The Torching of Atlanta

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The Torching of Atlanta
August 28, 2009
by Winston Groom
The Wall Street Journal

By the spring of 1864, when the Union Army's Atlanta campaign got under way, the Civil War should have been over. After the Confederacy's twin defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the previous summer, military victory for the South was all but impossible. Yet, for the die-hard leaders in ­Richmond, there remained the ­prospect of a "political victory," in which a military reverse, or even a stalemate for Yankee forces, might prompt war-weary Northerners to chuck out the Lincoln administration in the upcoming presidential election.

It was not an idle hope. Americans in the North responded to the Emancipation Proclamation by voting heavily against Lincoln's party in the midterm elections, and deadly riots had broken out in Northern cities to protest the military draft. If there had been scientific political polls taken in those days, it is estimated that the president's approval rating would have been only about 25%.

Lincoln's opponent that fall was none other than his twice-fired ­former general-in-chief of the Union Army, George B. McClellan, who ­favored a military truce with the Southern states. As the fighting in Georgia lengthened and intensified, even the editor A.K. McClure, Lincoln's friend and confidant, was predicting an easy McClellan victory. Thus the significance of the Atlanta campaign can hardly be overstated. It has attracted fresh attention from Marc Wortman in "The Bonfire" and from Russell S. Bonds in "War Like the Thunderbolt."

The Union victory at Atlanta is well-plowed ground. In May 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ­departed Chattanooga, Tenn., with a 100,000-man federal army to confront half as many Confederates ­under the South's pre-eminent escape artist, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston.

Using his considerable numeric advantage, Sherman proceeded to outflank Johnston throughout the spring in a series of clashes that left Confederate authorities in Richmond wondering whether Johnston ­intended to retreat all the way down to Key West. When it became ­apparent that Johnston was not ­going to offer a major battle to ­Sherman's army, Jefferson Davis ­replaced him with the fiery ­one-armed, one-legged Gen. John Bell Hood, who offered a major battle not once but thrice and was beaten every time at a final cost to both sides of about 70,000 casualties.

Then, after a two-month Union siege of Atlanta, Hood evacuated the city and, wanting no more to do with Sherman's Yankees, decided the best course of action was to march his army up to capture Chicago, an ­expedition that ended in tragedy with the battles in and around Nashville, Tenn.

Meanwhile, having savored his victory, Sherman faced a quandary that often bedevils successful ­generals: What to do next? Possessed of an incendiary disposition—in more ways than one—Sherman was taken by the notion that the quickest way to win the war would be to march his army straight through the heart of the South, destroying everything in his path. Or, as he put it to his ­commander, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant— to "make Georgia howl." At the same time, Sherman conceived a plan for the final undoing of Atlanta, which had cost him so much trouble to ­capture.

Mr. Wortman's "The Bonfire," ­subtitled "The Siege and Burning of Atlanta," doesn't get around to either siege or burning until the last 80 of its 400 pages; the rest of the book concerns itself with various other ­aspects of the war, the city, national politics and the state of the Union, such as it was. The author traces the fortunes of numerous civilian actors in the drama, many of them with pro-Union sympathies, including ­Atlanta's mayor, James Calhoun—a cousin of the former vice president and senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina—and Bob Yancey, a slave whose father (possibly) was the ­famous New England politician ­Daniel Webster.

The stories of such people become more interesting as Sherman's noose around Atlanta tightens, but I wish the author had refrained from ­referring to "a dozen" Confederate generals being killed in 1864 at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee. A dozen generals killed in any single battle—Civil War or otherwise— should be enough to raise a red flag. The six Rebel generals who were in fact slain at Franklin is shocking enough as it is.

Both books give admirable ­accounts of the circumstances leading to the fall of the city, an event that ensured Lincoln's re-election and sealed the fate of the Confederacy. However, Mr. Bonds's "War Like the Thunderbolt" is more compact in scope, and it recounts the Atlanta campaign, beginning with Sherman's arrival outside the city in July 1864, with lively and often grisly descriptions of the military action.

He quotes a journalist's view of the scene at the height of battle: ­"After that it was cut and slash. . . . The green grass took on a blood-red hue, and as the surgeon's saw crunched through the bones of ­unfortunates, hundreds of gory arms and legs were thrown into the ­baskets prepared to receive them."

One aspect of the Atlanta ­campaign that remains controversial is Sherman's treatment of civilians and the actual burning of the city. Most people associate the burning of Atlanta with the scene from "Gone With the Wind," but that was not Sherman's burning; rather, it was Rebel Gen. Hood's destruction of his remaining supply trains and ­ammunition—which created a big bang for sure but was nothing ­compared with the conflagration that Sherman left in his wake.

After Hood abandoned the city, Sherman marched his army in and promptly ordered the remaining ­citizens to leave. That was a serious matter in those days, since it wasn't as if you could just get in your car and drive to a motel. Atlanta had been a city of about 20,000; with winter coming on, the wild countryside would simply not support so many people roaming about with no food or shelter. City officials ­protested, but Sherman was having none of it. "War is cruelty; you ­cannot refine it," he replied.

What Sherman finally decided on was the annihilation of the city ­itself—an instructive example, as it were, for other Southern cities; or if you will, an act of terrorism. Earlier he had warned Atlantans to "prepare for my coming." In his written orders he couched the warning in terms of obliterating everything of military value, but, as in so many other places his army visited, the reality was ­destruction of the town by fire—the 19th century's version of carpet-bombing.

This kind of devastation was ­relatively unprecedented for ­Sherman's time; the burning and sacking of cities had more or less gone out of fashion as the customs of "civilized" warfare had generally foreclosed the molesting of civilians.

Sherman defied this sense of ­military restraint almost from the ­beginning; in fact, his earliest ­pyromaniacal urges in connection with Southerners and their property seem to have developed in 1862, while he was in charge of the ­recently captured city of Memphis. There, in retaliation for Confederates shooting at Union steamboats from the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, Sherman ordered the torching of all towns, villages, farms and homes for 15 miles up and down the river.

Sherman wrote a letter to one of Lincoln's cabinet members, ­declaiming that all Southerners—­soldiers and civilians alike—were ­enemies of the Union and ­recommending that they be driven from their homes and treated as "denizens of the land"—whatever that meant. Their holdings, he ­suggested, could be forcibly ­repopulated as the British had done in Northern Ireland.

After the Union capture of ­Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, Sherman had led his army corps in a carnival of destruction and pillage across Mississippi, during which he declared to the prostrated ­Southerners that "all who do not aid us are our enemies, and we will not account to them for our acts." He further threatened, in writing, "to take every life, every acre of land, and every particle of [your] ­property—You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will," he said.

Despite these menacing pronouncements, Sherman denied to his dying day that he ever meant for his troops to burn civilian property, but few believed him. Shortly after ­Sherman departed Atlanta for his "March to the Sea," a Confederate colonel named W.P. Howard inspected the damage and filed a report with the governor of Georgia. The city's infrastructure was completely ­destroyed, he said—railroads, foundries, shops, mills, schools, hotels and business offices—and "from four to five thousand houses" burned. A mere 400 homes were left standing, Howard wrote. Sherman had watched the scene from horseback as he rode out of town and later remarked: ­"Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins."

A similar conflagration occurred when Sherman reached Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, but he ­suggested that it was the Southerners themselves who started the fire. The closest he ever came to an ­apology was a line in his after-action report admitting that his men "had done some things they ought not to have done." Mr. Bonds correctly notes that recent revisionist ­historians have tried to play down or even deny Sherman's role in the burning, but he acknowledges that the vagueness of the general's orders left room for misinterpretation.

It is hard to reconcile the peculiar psychology of Sherman's military ­tactics with the fact that these were his fellow Americans whose homes were being burned—mostly women, children and old men, at that. For ­despite all his hard-bitten ­declarations against the Confederacy and its supporters, Sherman, in his private correspondence, often made a point of expressing an abiding ­fondness for the South and the Southern people.

With his victory at Atlanta, ­Sherman solidified himself as an American hero—in the North, at least—and ensured what Lincoln's ally Sen. Zachary Chandler called "the most extraordinary change in publick opinion here that ever was known." The South's hopes to exploit Northern discontent and wring a ­"political victory" from the war ­vanished.

Eventually, Sherman's scorched-earth tactics validated a new ­standard for military operations—the notion of "hard war" or "total war," in which civilians were no longer treated as innocent bystanders and their property became fair game. This policy was incorporated, ­improved and refined over the ­ensuing decades, reaching its most pitiless apogee at Hiroshima in 1945.
—Mr. Groom is the author of eight novels, including "Forrest Gump," and seven histories, including his latest, "Vicksburg, 1863."