The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  His anxiety about the “blank book” of the future mounted: Angered once again at his restive bondsmen, who seemed less and less willing to obey their masters’ orders, he cursed the day he purchased them. “I wish they were safe in my pocket in hard coin at old valuation, or near it,” he declared. Secession, however, had made the old valuation a dream.

  IN MID-AUGUST GENERAL Sherman’s commissary chief had issued a serious warning, stating, “Our supplies will soon be exhausted.” Feeding men and mules, however, was not the western armies’ commander’s foremost concern. “My only apprehension,” Sherman insisted when the alert about supplies came, was the draining away of fighting men. Bullets and shells, dysentery and typhus, even malnutrition, took their share of soldiers, but Congress and Northerners without the will to see the fight through were, he argued, the real enemy siphoning off his fighting force. The three-year enlistment terms for entire battalions would expire over the next two months. He fretted as “daily regiments are leaving for home,” taking from him their veteran soldiers, his “best material.” Replacement troops under current federal conscription acts came through state-based quotas and arrived fitfully, unpredictably, and poorly prepared; the only new men he could expect to join his ranks in the near term were what he called “niggers and the refuse of the South,” men, the racist general believed, who could not be made into soldiers and would “never come to the front.” Sherman forecast that before the siege reduced Atlanta, “my army on the offensive, so far from its base, will fall below my opponent’s, who increases, as I lose.” He looked over the fortifications and saw no diminution in the Southern enemy hunkered down there beneath the storm of shells he hurled over their heads into Atlanta. “I rather think,” he muttered, “today Hood’s army is larger than mine, and he is strongly fortified.”

  He was wrong about the size of General Hood’s army, which remained far smaller than his, but the secessionists refused to be driven from their earthworks. Indeed, Hood wanted to turn the tables, laying siege to the invaders’ railroad lifeline. Sherman could not remain in place forever. The ever-daring Army of Tennessee commander wanted to speed the uninvited Northern guests’ departure. As President Jefferson Davis had long urged on the reluctant, now displaced Gen. Joseph Johnston, Hood sent the cream of his own cavalry across the Chattahoochee at Roswell on August 10 and set them loose in North Georgia. The 4,000 horsemen rode six hundred miles through Union-held territory over the next month, first tearing up three long stretches of Sherman’s vital railroad line, then attacking the Dalton fort and capturing some 3,000 head of beef cattle destined to feed the Yankee army. The cavalry continued their raid deep into Tennessee, threatening Chattanooga and even causing panic in Nashville.

  Where others panicked, though, Sherman saw opportunity. With the rebel cavalry “out of the way . . . when shall we use cavalry, if not now?” he had wired Gen. George Thomas. On August 18, 4,700 of their own cavalry under the command of Gen. Judson Kilpatrick set off with Sherman’s orders to “ride right round Atlanta and smash the Macon road all to pieces.” If Kilpatrick succeeded, Sherman’s massive army would be spared the need to make “a long, hazardous flank march” of its own.

  The Yankee raiders spent the next six days riding a circuit of plunder and destruction around the city. They succeeded in destroying a stretch of track at Jonesboro, an important station town fifteen miles south of Atlanta, as well as two locomotives. They captured enemy horses, wagons, and guns and took out plenty of time to pillage and burn houses, stores, and public buildings in a couple of crossroad villages where many of Kilpatrick’s horsemen ended up drunk on the whisky stashes they found—all while keeping rebel skirmishers off their front and rear.

  Weary but bursting with pride, Kilpatrick reported back to Sherman on the evening of August 22 and recounted tales of high adventure on horseback. He triumphantly declared that his men had so demolished the Macon & Western Railroad that no train would run over it for at least ten days and perhaps as long as a month. The cavalry officer was not aware that Confederate railroad mechanics needed less time to repair the breach he’d made in the line than it took his men to make it. Early the next morning, an eleven-car train of munitions and food chugged into Atlanta behind three locomotives.

  AGAIN DISAPPOINTED BUT LITTLE surprised by his cavalry’s ineptitude, Sherman now knew, as he telegraphed Washington, “I will have to swing across” the Macon railroad “in force to make the matter certain.” With this likely eventuality in mind, he and his three army commanders had already devised a plan for such a risky movement. His entire force would have to disengage from its grappler’s headlock on Atlanta—and feint away from the secessionists’ counterpunches—along the entire siege line. And the evacuation needed to take place without alerting the Confederates and exposing the withdrawing troops to attack while their backs were turned. The plan called for a complex grand wheel right by three entire armies who would march counterclockwise around Atlanta. It would be necessary to interweave the movements of more than 60,000 men from three armies to set the clockwork in motion. And the entire evacuation would need to be accomplished in just a few hours in the blackness of two nights—and in silence.

  It was a risky maneuver under any circumstance, made doubly dangerous by enemy scouts and spies roving the countryside. Kilpatrick’s cavalry’s short-lived triumph did provide Sherman with valuable intelligence about the roads and terrain he would need to march across to reach his goal of breaking the Macon & Western Railroad line for good above the village of Jonesboro. Getting there meant marching his troops from the easternmost trenches more than thirty miles through enemy territory.

  BEGINNING AFTER SUNSET ON August 25 and continuing through the night, the Yankees crept out of their trenches and stealthily abandoned their camps north and east of the city. The siege guns were pulled back, their embrasures covered with brush. Surplus wagons, horses, men, and materiel went across the Chattahoochee, while the remaining wagons with rations for fifteen days for men and horses and a hundred rounds of ammunition per man rolled out—with bat-ting tied to the wheels to muffle the wagons’ rattling. Confederate scouts reported hearing “unusual train” movements north and noticed stacks of brush piled in front of the embrasures but did not realize the Yankees had evacuated their fortifications. A Union corps, including Lt. Col. Charles Morse’s Second Massachusetts, took up a position at the Chattahoochee River bridgehead, left there by Sherman to protect the railroad. Should disaster befall the wider movement, that line also would provide a last refuge for a retreating army. A second corps moved behind the first, then marched west and south to form a line well beyond the July 28 Ezra Church battlefield but facing northwards to cover the advancing column’s rear from surprise attack.

  The silence of the morning of August 26 confounded the Confederates in their earthworks. Officers ordered an extended artillery barrage to pound the rear of the former enemy positions, hoping to draw return fire. The Yankees were gone, wrote Pvt. Sam Watkins, “no one knew whither—and our batteries were shelling the woods, feeling for them.” The shells exploded in vacant copses and camps. Later that morning, nervous vedettes pushed out beyond the picket posts until they reached the empty Union camps. They found the torn-up earth cluttered with abandoned knapsacks, tents, coats, food, empty ammunition crates, and broken-down limbers, the light-industrial detritus and fouled landscape left behind by an army that had packed up and departed quickly, as if gone up into thin air.

  AFTER SUNSET ON AUGUST 26, a second Union movement began. The main body of the three armies commenced swinging out to the west of Atlanta and then south in a successive and concentric wheel by column. A corps left in the trenches at East Point screened the 60,000 men and supporting wagons and artillery in movement. The federal ruse worked as well as Sherman might have hoped. Hood telegraphed Richmond, “The enemy have drawn back so that their left is now on the Chattahoochee at the railroad bridge, their right unchanged.”

  By noon on Sunday, August 28, the Army of
the Tennessee had struck the Atlanta and West Point Railroad about sixteen miles southwest of the city, and the Army of the Cumberland had fallen upon the same line several miles northeast of there, closer to East Point. For the rest of that day and all the following, the troops worked steadily to demolish five miles of the line—though it was already effectively useless to the Confederates because of earlier operations near Alabama. Sherman, however, had grown to hate the Confederate trains running into Atlanta almost as much as the armies behind the city’s earthworks. He declared, “Let the destruction be so thorough that not a rail or tie can be used again.” The troops had a two-daylong Sherman necktie party. Sherman even had crews fill in railroad cuts with trees and dirt and loaded shells as vicious booby traps should an attempt be made to clear the cuts, “so we may rest perfectly satisfied as regards the use of this railroad during the remainder of the campaign.”

  Keeping the trains from rolling was foremost in Sherman’s thinking. He would sever Hood’s last railroad links to the rest of rebeldom and also complete part of his primary mission to ensure Army of Tennessee troops could not reinforce Robert E. Lee in Virginia. Atlanta should never again serve as a rail hub for Confederate troops on the move. But just as importantly, he wanted to blast Confederate communications—what today is termed “infrastructure”—beyond repair. That would render the Confederate heartland incapable of supporting a campaigning army or other large-scale insurrection forces. Atlanta to Sherman was only a battle, albeit a crucial one, in what he believed would be many more years of war to come. In the fighting ahead, he did not want to have to garrison a conquered Atlanta with a full division of troops, as Memphis, Vicksburg, and other occupied Confederate cities required—“so that,” he explained, “success was actually crippling our armies in the field by detachments to guard and protect the interests of a hostile population.” The railroads’ destruction would ensure that Atlanta, even if no Union troops remained within it, could not support another Confederate army; thus, he would be able to continue his war on the Confederacy without leaving crucial men behind to keep a grip on another hostile city.

  Sherman was thinking well beyond the war-making armies of the South. He wanted to destroy the South’s will to continue waging war. Inflicting desolation upon the wellspring of the rebellion was as important as the destruction of the Army of Tennessee. Much as the homes and crops of the Florida Seminole resisters needed to be destroyed when they made clear they would never leave voluntarily, Sherman believed that most secessionists would never willingly give up their cause. Large numbers of rebel soldiers and their civilian supporters would need to be driven from their homes, their means of livelihood obliterated and many, perhaps all, killed before the rebellion would be ended. His “aim then,” he admitted, “was to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and to make them fear and dread us.” He was there to teach a hard lesson, he wrote, quoting one of his favorite proverbs: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” He believed, he told Washington as he cut a swath of desolation through Georgia, “we cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war [that they will] sue for peace.” Destruction of the railroad was another psychological weapon in his nation’s arsenal against those who would otherwise continue to resist the will of the United States.

  Not until the morning of August 30 was he satisfied the job at hand was done. The railroad left beyond repair, movement toward his ultimate destination, the Macon & Western Railroad, could now commence.

  SHERMAN’S INSISTENCE ON THE utter destruction of the railroad gave Hood’s scouts the chance to alert him before the full Yankee movement struck out on its last leg toward the Macon railroad. Not until August 29, forty-eight hours after the grand federal wheel began circling Atlanta, did Hood grasp Sherman’s main objective: to cut his last rail and all-important line in and out of town. Sherman’s three columns were feeling their way toward the crossroads village of Rough and Ready and the station town of Jonesboro. However, Hood still misjudged the gravity of his danger—or feared a Yankee deviation from their march in on his southern perimeter. At first he sent parts of just two corps to Jonesboro to intercept the six-mile-long federal columns.

  By the afternoon of August 30, Sherman’s leading divisions had reached within a mile and easy cannon range of Jonesboro. Skirmishing soon began there and five miles north near Rough and Ready. Unruffled in Atlanta, Hood sent word at 1 P.M. that he didn’t think “the necessity would arise to send any troops to Jonesboro today.” Only as the sun began to set did he understand the dire threat developing against his communications. Hood called the two corps’ commanders he had sent into the field, Generals William Hardee and Stephen D. Lee, back to his Atlanta headquarters that night. Unlike Johnston, who would almost certainly have withdrawn at this point to a more defensible location after a successful flanking movement by the enemy, Hood had to go on the attack.

  Without enough cars to move his soldiers to the field by rail, he marched the remaining men from Lee’s and Hardee’s corps—about 20,000 troops—through the night out of Atlanta to head off the 60,000 federal forces, virtually Sherman’s entire troop strength. Hood kept a corps in Atlanta, still unsure where Sherman was going. Private Watkins joined the “forced march” out of town. He and his fellow Confederates tramped through the night and much of the next hot day along a circuitous route to avoid stumbling into contact with entrenching Union forces. Hardee and Lee were still uncertain where Sherman’s forces were concentrated. Watkins joked ruefully, “A small portion—about a hundred thousand—were nigh about there somewhere.” Strung out along the road from Atlanta, the sleepless rebels needed most of the day to reach Jonesboro and then line up for a charge, which Hood insisted upon repeatedly. He commanded that the lines should “go at the enemy with bayonets fixed, determined to drive everything they may come against.”

  Not surprisingly, when the two worn out Southern corps, depressed to be facing the bulk of Sherman’s armies after thinking for days they had won, advanced starting at 3 p.m. on August 31, their lines were badly disorganized, more like an “infuriated mob,” remarked one witness, than a veteran army. They charged into well-entrenched positions rife with artillery. Some companies simply refused to advance. “We did our level best to get up a fight,” recalled Watkins of the battle, “but it was no go, any way we could fix it up.” The Confederates were used up, horribly outnumbered and out-gunned. The battle was a “killing time” for the Yankees. When it was done, at least 2,000 rebels lay dead or wounded against a loss of just 172 Union soldiers.

  STILL NOT SURE WHAT Sherman’s next move might be, Hood ordered Lee’s Corps above Jonesboro back into the city in the early morning hours of September 1. It was his final error—and should have been a fatal one for the Army of Tennessee. The men marched, recalled Watkins, “without any order, discipline, or spirit to do anything. . . . Everyone was taking his own course, and wishing and praying to be captured. Hard and senseless marching, with little sleep, half rations and lice, had made their lives a misery.” Sherman’s 60,000-man army interposed itself between Hardee’s heavily damaged corps dug in above and to the west of Jonesboro and Lee’s weak and exhausted force slinking toward Atlanta. Watkins thought the end of the war was upon the army. The Northerners attacked General Hardee’s remaining forces at Jonesboro that afternoon. Sherman personally commanded the battle, attempting to use his superior numbers to hold Hardee’s front while getting on his rear. However, he still insisted on keeping a large portion of his force well above the battlefield at work destroying the railroad. That left otherwise easily cut off routes of retreat open for Hardee—and the corps moving toward Atlanta.

  Still, the trap at Jonesboro nearly slammed shut. The night prior, though, Southerners had thrown up entrenchments in the heavily wooded and bramble-tangled countryside. The stout defensive position allowed Hardee’s men to slip out of the trap even as the jaws snapped down. The
Northerners captured nearly an entire brigade, more than six hundred prisoners, but the rebels held off the attackers until nightfall. Hardee lost another 1,000 men in total; Sherman just as many. Under the cover of darkness the Confederates fell back seven miles to Lovejoy’s Station. The Yankees advanced on them the next day but encountered strong earthworks with swamps and thick tangles of vines protecting the defenders’ flanks. Sherman decided to leave the rebel remnant there.

  At this juncture, the Northern general had the opportunity to crush and destroy at least one, and probably both, of the badly demoralized, exposed, and truncated components of the Georgia defense by driving on Atlanta or encircling Hardee’s remaining men at Lovejoy’s. Sherman’s army commanders asked permission to do just that. With the maddening whistles of the trains still echoing in his head, Sherman again ordered his vast army to stop and concentrate on destroying the railroad. He gave instructions to wreck the railroad between Jonesboro and Rough and Ready, declaring to General Thomas, “I don’t believe anybody recognizes how important it is now to destroy the railroad.” That allowed Hood the time he needed to reorganize. This time, though, it was not for another attack.

  BY NOON ON SEPTEMBER 1, Hood’s forces were pulling out of the fortifications and assembling along the Atlanta roads. Some Atlantans, recalled one young man on hand, “could not believe that the city was to be given up.” Many residents ran back to the bombproofs they’d believed they’d exited for good. Now they feared Confederate forces marching down the Decatur and McDonough roads were massing for another battle.