"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 12th-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.)
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