War exploded across the united states in 1861. In the North, it was called the Civil War. Southerners knew the struggle as the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression. No matter which name was used, the results were the same—misery, devastation, and sorrow. This was especially true for the South and the thousands of families such as the Floyds who were caught in the cross fire.
With the outbreak of the war, Cass County’s prosperity and growth abruptly ended. Although all three of the county’s representatives to Georgia’s Secession Convention of 1861 initially voted to remain in the Union, as did most other north Georgia convention delegates, many local men and boys joined the Confederate army when the majority of convention delegates ultimately chose to leave the Union. On January 19, 1861, when Georgia officially seceded from the United States, volunteer companies mustered overnight. Military units, such as Etowah’s Infantry and the Cherokee Cavalry, formed and the soldiers left home in handmade uniforms to do battle with the damned Yankees at Manassas and Spotsylvania.
Area residents, bitter that the man for whom their county was named was a Northern sympathizer, voted on December 6, 1861, to change the name from Cass to Bartow, in honor of Francis Stebbins Bartow, a Georgia native and a general in the Confederate army. Bartow died during a gallant charge against a Union battery at the first battle at Manassas at Bull Run, Virginia, in 1861, but lived long enough to encourage his brigade, comprised mostly of Georgia and Kentucky regiments, with the stirring words, “Boys, they have killed me, but never give up the field!” That dying pronouncement inspired countless Bartow County lads, including a good many Floyds, for years to come when they played at war in the woods and pretended they were bold soldiers in gray vanquishing imaginary Yankee invaders.
There were frequent skirmishes in the area throughout the war, but the first significant action to take place in Bartow County occurred on April 12, 1862, and became known as the Great Locomotive Chase. The Floyd family and the other local citizens never forgot the audacity of those involved in this incident.
Union spy James J. Andrews, a mysterious double agent who spent the first year of the war smuggling medicines into the South, only to return with intelligence reports for the Union command, determined one way to defeat the Confederacy was to sabotage its railroad network. Andrews focused most of his spying efforts on the Western & Atlantic Railroad that snaked 138 miles northward from Atlanta through the mountainous terrain of northern Georgia. The W & A then crossed into Tennessee and entered Chattanooga, where it tied into other railroad lines. Financed and owned by the state of Georgia, the W & A was probably the South’s best-run railroad. Some of the Floyds and their circle worked for the W & A, which served as a lifeline artery for Bartow County and the rest of northwestern Georgia. A single-track line, with sidings at Adairsville, Calhoun, Tilton, and Dalton, the W & A crossed several major streams on covered wooden bridges and raced through a long tunnel that sliced through towering Chetoogeta Mountain.
Andrews’s plan was to steal a Confederate train just north of Atlanta and then chug full steam ahead into Chattanooga, destroying bridges, tunnels, and telegraph lines all along the W & A line. Andrews and twenty-three volunteers dressed in civilian clothes and tucked pistols beneath their coats. All but one of the raiders were Ohio soldiers who had volunteered to leave their Buckeye regiments for this secret mission behind enemy lines. They ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-two, and most of them had seen action during several frays in Kentucky and at Bull Run the year before.
The disguised raiders were careful to minimize their conversation so their northern accents would not give them away. They traveled south-eastward from their Union army camps in Tennessee to Chattanooga, where they broke into small parties and boarded trains headed south to Marietta, Georgia, just above Atlanta. They determined that if they were stopped and questioned, they would say that they were Kentuckians on their way to enlist in the Confederate army. On April 12, Andrews and his men assembled in a Marietta hotel room for one final briefing. At the end of the meeting, Andrews vowed to “succeed or leave my bones in Dixie.” Then they walked to the station and boarded a train being pulled by the General, a powerful wood-burning locomotive built for the Western & Atlantic in 1855.
During the twenty-minute breakfast stop in Big Shanty, they uncoupled all but three of the cars and seized the locomotive. Their action did not go unnoticed. Some startled W & A crewmen led by conductor William Fuller, at first assuming a band of rebel deserters from a nearby training camp had stolen the General, borrowed a repair crew’s handcar and chased the train thieves. Eventually, the pursuers were able to commandeer another locomotive and pick up additional volunteers for the chase. Because of the close pursuit, Andrews and his raiders were not able to cause much damage to telegraph and rail lines as they thundered through Bartow County, pausing only briefly at the Adairsville station on their northbound adventure. Near the Tennessee border, the General literally ran out of steam when the locomotive’s boiler water and firewood supply was exhausted. The raiders deserted their locomotive and took to the woods.
News of the train chase spread like scarlet fever across northern Georgia. Within a few hours, Confederate cavalrymen patrolled the countryside and guarded crossroads. Soldiers home on leave and farmers, such as the Floyd brothers and their neighbors, took up squirrel rifles, shotguns, and even butcher knives. They formed posses and scoured fields and forests with their best tracking dogs in hope they would encounter the Yankees. Within a week, most of the raiders were captured. Seven of them, including Andrews, were tried and convicted as spies, and were hanged from an Atlanta gallows. Some of the others managed to escape prison and the rest were exchanged for Confederate prisoners. In 1863, the entire band became the first recipients of a new military award, the Congressional Medal of Honor. The survivors were invited to the White House, where President Abraham Lincoln himself pinned the decorations on their tunics.
Although the Andrews expedition was unsuccessful, the Floyds and other Bartow Countians endured hardships far greater than pesty Yankee raiders bent on tearing up railroad tracks and pulling down telegraph wires. In 1863, the Civil War was long from over, and its travails and sorrows would leave a lasting impression on the farmers and merchants of north Georgia. Early Southern victories soon gave way to defeats. Union blockades forced shortages of food and munitions, and many of the fertile fields grew wild because few men were there to tend them. The saying was that Confederate conscription had “robbed the cradle and the grave.” In many instances, only old men and boys were available as home guards to repel the Yankee sorties. Despite the gloom that had settled over these parts, there were a few bright moments.
In the spring of 1863, Union Col. Abel D. Streight led a sixteen-hundred-man mounted infantry regiment in an invasion of western Georgia. His mission was to destroy the Western & Atlantic Railroad and capture Rome, the seat of nearby Floyd County. An important manufacturing center at the head of the Coosa Valley, Rome was built where the Oostanaula and Etowah rivers converge to form the Coosa River, which drains to the Gulf of Mexico. Rome was also the home of the Noble Foundry, a factory that produced cannon for the Confederacy. Despite the size of his regiment, Streight was outmaneuvered by the four hundred rebel soldiers commanded by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a clever tactician who convinced his foe that the superior Union force was actually outnumbered.
There were also bittersweet triumphs, such as Chickamauga, the greatest Civil War battle fought in the West. The name Chickamauga derived from the Cherokees and meant “river of death.” It was a fitting name. This bloodbath took place on September 19 and 20, 1863, in the woodlands north of the Floyds’ stomping grounds along the black waters of Chickamauga Creek on the Tennessee and Georgia border. The battle there was considered a victory for the South—but at the cost of 18,000 Confederate and 16,000 Union soldiers either dead, wounded, or missing. The Pyrrhic nature of the victory may have well sounded the death knell for the Confederacy. After the fighting stopped, Confederate Gen. Daniel H. Hill said, “It seems to me that the élan of the Southern soldier was never seen after Chickamauga; the brilliant dash which had distinguished him was gone forever. He fought stoutly to the last, but after Chickamauga, with the sullenness of despair, and without the enthusiasm of hope. That ‘barren victory’ sealed the fate of the Confederacy.” Nonetheless, the war continued for another nineteen bloody months.
With each passing day in the years between 1863 and 1865, more fresh graves sheltered by magnolias and mimosas appeared in the cemeteries of northern Georgia. Patience Floyd and her daughters-in-law, with their broods of children, and the other wives and mothers of the Confederacy prayed for their men’s safe return. They celebrated the victories and mourned the defeats. Sometimes only inspiration from the King James Bible preserved morale. Other times, the sweet strains of “Dixie,” a song written by a member of an Ohio minstrel troupe that became the unofficial national anthem of the South, kept the Confederate faithful strong.
I wish I was in de land ob cotton,
Old times dar am not forgotten
Look away, look away,
Look away, Dixie Land.
Then, in 1864, along came Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Here was a man clearly intent on making his own stand in Dixie. Sinewy, with unkempt hair and a red beard, Sherman was affectionately called “Uncle Billy” by his troops. Northerners viewed him as the Union’s avenging angel. To the South and especially the citizens of Georgia, however, Sherman was a “ruthless friend,” an incarnation of Satan himself.
The story of his famous march to the sea is a frequently told one in American history, but it needs to be repeated again here, for the Georgia that the Floyds would face after 1865 bore little resemblance to the land they had known before the war.
Sherman was determined to conquer the South. His plan was to march a massive army down the length of Georgia—one of the largest slave-owning states of the South—to the Atlantic Ocean and split the Confederacy in half. His hope was to destroy further the disintegrating southern economic system and to demoralize the civilian population. Sherman’s route followed the Western & Atlantic Railroad to Atlanta, the Macon & Western Railroad from Atlanta toward Macon, and the Central Railroad to Savannah. It passed through Adairsville and the Floyd’s property. More than any other warrior, Sherman brought the war home to the women and children of Georgia.
On May 4, 1864, Sherman with the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the Tennessee, and the Army of the Ohio, together with four cavalry divisions, crossed from Tennessee into Georgia. This combined force of 98,797 seasoned Union soldiers, mostly from Ohio, Illinois, and Minnesota, faced only scant resistance from Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and his smaller Confederate army.
Walter and Redding Floyd and many other Georgia farmers and townsmen had already answered the call to arms when broadsides issued by the governor were posted across the state, urging “all able bodied men between the ages of 20 and 50” to join the Confederates. There were few men left in Georgia to resist Sherman. Most were outside the state, fighting in Tennessee with Hood or with Lee in Virginia. When the call went out, a battalion of cadets from the Georgia Military Institute at Marietta reported for field duty. Many of them died in battle before they had their first shave. Bartow County’s landed gentry sent off its sons to serve as cavalry officers or to command companies of conscripts. A few became secret agents and conducted spy missions. These young aristocrats saw themselves as chivalrous protectors of their Greek Revival mansions, their sprawling plantations, and a vanishing way of life. They directed farmers and shop clerks in battle and tormented the Northern invaders every way possible. They set up ambushes, led scouting missions behind enemy lines, and derailed Yankee supply trains. Some of the more daring Confederates ended up with “dead or alive” rewards on their heads. They believed they could stop Sherman and his brutal horde of Yankee rogues.
Sherman’s detractors, especially the pro-Southern English press, said the Union strategy of moving through Georgia was pure folly. Some even compared Sherman to Napoleon, and predicted his march to the sea would end up “a second edition of the French retreat from Moscow.” Meanwhile, the combined Union armies led by Sherman and his generals moved south from the city of Calhoun into Bartow County.
On May 19, 1864, Union forces took Cassville without a fight, but there was still skirmishing throughout the area, with heavy losses on both sides. A few days earlier, when federal troops were known to be approaching Adairsville, a gun factory was quickly disbanded and moved elsewhere. Bridges, flour and corn mills, cotton gins, and depots were burned to the ground.
The Yankees foraged from the fields and pillaged from smokehouses. The Northerners found ripening fruit, cribs filled with oats, and knee-high green corn. They took all the chickens, hogs, and cattle in sight and gorged on blackberries growing in the river bottoms. Acting on orders from above, the soldiers shot any bloodhounds they encountered—in the belief that most of these dogs had been used to track escaped Union prisoners or runaway slaves. Army teamsters reaped wheat and other grains to feed their horses and mules. In some instances, the federal troops took desks and benches from local schools and academies and ripped strings and keyboards from plantation pianos, using them as feed troughs for horses.
Hardly a kitchen, cellar, or pantry shelf went untouched as the Yankees plundered farms and towns like packs of famished wolves. They hauled off eggs, pickles, lard, flour, and wine. Bales of cotton, bedding, furniture, and paintings, which could not be carried away, were put to the torch. Delicate china and fine old glassware were smashed. Sofas and ottomans upholstered in black horsehide were ripped open with knives and bayonets. Handsome grandfather clocks that had not missed a tick in a century came crashing down on hardwood floors. Churches, schools, and libraries were destroyed. Manicured shrubs and formal gardens were trampled under the marauders’ horses. Civilians were strung up by their thumbs and tortured with bayonets to make them tell where they had hidden their family heirlooms. As in most wars, women and children were terrorized and often raped, especially black women, who the Northern soldiers considered to be subhuman. Silk dresses snatched from the armoires in the antebellum mansions were placed under Yankee officers’ saddles. The larger residences were used to house officers or set up as military hospitals, and the inside walls were defaced with the writings and drawings of the soldiers. A few homes were left untouched on account of the Masonic emblem attached to doorways.
Every evening for many months during 1864, Patience Floyd and her family saw the distant camp fires stoked by fence rails and planks the soldiers pulled from barns. Union pickets gathered around those flames, broiling hunks of confiscated beef and pork at the end of a ramrod. The Floyd children trembled at the sound of artillery booming in the mountains. Although they managed for the most part to escape harm’s way, the terrible horror of war could not be avoided or ignored. Many nights, they went to bed hungry, fearful that Yankee troops would break into their homes.
In June of 1864, General Johnston’s 65,000 Confederate troops, still stinging from a series of defeats, including losses at Resaca and points north, managed to hold the high ground at Kennesaw Mountain, just a few miles from Marietta. Johnston was up against a numerically superior Union force, but Sherman made the mistake of abandoning his strategy of flanking movements and instead launched a bloody frontal assault. This maneuver cost Sherman almost three thousand killed and wounded, compared to fewer than five hundred Confederate casualties. Sherman was relentless, however, and a short time later, he outflanked the Confederates and forced them to retreat.
After the battle at Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman wrote his wife, “I begin to regard death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash.”
Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, relieved Johnston of his command. The new Confederate commander, Gen. John Bell Hood, tried his best to stop the onslaught of Union soldiers. It was futile. Rebel troops, many of them boys, were offered shots of liquor to give them courage in combat. Years later, Union veterans recalled how the Southern soldiers pulled their hats down before they charged, as if they did not want to see the certain death awaiting them. Despite brave attempts by the outnumbered Confederates to halt them, the Yankees kept coming.
On September 2, 1864, after four months of fighting across 130 miles of rugged northwestern Georgia, Sherman’s troops marched into Atlanta. The next day, Sherman wired Washington, “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
Several days later, Sherman himself rode into the city with a letter of congratulations in his pocket from a grateful Abraham Lincoln. Sherman saw that months of siege had taken a horrendous toll. All roads into Atlanta were lined with the bloated carcasses of horses, cattle, and men. A pall of gunpowder and death hung like poisonous fog in the air. Victorious Union soldiers broke open barrels of whiskey. They shouted and danced and sang while the civilians fled. The actual march to the sea would not begin until November, when the Yankees put the torch to Atlanta. In the twilight of the summer, as Sherman planned his continued drive, the end was clearly in sight for the Confederacy, however.
The war persisted as Northern troops remained in Bartow County for several months. The heaviest fighting in the county took place October 5, 1864, at Allatoona Pass, where more than fifteen hundred men lost their lives. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a private in the Sixth Wisconsin battery, wrote in his diary after the battle: “I don’t think there has been more desperate fighting done this year than yesterday at Allatoona.” The grave of an unknown soldier on the edge of the railroad track in Allatoona Pass was left as a memorial to this bloody engagement. For many years, the workmen of the W & A Railroad cared for this grave and left wildflowers and verses to the nameless hero who “died for the cause he thought was right.”
On November 5, 1864, a party of about three hundred soldiers from the Fifth Ohio Cavalry occupying Cassville received orders from Sherman to destroy the town. They burned down homes, colleges, hotels, and the courthouse. Only the town’s churches and a few residences, used as hospitals, were allowed to stand. Cassville’s population dwindled, and the town never regained its prominence. Years later, the county seat was moved to Cartersville. After he burned Cassville and some other neighboring Georgia towns, Sherman consolidated his positions and brought up fresh reserves. His most famous burning was of Atlanta, and then he continued his march toward Savannah and the ocean, leaving a path of devastation and death in his wake that measured three hundred miles long and sixty miles wide. Sherman’s orders were quite clear. The troops were to continue to forage liberally as they destroyed farms, mills, gins, barns, and warehouses.
Destruction rained everywhere in Bartow County. Bands of deserters and robbers from both the Northern and Southern armies hid in limestone caves in the mountains. Many of them claimed to be “scouts” but were in truth renegade guerillas with jingling spurs and long, dirty hair tucked under broad-brimmed hats. They pillaged and raped, becoming more feared than the Yankees. In Atlanta and the other cities, wild dogs slept in ruined homes and piles of rubble by day, and at night formed packs and roamed the streets. One Southern lady turned refugee later wrote that “the baying of these animals in unison was the only sound to break the profound stillness.”
By the time the war ended in April of 1865, abandoned breastworks and rotting horses littered the landscape. Defeated soldiers, some of them with the mud and dust of six states on their tattered clothes, straggled back to their homes on foot. They scrounged parched corn, withered peaches, and raw turnips to eat. According to the terms of the declaration of peace, paroles were given to these sad-looking men with empty eyes who gathered and quietly recited oaths of allegiance to Andrew Johnson, the new federal president. It was said that there were 18,000 men paroled at the Bartow County town of Kingston alone.
Both Redding and Walter Floyd survived the war. They returned home, rolled up their sleeves, and rebuilt their ruined farms. If they could endure the torment of battle in their own backyard, they knew they could survive the indignities of Reconstruction and the exploitation of the carpetbagger. It was a difficult time. Georgia was forced to endure two periods under military rule, and was not readmitted to the Union until July 15, 1870. The older Floyd children, tempered by years of conflict and strife, had become resilient young men and women. By the mid-1870s, fields of cotton returned and Bartow County began to recover. It was during this time that the next generation of Floyds, including Charles Murphy Floyd, Charley Floyd’s grandfather, struck out on their own.
Charles Murphy, Redding’s third-oldest child, was only nineteen years old when he married Mary Elizabeth Morris just two days after Christmas in 1877. It was the same month that Georgia’s new constitution, which increased the strength of rural counties in the legislature, was ratified. Mary was born in Georgia on June 6, 1858, to J. W. Morris, a native Georgian born in 1831, and his wife, Emily Maddox, born in North Carolina that same year. Mary’s younger brother, Augustus Morris, born in 1860, came to live with the young couple for a time and worked as a hired hand on his brother-in-law’s farm.
Soon after their home and farm were established, Charles and Mary wasted little time in starting a family. They had a total of nine children, seven of whom lived to adulthood: Walter Lee, born November 2, 1878; Pearl, April 18, 1882; twins, Cordia Bunia and her brother Buman, December 20, 1884; Beller Redding, November 9, 1887; Burley, March 25, 1893; and Emma Orgedell, better known as Susie, January 21, 1899.
They named their eldest son, Walter Lee, for his grandfather Redding’s big brother. When he was just a new baby, Walter could make his eighty-two-year-old great-grandmother Patience smile, and sometimes even laugh whenever she held him. His name fit. The name Walter came from the Old English weald, meaning “woods,” and from the start, it was evident Walter was more at home when he was in the forest under a canopy of trees than anywhere else. In time, he would grow into a lean and strong youngster who could hold his own with the other boys. He and his siblings cut wood, hauled water, and worked in the cotton fields alongside their parents. They fished and swam in the ponds, creeks, and rivers and stalked game in the hardwood and pine forests still scarred from the war.
Like his father and the other Floyds before him, young Walter became a crack marksman and had a way with horses and hounds. And his dark good looks did not go unnoticed by the young women of the county, Mamie Helena Echols, a pretty girl from a big Georgia farm family, was one of those attracted to the eldest Floyd boy. She apparently did not escape Walter’s gaze, either. He was impressed with her appearance and style and wasted no time before he came calling at the Echols’s home, located near the Cedar Creek community. As the country boys would put it, Mamie could make a man plow through a stump.
Born in Bartow County on March 13, 1881, Mamie was the daughter of Elmer Wilton Echols and Emma Elizabeth Gaines Echols. Elmer had been born in Bartow County in 1852, and Emma, the daughter of South Carolina natives, was born in the county the same year. Married in 1877, Elmer and Emma had two other daughters besides Mamie: Eula Vernon, 1879; and Julia, 1886. They also had four sons: Arthur, 1882; Wiley Erwin, 1888; Forest, 1883; and Royal, 1891. Devout Baptists and capable farmers, the Echols were as respected and well liked in their community as the Floyds.
On December 19, 1897, the beguiling Mamie—quite sweet at sixteen—married nineteen-year-old Walter Floyd in a simple ceremony attended by their relatives and some close friends. They were soon able to set up housekeeping and start their own family, and by the time she turned twenty-one, Mamie already had three children. First came Carl Bradley, who was always called by his middle name, born on November 7, 1898, followed by Rossie Ruth, born on September 17, in the first year of the new century. Another daughter, named Ruby Mae, arrived on May 2, 1902.
Mamie treasured her trio of healthy babies. So did Walter. Still, as much as he loved Bradley and the two little girls, he was ready for another son.
Then along came Charley.