now stalks abroad.” Killing and death had become as much a part of the North Georgia landscape as wood ticks and loblolly pine. He confessed that a certain callousness had taken hold of him. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash.” What truly appalled him was that even now “the worst of the war is not yet begun.” Nonetheless, “the work [has] progressed and I see no signs of a remission till one or both of the armies are destroyed.”

  ATLANTA ITSELF, THE GREAT GOAL, was now within eyeshot. Lt. Henry D. Stanley, a quartermaster from Farmington, Connecticut, drove his wagons behind the Yankee army’s advance. In a free moment, he scrambled up two hills and climbed three trees before having “the satisfaction of . . . seeing what I had so long been looking for. In the distance and directly in front I saw the eastern portion of the coveted city for which 130,000 men are fighting; part to capture and part to protect.” He was surprised to see “a great many trees in the city which of course hid most of the buildings from view.” From his tree-top perch, he could “distinguish a brick from a wooden house. I also saw what I suppose to be the Arsenal. . . . I could also see the church steeples.” He sat in the gnarled tree “looking as hard as possible toward A[tlanta] and wondering what the inhabitants were thinking of.”

  IT WAS NO SECRET: The people were thinking about Sherman’s army. On July 5, the Southern Confederacy insisted, “Atlanta will not and cannot be abandoned.” Confederate officials made clear, however, that the city would likely fall. That day, they removed the arsenal’s machinery, as well as the Confederate Quartermaster Department and most of the fair grounds hospital complex’s supplies and patients, to more secure locations in Macon, Columbus, and Augusta. When the “order came to remove all hospitals,” Mary Mallard no longer hesitated. It was time to go. She threw her things together and ran to the car shed. A few days later took up a new residence in Augusta.

  The scramble to get out was now on. The city, recorded Richards on July 10, had been “in a complete swarm” for days now. He and his wife decided “to stay at home, Yankees or no Yankees.” Despite the “terrible tales of them,” he did not feel threatened or even have the same hatred of all things Northern that had inflamed him for so long. “I don’t think they are as bad as they are said to be.” He noted that many others concurred and intended “to remain in the city if the enemy gets possession.”

  The teen socialite Sallie Clayton’s family wanted to leave. They packed up whatever valuables they could, but then tragedy struck. The entire family would have moved out of their big house opposite City Hall, but Sallie’s four sisters fell gravely ill. Gussie, the youngest and her closest companion, had typhoid fever. Her “worn-out” parents needed to stay home with their sick children, “happen what may.” Sallie left for the tranquility of an uncle’s Alabama plantation.

  At her home across the Five Points on Houston Street, Cyrena Stone looked around her. All her white neighbors were gone. With artillery crashing just a few miles away, she took a moment to note, I “am alone on the hill.” Friends came to her and urged her to join the exodus. But, she insisted, “this is my home, & I wish to protect it if possible.” She understood, however, that “there may be no battle here. If not I am safe; if there is one, where is any safety?”

  V

  THE THIEF IN THE GLOAMING

  BY NIGHT THERE IS FEAR IN THE CITY,

  Through the darkness a star soareth on;

  There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith,

  Then the poise of a meteor lone—

  Lighting far the pale fright of the faces,

  And downward the coming is seen;

  Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc,

  And wails and shrieks between.

  It comes like the thief in the gloaming;

/>   It comes, and none may foretell

  The place of the coming—the glaring;

  They live in a sleepless spell

  That wizens, and withers, and whitens;

  It ages the young, and the bloom

  Of the maiden is ashes of roses—

  The Swamp Angel broods in his gloom.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, “THE SWAMP ANGEL”

  CHAPTER 21

  A PERFECT SHELL

  THE MINERAL-GREEN WATER of the Chattahoochee River flowed sluggish and silty beneath the mid-July sun, still running about waist high from the heavy June rains. The longest river through the largest eastern state, the Chattahoochee spills cold water off the Appalachian Mountains in the northeast in a slanting course past Atlanta before making a beeline south along the Alabama border to join the Flint River at the Florida border and flow out to the Gulf of Mexico via the Apalachicola. With stone outcroppings and sandbars around Atlanta, it was not navigable except for small craft such as the native populations once used for their local commerce over thousands of years prior to their removal. Its many creek tributaries powered mills along their banks, and bountiful crops grew out of the river’s bottomlands, that is, until the local millers and farmers fled before the approaching war. Seven vacant granite spires pointed skyward out of the riverbed in a line, bank to bank. The voids between the towering piers marked where the Western & Atlantic Railroad bridge, its ruins now lying tangled below on the river bottom, once perched. The rearguard Confederates had torched the bridge on July 9 before joining the rest of the army in its present position along the high southeastern banks and the outer works of Atlanta itself. At the back of the rebel fortifications, trainloads of munitions smoked up from Atlanta and then chugged backwards with the wounded over the six miles through the cuts and rises to the downtown rail yards. Along the northwestern riverbank stretched the Yankee lines. For the most part, William Tecumseh Sherman’s 106,000 veteran soldiers, perhaps 90,000 of them ready to fight, breathed easy while keeping their heads below the parapets and out of sharpshooters’ sights. As a token of war, though, an occasional cannon crash or the crack of a sharpshooter’s rifle from behind each army’s red clay ramparts sent a chunk of metal whistling across the river, raising smoke, red dust, and sometimes a death cry within the enemy’s fortifications.

  Although Sherman’s men had crossed the river fifteen miles above here near the town of Roswell and a raiding party was on its way to cut the rail line southwest of Atlanta at the Alabama border, for now he had decided not to push further against the main body of the 44,000 or so hardened rebel soldiers plus another 5,000 militiamen on the opposite bank. He had surveyed the works he’d need to assault—and that after fording the river, which ran anywhere from fifty to three hundred yards wide—and judged them “the best line of field intrenchments I have ever seen.” After the debacle at Kennesaw Mountain, he preferred a return to his effective, if inglorious, flanking operations. He wasn’t idle. Shortly he would begin wheeling his armies over the river, he telegraphed Washington, “to make a circuit [of Atlanta], destroying all its railroads,” severing it from the Confederacy and rendering it an untenable base for the army within.

  Ignoring his terrible casualties—already more than 15,000 men to date—and multiple failed assaults on impregnable rebel defenses, he took time to write a long letter to his friend, the commanding general in Virginia, Ulysses Grant, concluding that his strategy to date had “been rather cautious than bold.” Unlike Grant, though, he had tangible successes to show. He was ninety-eight miles from his starting point in Dalton; for every man he had lost, he had taken one in return from an army far less able to sustain such attrition; most importantly, he had kept the Confederates opposite him pinned down and unable to send reinforcements to Virginia. But the war was far from won. Atlanta was still “a hard nut to handle,” he admitted. The enemy, he knew, could still dart out and bloody him at any moment. “These fellows fight like Devils & Indians combined,” he wrote his wife in grudging admiration, “and it calls for all my cunning & strength.”

  Within the shelter of the Confederate fortifications, T. Holliday was now a hardened militiaman after a month’s baptism under fire. The slight, blond-haired, and squinty-eyed plantation owner was no longer without a gun; he now carried a repeating rifle and ammunition recovered from dead Yankees. He wrote his wife, Lizzie, at home in Wilkes County near the South Carolina border to tell her he had grown accustomed to the strangeness of battlefield life. Nothing about war shocked or even disturbed him any longer. He marched with indifference past blasted heaps that once were men, farms, and wagons and curled up on the ground to a metallic lullaby. “I can lie down under the mouth of a cannon and go fast asleep,” he boasted. On duty beside the river, he would have preferred a hook and bait in place “of gun and my Yankee physic box hung to my side.” Within it, though, he had “40 blue pills to administer to some patient of the Yank tribe. I hope that they may have the effect of rendering him unhealthy.”

  His enthusiasm for the cause remained strong. He hoped only “to get the Yanks out of Georgia and then come home in peace, yes, lasting peace; peace that my children can say that my father helped to obtain. I want it said by them in years yet to come that my father fought for my liberty.” Many of his comrades in arms no longer shared his conviction. After battling to hold their lines all day beneath the torrid sun, only to fall back sleepless through the night to entrench new positions, day after day, Holliday admitted, “Hundreds are deserting every day and a great many declare that they will not go beyond Atlanta.” He waited for the “fool” Gen. Joseph Johnston to go on the offensive while the Southerners still had a fighting chance. His army, Holliday contended, “is stronger to-day than it will be to-morrow.” Despite the attrition, the cotton farmer believed his army could win. “The soldiers all seem to be of one mind and that is that we can whip the Yanks if Johnston would fight them.”

  Together with the “ditching and bullets and shells,” he had but one complaint to share about his newfound life as a soldier: there was not enough to eat. He must have laughed when he wrote, “There seems to be some property in the water that has a tendency to give a man a good appetite. One that is sufficient to eat maggots and meal without sifting and no complaint laid only in one respect and that is that there is not enough of it.”

  NOT FAR FROM THAT SPOT, thoughts about food also gnawed at Confederate artillery captain A. J. Neal. He was exhausted like all the men after sixty-eight straight days of “continuous marching, fighting and entrenching.” The men around him looked hangdog. They were losing teeth to scurvy and had taken to cooking up “polk, potato tops, May pop vines, kurlip weed, lambs quarter, thistle, and a hundred kinds of weeds I always thought poison.” His boys called it “long forage,” and in a note to his sister, he had to agree, “It beats nothing.” The current lull in fighting made him witness to one of war’s more extraordinary sights. He eyed his opponents across the way in Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Union army division. “Any of us would do anything to destroy the other,” none would deny, but there before him were soldiers from both sides scrambling down the pine-shrouded banks to emerge at the river’s edge, where they bathed without fear across from each other in the refreshing mountain water. Even General Sherman stripped bare and waded into the Chattahoochee in plain sight at one point.

  The enemies, most of them not much older than boys, frolicked along the banks, ridding themselves of months of filth and cooling off bug bites. They called out to each other, taunted one another, and even serenaded the opposing camp with derisive songs. It wasn’t long before many had laid aside their guns and waded out into the river. There they bartered canteens, hats, whisky, Northern supplies of coffee, and Southern tobacco. Boyish fraternity and commerce temporarily trumped the sectional rancor and stopped the violence of fratricidal war. Neal watched men in blue and butternut uniforms who “walk[ed together] along the river banks talking as friendly and courteously as if to old acquaintances.” Nobody dared
break up the signs of enduring American fraternity by shooting. When officers came around and ordered the men back to their posts, they ducked away into the brush along the banks but left promising to shoot over their opponents’ heads if forced to skirmish.

  The easygoing meetings among the warring enemies did not surprise Charles F. Morse, in Hooker’s Corps opposite Neal’s battery. The Harvard-educated Second Massachusetts Infantry lieutenant colonel felt no hatred for the Southern men he had come to drive from the field and kill, if need be. “When we fight,” he wrote his family in Cambridge on July 15, “we fight to crush the rebellion and break the power of the rebel armies, not against these men as individuals.”

  THUS IT WAS THAT THREE DAYS LATER, as Sam Watkins stood picket next to Neal’s battery near the riverside, he wasn’t surprised to hear a Yankee sing out from the other bank. “Johnny, O Johnny, O Johnny Reb,” came a voice from Hooker’s Corps.