The Bonfire

THE CONFEDERATE ARMED FORCES made up for their amateurism and comparative lack of firepower with spunk, martial spirit, and a clever and knowledgeable leadership corps drawn from resigned U.S. Army officers and graduates of the seven military colleges in the slave states. Northern states had only one such institution to draw upon. Better-equipped and -supplied, more professional, and backed by a sounder dollar, the Union military nonetheless seemed unable to get out of its own way. Since the rout at Manassas, the demoralized federal army was far from an aroused lion and looked more like a paper tiger. Frustrated by the lack of progress against the rebels, Abraham Lincoln changed commanders of the Union army three times and of the Army of the Potomac, his most visible command, five times within the first two years of war. A wary, if pleased, Samuel Richards, surveying the year 1861, was roundly satisfied with his decision to relocate to Atlanta and felt bold enough to declare, “We know not what another year may bring forth but of one thing I am certain, that is that the Union will not be restored!”

But the Army of the Potomac was not the only Union army. Elsewhere, the Union had made significant advances. They commanded the coast and pressed on the major ports of the arterial rivers. The war for Southern independence ate men up, and the enrollment terms for many state and Confederate soldiers who had joined in the first days of the rebellion were drawing to a close, while casualties and sickness mounted. More than 700,000 men had already enlisted in the Union army. Additional Southern troops were desperately needed. The Confederate Congress and Georgia’s governor appealed for volunteers—and, for the first time, threatened to begin drafting eligible men. Whereas Atlanta’s husbands and sons had rushed to join at the first call, they now failed to respond at all. An army recruitment officer, his hard-earned battle scars apparent, trolled the Five Points “asking for volunteers,” but in five weeks not a single new man joined up. According to one disheartened observer, “Hundreds of our citizens who are physically able to bear arms . . . pass him every day on the streets, and seem to have no interest in his efforts.” In an early February letter to the Southern Confederacy, “Stonewall,” as he signed his complaint, beseeched, “What is the matter with the men of Atlanta?” He pointed out the grand ambitions of a city that “aspires to be the seat of Government of the Confederate States, and the heart of the Nation in all respects for all time to come.”

He harkened to the months ahead when winter camps broke and fighting would resume in Kentucky, perhaps even spreading into neighboring Tennessee. “The enemy will be upon us in the spring; and if our army is beaten, of what value will be the gains which many of the people of Atlanta are laying up in store—many of them ill-gotten, by extortionate speculation upon the necessities of the Government and the poor of the country?” He issued “a general ‘fall in to ranks.’”

The enemy did not wait for spring. At the very moment Stonewall issued his public plea for Atlantans to stop loading their wallets and begin loading their rifles, Yankee forces invaded neighboring Tennessee. On February 6, 27,000 soldiers and marines under the combined command of the bibulous Midwestern Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and the teetotaling Connecticut Yankee navy commodore Andrew H. Foote stormed Fort Henry, northern portal to the Tennessee River. Its capture opened the river to federal navy gunboats all the way to Alabama and exposed Fort Donelson, a brief march across a narrow isthmus to the Cumberland River, to Grant’s army. Offering “no terms except unconditional and immediate surrender,” Grant took 12,000 prisoners there on February 16. Thinly spread Confederate forces could not hold the weakly defended Nashville. They evacuated the city, its hospitals, and its arsenal before the Army of the Ohio marched in unopposed on February 23. It was the first capital city of a Southern state to fall to the Union army, and it would not be long before Memphis and then New Orleans fell, leaving Vicksburg as the last major Confederate bulwark holding the Yankees back from turning the Mississippi River into a north-south federal highway straight through the Confederacy.

WITH THE UNION ARMY advancing deeper into Tennessee, the need for city defenses first became apparent in spring 1862 when a group of twenty-two federal soldiers dressed as civilians under the direction of a murky spy and contraband dealer, James J. Andrews, captured a Western & Atlantic Railroad train at Big Shanty (today’s Kennesaw) less than thirty miles above Atlanta and rode it back toward Union lines near Chattanooga, hoping to destroy the single-track rail line behind them. This would have cut off the main supply line from Atlanta to Confederate forces in the southwest corner of Tennessee at Chattanooga. From there, few defenders stood in the way of a Union army on the march over the 130 miles to Atlanta. Thanks to a sharp-eyed conductor who chased down the train while alerting soldiers, the Andrews raid failed, and all of the raiders were captured. Still, the incident signaled that the war was extending its reach toward Atlanta.

The Southern Confederacy described the raid as “the deepest laid scheme, and on the grandest scale, that ever emanated from the brains of any number of Yankees combined. . . . The mind and heart sink back appalled at the bare contemplation of the consequences which would have followed the success of this one act. We doubt if the victory of Manassas or Corinth were worth as much to us as the frustration of this grand coup d’etat.”

Eventually, the captured men were brought to Atlanta, where they were tried as spies; eight of them, including Andrews, were hanged on a public street and their bodies tossed into a shallow grave. The city was shaken. So were some of the hundreds who watched. Sallie Clayton’s eight- and ten-year-old younger brothers witnessed the hangings and saw two of the ropes break under the men’s weight, requiring that the half-hung pair be strung up again. Their teen sister recalled the hanging of the “bridge burners” as “the first thing that happened in our midst to give us a realization of the sad things of war.” Atlantans’ assurance of their immunity to the war’s violence was no longer so easily sustained.

Instead of unshakeable confidence, the city’s residents began to experience wild mood swings as inaccurate and exaggerated news, good and bad, of the war found its way unevenly to the city. Samuel Richards recorded that following the grim war news from western Tennessee, “Our citizens are desponding and think we are done for.” He felt glummer yet when walking through the car shed a few days later he saw three boxes containing soldiers’ remains being unloaded from a train. But some months later, despite having been pushed out of Kentucky, A. J. Neal wrote his sister Emma in Atlanta from his artillery brigade’s camp outside Knoxville in Middle Tennessee that, despite all the doomsayers, for his part, he saw “nothing to cause despondency” and urged her “not [to] grow despondent at home or think it possible for the South to be subjugated.” It was, he wrote, “nonsense” to think an army of so many men defending their own homes could “ever be conquered.” He and his men were ready to keep fighting on until the South was burned over, should it come to that, leaving the Yankees nothing but ash and ruins for their pain. “Rather than affiliate with the North again I hope our rivers and branches may run with blood and that when subjugated the victory may be,” he wrote, paraphrasing Shakespeare, “As cities won by fire / So won, so lost.”

NEAL GOT HIS WISH by April. Under the leadership of Grant and a now battle-ready William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union victory at the Battle of Shiloh (Pittsburgh Landing) on the shores of the Tennessee River in southwestern Tennessee in the first week of April 1862 opened up northern Mississippi to invasion at an unprecedented cost. The two armies together sustained nearly 24,000 casualties in just two days. Neal’s and other soldiers’ battle cry of “Death Before Dishonor” resonated at home. George W. Adair’s Southern Confederacy took up the rebel yell and called out,

Arouse, ye men of the South! Rush to the field of battle! Sink down in your own blood and hail it as a joyful and happy deliverance, in preference to submission to the heartless abolition Yankees. Let your battle cry be,‘Victory or Death!’ Far better would it be for the Atlantic Ocean with one swell surge to rise up and sweep us and all we have into the Pacific than for the infernal hell-hounds who wage this wicked war on us to triumph. Let any cruelties, any torments, any death that earth can inflict come upon us in preference to the triumph of the Yankees!

Still living in his father’s house, William Lowndes Calhoun heard the call. While refugees from Nashville were just beginning to flood the car shed, the twenty-four-year-old attorney and son of the mayor led in organizing the first new infantry company from the city since the summer. Named the Calhoun Guards in honor of his father, who likely funded it, the company elected the mayor’s son as its first lieutenant. Eventually he became captain of the Guards, which was designated Company K, Forty-second Georgia Infantry. In the first months of his term, he rode away from the battlefields, detached by the army to run a prison camp in Madison, Georgia. After mustering out at the end of his enlistment, though, he quickly reenlisted in his company in time to join the party at Chickasaw Bluffs line above Vicksburg. He would see plenty of action this time.

IN DEPARTING FOR THE SERVICE, Lowndes had already heard plenty of tales about the fighting going on far from Atlanta. Not long before he left, his cousin, Ezekiel’s son, Edward Calhoun and Edward’s foster brother, Robert Clingan, their enlistment year expired, returned home from Virginia. Both were far thinner after a year on short rations than when they set out. “The idol of the household,” Edward regaled the family with tales, in his nephew’s breathless words, of “thrilling experiences when on the red fields of carnage, his hair-breadth escapes when so nearly captured, the many ghastly sights he saw; and the acts of bravery and cowardice displayed by men when engaged in battle.”

The heroism they’d shown, though, had more to do with braving the elements than contending with enemy fire. The Gate City Guards had fought briefly with Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army at Pensacola before being ordered to northwestern Virginia, where, less than a week before the great victory at Manassas, they were caught up in the first heavy land battle of the war at Laurel Hill. Edward Calhoun, Clingan, and the other Gate City guardsmen were among hundreds of men who broke and fled across a branch of the Cheat River, where they found themselves cut off from the main body of retreating Confederates and their supply wagons. To rejoin their army, they sought a path to the safety of the Valley of Virginia. Demoralized, hungry, without enough clothes or blankets, the men climbed and hiked across the Allegheny ridges and descended into the vast western Virginia wilderness forests, where they became completely lost. After wandering without food for four days, drenched, cold, and exhausted, many men grew sick and some deranged, scores falling by the wayside. Finally, a local hunter chanced upon the wandering troops and led them down the valley to safety. Thirteen men out of the Gate City Guards died; many others were left too debilitated to continue serving. Edward, Robert, and the other survivors still fit for service rejoined the regrouping army in Richmond, serving under Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

After barely a month at home, though, Edward and Robert felt encouraged and fit enough to return to the fight. This time, these Calhoun men joined Ben Yancey’s replenishing Fulton Dragoons cavalry. Young Pickens Calhoun’s time to serve had arrived. Edward’s younger brother was now old enough that his deeply distressed father could not keep him from joining the others. Ezekiel “vigorously protested.” Pickens told him that should he stay home now, he would fare worse than anything he might face in the army. He “would rather fill an honorable soldier’s grave than be branded as a coward.” The three brothers in arms left with their new company for Virginia to join Gen. Wade Hampton’s already legendary Legion. The Legion would eventually fight in virtually all the major engagements in the Northeast, including the Wilderness and at Antietam (Sharpsburg), Gettysburg, and the siege of Petersburg. Those who lived long enough would finally close out the war at Appomattox.

The physician Edward was placed in charge of a regimental ambulance. By September 1862, he found himself in the middle of the horrendous slaughter at Antietam, driving his ambulance wagon to pick up wounded soldiers in the field when the Union line charged. Rifle and cannon fire flew about him. An exploding shell tore away the wagon’s canvas top as he started back for his own lines. The howling wave of Yankee soldiers, stopping only to shoot, overtook him. He and his wagonload of wounded were taken prisoner and led into the Union line. In the lashing tidal sweep of the battle, though, the Confederates regrouped and charged back into the Union line. In the ensuing chaos, Edward saw his chance and drove his careening wagon back through the battling men, black smoke, whistling balls, and exploding shells, reaching safety “without even receiving a scratch.”

DISEASE WAS KILLING EVEN more fighting men than shot and shell. Thousands of men in filthy encampments fell ill with typhoid, dysentery, and smallpox. With his trained eye, Edward noticed that Pickens Calhoun was starting to look weary and flushed; he could see that his little brother was sick and told him to take a furlough, but Pickens refused. Over the next few days of riding, his grey eyes dimmed, his cheeks hollowed out, and his long and already slender frame grew skeletal. Finally, Pickens could ride no further. Edward helped carry him to a nearby house, where a mother and daughter took him in. Edward returned a few days later to find Pickens had died.

A few months after Pickens’s death, his foster brother, Robert Clingan, was sent out on a courier mission on horseback while a battle raged. Just as he approached the officer for whom the message was intended, an artillery shell exploded nearby, ripping into the officer and knocking him from his saddle. Clingan jumped to his side and carried him behind the shelter of a tree. As Clingan stood, a Yankee sharpshooter put a minié ball through his forehead.

FIGHTING AND ILLNESS RAVAGED both armies. Unimaginably huge numbers of sick and wounded soldiers needed care and respite away from the front. With hot fighting raging west, south, north, and along the seaboard, Atlanta offered a refuge not just for manufacturing but also for wounded and sick soldiers. The long trains of empty freight cars running into town to pick up war munitions offered ideal transport. Atlanta’s vaunted “pure waters, salubrious air, and delightful climate” were still good enough that a month after James Calhoun took office for his first term in January 1862, the Southern Confederacy reported, “These great blessings which Heaven has favored us with, are about to be put to practical use in a line not heretofore attempted. The Medical Director of the Confederate States Army is here to establish a mammoth hospital at this place.” A month later, the first five hundred convalescing soldiers from the Army of Mississippi arrived. Within less than six months, Atlanta, the center of manufacturing and merchant trade, was also the “hospital city of the South.” One by one, the army took over larger buildings in town, warehouses, schools, ballrooms, concert halls, and hotels among them, to house and care for the sick and wounded. The Empire and Heery hospitals, Gate City, City Hotel, Alexander, Concert Hall, Wilson’s, Denny, Medical College, and Jane’s and Hayden’s hospitals were named for their previous uses or owners. Beds lined the rooms and halls, with just enough space for a nurse or doctor to move between, and a surgical room, where available, was set off away from the other spaces to dampen the cries of the men in their unanesthetized pain. Without drugs to halt infections, few survived in pain for long in any case.

The hospitals could not keep up with the growing river of wounded and sick coming off the trains. Mayor Calhoun was charged with identifying more structures to be commandeered for hospitals and sites where new ones could be built. The army pressed to convert the large council and courthouse rooms in the City Hall into hospital wards, but Calhoun refused, insisting that maintaining a civic and administrative center for “the County, State, and City is a matter of great public necessity.” In the summer, plans were drawn up to construct forty buildings on the fairgrounds on the south side of Fair Street near the Georgia Railroad and the army’s munitions laboratories.

Soon, even those facilities were not enough. Tent hospitals and a two-hundred-bed “wayside” hospital went up near the tracks to distribute the wounded and to handle overflow from the more permanent facilities. Specialized hospitals were also erected, including one devoted to contagious diseases such as pneumonia, venereal diseases, measles, and smallpox that covered 155 acres of what was called “Markham’s Farm,” property seized by the War Department from the known Unionist William Markham. As long trains of cattle cars returned from the Tennessee front with their cargo of sick and wounded soldiers—up to 10,000 wounded men after a single battle—the passenger depot became a scene of crowding, odors, flies, and moans. The overfull hospitals could not handle the waves of new patients, and many were carried off the train and laid out on the depot floor or beneath the trees shading the neighboring City Park to await a physician’s attention or triage. The stretchers became a maze through which departing and arriving passengers, often bewildered and exhausted refugees, needed to work their way. Townspeople crossing the city would walk blocks out of their way to avoid the terrible sights.

SALLIE AND GUSSIE CLAYTON helped darn socks with the older women and pulled lint together to make bandages for the wounded. Each morning they prepared bundles of food, clothing, and supplies to take to the hospitals. Now considered a woman, though, Sallie was frequently turned away from visiting the convalescing men. Only the younger Gussie was permitted to attend to their needs. For Gussie, this chance to help would one day prove tragic.

The girls had to leave their beloved Female Institute schoolhouse overlooking the city when the army took that as a hospital as well. They now met their classmates and teachers for school at the Neal house across Washington Street from their home. The inseparable Clayton sisters were drawn to their old schoolhouse when, out for a stroll one afternoon, they found themselves nearby. They decided to pay a visit. They entered quietly through the doors they had opened countless times. The girls looked about in stunned horror. The chapel, music room, and classrooms where they and their friends had once filled pews, chairs, and desks were now lined with rows of groaning, bandaged, and mutilated men. The odor was overwhelming. They ventured to look downstairs into the raised basement but quickly turned away from the sight of stacked corpses. Piles of amputated arms and legs lay there as well. It was now the “Dead House,” where the remains of the dead and debris of surgeries awaited burial or shipment home.

Sallie could not comprehend such a transformation of a place she formerly thought of as filled only with the ringing laughter and playful voices of young girls dancing, singing, and reciting their lessons. “The change was so like a play,” she recalled. “First, the ringing down the curtain on a picture of Life, and Joy, and Mirth, and raising it again to present one of Gloom and Sorrow, Suffering and Death.”

THE TENS OF THOUSANDS of sick soldiers and the crowds of refugees, many exhausted from their long journeys, carried contagious illness with them. It didn’t take long to spread to the wider population. Scarlet fever and smallpox swept the city starting in the fall of 1862 and continuing on into winter, despite a largely ignored, mandatory vaccination program for whites. Red quarantine flags marked out houses with smallpox cases within. Mayor Calhoun established a quarantine hospital with armed guards. Patients with mild cases still wandered off from quarantine, spreading the disease and setting off epidemic outbreaks in the city. Finding people to nurse the sick was nearly impossible. Few whites would work the low-paying contagious-ward jobs; nor did many owners want their costly slaves exposed to smallpox, typhus, and other virulent diseases. Soon, however, Confederate seizures of hundreds of bondsmen and women led to their comprising almost half the hospital workforce, including 80 percent of the attendants caring for the sick and wounded.

Their health care ignored, blacks, crowded in slave quarters, fell ill in large numbers. In December, the city ordered the complete isolation of infected blacks on a farm a few hundred yards from the army’s Markham’s Farm quarantine hospital. Christmastime 1862 was a somber one in Atlanta as people had little to celebrate and feared visiting friends and neighbors, whose homes might harbor smallpox, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and other terrible diseases. A few weeks after his infant daughter Alice’s death, Samuel Richards was “quite anxious lest [contagious illnesses] come into our fold.” To keep any contagion at bay, he placed bags of herbs around his remaining children’s necks “as haply it may do some good.” Such protection could not prevent illness entering the Richards brothers’ shared household, though. Jabez’s young wife died of consumption in the early days of 1863.