Quotes of the Day (The Fall of Atlanta, Seen by Gen. Sherman and Scarlett O’Hara)

"The next morning [Confederate] General [William J.] Hardee was gone, and we all pushed forward along the railroad south, in close pursuit, till we ran up against his lines at a point just above Lovejoy's Station. While bringing forward troops and feeling the new position of our adversary, rumors came from the rear that the enemy had evacuated Atlanta, and that General [Henry W.] Slocum was in the city. Later in the day I received a note in Slocum's own handwriting, stating that he had heard during the night the very sounds that I have referred to [explosions]; that he had moved rapidly up from the bridge about daylight, and had entered Atlanta unopposed. His letter was dated inside the city, so there was no doubt of the fact. General [George] Thomas's bivouac was but a short distance from mine, and, before giving notice to the army in general orders, I sent one of my staff-officers to show him the note. In a few minutes the officer returned, soon followed by Thomas himself, who again examined the note, so as to be perfectly certain that it was genuine. The news seemed to him too good to be true. He snapped his fingers, whistled, and almost danced, and, as the news spread to the army, the shouts that arose from our men, the wild hallooing and glorious laughter, were to us a full recompense for the labor and toils and hardships through which we had passed in the previous three months.”— William Tecumseh Sherman, The Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman (1875)

“Then a strangely incongruous sight struck her [Scarlett O’Hara’s] eyes….Men, women and children, black and white, hurried, hurried with straining faces, lugging packages and sacks and boxes of food — more food than she had seen in a year. The crowd suddenly gave a lane for a careening carriage and through the lane came the frail and elegant Mrs. Elsing, standing up in the front of her victoria, reins in one hand, whip in the other. She was hatless and white faced and her long gray hair streamed down her back as she lashed the horse like a Fury. Jouncing on the back seat of the carriage was her black mammy, Melissy, clutching a greasy side of bacon to her with one hand, while with the other and both feet she attempted to hold the boxes and bags piled all about her….Scarlett screamed to her, but the tumult of the crowd drowned her voice and the carriage rocked madly by.

“For a moment she could not understand what it all meant and then, remembering that the commissary warehouses were down by the railroad tracks, she realized that the army had thrown them open to the people to salvage what they could before the Yankees came.”—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)

The destiny of the United States changed utterly on this day in 1864 when the mayor of Atlanta surrendered his city to Union forces. Only 10 days before, Union armies had appeared so stalled on all fronts that Abraham Lincoln felt obliged to compose a message detailing how he intended to cooperate to preserve the Union with former General George B. McClellan if, as it seemed increasingly likely, “Little Mac” and the Democratic Party defeated Lincoln in the fall Presidential election.

The day after this transportation hub of the Confederacy capitulated, though, General William Tecumseh Sherman had written Gen. Henry Halleck, the de facto army chief of staff, “So Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

So, it soon became apparent, was Lincoln’s victory. Writing this past weekend in The Wall Street Journal, historian Fergus Bordewich notes that Lincoln’s running mate, Andrew Johnson, botched Reconstruction when he succeeded to the Presidency after the Great Emancipator’s assassination, but that the consequences would have been “momentous” if their ticket had lost in November 1864:

“Although he expressed a willingness to continue the war if necessary, in practical terms McClellan's victory in the election would likely have led to European recognition of the Confederacy, Southern independence, and the forcible return to slavery of the hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had fled to the Union armies for safety.”

For all the many—and enormous—differences between the two passages above, they are united in one feeling: astonishment. Sherman is jubilant that the three-month siege of Atlanta is over, that it’s all ended now—both the foot-by-foot, thrust-and-parry campaign of maneuver against  wily, defensive-minded Confederate’s Joseph E. Johnston and the pitched battles of the latter’s offensive-minded but recklessly brave replacement, John Bell Hood .

Astonishment of a different sort underlies Scarlett O’Hara’s feelings about the fall of the city in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gone With the Wind. With a news blackout existing in effect, most city residents had little idea of the progress (or lack of same) of Confederate arms. Now, it appears, for Scarlett and thousands of others, Armageddon is at hand.

Besides the different perspectives of victory and defeat (not to mention nonfiction and fiction), these passages are also marked by different perceptions of order. For Sherman, a peacetime banker whose world was profoundly darkened by the Panic of 1857—and whose wonderful subsequent appointment as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy had come to an end because of secession—the victory, he thought, meant the consolidation of the prewar order.

Scarlett, however, senses that disorder is at hand, in the cry repeated throughout this chapter: “The Yankees are coming!” A city that had, in a real sense, gained much of its influence throughout the war as the site where so many had fled from Union troops in Tennessee and Mississippi was now experiencing its own refugee crisis.

Neither the capital of Georgia nor even its largest city, Atlanta had leveraged its position as a railroad hub, so that by 1863 its population had reached 20,000, making it the 12^th-largest city in the Confederacy. As Sherman had pressed harder in the spring and summer of 1864, however, the population had fallen back to roughly 3,000. That was the state of affairs when Sherman issued one of the most controversial orders of the war.

The Union general believed that Confederate refugees had acted as a drag on the advancement of Union armies in Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez and New Orleans. Now, foreseeing that “sutlers and traders” were about to descend on Atlanta, too, he decided to take a step that even his dispassionate explanation a decade after the events in his memoirs failed to mitigate: “to remove the entire civil population, and to deny to all civilians from the rear the expected profits of civil trade.”

Sherman’s relocation order worsened an already perilous refugee crisis. Moreover, the steps taken by his troops to cripple the South’s war effort—machine shops, foundries, railroads, depots—blended in the mind of the region with the destruction left by Hood. (To ensure that the Union captured nothing of consequence from the city’s railroad stock, the latter blew up over 80 railroad cars filled with ammunition, in the process wrecking homes whose losses would later be ascribed to the Yankee and his men.)

There is another aspect of Margaret Mitchell’s evocation of havoc. The chaos seems at first to affect everyone the same, both black and white. But  Mrs. Elsing’s black mammy, Melissy, proves as utterly incompetent at protecting her mistress’s precious food supply as Scarlett’s maid Prissy is in assisting Melanie Wilkes’ childbirth. Melissy's failure also prefigures Mitchell’s (and the racist white South’s) belief that blacks will be even more irresponsible in running state governments during Reconstruction.

Mitchell’s gripping narrative of the fall of Atlanta laid the marker for perhaps the most vivid scene in the 1939 film adaptation. But, like Sherman, she never realized the pathos of the African-Americans who were also swept up in the maelstrom engulfing Atlanta in September 1864—and who would find themselves with even less protection from the storm when the federal government withdrew its troops from the South beginning in 1877. 

(For more on the movie Gone With the Wind and its treatment of blacks, the Irish, and Reconstruction, see this earlier post of mine. See this link for another post describing, in more detail than the current one, Sherman's unrelenting four-month campaign to take Atlanta.)

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on Death in Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign)

“Successive scores of rifles spat at him [Lieutenant Herman Brayle of the Union Army] viciously as he came within range, and our line in the edge of the timber broke out in visible and audible defense. No longer regardful of themselves or their orders, our fellows sprang to their feet, and swarming into the open sent broad sheets of bullets against the blazing crest of the offending works, which poured an answering fire into their unprotected groups with deadly effect. The artillery on both sides joined the battle, punctuating the rattle and roar with deep, earth-shaking explosions and tearing the air with storms of screaming grape, which from the enemy's side splintered the trees and spattered them with blood, and from ours defiled the smoke of his arms with banks and clouds of dust from his parapet.”—Ambrose Bierce, “Killed at Resaca,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the opening battle in Union General William T. Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta: the Battle of Resaca, Ga. The clash between Federal and Confederate forces mirrored what was happening hundreds of miles north in Virginia, where Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee’s game of probing, parry, and continual maneuver was yielding startling losses. The duel between Sherman and rebel commander Joseph E. Johnston was not quite as deadly, but at least initially, it seemed just as dispiriting to Federal troops, with seemingly little appreciable ground gained. Ambrose Bierce, a Union veteran of this Western theater of operations, is best known to readers for his cynical Devil's Dictionary and his mysterious disappearance in 1914. But he recorded decidedly modern, disillusioned impressions of the madness of the Atlanta campaign in particular and all wars in general, in this classic war story.

When the butcher’s bill came due from the 48 hours of fighting, the Union and Confederate armies had lost about 2,800 men each, with the latter showing that they could slow, but not stop, their foes’ advance upon the Rebel industrial center of the Deep South. The fighting was marked by the usual incompetence and folly even on this first day of battle, when the Federals lost precious time coordinating assaults because a commander was drunk.

The results of the battle might have been inconclusive for Sherman and Johnston, but they confirmed Bierce in what critic Edmund Wilson has called his “obsession with death.” The young man saw all the war he could ever want at Shiloh, Corinth, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Franklin. Like the narrator of “Killed at Resaca,” Bierce was a topographical engineer who knew better than to make insinuations about any spots that afforded protection.

Not so with the force behind “the best soldier of our staff”: Lieutenant Herman Brayle, who takes constant chances with his life in the face of the enemy: “He would sit his horse like an equestrian statue, in a storm of bullets and grape, in the most exposed places--wherever, in fact, duty, requiring him to go, permitted him to remain--when, without trouble and with distinct advantage to his reputation for common sense, he might have been in such security as is possible on a battlefield in the brief intervals of personal inaction.”

Inevitably, Brayle is shot by the enemy. In going through the effects of the bravest man he ever knew, the narrator discovers a motive for his complete disregard for safety: a letter from the dead man’s sweetheart, advising him of a “rumor” she had heard that “at some battle in Virginia…you were seen crouching behind a tree….I could bear to hear of my soldier lover's death, but not of his cowardice."

In the story’s stunning conclusion, Bierce—a decorated veteran himself, forced out of the fighting because of a head wound—vents his frustration with the vast incomprehension of soldiers’ experiences, as well as his pronounced misogyny. His narrator visits Brayle’s girlfriend, a remarkable beauty who, upon receiving her stained letter to the dead man, tosses it on the fire because she can’t stand the sight of blood. Then, trying to overcome this impression of her callousness, she asks how Brayle died.

The short, bitter reply that ends the story evokes far more than it can begin to suggest: “Bitten by a snake.” It implies everything about the faithlessness of women—something in which Bierce believed in wholeheartedly in his personal life. (His marriage collapsed because he wrongly believed his wife was guilty of adultery. Then, as if to confirm that he was not completely crazy about female perfidy, his son Day’s fiancée left him for another man, leading Day to shoot both before his own suicide.)

The story’s ending brings the reader up short, in the same manner as Ernest Hemingway’s famous final line of The Sun Also Rises: “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” In fact, the relation between the two authors’ war fiction and lives is instructive.

As Roy Morris notes in his biography of Bierce, both men (Bierce, of course, in the Civil War, and Hemingway, as an ambulance driver, in WWI) carried wounded soldiers, at enormous risk to their own safety, back to their own lines, only to see the men die anyway. It only seemed to confirm their belief in war’s absurdity.

I don’t know why Hemingway praised Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as "the first great American war story" while ignoring Bierce’s contribution. Crane had not witnessed a minute of combat before he wrote his masterpiece; in fact, he was born six years after the Civil War ended, so he had no firsthand knowledge of the conflict. In contrast, Bierce’s work was informed by what he saw, and he made no attempt to make it less ugly for readers.

If Bierce’s work was every bit as realistic as Crane’s, then how could Hemingway have ignored it? I think it has to do with two factors: Bierce’s frequent resort to supernatural or fantastic fiction, and his lack of a consistent, compelling single figure.

Whether it’s called horror, supernatural or fantastic fiction, this genre deals overwhelmingly with altered interior states, the breakdown of the self. And few phenomena on earth accelerate such psychic disorientation and disintegration as much as war.

Thus, the experience of battle might have confirmed Bierce’s disbelief in a rational God, the increasingly thin line between life and death in war led him to write eerie pieces in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, including the much-anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In contrast, Hemingway might have felt haunted by a world without God, but he desperately tried to believe in a deity—just as tenaciously, in fact, as Lt. Frederic Henry struggles to hold onto reality after his convulsive wound gives him what feels like an out-of-body experience in A Farewell to Arms. He felt greater affinity for Crane’s naturalistic style than for Bierce’s occasional resort to ghosts and vague life-after-life in his stories.

Second, with Henry Fleming, Crane found a single youthful figure whose struggles would parallel the novel and short-story characters who served as stand-ins for himself: Lt. Henry, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Paul Krebs of “Soldier’s Home” and Nick Adams in a whole slew of stories. Lt. Brayle and other characters in Bierce’s stories might be easy to visualize, but the author offers little about their thinking. The greatness of his short fiction rests not on psychological exploration, but on unsparing, exact descriptions of “the rattle and roar” of war.

This Day in Civil War History (Sherman Takes Atlanta)

September 2, 1864—Union troops under General William Tecumseh Sherman entered Atlanta after a four-month campaign starting in Chattanooga, Tenn., marked mostly by flank movements, punctuated by a few slugfests that did little to halt his inexorable progress into the heart of the Confederacy.

Now, as Northern sentiment swung decisively in favor of Abraham Lincoln in the upcoming Presidential election and away from a negotiated peace, this major Confederate commercial center and railroad depot trembled at what lay in store from a general who, only four years before, had warned cherished Southern friends that they were risking disorder and calamity by choosing secession.

They would have trembled even more if they knew only half of what he was planning for them.

In one typical comment, Sherman told Professor David Boyd of the Louisiana State Seminary in December 1860: “You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!”

If you play word association with a Southerner, he’ll probably come up with “fire” if you prompt him with “General Sherman.” In fact, on the night of September 1, 1864, fires were what Atlantans would have seen in the distance.

The thing is, that same night Sherman experienced the same thing, some twenty miles to the north of the city. Around midnight, the normally restless general, after hearing “sounds of shells exploding, and other sound like that of musketry,” went to the home of a farmer, who told him it sounded like a battle. The same noises came four hours later.

It wasn’t until the next day that Sherman learned it was what he suspected: that Confederate commander John Bell Hood, deciding that saving the city was a lost cause, had evacuated, blowing up munitions to keep them out of the hands of the enemy.

It was an incredible conflagration: Hood’s ammunition trains, consisting of seven locomotives and 81 loaded cars, all set ablaze, red-hot fragments from exploding missiles shooting right and left, making the earth tremble, near-by houses rock, window glass shatter, and plaster and loose bricks fall. Every building for a quarter mile within the vicinity was torn to pieces or pockmarked with shell fragments.

This was the blaze that everyone remembers from Gone With the Wind.

Everyone in the area around the blaze was warned to leave. That might have been the only time that the one-armed general took care throughout the just-ended two-month siege of the city.

In his Memoirs, Sherman summarized his reaction to Jefferson Davis’ decision to substitute, for the defense of the city of 20,000, Hood for Joseph E. Johnston—a wily general who yielded territory while seizing advantageous high ground that would keep his losses to a minimum—in this manner:

“I immediately inquired of General Schofield, who was his classmate at West Point, about Hood, as to his general character, etc., and learned that he was bold even to rashness, and courageous in the extreme; I inferred that the change of commanders meant ‘fight'….This was just what we wanted, viz., to fight in open ground, on any thing like equal terms, instead of being forced to run up against prepared intrenchments.”

Three times between early July and the start of September, Hood attacked. Each time, he was repulsed with losses he could not sustain.

The end for Atlanta came at the Battle of Jonesboro, an action precipitated by Sherman’s decision to cut Hood's supply lines—the Macon & Western and the Atlanta & West Point Railroads. In particular, historian Shelby Foote points to Sherman’s “grand left wheel around Atlanta,” a maneuver in which he threw all but one of his seven corps in one concentrated movement and tore out the railroad so it could not be used again.

“I have Atlanta as certainly as if it were in my hand,” Sherman told General George Thomas. Hood’s subordinate, William Hardee, didn’t stand a chance—and, this time, Hood knew it, and sensibly left him evacuate. Jonesboro had been bad enough as it was, with Hood losing nearly twice as many men (2,000) as Sherman (1,150).

Orders from Ulysses Grant had been for Sherman to wreck Hood’s army, then take Atlanta. Sherman got the priorities backward, and even after the city was taken left it to Thomas to pursue Hood later in the year in a battle of annihilation in Tennessee.

The red-haired, fierce-eyed Northern commander was mulling over a course radically different from his stated orders when he was visited by a delegation of civilians headed by Atlanta Mayor James M. Calhoun. “The fortunes of war have placed the city of Atlanta in your hands,” Calhoun said. “As mayor of the city I ask protection for noncombatants and private property.”

A few weeks later, the civilian delegation had its answer: Nothing doing.

The enormity of Sherman’s plans for the city was underscored for me in Winston Groom’s review last Friday in The Wall Street Journal of two new histories of this epic campaign.

Groom mentioned a letter that Sherman wrote to one of Lincoln’s Cabinet members, in which the general proposed that the properties of all Southerners be forcibly repopulated—and this sent a chill down my spine as soon as I read it—“as the British had done in Northern Ireland.”

If Atlantans thought that Hood's blaze was something awful to behold, they would not believe the one set by Sherman’s army as it left in November for Savannah. Ahead lay “the March to the Sea.” The destruction of the South by the first modern man of war lay at hand.