The Bonfire_The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

by Marc Wortman

  The newspaper listed the names of forty-seven better-known among the men—the others “too numerous to mention”—including “a base traitor,” William M. Markham, the wealthy former mayor who had built much of downtown Atlanta, now in ruins, and his rolling mill partner, Lewis Scofield, as well as James Dunning and Samuel P. Richards, who was presently in New York City. Richards might have protested, but their decision to immigrate to the Yankee land made their loyalties crystal clear. “Atlanta is better off in recognizing them as open enemies, than it was when they were recognized as citizens, being its secret enemies and enemies of the Confederacy and the cause of the South.”

  Among the most reviled of those now open enemies was Cyrena Stone’s attorney husband Amherst. He had left town in 1863, with tens of thousands of dollars fleeced from fellow Atlanta citizens, Unionist and non-Unionist alike, in a half-baked scheme to employ his connections in official federal circles to set up a government-approved blockade-running outfit. Once in the North, he was quickly taken up by military police. He spent most of the remainder of the war in a U.S. prison on an island in New York City. Upon his release, he took a leading role in advocating on behalf of exiled Southern Unionists and agitating against the Confederacy. He eventually returned to Georgia to take up an official role in its reconstruction. His crooked plan to operate a blockade-running company, however, caused the U.S. government to deny his claims for restitution for the destruction of his Southern property. Cyrena had lived on her own, like so many women during the war, in her Houston Street home until she went north following Sherman’s expulsion order. She and Amherst were probably never reunited. She died of cancer in 1868, aged thirty-eight, in Vermont, not far from where she was born. Her secret wartime diary and her personal accounts of her experiences provided her sister, Louisa M. Whitney, with the background for a loosely fictionalized 1903 retelling of Cyrena’s experiences in Civil War Atlanta and her surreptitious resistance to the Confederates.

  EARLY IN DECEMBER 1864, Lt. Col. Luther J. Glenn, another former mayor of Atlanta, returned with his Cobb’s Georgia Legion infantry company from the fighting in Virginia to reestablish a Confederate military presence in Atlanta. He was joined by now Maj. George Washington Lee, the post’s earlier provost marshal. Whatever previous animosity Lee felt toward the Yankees had redoubled because of the personal affront of having his entire extended family expelled by Sherman. The bluecoats had driven six Lee women and thirteen children, with their belongings packed in one wagon pulled by a single old horse, into exile from Lee’s hometown. According to the Intelligencer , Lee earned a badge of honor in having Sherman single him and two other Atlanta officials—Alexander M. Wallace and E. T. Hunnicutt—out for arrest. Sherman may never have actually given the order. Nonetheless, the newspaper claimed the Northern commander, urged on by Markham, had said the trio should be “denied all privileges of captured soldiers and treated and punished as traitors and outlaws” for their mistreatment of “loyal persons” living in the city and Union prisoners held here.

  Lee had faced charges of having sold Confederate service exemptions, but there was no doubting that he had personally fought to stave off the invasion. He had taken command of a four-hundred-man force that failed in its efforts to hold off the July federal army crossing of the Chattahoochee at Roswell. He had then gathered five hundred men, with arms but no ammunition, to protect the state capital at Milledgeville. After that, he formed a guard for federal prisoners held at Macon. In August, he had organized a home-guard defense against a Yankee cavalry raid on the town. Back in Atlanta, Glenn and Lee sought to reimpose their Confederate authority. They rounded up Atlanta’s previously exempt railroad workers and anyone else they could conscript to serve in a Confederate army that, in fact, would exist only for a matter of weeks longer.

  Glenn and Lee intended to bring to heel again any who might think that the Confederacy’s days were at an end. Ever the instigator, Steele urged a thorough cleansing of Atlanta’s population, for “all our enemies in this community did not go North. . . . Amid the ruins of our dwellings, and surrounded by the general desolation wrought by our accursed foes, there are persons who do not hesitate to say that they would rather have the ‘Yankee army around them than the Rebs.’ . . . We submit that people who feel thus should not be permitted to live among us. . . . It is the duty of our authorities to see that the country is rid of their presence, at least.” But with a city mayor who in all likelihood agreed with such sentiments, the increasingly toothless Confederate officers in town, as desperately cold, ill-clad, and hungry as their neighbors in the midst of another biting winter, had little power left to enforce loyalty to their dying cause. Many simply used their power to enrich themselves.

  They arrested a few of the men who had remained in the city during Sherman’s occupation. Prior to the expulsion, James Calhoun had arranged with General Sherman for well-to-do townspeople to move their most valuable possessions into the Trinity Methodist Church on City Hall Square for safekeeping. Calhoun had left open Unionist James L. Dunning in charge of the property, but Dunning had moved north to the safety of New York City when Sherman’s army moved out. He left John Silvey, who had provided “coffee and other refreshments” to the wounded Yankee prisoners during the fighting, responsible for the furniture. In early December, thirteen of Glenn and Lee’s soldiers surrounded Silvey’s house and arrested him, charging him with treason for cooperating with the Union occupiers. He and others taken in by the Confederates for disloyalty were held for a few days in town before being sent to Macon for trial. A bribe of $4,000 in Confederate money, however, won Silvey’s release.

  Lee’s constant fight to bring to heel men he considered traitors to the Southern cause in Atlanta and throughout Georgia gained him plenty of enemies. A few months after he came back to town to reignite the city’s dying Confederate embers, two men called him out of his house and blasted him with a slug shot. Though badly stung, Lee managed to draw his gun and shoot down one of his assailants. After the war reached its conclusion, Lee turned to managing the many properties, including a valuable rolling stock foundry, he had accumulated. He was a poor businessman. All his ventures failed, and when his decades-long battle with consumption ended with his death in 1879, the once fearsome Confederate enforcer was the operator of a third-rate boarding house.

  THROUGHOUT THE FROSTY WINTER months at the beginning of 1865, people returned to their homes in small numbers day by day. Then, on March 3, the first train into Atlanta since Sherman’s departure rolled in on the repaired Atlanta & West Point Railroad line from Alabama. The reception was much like that for the very first train into Terminus just twenty years earlier in 1845. “Upon hearing [the whistle of the locomotive], men, women and boys shouted with joy,” a reporter wrote. “The old, familiar and inspiring sound was grateful [sic] to us all.” The train whistle was a loud and clear signal that Atlanta would be rebuilt. “Soon,” proclaimed the Intelligencer, “the other railroads will form their connection with our city, and then, from her ashes, Phoenix-like, Atlanta will rise to resume her former importance in Georgia and the South, never again, we trust, to be wrested from her by our savage foes.” The railroad was the vehicle that once again brought people, goods, and cash washing into town.

  By the first weeks of March, several businesses operating out of makeshift cabins in the downtown were up and running. More importantly, investors believed in Atlanta’s future: “Building business lots are in great demand,” reported the newspaper, “and are held at astonishingly high prices. This augers well for the future of Atlanta.” With the spring, the previous trickle of returning and new residents became a torrent. Soon, 150 stores, most housed in shacks and lean-tos, were in operation. A new instant city was rising.

  THE “GOOD GOVERNMENT” Whig politician of former days, Mayor James M. Calhoun devoted much of his time and the city’s funds in his last term in office to making the roads passable. He concluded his political career prosaically by declaring, “We have removed inc
redible amounts of dirt and rubbish from the principal streets, filled up washes and low places in others, [and] done a great deal of heavy and expensive work in others.” Even his old nemesis, Steele’s Intelligencer could not help but approve the progress. “In every direction we notice that the rubbish is being removed, and preparations are making for the erection of new buildings. The sound of the trowel and the hammer is heard on every side, and everything betokens an earnest determination on the part of our people to restore Atlanta as rapidly as possible to its former commanding position in the commercial world.”

  Samuel Richards didn’t see much progress when he stepped off a train car at a makeshift depot on August 10. He was met by “a dirty, dusty ruin.” Three and a half months earlier, he had stood with the massive crowd in midtown Manhattan for three hours to watch President Lincoln’s funeral cortege pass slowly by. That night, he spat, “Would to God that he had never been born.” Despite the blasted state of Atlanta, he was pleased to see “busy life is resuming its sway over its desolate streets, and any number of stores of all kinds are springing up as if by magic in every part of the burnt district.”

  He and his brother resumed their trade. The revivified commercial magic touched them. Their sales grew rapidly, soon greatly outpacing those of the war years. Jabez and Samuel Richards expanded their store into one of the largest stationery firms in the South with customers throughout Georgia and beyond. Samuel Richards, however, did not willingly share the fruits of the business with his brother. In 1878, Jabez learned via an ad his brother had placed in the newspaper that the church deacon had dissolved their partnership, begun in 1848. Jabez battled debt for the rest of his life, while Samuel’s new S. P. Richards Company thrived. Today it continues to operate and is one of the world’s leading office-supply companies.

  IN THE LAST DAYS OF the Confederacy, many of the new residents coming to Atlanta were black. Although slavery had ended legally, it nonetheless continued—in some cases by force and in others by necessity. War had impoverished bondsman and master alike. Families came back to town with slaves—or servants with nowhere else to turn for food or shelter—while former slaves who were turned out without provision for their survival from the devastated plantations in Sherman’s path gathered in increasingly large numbers in the squatter camps sprawling about the outskirts of town. The Intelligencer eventually complained about the squalorin the suburbs of Atlanta . . . [where] a promiscuous assemblage of houseless and homeless creatures . . . [are] living in booths, arbors, tent-flies, and rude temporary structures of old cast-off plank. . . . Who these people are no one knows, and how they manage to subsist is equally mysterious. . . . There are many old and decrepit females and young children . . . utterly helpless. Poverty in its direct form reigns supreme among them. . . . [Black men and women], who have left their homes in pursuit of something they do not exactly know what, comprise the greater part of this unfortunate mass.

  Not all of the former slaves suffered such miserable conditions. According to Mayor Calhoun’s son Patrick, returning refugees found former slaves left behind by Sherman’s departing army “well supplied with Yankee beans, coffee, canned goods, and cheese in great quantities, given to them by the Yankee soldiers when they left.” Fortunately, most were willing to share with their former masters.

  Robert Webster, despite the looting of his fortune and his active work with Union prisoners, remained in town after Sherman left. Although he insisted that the bluecoats had “ruined him”—leading him to lay claim in postwar years to US$10,000—he still remained among the town’s wealthier men of any color. A white businessman G. C. Rogers said, “Bob was better off than any of us. [He] had money and had more money than his old master.”

  In fact, his former owner, Maj. Ben Yancey, had returned to Atlanta with his Fulton Dragoons to bolster the militia, but finally abandoned the Confederate fight and now lived in Athens, where the fey Sallie Clayton soon arrived to share the household’s hospitality before returning to her family home in Atlanta. The Yankees had destroyed most of Yancey’s numerous plantations and other properties and, of course, freed his many slaves. He was left with four horses and burnt-over land and otherwise penniless. His brother, William Lowndes Yancey, firebrand leader of the Alabama States’ Rights faction who had worked so tirelessly to bring on secession, had died in 1863. Montgomery marked his funeral with a massive outpouring of grief. In his new state of poverty, Ben Yancey wrote to Webster and “asked him if he could loan me $150.” Webster’s reply came express in the form of “$100 in gold and $100 in silver.” He also sent word, said Yancey, “I could get more if I wanted it.”

  Though the bondage of human chattel to owner was broken, master and slave remained intertwined even after slavery’s demise. For years after, whites in town continued to call Webster by the name Yancey. He would correct them, “My name is and has always been Robert Webster.” He was proud to claim Daniel Webster as his father. He insisted, however, he felt genuine fondness and respect for his former owner. “I love the noble name of Yancey,” he proclaimed.

  WHILE THE CONFEDERACY STILL ruled the land, changes in Atlanta raced ahead of the laws on the books. In the very last days of March, Steele reiterated his oft-issued call for Calhoun and the city council to forbid the “practice of allowing negroes to hire their own time,” which was now much more widespread. The die-hard racist also pointed to “a case in our own city,” very likely Prince Ponder or Robert Webster,

  “in which a slave has become the owner of a mule and dray, and has actually employed another slave to drive it for him. It is contrary to reason that that slave can be as valuable to his owner, when encumbered with his mule and dray and hired man, as he would be without it; much of his time is necessarily taken up to looking after his individual interests. There are other instances in our community of slaves living to themselves and carrying on business on their own account as though they were free.” Steele and many other whites refused to accept that freedom for black people—or at least the end of their perpetual slavery—had truly come to the South.

  The great equalizer was poverty. The abject conditions facing all city residents forced a blurring of the color divide, in which the previously inconceivable could now occur. Nine-year-old Henry Ossian Flipper had grown up on the Ponder place a slave until fleeing with his family to Macon. Although still slaves in theory, as far as any of them knew, without permission from Ellen Ponder or any other white authority, Henry, his cobbler father Festus, mother Isabella, and four brothers returned to Atlanta in the early spring of 1865.

  Since their quarters at the Ponder place were an uninhabitable ruin, the Flipper family moved to a shack on Decatur Street where Festus opened a boot shop. Slave or free, he soon made good money. The family of an ex-rebel captain moved in next door to the Flippers. The wife of this soldier for a white man’s empire offered to instruct Henry and his brothers “for a small remuneration.” She needed the money, however little. The five Flipper brothers’ education resumed. They soon moved to missionary schools and, eventually, into the first black colleges established in the Lower South. Each Flipper brother became a community leader: one a founder of Big Bethel, the leading African Methodist Episcopal church in Atlanta and a bishop of the Georgia church, another a professor at a black college in Savannah, another a physician in Florida, while a fourth carried on his father’s shop and trade. Henry, who as a boy had watched soldiers marching past his slave quarters and owed his freedom from a life of slavery to the Union army, would overcome venomous racial hostility to become the first black man to graduate in 1877 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and one of the first black engineers in the nation, as well as an author and federal official.

  AFTER THE WAR, institutions for improving the lot of former slaves grew more rapidly in Atlanta than any other city in the South. However, freedom in terms of full civil rights remained a far-off hope. When federal troops returned to the city, among their first acts was to impose another passport system to con
trol the movement of freemen through town. Robert Webster, who had returned to the barbering business with renewed success, became a Republican Party leader during Reconstruction. He personally funded and housed many black officials from across the state who came to Atlanta to serve in the legislature but were unable to find hotels or boarding houses willing to take them in. Even after Webster’s death in 1883, the legacy of his slavery continued to haunt his children. Ben Yancey’s daughter held the deed to the former slave’s Houston Street house, which as a slave Webster could not legally purchase. After Webster’s death, the former slave’s widow and his final owner’s heirs each laid claim to the valuable property. The legal wrangling continued for seven years until the contending parties shared in proceeds from its auction.

  Despite slavery’s complex legacy, cruelly onerous race laws, and outright antiblack violence, Atlanta became a magnet for freedmen. By 1870, its black citizenry had grown to more than 10,000, not quite half of the city’s population. The South’s largest black middle class took root, many of its members drawing upon the wealth, skills, and education of the former slaves who had earned a measure of freedom and helped bring about the end of slavery during the war. Upon the ashes of Atlanta, African Americans erected the foundations their children and grandchildren would build upon in the next century to establish their full rights as American citizens.