The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  Sherman heard about the speech the next day and wired President Lincoln about it. He wrote of the “bad effect” that would come should he be forced to guard his line back to Chattanooga and Nashville “to an extent that I could not act offensively.” He seemed to be warning the president that what lay ahead might appear unorthodox while letting him know that strategic and political implications were being considered. Two days later, he offered Ulysses S. Grant a glimpse of his surprising intentions. He would “destroy Atlanta, and then march across Georgia to Savannah or Charleston, breaking roads and doing irreparable damage.” Of one thing he was certain: “We cannot remain on the defensive.” A week later, he was convinced that destroying Georgia’s war-making ability was the best course of action as long as the South remained in rebellion, which he expected would continue, he told Grant, “until we can repopulate Georgia.” Before then, it would be “useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources. . . . I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”

  Sherman’s men wondered how long their respite might continue. The general spent the pleasant fall evenings together with his officers, who gathered about his headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel Morse and others were there in September when he said cryptically, Let’s “wait until October, when the corn [will] be ripe, and then go down and gather it.” They didn’t know quite what he meant until preparations began. He sent all sick and disabled men to the rear. All superfluous supplies beyond those needed for a light marching army were also shipped north. Then, after the last train had departed, he stunned his men by ordering the total destruction of the railroad to their rear— their lifeline to the rest of the federal army—almost all the way to Chattanooga. The 62,000 men still with Sherman were isolated, minimally supplied, in a hostile land. They would march through it, destroying anything that could support the rebel army, feeding themselves with whatever they could forage. Sherman had already practiced such a maneuver the previous January in Mississippi. Nonetheless, nothing quite like it—not in scale or distance, significance or risk—had ever been undertaken before.

  IN THE VERY FIRST DAYS of November, Morse wrote home, “I am now going to let you into some of our mighty secrets. We are going to abandon Atlanta, first utterly destroying every railroad building, store, and everything else that can be of any use to the rebels. Then, cutting loose from everything and everybody, Sherman is going to launch his army into Georgia.” The Second Massachusetts’ officers were initially charged with surveying the city and preparing for its destruction, until the mission was placed under the more experienced Capt. O. M. Poe, the chief engineer of the army.

  Sometime in the night of November 10, arsonists set fire to a cluster of private houses on the north side of town. According to Connecticut quartermaster Lt. Henry Stanley, the army made “every exertion . . . to extinguish the fire.” Even Generals Geary and Slocum joined the fight to put out the flames. The next morning, Slocum offered a reward of $500 for the arrest of the arsonists or anyone who set fire to buildings after that.

  Such attempts to thwart extracurricular destruction seemed pointless when four days later the work of pulling down the city began in earnest. On November 14, troops began systematically knocking down the stations, roundhouses, and other structures along the railroads. Poe directed teams of soldiers using iron rails suspended from a rigged chain, which they swung back and forth as a battering ram against building walls and supports. The men battered down alternate piers along one side of the massive vaulted car shed. With the collapse of the last pier, the enormous structure slid over under its own weight, and, said Morse, “the great roof carried the entire building to the ground, with a resounding crash.” Tall brick industrial smokestacks, battered by the swinging rail below and pulled by rope tied above, toppled over and came crashing to the ground like great sequoias. Stanley watched the railroad “speedily transformed into nothing or a great quantity of small pieces.” A roundhouse constructed from heavy granite blocks and able to store forty locomotives seemed impregnable, “but a few busy hands soon reduced it to nothing.”

  The night of November 15 provided a spectacle, Morse recorded not long after, “impossible . . . to imagine.” Fire provided the coup de grâce for central Atlanta. He had stage seating for the conflagration. “We sat on top of our house for hours watching it. For miles around, the country was as light as day. The business portion of Atlanta, embracing perhaps twenty acres, covered with large storehouses and public buildings, situated in the highest part of the city, was all on fire at one time, the flames shooting up for hundreds of feet into the air. In one of the depots was a quantity of old rebel shells and other ammunition; the constant explosion of these heightened the effect.” The spectacle went, he found, “from the sublime to the ridiculous” when, in the midst of this grand orgy of destruction, a Massachusetts regimental band “went up and serenaded General Sherman; it was like fiddling over the burning of Rome!”

  He noted, though, that his forces “kept large patrols out to protect the dwellings and other private property of the few citizens remaining in the city; this was effectually done.” Sherman would always insist that his army never torched a single private dwelling.

  FINALLY, EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, Morse could attest to the completion of the work. Sherman himself marched forth with his army out the Decatur Road to launch his march to the sea. “On the morning of the 16th,” Morse witnessed, “nothing was left of Atlanta except its churches, the City Hall and private dwellings. You could hardly find a vestige of the splendid railroad depots, warehouses, etc. It was melancholy, but it was war prosecuted in deadly earnest.” The last regular corps did not start off its march until about half past four that afternoon. The Massachusetts man wistfully recollected, “We followed after, being the last United States troops to leave Atlanta.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE NEW SOUTH

  GEN.WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN’S army began its three-hundred-mile furrow of destruction to the coast, pillaging and destroying whatever might support a hostile army—the much-reduced yet still determined Army of Tennessee, which had moved behind Sherman’s own advance and up into Tennessee—and seizing, or stealing, whatever else served its purposes. Only light harassment from a small Confederate force, much of it composed of the state militia’s old men and young boys, and cavalry skirmishers disturbed the army’s wide swath of devastation across Georgia’s most fertile lands. Sherman intended to prove “we can march a well appointed army right through [ Jefferson Davis’s] territory.” This action “may not be war,” he admitted, “but rather statesmanship,” as he archly called it, providing “proof positive” to any who still might think otherwise “that the North can prevail in this contest.” As Sherman’s forces ploughed remorselessly southeastwards, the Huff family, who had taken flight to the countryside from their Marietta Street home, joined the refugees returning—in a trickle at first and then in waves, like the reversing tide—to Atlanta.

  The first returnees reached Atlanta in late November and early December. What they found stunned and appalled them. They journeyed back into “an ocean of ruins.” The forests that once obstructed the views all the way to Kennesaw Mountain to the north and Stone Mountain to the south were gone. Any tree not cut down by the armies or Confederate arsenal stood truncated and limbless, bleak testaments to the storm of violence that had passed their way. The people traveling into town immediately noticed a peculiar absence: Silence engulfed a place famed, or reviled, for the constant caterwaul of its whistling, clanging, and puffing trains, pounding hammers, rasping saws, rushing carriages and jibbing horses, call-and-response barking between sellers and buyers, ringing church bells, and bustling sidewalks and passageways. That Atlanta was a city of the dead could not be doubted; the odor of death overwhelmed everything. “ The putrid carcasses of dead horses and mules met the eye,” reported one of the first people back in town, “while the stench that exhaled from them filled the air, p
roducing a loathing on the part of all who ventured into the city, unutterably disgusting.” There was no escaping the stench, for even “within its corporate limits lay the last remains of man and beast emitting the same disgusting odor.”

  Passing the city’s battered ramparts, the Huff family took many detours to reach Marietta Street. Piles of toppled brick, once the walls of buildings, covered the streets and couldn’t be crossed over. Their wagon had to be lightened and then pushed while the mule was cajoled to clop over frozen clay roads left nearly impassable by the heavy army wagons and artillery pieces that had cut them up. The pits of what had been cellars beneath charred buildings yawned open dangerously—many still held unexploded ordnance—as did cisterns and gopher holes, easy traps for the unwary, especially at night.

  Miraculously, the Huff house, though atop a hill within the lines, had come through the fighting badly damaged but still standing. The family and their servants huddled together around their log kitchen house fire in the winter cold, while the big house underwent repair. In the unbroken darkness of their first night back, their ears perked up at an unsettling howling that rose and fell in the distance. “It seemed to start a long way off and come to us from the northeast or the direction of Peachtree Creek,” recounted Sarah Huff. It sounded “like the moaning of doves” to her mother, but far louder and more piercing. Sarah was eight years old the first time she heard the mysterious howls echoing in the icy North Georgia night. “No,” she realized, “it was not the sound of doves, but the distant baying of dogs, dangerous dogs.” The farm families, and even many city dwellers, typically kept half a dozen or more hounds for hunting and other dogs to protect the barnyard animals. The owners had left their canines behind in their flight from Atlanta, and now, the eight-year-old Huff shivered, “the baying of these animals in unison was the only noise to break the profound stillness.” The starving, half-feral dogs roamed in packs, snarling and snapping at anyone who dared approach, just part of a desolated landscape war had returned to an inhospitable, savage, and wild state of nature. “Ruin,” cried one of the returnees, “universal ruin was the exclamation of all.”

  HUNGRY AND RAPACIOUS ex-Confederate soldiers wandering home and others from the countryside looking for easy plunder came into the largely abandoned city, where they broke into the vacant houses. They took what they wanted or moved in as squatters. Without protection, the fifty or so remaining families were easy targets for marauders. Georgia Gen. W. P. Howard surveyed conditions in Atlanta and wrote a December 7 report to Gov. Joseph Brown. He found,There are about 250 wagons in the city on my arrival load[ed] with pilfered plunder; pianos, mirrors, furniture of all kinds, iron, hides without number, and an incalculable amount of other things, very valuable at the present time. This exportation of stolen property has been going on ever since the place had been abandoned by the enemy. Bushwhackers, robbers and deserters, and citizens from the surrounding country for a distance of fifty miles have been engaged in this dirty work.

  Among those who returned earliest to town, Ezekiel Calhoun and his daughters and grandchildren made their way back to their home off Washington Street. Dr. Calhoun’s grandson Noble explored the warred-over landscape “of almost unequaled desolation.” With Calhoun’s brother not yet back, the few score men in town voted the elderly physician acting mayor. He appointed every man to serve as a police officer. The citizen police soon found robbers breaking into the Trinity Episcopal Church, where departing families had stored pianos and other valuable furniture, and at gunpoint the men forced them to return the stolen goods.

  On December 10, John Steele and the Intelligencer staff, returned with their presses to town, brought out a single-sided issue on flimsy paper to distribute throughout the region. Given the “great scarcity of everything in the city,” the editor invited “country friends” who read the paper and were “fortunate enough to escape the clutches of the Yankee hordes” to bring their produce to the city. The newspaper assured farmers that returning Confederate quartermasters would no longer seize their teams and provender.

  That same day, weary and footsore, James M. Calhoun trudged into his devastated city. He had taken the train as far as Jonesboro and then walked the last twenty miles, carrying a heavy valise and overcoat in hand.

  THE PROCESS OF REBUILDING the city was foremost on Calhoun’s mind as he went back to work in the damaged but functional City Hall. Enormous piles of debris needed to be removed, roads resurfaced, holes that once were buildings filled in, walls and chimneys in danger of toppling knocked down, dead animals removed, and bodies buried; only then might reconstruction begin. The city was broke, the Confederate money it might raise for rebuilding essentially worthless, and any building supplies, other than old bricks, were many days’ wagon ride away. The annual mayoral election was held amid the ruins, and the few men on hand returned Calhoun to office. He and the city council resumed their meetings on January 6, 1865, and immediately set about borrowing money to pay bills, issuing bonds and employing surveyors to review damage, to begin rebuilding and extending streets, and engaged the railroads in the removal or reconstruction of their depots.

  The spirit of the old Virginians who had carved Atlanta out of a former native wilderness would rekindle. The Intelligencer invoked the city’s still recent origins to remind those who now returned that the wreckage of Atlanta had just a few years earlier been “the abode of the red man who roamed over it in search of game. . . . The march of civilization—the rapid advance of the white man with his implements of agriculture—had imposed this necessity upon the poor Indian and soon after his removal, nay before it was fairly accomplished, the axe had felled the forest in many a locality and the ploughshare and the hoe had begun their work in fulfillment, as it were, of the decree of the Eternal.” Atlanta, through its railroads, had become the most important interior city of the South and its commercial center. As far as the Intelligencer was concerned, the divine decree remained in force. Although returned to savage wilderness, Atlantans would, with the spirit of old, build a new and better Atlanta. The Gate City’s strength lay in its people: “That which built Atlanta and made it a flourishing city, will again restore it, purified, we trust, in many particulars, by the fiery ordeal through which it has past.—Soon the whistle of the steam engine will again be heard in its limits. . . . Let no one despond as to the future of our city! . . . She will soon rise from her ashes.”

  EVEN IF THE ATLANTA OF old was dead, the Civil War, however, continued. Militiaman Allen T. Holliday marched on with the state guard. Falling back from Atlanta, he wrote his wife, Lizzie, in despair at his powerlessness to help or “advise you what to do should a Yankee raid get through Wilkes.” He urged her, “Treat them as kind as you can under the circumstances. I know it is hard for us to love our enemies but we are taught to do so.”

  Union army cavalry on the eastern flanks of Sherman’s march through Georgia did reach the 3,000-acre Wilkes County plantation outside the town of Washington near the South Carolina border in late November. In anticipation of the Yankees’ arrival, Lizzie sealed the china and silver in secret lockers set inside the walls and moved the livestock into a forested river bottom. With her short brown hair tied back, she met the bluecoats on the front steps of the small plank house T. and the slaves had built for the couple and their five children a decade earlier. Many of the forty Holliday slaves joined the thousands of other freemen who now moved with the Yankee army like a vast, trailing cloud. Although T. still served, the officer leading the federals decided not to destroy the Holliday home after Lizzie told him that T. was a fellow Mason. Along with the rest of the militia, though, T. soon mustered out. He came home from the trenches a broken man, suffering from a severe respiratory ailment, probably tuberculosis, and died a year later, in November 1865 at age thirty-seven. However, 145 years later, his great-great-grandson farms the same land Holliday once did.

  Sherman’s columns swept from Wilkes south toward the coast. On December 22, a jubilant General Sherman teleg
raphed President Abraham Lincoln to present “as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Having completed their now world-famous march away from Atlanta virtually unimpeded across the entirety of Confederate Georgia, Sherman’s proud army rested. The work of subduing the rebellion, Sherman lamented, would soon have to resume. “There seems no end but utter annihilation that will satisfy their [rebels’] hate of the ‘sneaking Yankee’ and ‘ruthless invader’. . . . Although I have come right through the heart of Georgia, they talk as defiantly as ever.”

  ATLANTA’S INTERNAL CIVIL WAR also continued. Confederates returned to the city and resumed their battle against their Northern-leaning neighbors. The day Savannah fell, Steele published bitter recriminations: “Some months ago, aye, three years ago also, we predicted that if ever the enemy made his appearance in Atlanta, he would find among its citizens a number of them ready to bid him welcome and to take part in his behalf.” He blamed “traitors who have fled to the enemy” for enabling the fall and destruction of Atlanta. The city, he contended, had “been cursed with the presence of men and women who were as spies in its midst, and did all in their power secretly to promote its downfall.” He noted, though, that with their departure north, “our city [is] at least relieved from their presence, though no gallows is left standing to commemorate their exit from it.”