The Bonfire

THE LAND TO THE SOUTH of Dalton was emptying out. A. J. Neal watched “nearly the entire population . . . moving off taking their Negroes south,” even before the real battle began. Already chaotic and choked with soldiers and supplies heading toward the front, Atlanta was now jammed with refugees moving away from it. Proud Confederate Mary Gay left from the car shed to carry a last basket of food to her brother, Tom Stokes, at the front. She managed to get a seat on a train to Dalton packed with sad-faced young wives, children, and grandmothers going to see their men “for, perhaps, the last time on earth.” Gay, too, thought “another fond embrace . . . would palliate the sting of final separation.” As the train chugged at a crawl through the former Cherokee country where Gay had spent her early childhood, she looked out at an endless line of refugees in wagons heading south that “literally blockaded” the roads. Most made their way into Atlanta.

Increasingly nervous, the city held a rally of sorts for the army—and to fortify its own outlook—in early February. Young socialite Sallie Clayton called it “about the greatest day ever seen in Atlanta” when Gen. John Hunt Morgan came to town. Morgan had won fame for the cavalry raids he led for a thousand miles into Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. While the Great Raid of July 1863 (labeled derisively in the North the Calico Raid for its plundering of dry goods stores) had violated Gen. Braxton Bragg’s express orders not to cross the Ohio River, it caused extensive damage, set off panic in the towns and countryside where Morgan operated, and showed the North’s vulnerability to guerilla operations. Just as importantly, Southerners depressed after Vicksburg’s fall and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg were cheered by the show of bravado. Morgan’s laurels, though, came at a high price. On July 26, 1863, federal troops captured him and nearly all his men—experienced cavalry the Confederacy could ill afford to lose—near New Lisbon, Ohio. In November, Morgan managed to escape. Atlanta was able to enjoy his company, but they had much greater need of his cavalry.

Morgan spent the night of February 6 at Mayor James Calhoun’s house, sharing a grand meal with the town’s fathers and local Confederate leaders. The following morning, he made the few-block ride to deliver a short speech and attend a reception in his honor at the Trout House. His carriage was born along by stout men through a crowd too thick for horses not to trample people. Sallie Clayton joined a throng dense enough for “a boy to walk on the heads and shoulders of men” from one end of the city’s central district to the other. Samuel Richards also stood amid the “large concourse of citizens” to hear the general.

Mayor Calhoun introduced General Morgan to the vast crush of people before him. The mayor invoked the memory of Stonewall Jackson, the greatest Confederate cavalry hero, killed in battle in Virginia. Calhoun intoned,

While we mourn the loss of a Jackson, we have great cause to rejoice that we still have many noble leaders left, and amongst them a Morgan, and feel that the spirit of the South can never be subdued while we have such men to lead and encourage our gallant armies. . . . I know our brave soldiers have almost performed miracles; that they have fought as no soldiers have fought before; yet in view of the dangers which threaten us, may I not hope that they will take another step higher upon Fame’s proud temple, and fill the world with the renown of their patriotism and bravery.

Calhoun sought to encourage the citizens, telling them that those at home, too, should be inspired to feed, clothe, and sustain the army, and should, “if they have an excess” of food, turn it over to the commissary, “and by every kind word and deed, and by a united, persevering and determined effort of the army and the people, we may expect a glorious termination of our troubles and sacrifices, and our efforts to be rewarded with independence and a promising future.”

EVENTS HAD FORCED A change in Mayor Calhoun’s sentiments. He had resisted secession and the coming of the war with all his might, he supported peace candidates in Confederate elections even while the war raged, and he seemed to use his authority on behalf of the Confederacy only to the degree necessary for the leader of its second most important city, but the Confederacy was now his nation. His entire family was caught up in the cause. His revered older brother, Ezekiel Calhoun, now nearly seventy years old, had already buried one son and another young man he regarded as a son. The doctor’s oldest son, Edward, was still pulling in the wounded from the Virginia battlefields in his ambulance wagon. Finally, despite Ezekiel’s opposition to a cause that had once led neighbors to threaten his life, he, too, had entered Confederate military service. He now served as a regimental surgeon with the Sixtieth Georgia Regiment on the Island of Skidaway, a heavily bombarded barrier island near the blockaded mouth to the Savannah River.

James Calhoun, too, had a blood investment in the war. His oldest son, Lowndes, now held his rifle in a forward skirmish line north of Dalton. He had reorganized the Forty-second Georgia after its virtual destruction in the Vicksburg siege. Back in the lines, in February, he and his men had already helped to knock down an attempt by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops to push in the Confederate lines in the foothills above Gen. Joseph Johnston’s winter camp. Waiting now for the full force of the Yankee invasion to strike, the Atlanta men behind their breastworks could hear the first gunfire pops echoing through the North Georgia forests and off the ridges. As James Calhoun looked out at the hopeful thousands gathered before him at the Trout House, waiting expectantly to hear cheering words from their Confederate hero, one hundred miles to the north a Yankee storm was building the strength to sweep all of them away.

NEARLY ALL ATLANTANS were at least aware of the preparations for battle being made at Dalton and recognized that their city was at the center of Sherman’s crosshairs. “No event could be more disastrous to the Confederacy” than losing Atlanta to the Yankees, the Intelligencer insisted. Hope remained widespread that Johnston’s forces would hold off the invaders long enough to force a negotiated settlement. The longer the Confederates succeeded in enduring, the more likely the so-called Peace Democrats would be able to defeat Abraham Lincoln in the election due to be held in the fall of 1864. The country was tired of the indecisive war; if the South could forestall Sherman and Grant in their grand designs for the campaign, the Unionist president might be voted out. Besides, the people trusted their army and its new general in Dalton. “Of the capacity of General Johnston none could utter a word of doubt,” the Intelligencer proclaimed. Most in the city seconded that vote of confidence. Mary Mallard, a coastal refugee living in Ezekiel Calhoun’s place, had shared the “perfect ecstasies” people felt when catching a glimpse of the dashing General Morgan during his stay. She trusted that with such leaders, Atlanta would remain unchallenged. “No one seems to apprehend any danger for this place,” she wrote her mother on May 5. However, she also noted that the town’s thousands of hospital beds were being emptied of the sick to make room for the anticipated wounded. “We will be in a dreadful predicament should General Johnston be unsuccessful or be compelled to fall back, but no one seems to contemplate this. All have the utmost confidence in his skill.”

Some were less certain. At the end of the day on May 7, when the first shots of the spring campaign were fired, Samuel Richards sat at his desk in a quiet house. “If we are defeated in these battles,” he reflected, “I fear the bright and cheering hopes of peace that now animate all hearts in the South will be dissipated quickly.” Even so, Richards gave no indication in his diary that he feared his own life might be at risk. The idea that Atlanta might be devastated by a distant force held off by the high ridges and the Confederate defenders within them was still, for most, beyond comprehension.

THE CONFEDERATE LINES Sherman’s men marched into that day started above the 840-foot rise known as Tunnel Hill. Perhaps the Lower South’s greatest antebellum engineering feat, a 1,477-foot Western & Atlantic Railroad tunnel pierced through the pine-covered granite ridge ten miles north of Dalton. Starting in the valley north of there, which Johnston had flooded by damming up Mill Creek, his men stood ready to fight from dug-out emplacements and behind breastworks and boulders along the tops and cliffs of the parallel ridges that raked like scars across the face of North Georgia. Rocky Face Ridge, named for its sheer western palisade wall, was chief among these, stretching from above Dalton south for nearly twenty-three miles to its southern end near a loop in the Oostanaula River. Sherman knew the terrain his men now moved into from his youthful tour through a land “to which I took such a fancy” twenty years earlier. The ridge formed a natural rock barrier, much like Lookout Mountain, which Grant had surmounted outside Chattanooga, but far more impregnable to assault. “The Georgian Gibraltar” fronted the invaders like a bulbous castle wall, every niche in its face bristling with men and their guns. The cliff walls would never yield to even the strongest artillery battering ram, and the valley in front of them left little cover, or hope, for a successful assault.

When the Yankees made their first try, Mayor Calhoun’s neighbors’ son, A. J. Neal, directed his battery, shelling the initial wave of the charge from three miles north of Dalton on the Tunnel Hill Road. Fighting went on all around him; “shell and bullets fell among us,” though in the confusion of the battle, he could judge little about what was going on, except from the crescendo of battle noise. After two days of fighting, though, he was pleased. His battery in Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham’s Corps protected the vital Mill Creek Gap through the Rocky Face Ridge, despite there being at times as many as ten attackers for each defender. The gray coats succeeded in repulsing the initial advances and then “made a sortie and drove the Yankees from the field.” After two days, however, Sherman’s army seemed only to be probing the lines and had not attacked Confederate forward positions in force. Neal hoped the Yankees would be foolhardy enough to undertake a full frontal assault on their lines “for I want a victory here.” Driving back and then crushing the enemy now, as had already happened at Shiloh and Chickamauga before, “would end this war speedily.” The Yankees, he felt certain, could not pierce their lines “except by flanking.”

SHERMAN, PERHAPS BETTER THAN Johnston, knew there were three possible doors through the long sweep of the Rocky Face Ridge wall. Closest to the federals’ main force moving down on the rebels and also closest to Dalton was Mill Creek Gap (known to locals as Buzzard’s Roost), about three miles south of Tunnel Hill. The railroad tracks between Chattanooga and Atlanta that served as opposite-running lifelines for the two armies passed through the gap and then ran south. That railroad provided a ready shuttle behind the ridgeline for moving rebels and their supplies in response to Sherman’s attacks. Another three miles south of Mill Creek Gap was Dug Gap, a pass notched into the ridge. Thirteen miles southwest of Dalton, the Snake Creek Gap ran between two mountains and opened beyond them into Sugar Valley, running five miles to the banks of the Oostanaula at the village of Resaca. Sherman thought his breakthrough would come at the southernmost opening. However, he sent three-fourths of his entire force, combining the Army of the Cumberland under Gen. George Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, and the Army of the Ohio led by Gen. John M. Schofield, against the Mill Creek and Dug gaps. He might knock the Confederates back through one or both of the heavily defended northern gaps, though that seemed unlikely. Sherman himself described the Mill Creek Gap, its walls filled with hidden men able to fire down on any heads daring to approach from below, as “the terrible door of death.” At the least, his two armies would pin down the main body of Johnston’s men. Meanwhile Sherman’s own beloved Army of the Tennessee, now commanded by his favored general, the fast rising and brilliant young fellow Ohioan James B. McPherson, would sidestep the Rocky Face Ridge altogether before marching south and through Snake Creek Gap.

Scouts involved in earlier skirmishes along the ridge had reported finding almost no defenders or obstructions there. Johnston had spent the winter months fortifying Dalton and protecting its northern approaches closest to the enemy’s camp. He had paid scant attention to his southern flank except well south at his supply depot in the railhead town of Rome at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers. He may not have even been aware of the gaping hole he’d left. If McPherson could surge through Snake Creek Gap into the valley, his army could cut the railroad line at Resaca, severing Johnston’s lifeline and forcing him to fall back across the Oostanaula or risk encirclement, logistical strangulation, and the utter destruction of the only army between Sherman and Atlanta.

On May 9, McPherson’s men encountered little opposition as they moved warily through Snake Creek Gap. They entered Sugar Valley and approached within a couple miles of Resaca. McPherson sent Sherman word at his headquarters about their advance. Reading McPherson’s message, the excitable commander pounded on the table, sending dishes and cups flying. “I’ve got Joe Johnston dead!” he exclaimed.

THE SNAKE CREEK GAP surprise had worked. But at the moment of his potential triumph, McPherson was caught flat-footed. Gen. Leonidas Polk, the corpulent Episcopal “Fighting Bishop” of Louisiana, commanded a 15,000-man corps, the Army of Mississippi. With the invasion of Georgia under way, he raced from defending Alabama to reinforce Johnston’s army. In Resaca, 3,000 advance men joined the small guard already in place just as McPherson’s army of 23,000 passed through the gap. A mile outside Resaca, the Yankees, who believed they had broken through unnoticed, encountered fire from the hastily dug-in defenders around the town. McPherson did not know that he outnumbered the Confederates nearly six or more to one in an open plain. Instead, shocked by the sudden resistance, McPherson reconsidered his position, fearing that the roads he marched on through the valley were dangerously exposed. He assumed Johnston had gotten wind of his movement and was prepared for his arrival, perhaps had even set a trap. Cut loose from the army’s main body and supplies and charged by Sherman’s somewhat contradictory orders to cut the railroad at Resaca, then withdraw back into the fortifiable approaches to the gap, he entrenched his men within the defensible confines of the Snake Creek Gap.

The rest of Polk’s Corps flooded into Resaca, holding the rail line. Johnston soon learned about the movement to his rear and realized the potentially lethal threat he faced. “The Yankees,” remarked Pvt. Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee, “had got breeches hold on us.” He and the rest of Johnston’s men started disengaging from Dalton to reinforce Resaca and defend along the northern banks of the Oostanaula River. Realizing the enemy was slipping away, Sherman ordered nearly his entire army on a parallel march south to follow McPherson into the Snake Creek Gap. But it was too late. “He could have walked into Resaca,” spat Sherman, livid with frustration. If McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee had taken the town and the rail line there, Sherman was certain Johnston’s pinched-off and hard-pressed army would have been forced to scatter into the mountains. Not a week into the most significant western campaign of the entire war, he would very likely have bagged half of the opposing force and demolished any significant further resistance to his advance on Atlanta. The war in Virginia and elsewhere would have continued, but with no chance of reinforcements or further food and supplies reaching other fronts from Georgia, the Civil War would effectively have been won.

Instead, the reinforced Army of Tennessee now had nearly 70,000 well-positioned men in and around Resaca ready to defend their lines against a charge from a force not much larger than itself. The first attempt at flanking Johnston had driven him to retreat, but the retreat had left him stronger than before. A set-piece battle was in the offing along the Oostanaula with the odds no longer in the Union army’s favor.

THOUGH HE MAY HAVE preferred to avoid such a fight, Sherman would have to battle. He hoped to pin the Army of Tennessee against the river banks and destroy it there. Starting with skirmishing and probing by the Union forces on May 13, the first major battle of the campaign began. “We have been in hot and heavy ever since,” A. J. Neal wrote home two days later. The battle moved across the valley as the two sides charged breastworks, only to be driven back. The Yankees pushed forward a strong skirmish line near Neal’s trench on the third day of the fight, May 15, and had sharpshooters “behind every tree and shelter.” Shells fell all around Neal. “To expose your head one second,” he found, “is to draw a dozen bullets.” But rebel bullets and shells tolled too. When, the night before, the Union men charged his position, Neal’s comrades set a large building on fire to light up the field, putting the approaching Yankees into ghostly visibility, “and opened on them with a dozen pieces of artillery repulsing the attack.”

The day before, Gen. John Bell Hood’s Corps had nearly broken through the Union lines until reinforcements arrived to force the attackers back. The Yankees regained the lines, but their dead littered the field. That night, the infantry from behind their chest-high fortifications around Neal’s Confederate cannons taunted the Yankee line across the field with the news of Hood’s bloody work. Neal heard a Yankee shout back, “What is Confederate money worth?” What Neal called “a rich scene” quickly ensued as the two lines hurled insults back and forth. A rebel shouted, “What niggers command your brigade?” ignoring the fact that General Sherman shared many of the same racist views as his foes. Although he was fighting to impose Union authority, including the abolition of slavery, on the slave states, the Union commander refused to admit black soldiers into his army. He despised as a dangerous weight upon his army the cloud of former slaves who, having fled their Southern masters, now gathered around the camp of their liberators as it moved into Georgia.

While Neal recorded his impressions, somewhere in the fields and woods nearby William Lowndes Calhoun lay moaning in pain, his hip shattered. During the fighting that afternoon, the Forty-second Georgia as part of the Georgia Brigade had charged against the Union lines. Moving through what their commander called “a thicket almost impenetrable” to sight or sound, they met a fierce hail of bullets and were almost immediately driven back, leaving more than one hundred men dead and wounded behind. Calhoun fell when a minié ball ripped into him. His comrades carried him back. Not long after, he lay in a boxcar with the other wounded bound for Atlanta. He would never walk again without pain. For the mayor of Atlanta’s son, the Civil War fighting was over.

ON THE NIGHT OF MAY 13, an ashen Johnston gathered his generals. He had learned that an entire Union division had crossed the Oostanaula at Lay’s Ferry several miles to the south of Resaca. That deeper flanking move, steadily reinforced by Sherman, threatened to cut off the Western & Atlantic Railroad again. This time the entire army would have to withdraw from its lines and fall back across the river. Working through the night, the rebels evacuated their positions and, after crossing the river, burned the railroad bridge behind them.

That began a series of running encounters south of the river through the gently rolling hills beyond. Johnston kept hoping to find a position that would give him the advantages he wanted, and Sherman marched his men around. “It was fighting, fighting, every day,” Tennessee rebel Private Watkins recalled. “When we awoke in the morning, the firing of guns was our reveille, and when the sun went down it was our ‘retreat and our lights out.’” By day the men fought, and by night they built breastworks. “I am well nigh worn out,” admitted A. J. Neal, “fighting all day and running or working all night.” He was sure, though, if the Yankees would “only give us a fair fight we could sweep them from the face of the earth.”

Sherman, though, had no intention of giving such a fight for now. For his part, General Johnston could not find a position where he felt it safe to turn around and attack his pursuers. He decided to fall back across the next great regional barrier, the southwest-running Etowah River, crossing what Sherman called “the Rubicon of Georgia.” Sherman expected to follow close behind through the heavy wilderness ahead and, at the final river-rampart, “to swarm along the Chattahoochee in a few days.” At some point, he believed “a terrific battle” near that river was inevitable.

Bone-weary, the soldiers of both armies fought and marched without let up, through summerlike dust and heat. They scratched at poison ivy rashes and cuts from brambles and sharp rocks, swatted at swarms of flies, slapped at biting mosquitoes, and wriggled and danced about incessantly like marionettes tugged on razor-wire strings held by the cruel lice crawling over their raw skin. The misery of the campaign equaled the dangers of flying lead and exploding iron. The Yankee army, though, was deep in Georgia. In two weeks of hard fighting, Sherman had covered half the distance to Atlanta. A little more than fifty miles separated his soldiers from the citadel of the Confederacy itself.

On May 22, an enthusiastic Col. Charles Morse, of the Second Massachusetts Infantry, wrote that the next day began the drive over the Etowah. “In the words of Sherman’s general order, we start on another ‘grand forward movement,’ with rations and forage for twenty days.” Sherman did not need to tell his men, but, reflected Morse, “Atlanta is evidently our destination; whether we shall reach it or not remains to be seen. One thing we are certain of—Johnston cannot stop us with his army; we can whip that wherever we can get at it.”