The Bonfire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I - FRONTIER

  CHAPTER 1 - FLAGS

  CHAPTER 2 - VIRGINIANS

  CHAPTER 3 - REMOVAL

  CHAPTER 4 - SHERMAN IN THE SWAMP

  CHAPTER 5 - ANOTHER PASSAGE

  CHAPTER 6 - THE COMPROMISE

  II - GATE CITY

  CHAPTER 7 - THE CORNERSTONE

  CHAPTER 8 - EARTHQUAKE

  CHAPTER 9 - NEVER! NEVER!! NEVER!!!

  CHAPTER 10 - SPECULATION

  CHAPTER 11 - STREET THEATER

  III - CLAMOROUS TOWN

  CHAPTER 12 - THE DEAD HOUSE

  CHAPTER 13 - ENEMIES WITHIN

  CHAPTER 14 - RIVER OF DEATH

  CHAPTER 15 - A DAY’S OUTING

  IV - THE HUNDRED DAYS’ BATTLE

  CHAPTER 16 - RAILROAD WAR

  CHAPTER 17 - CANDLE ENDS

  CHAPTER 18 - FIGHTING, FIGHTING, FIGHTING

  CHAPTER 19 - ROMAN RUNAGEES

  CHAPTER 20 - PRAYERS

  V - THE THIEF IN THE GLOAMING

  CHAPTER 21 - A PERFECT SHELL

  CHAPTER 22 - THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA

  VI - WAR IS CRUELTY, AND YOU CANNOT REFINE IT

  CHAPTER 23 - GOODBYE, JOHNNY

  CHAPTER 24 - THE FIRST BONFIRE

  CHAPTER 25 - THE SECOND BONFIRE

  CHAPTER 26 - THE NEW SOUTH

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  FOR JODI, REBECCA,

  AND CHARLIE

  Haven’t you heard, though,

  About the ships where war has found them out

  At sea, about the towns where war has come

  Through opening clouds at night with droning speed

  Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,—

  And children in the ships and in the towns?

  Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?

  Nothing so new—something we had forgotten:

  War is for everyone, for children too.

  I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.

  The best way is to come uphill with me

  And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.

  —ROBERT FROST, “THE BONFIRE”

  Georgia in 1860

  Native Treaties and

  Territorial Cessions

  in Georgia

  Atlanta Campaign

  of 1864

  Atlanta

  Region

  Atlanta

  Defenses

  Atlanta

  in 1864

  INTRODUCTION

  CIVIL WAR ATLANTA has been wreathed in legends. Made into the poignant epitome of the defeated South, Atlanta as portrayed was filled with tragic defeated Southern heroes with nary a single solitary sympathizer for the Union or for Lincoln. The city’s black inhabitants appear as passive spectators in a war fought in part over their freedom. Then, there are what may be the two most famous quotations associated with the entire Civil War, both supposedly spoken in Atlanta. Both of them were invented. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Rhett Butler’s line of seventy years ago, still ranks as the most memorable ever uttered on the screen. The other is credited to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman as he put the torch to Atlanta 145 years ago: “War is hell.” In fact, he probably never said these words, and if he did, he certainly didn’t while in Atlanta. The story of Atlanta is more than misplaced one-liners or the saturated colors of melodrama.

  Sherman did write something far more cold-eyed and to the point when the mayor of the Lower South’s most important Confederate city appealed to the Union army commander to take pity on his already destitute and battered citizens and rescind his order expelling them from their homes. Sherman answered him, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” End the war, and the cruelty would end. We have sanitized modern war in ways that allow us to ignore what Sherman knew. We forget his words time and again at our peril.

  The cruelty the Union armies inflicted upon the Gate City, along with Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to batter down the defenses of Richmond, became the great object of worldwide attention throughout the summer of 1864. However, that cruelty, too, has become mythologized. Sherman was charged with torching Atlanta, conducting a war without restraint upon civilians. His “statesmanship” by military means has since been used as a justification for the modern practice of total war. In fact, he is unjustly charged with being solely responsible for the city’s devastation. Two monumental bonfires engulfed Atlanta, the first set off by its defenders, the second by its invaders. The people of the United States and the would-be Confederacy played with fire and ignited a conflagration they could not control. Once the nation went to war with itself, “you might as well appeal to the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships,” Sherman insisted.

  War is cruelty. Its bloodshed and destruction—the “hard hand of war,” as Sherman really did call it—struck Atlanta with a greater ferocity than it has any American city in history. This is the story of how Atlanta and its people came to be in the direct line of the whirl-wind, what one of the besieged city’s Confederate defenders called “a grand holocaust of death.”

  I

  FRONTIER

  AND ALL SWAY FORWARD on the dangerous flood

  Of history, that never sleeps or dies,

  And, held one moment, burns the hand.

  —W. H. AUDEN, “XXX”

  CHAPTER 1

  FLAGS

  THEY STIRRED EARLY. Climbing out of their cellars and bombproofs, the sheltering people looked up as if surprised to see the sun return. As if a sign of the world’s sudden transformation, the sun they gazed up at looked different from those that had come before; it pulsed blood red, suffusing the dense, smoky sky with an unearthly crimson glow. Cinder and ash peppered the late-summer air.

  A reeking sulfurous stew that stung the eyes had already settled over the town, filling the railroad cuts, hollows, and streets. Its tendrils wavered along the hillsides and ravines and sifted through the blackened skeletons of what once were houses and factories, railcars and machine shops. It was the silence, though, that shocked people most. Three predawn hours of gut-rattling, earsplitting, and window-shattering explosions and gunfire made the previous night feel like the announcement that the Apocalypse had finally come. But the infernal noise had ended shortly before the morning’s light tipped into the eyes of those hunkered down within the earth.

  Slowly, tentatively, they stepped out into the dawn. Here and there, heads poked above the ground, one by one like mushroom tops. White and black, all filthy and stricken, the bone-weary women, children, and old men, straggling soldiers and rearguard cavalry began making their way tentatively toward the center of Atlanta. It was the morning of September 2, 1864.

  “I HAVE NEVER SEEN the city more quiet,” said Thomas Kile. The Atlanta shopkeeper and fireman watched the people begin to gather at the Five Points. He and his fellow fire company members had watched helplessly through the night as the exploding bonfire set off by the fleeing Confederate army flattened the Georgia Railroad’s roundhouse, obliterating five locomotives and an eighty-one-car-long line of munitions-packed freight wagons, together with the parallel quarter mile of trackside brick depots and scores of neighboring homes. Yankee and rebel soldiers and officers more than twenty miles away watched the glow on the horizon from the ensuing firestorm; thousands of Atlantan refugees in Macon nearly eighty-five miles away heard the thunder of the explosions. A big chunk of their city was simply gone. Not even a crow flapped over the smoldering ruins.

  At least while they were under fire, th
e people had known where the enemy was and understood his intentions clearly. But suddenly they were suspended between two great armies, one a closing fist, massive and unyielding in its grip on the city’s throat, the other a rapier, bent and broken, yet still lethal, lashing out desperately from point to point to bloody the invader’s death grip enough to make him yield.

  Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman hunched with his 85,000-man Union army somewhere in woods and fields out past the seven miles of surrounding earthworks, waiting to conclude their violent task. “Whether . . . inside Atlanta or not,” proclaimed the commander of the southern U.S. Army, the largest and most ferocious fighting force ever assembled other than commanding general Ulysses S. Grant’s own Army of the Potomac, “it will be a used-up community when we are done with it.” He had yet to capture his great prize, but he was right. “The hard hand of war,” in his apt metaphor, had indeed smashed up Atlanta, squeezing and crushing it with greater fury than any ever unleashed on an American city before.

  Knowing nothing of their fate except the news brought into town on the rushing waves of opposing rumors and smuggled newspapers, the city’s survivors proceeded to the dead center of a vast continental storm. Two days before, word had gone out of a great Confederate victory on the city’s outskirts; the previous night, nearly the entire corps left within the city marched away. Would the small remaining cavalry force make a final stand? Would their Yankee foes, in their lust for Southern blood, loot, and women, charge into the city, leveling everything and killing everyone in their path?

  The people of Atlanta were perfectly alone, though the eyes of both American nations, the United and the Confederate States, indeed the whole world, watched closely as their final fate played out. President Abraham Lincoln in the Washington Executive Mansion and his Richmond counterpart, Jefferson Davis, hovered near their telegraph operators, waiting for word. They understood, too, that their fate, no less than that of the people of Atlanta, depended on the siege’s outcome. They watched for the greatest urban fight in American history and the climatic battle of the war to reach an end.

  “NO MOB,” KILE SAID of the people searching each other out after the cataclysmic night. “All appeared to be quiet and decent and no disorder, whatever.”

  By ten that morning, five hundred people stood in clutches and individually about the Five Points, the city’s central square where the great thoroughfares of Peachtree, Decatur, Marietta, Whitehall, and Cherokee streets met and where the four rail lines converged, making Atlanta the one, crucial city of the lower South. The battered brick, stone, and wood walls of the buildings that lined the square, businesses bursting with commercial energy until just days before the Yankees arrived on the city’s outskirts, now threatened to topple. The vaulting roof of the car shed across the square, terminus for the trains that even a few days before still moved through town at all hours of the day and night and powered a small frontier crossroads into the center of the world’s attention, covered a vacant silence.

  The hoof clatter of Mayor James Montgomery Calhoun’s horse rattled the emptiness. He carried a white flag from a pole behind him. He was soon joined by eight other men who circled their mounts at the corner of Marietta and Peachtree streets.

  One turned to Calhoun. “Shall we go armed?” the man asked. He brandished four six-shooters.

  Calhoun’s thick chin beard had gone snow white, and exhaustion had eaten up his melancholy and narrow face. The mayor looked older than his fifty-three years. He rose up in his saddle. No guns, he insisted. “Our white flag will be our best protection,” he said.

  He had taken another step to protect the party, clearer in its way than any flag of surrender in this would-be Southern nation. Calhoun was cousin to John Caldwell Calhoun. The U.S. senator, two-time vice president, and would-be American president from South Carolina, dead now nearly fifteen years, had set the stage for the rebellion with his famously unbending promotion of the states’ right to set their own course within the Union. Now his far younger cousin, mayor of the Gate City of the South, the indispensable railroad hub of the Confederacy, had done what would have been unimaginable even the day before. He asked Bob Yancey to ride out with them to meet the Yankee army.

  Yancey, too, claimed kinship to a once nationally powerful politician, also a U.S. senator and presidential aspirant. Gone almost as long as Calhoun, Daniel Webster, the Cast-Iron Man’s Puritan nemesis from Massachusetts, formed with him two of the three corners—together with Kentucky’s “Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay—of a triangle of heroic political orators, the “Great Triumvirate.” They had dominated the now-failed civic debate for most of the first half of the century over just what type of nation America should be—or if it would continue to be one nation at all.

  Yancey’s possible blood ties to the “Defender of the Constitution and the Union,” buried more than a thousand miles away in the North, would not, however, deflect a single jumpy, trigger-happy Northern marksman’s bullet from the riders’ heads. What mattered was Yancey’s skin color. It was black. Yancey was a slave. Though by rights neither man nor citizen, Yancey would ride out together with a group of the Citadel of the Confederacy’s leading white citizens, slaveholders among them. He would meet their city’s besiegers as the other men’s equal, perhaps their savior, on a short journey to determine Atlanta’s fate.

  THEY RODE WARILY ALONG, Calhoun leading the way northwest out the Marietta Road. They guided the nervous horses through the scattered bricks, shell fragments, and downed trees, past the many shattered houses and charred outbuildings along the dusty clay road running parallel with the Western & Atlantic Railroad cut. Cantering up a steady incline toward the city’s perimeter, they reached the suburban fringes of town, where they emerged from the shade of the trees hanging over the road into the barren, sun-raked, fought-over land. Barely a tree and few structures of any kind remained standing for as far as the eye could see. Here they passed the wreckage of the once graceful Ponder family estate, twenty-five hilltop acres of boxwood gardens and orchards where the residents caught the cooling breezes and enjoyed the view from an observation deck atop the stout yet stately plastered stone mansion. The house’s windows made for ideal sharpshooter’s nests. Yankee artillery had blasted away ceaselessly at the house until it seemed a miracle that the remains continued to stand at all.

  Just in front of the Ponder house, the massive earthworks ran past like a thick, livid scar demarcating the edge of their island city. The horses stepped around the obstacles and beyond the sandbagged trenches, through the palisades and tangle of tree branches and trunks. Here and there a spiked canon stood mute and useless. They entered the half mile of denuded killing ground that for nearly two months had spanned the distance between the warring armies.

  Tens of thousands of young men who had never heard of Atlanta before had come from farms, towns, and cities across the land. They came willing to kill or die for possession of the city. The humps of hastily dug graves and bleaching bones showed where many of them had done just that. The bloated and blackened corpses of dogs and horses brought down alongside their masters lay willy-nilly in grotesque poses where they, too, had come to violent ends on the shell-plowed slopes. The fouled air smelled of death combined with the rotting debris and human and animal waste left behind by the thousands who, until the day before, had lived for six weeks within the trenches. Calhoun’s party covered their faces against the evil stench and waved away the clouds of bluebottle flies. The nickering horses tossed their heads and tails against the swarms. No birds called. Even the vultures had long ago fled.

  Leaving the ruins of Atlanta behind them, the men simply did not know what lay beyond the city’s bristling frontier. Calhoun glanced back at the beloved hometown he had worked so hard to preserve from such a reckoning.

  CHAPTER 2

  VIRGINIANS

  JAMES CALHOUN TURNED FIFTEEN just about the time his father, known as Farmer Billy to one and all, died in 1827. His death left a whiskerless boy as the old
est male on a farm that could barely support his family. Their red-dirt plot of cotton fields and grassy pastures lay near the Savannah River, in the Upstate South Carolina county of Abbeville. The Calhoun farm was one of many smaller ones that had been sliced out of a series of four far larger land grants made to the four Scotch-Irish Calhoun brothers, James’s grandfather and great-uncles, in Colonial days. They had carved out what became a growing community of family farms known as the Calhoun Settlement from the rolling wilderness hills and fens cut here and there by ancient Indian trails along South Carolina’s border with her sister colony, Georgia. Several Calhoun Settlement farmers enjoyed a good deal of success over the decades and managed to expand their landholdings, purchase slaves to plant and harvest the cotton, and, with the profits, send their sons off the farm for an education.

  By the time Farmer Billy passed on, though, a glut of Upstate cotton had depressed the market and its growers’ profits. The federal Tariff of 1824, which raised import duties to 33.3 percent, brought retaliation against American exports that further undercut the local farmers and depressed the entire South’s economy. The region’s farmers shared the blame for weighing the region down. The once dark loam underfoot, a creamy black matter able to nurture virtually anything planted within it when the Calhoun brothers arrived, had gone stale and dusty through overfarming. The used-up earth ran now like red sand between a man’s fingers and could no longer sustain the kind of intensive cash crop farming that had once enriched the Calhoun families and others in the settlement. For a young man like James, left to work the inhospitable land, a farmer’s future pressed on his heart like the canvas bags of low-value cotton hanging off the shoulders of the slaves in the fields. The life of a backcountry planter held little allure for him in any case.