The Bonfire

WITH THE STARS AND STRIPES no longer flying over Atlanta, the city voted for town officers two days before the Milledgeville secession convention. Some still hoped the city might return to being a moderate bastion against the rising radicals, but it was not to be. The agenda-setting secessionists now held the stage and would fight to stay there. James Calhoun’s older brother, Ezekiel, the physician, militia captain in the Creek War, and one of the region’s earliest white settlers, ran for mayor. Even finding a soapbox from which to speak his mind was difficult. “Every Union man was muzzled,” said the Unionist builder Julius Hayden. The white-haired physician had doctored a goodly number of the town voters at one time or another, but, like other Unionists, “could not express any opinion at all unless he expressed it in favor of secession.” Opponents questioned Calhoun’s manliness and readiness to stand up to the Black Republicans, labeling him and several city council candidates “submissionists.” They withdrew in protest two days before the vote. Intelligencer publisher Jared Whitaker, who had beaten the drum for secession, was no moderate, but he was in fact less radical than his opponent, a former mayor, William Ezzard. Whitaker won the office he had long had his eyes on.

Confederate Atlanta now assumed the cause of nation building with the same boosterish fervor it brought to its own rise. Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, named president of the Confederate States of America, resigned his Washington seat and traveled to the government’s temporary capital in Montgomery, Alabama. Once there, the triumphant overlord of the rebel government, William Lowndes Yancey, introduced his man to the cheering crowd turned out to greet him, declaring in the words that would become the best remembered of his life, “The man and the hour have met!” During Davis’s journey south, on February 16, two days before his own inauguration and two weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in Washington, he stopped over for a night in Atlanta. Militia units paraded and fired volleys in his honor. Five thousand people gathered to hear him speak outside the Trout House hotel. Meeting in his room, city leaders urged him to build the new government’s capital in Atlanta. They touted the city’s healthy air, central location, unmatched rail access, seven hotels, and abundance of fresh seafood, meat, and vegetables, “including,” wryly boasted the Gate City Guardian newspaper, “goobers, an indispensable article for a Southern Legislator.” The Southern Confederacy newspaper proclaimed its hometown would gladly serve, being “par excellence the most suitable point within the limits of the Southern Confederacy for the locating of the Capitol and other public buildings.” Rising in the distance, Stone Mountain contained more than enough granite “to construct the public buildings of a thousand Southern Confederacies.”

SOON AFTER THE DAVIS VISIT, the city dispatched a trio to Montgomery to promote those same advantages to the new government’s assembly. The chosen men were Mayor Jared Whitaker and former mayor William Ezzard, both widely known secessionists, and one prominent former opponent, James Calhoun. Whatever his resistance to secession and fears about the future, Calhoun felt bound to the course the South had determined upon for its future. His heritage, family, wealth, social standing, personal ties, and loyalties made this his land. He was a Calhoun. Moreover, much of his personal wealth was tied up in his more than fifty slaves. He “sympathized with the cause of the South.” The vote had been taken, the state had seceded, and now, he believed, “it was my duty to go with the South.”

The peril became quickly apparent. Under a headline reading, “Loyalty to Government the Duty of Every Good Citizen,” James P. Hambleton’s Southern Confederacy recognized that some might question where their duty lay, and “regardless of the authority of this Government, and their obligation to support it, have turned their longing eyes towards the Black Republican fleshpots of Lincoln, Greeley [the influential Republican New York Tribune’s editor] & Co.” The newspaper condemned all Union partisans and urged that they “be summarily dealt with as traitors. There should not be among us any man who is so base, and treasonous . . . [as to] recognize the authority or laws of the United States as extending over us.” The new government should wield its power to exile or punish any who undermined the rule of its law.

“REGULATORS OR INVESTIGATING COMMITTEES,” an extension of the minutemen’s Committee of Safety, applied other, more direct means to bring former Unionists in line. They went from house to house, meeting with known Unionists. After the encounters, most dropped their public opposition to the new order. Hayden trembled as he watched the committees do their work. “Every Union man they could find who expressed Union sentiments was ordered to leave the State and a good many were whipped or lynched,” he said. Some still resisted. A local committee rode up to Harrison Baswell at work in his farmyard outside his house on the rich bottomlands he worked along the Chattahoochee River just outside Atlanta. The men demanded he support the Confederate cause and join a military company they were forming. If he did not, right then they would string him up as “a traitor and Tory to his country.” Baswell retreated into his house and came back out, pointing his shotgun at them. “Gentleman,” he said, leveling his gun, “I ain’t got but one time to die, and before I will go off with you, and fight against the Union, I will die in my own yard.” The men turned out of his property, but he hid out after that. When he discovered his son J. T., not yet sixteen, had joined the Confederate army, his nephew recalled Baswell spitting out angrily that he would have shot his son rather than “see him go off like he did to fight against the Union.”

Inside the Atlanta town borders, secession leaders had subtler means of silencing opposition to the new national government’s authority. Outspoken Union supporter James Stewart could no longer get his views published in local newspapers. He did find a Nashville newspaper willing to print a letter in which he declared, “I may be coerced to obey but will never acknowledge the government de facto of the seceding States.” He was unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of Confederate authority, but he called for peaceful resolution of the sectional dispute. He hoped “the incoming [Lincoln] administration will not countenance or recommend war upon the erring people of the South.” He roundly criticized the seceding states’ seizure of U.S. arsenals as “stupendous farce,” yet urged moderation, calling for the defeat of the radicals, North and South, through ballots and not bombs. The Intelligencer ignored his pleas for peace and reprinted the Nashville article for its readers as an example “bristling with rank treason.” The editor fulminated, “ We cannot live with incendiaries and traitors in our midst,” and then, invoking an ancient city ultimately destroyed from within, urged the swift expunging of such men. “If the Greek horse is among us, let us cast him into the sea.” The newspaper would not let the matter rest. A few days later, it branded Stewart as “dangerous” and decreed that “all such men as this Stewart is must leave this community ‘peaceably if they may, forcibly if we must.’”

Finally, two afternoons later, Intelligencer publisher and now city mayor Whitaker, acting “at the invitation of a highly respectable Committee of [unidentified] gentlemen,” called privately on Stewart. Stewart emerged clearly shaken by what Whitaker told him. He now contended that his words were “misapprehended.” In a public statement printed in the Intelligencer, he swore his loyalty to the new government and vowed to “support with all my power any war measure necessary to resist coercion, by the Federal Government, or the invasion, by any other power, against the Confederate States of America.” He never published another word challenging secession or questioning the legal authority of the Confederate government. Not long after that, his flour mill won a rich contract to produce hardtack for the Confederate army.

IN LIGHT OF SUCH FORCED CONVERSIONS, Calhoun and nearly all of his many Atlanta neighbors who had once spoken out for, or at least voted in favor of, cooperation and compromise threw their lots in with the Confederate cause. The editors of the Southern Confederacy likely had Calhoun in mind when the paper admitted “that many of our best citizens were opposed to secession.” Such men, in the heat of the crisis, “were honest, and we have not the slightest word to say against or fault to find with them on this account.” The newspaper welcomed their newfound readiness to accept the revolution, praising each former opponent who had “since manifested his patriotism and fidelity to his country, by yielding a cordial and cheerful obedience and support to its policy.”

Such generosity toward former oppositionists had its limits, however. “We do think it is the bounden duty of every good citizen to defend his country in every measure she may adopt,” the editors averred, “or leave it at once. It is wrong and wicked to remain among us, opposing our government, and stirring up strife and dissensions among our people, in opposition to the established order of things; and no good man will be guilty of it.” Those who remained in Atlanta should now declare and show their loyalty or leave—or face other, more serious consequences.

IN THE SPIRIT OF REVOLUTIONARY patriotism infecting the city, there were practically endless opportunities for Atlanta residents to demonstrate their zeal for the new order. The city’s rail hub location made it a frequent layover point for government and military officials and troops in the newly forming rebel army traveling among the seceding states. On March 12, the new Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, spoke to several thousand people outside the Atlanta Hotel. Little Alec had dropped his long-standing opposition to secession, even competing with fellow Georgians Howell Cobb and Robert Toombs for the Confederate presidency. He could hardly have failed to catch the irony of where he now stood and looked out over a sea of beaming faces. On these same steps, thirteen years earlier, he had run into Judge Francis Cone, who had refused to retract his “traitor” charge against Stephens, then in the unequal ensuing fight, nearly stabbed him to death. Now, Stephens—“his withered hands in gloves much too large—a face like a mummy—except the bright black eyes—and when on the stand . . . look[ing] like a little boy”—stood one rung below the top of the new Southern national government.

His words to the crowd have not survived, but he probably rehearsed the argument he would famously deliver in Savannah less than two weeks later, his widely reprinted and much discussed “Cornerstone Speech” on the basis for the new Southern republic. In that speech he insisted that responsibility for the collapse of the national union rested with those who did not accept “that slavery— subordination to the superior race—is [the negro’s] natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” The Confederacy’s “cornerstone,” he intoned, “rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Those in the North who clung to ideas of equality

with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind—from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just—but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. . . . They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

The new nation’s people had much work ahead of them. With state militias moving against federal arsenals and military facilities, Alexander Stephens told his Atlanta listeners to expect the surrender of Charleston Harbor’s Fort Sumter any day now. He assured his audience that war was not in the offing but urged them to secure the peace by preparing to fight.

The two standing Atlanta militia companies, the Gate City Guards and Atlanta Grays, were the first to muster for the new Confederate and state armies. Other units formed swiftly, often sponsored by wealthy citizens who took captaincies or made sure their sons were elected officers. With bounties and the inducement of colorful and dashing uniforms for those who could afford them, hundreds of privates joined the Safe Guards, the Free Trade Rifles, and ten other new companies that came together before the year ended—along with cadet corps and home defense guards made up of those too young or too old to enlist. Six of Atlanta’s volunteer fire companies transformed themselves into military organizations that spring. In June, Ben Yancey formed up the Fulton Dragoons, a cavalry company, which joined the Georgia Legion, whose officers included Thomas R. R. Cobb, Howell’s younger brother, and former Atlanta mayor Luther Glenn, who was married to the Cobbs’ sister. The following November, when Cobb the cadet took a seat in the Confederate Congress for a period, he placed Major Yancey in command of his famous legion already winning battlefield fame in Virginia as part of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Although Fulton County had long resisted the cry for secession, with Atlanta at its center, its citizens provided the largest number of volunteer companies of any county in the state in this first call to arms, together with 150 enlistees in the regular army. By the following October, more than a thousand Atlanta men had joined forty Georgia regiments leaving for the battlefields. By the end of the war, Fulton County had provided the Confederacy with 2,660 soldiers.

Like the militia of earlier wars, the citizen soldiers assembled into motley bands, making up in spirit for what they lacked in professional training. Soon they gained a measure of discipline and order. The tread of marching boots in the streets now competed with the sound of clattering train cars. Parks and squares were turned into drill grounds. Fife and drum bands filled the air with martial music. Despite the seizure of federal arsenals and forts, the city and state had few munitions to offer or spare; men marched with their personal revolvers and bowie knives or shouldered shotguns and old muskets left from the Mexican-American War and the Indian Wars. Those without long guns even carried fence posts instead. Officers rode their own horses. Crowds of women and men too young or too old to serve gathered to cheer the parades on. An Atlanta mother beamed with pride as her young son, enthused by the passing lines of men, assembled the family slaves together into a company and marched them about the house yard.

The city turned out its pockets and purses in support of the incipient military buildup. Wealthy citizens donated cash, valuables, and household items to benefit the new companies. The Atlanta Amateurs dramatic group held regular fund-raising performances at the Athenaeum. Many evenings, men’s voices from political meetings rang out from City Hall where town ladies also came together in adjoining rooms to form support societies, sewing regimental flags, uniforms, and socks for the new companies. When Sarah Huff ’s father and uncle prepared to join Yancey’s Fulton Dragoons, entering Cobb’s Legion, her “weeping” mother and aunt “began basting and fitting the uniforms.” After they were uniformed, Ben Yancey’s men started off on the road to Virginia. It would be four years before the Huff women would see them again. Soon, they and other women formed associations to make bandages for the wounded.

AMONG MANY TOWN FAMILIES busied with making their sons and husbands at least look like soldiers were John and Mary Jane Neal. Their eldest two sons, Andrew Jackson, or A. J., Neal and older brother James, were among those who mustered at the earliest call. James, became captain of an Atlanta company known as the Jackson Guard, also known as the Irish Volunteers for its large contingent of Irish-born volunteers, which was quickly detached as part of the Nineteenth Georgia Infantry to the new Confederate army in Virginia. The twenty-four-year-old A. J., an attorney, had only recently opened his first office in the swampy inland Florida town of Micanopy. When the state seceded, he promptly enlisted. He was now a mounted lieutenant with the Marion Light Artillery in its first encampment near Pensacola. The rebel troops there were preparing to move against the large federal garrison on an island across the harbor. First, though, the company needed to uniform its men. A. J. wrote to ask his father to search out merchants in Atlanta able to supply “uniforms, swords, sashes, shoes, clothing, etc.,” everything to outfit the battalion. In a few days his company’s Captain Powell would arrive in Atlanta with “plenty of money” in hand. A. J. Neal knew it would be impossible to find enough “cadet gray” cloth uniforms, but with the need to fight still uncertain, he assured his father that “flannel shirts and cheap pants” would do.

The Neal family had moved just the year before from its large plantation in Zebulon, in Pike County, south of Atlanta, into its new house, a block down Washington Street from Calhoun’s place. The Neals lived at the corner of Mitchell in a brick Greek temple of a mansion admired as perhaps the grandest in-town house yet built in Atlanta. It had two-story white Corinthian columns supporting a pediment roof extending over the length of a front porch from which the parents, their three girls, and another son still at home cheered on the men marching past or drilling in the shady square in front of the City Hall and Fulton County Courthouse. With guests such as the Calhouns or the Claytons, who lived on the opposite corner of Mitchell Street and whose young daughters and sons were playmates of the younger Neal children, at their table, the Neals shared their sons’ letters from the developing front.

For now, the family anxiously awaited the arrival of Captain Powell, who would carry word about “how affairs stand . . . and what are the prospects of war.” The lively dinner table companions enjoyed the bountiful provender from their farms, never imagining that the violence of what would surely be a short-lived war, if it came to that, could directly impinge on them. The same things that made Atlanta so attractive to them and increasing numbers of new residents, though, would one day bring the leader of the enemy forces to eat at the very same table they presently shared.

LARGE CROWDS ROUTINELY gathered to watch newly commissioned regimental officers receive their new command’s flags at elaborate patriotic ceremonies in which a young local beauty committed the flag to the regiment’s designated color bearer and called upon him “to guard it with his life.” At the ceremony for the Confederate volunteers, the Athenaeum’s eight hundred seats were jammed as Ben Yancey’s daughter presented a flag she had sewn for the departing company. As she transferred the colors to the regiment’s protection, the loud rhythmic bass voice of the receiving sergeant resounded through the hall with his promise that “Never! Never!! Never!!!” would he “allow its folds to trail in the dust.” The house went wild, refusing to quiet until the orchestra launched into a rousing martial tune.

On hand for this and many other patriotic displays, sixteen-year-old Sallie Clayton watched and shared in the events that had transformed her adopted hometown into a military camp. “Everything seemed to be preparing for active service,” she recalled, “and on all sides the cockade was visible.” She and her more than two hundred fellow students from the Atlanta Female Institute now drilled and trained for elaborate ceremonies to honor their male neighbors forming up to defend their new nation. While the city had as yet no public schools—despite the urging of many leading citizens that some alternative be found for the many poor children running unattended in the streets—the Female Institute opened its doors in 1860 to those daughters of families able to afford the $36 half-year’s tuition. Sallie walked nearly a mile each way—four times daily, counting her return home for lunch—to and from the brick and stone building on Ellis Street near Houston, overlooking the city. The Female Institute’s dome atop what came to be known as College Hill was visible from nearly any vantage point in town. Though the walk left Sallie and her younger sister and constant playmate Gussie weary, “and it was never known at what moment a cow would dispute the passage of a street with us,” they loved sharing in morning religious services in the buildingwide first-floor chapel, followed by Latin, French, oratory, reading and arithmetic recitations, calisthenics, dancing, and music in the upper-floor classrooms. She felt, “No building in the place could have been the scene of more joy and happiness.”

Through the open windows on College Hill, the students could hear the shunting trains and crowds jamming the car shed, where company after company from up-country towns piled out of cars to reassemble in the neighboring open field of trees, mud, and grass known as City Park “amidst stirring martial music and firing of cannon.” Local women were always on hand to greet the young men, “all recognizing,” shared Clayton, “in every soldier a father, husband, brother or son and all were anxious to aid each one of them in some way.” The chaos and emotion around the station sometimes proved dangerous. After many hours packed together on trains—even the car roofs were filled—spirited young soldiers in the making leaped from cars slowing into the car shed and began firing their revolvers into the arching ceiling, stampeding the throng of panicked well-wishers on hand to welcome them.

Neighboring streets also filled with wagon trains and long lines of uniformed men moving through. Walking home one afternoon, a demure Sallie needed to cross Marietta Street as one company after another filed past. As she waited at first patiently, “the opportunity for a little fun . . . more than they could resist,” the soldiers began taunting her, calling her their “personal property” in words that put a “crimson hue” into her cheeks. Unable to get across the street, she was forced to walk the entire length of the long marching columns of men, accompanied by “shouts and laughter” the whole way. Only “with the utmost difficulty” did the blushing young woman keep a “dignified pace” before finally reaching her door.

While in town, the soldiers camped in the new Confederate barracks built on Peachtree Street toward the outskirts of Atlanta near the spot where townspeople used to ride the early version of the Ferris wheel and eat ice cream on hot summer nights. On April 1, 1861, “the greatest gathering that was ever witnessed in this city took place” to salute the seventy-five Gate City Guards under its captain, former mayor William Ezzard, debarking along with companies from the Cherokee County towns of Ringgold and Cartersville to join with A. J. Neal’s and the many other regiments assembling in Pensacola for the assault planned on the resisting federal garrison there. Cheering onlookers filled the balconies and windows, even the rooftops, of the Trout House, the Atlanta Hotel, the Athenaeum, and other neighboring buildings and depots, even straining to see from the tops of rail cars parked in the yard. “Every available space was crammed with living masses,” reported the Southern Confederacy.

The entire Atlanta Female Institute student body lined up along the Atlanta Hotel facing the file of soldiers. Each young lady dressed in white carried a small version of the new “Stars and Bars” Confederate States flag in her gloved hand. The carefully rehearsed line of girls moved across the street and handed a flag to each soldier opposite. Inscribed on the back of the flags, turned over by the doe-eyed girls for the young men in their fresh uniforms, were the loin-stirring words, “From the Young Ladies of the Atlanta Female Institute. None but the brave deserve the fair.” As it pulled out whistling, the thirteen-car train holding the flag-waving men bound for the army was accompanied by “the booming of cannon and the cheering and shouting of the unnumbered throng, and waving handkerchiefs by the ladies from the windows and balconies contiguous.” Each departing soldier felt the warmth of a pretty girl’s hand linger in his own as the train carried him off to the front.

DESPITE THE PREDICTIONS THAT not a shot would be fired to win Southern independence, Lincoln made clear that the Union was indissoluble—and war came. South Carolina forces opened fire on Fort Sumter outside Charleston on April 12, 1861. Lincoln had a tiny 16,000-man army at his disposal and a small navy. The South, with its state militias, enjoyed an actual manpower advantage over the Union when the first shots rang out. On April 14, the Confederate flag rose over Fort Sumter. A day later, Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen for ninety days’ service to suppress the insurrection “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Atlanta’s streets erupted in what were now becoming routinely boisterous and pyrotechnic displays of support for the Confederate attack. Two days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, a “citizens committee” threatened to visit all Northern merchants to insist they hang Confederate flags over their stores. If they refused, they would “be accommodated to a coat of tar and feathers.”

The town’s high society enjoyed more refined displays of patriotic ardor indoors. Sallie Clayton and other students of the Female Institute held a floral pageant beginning with the raising of the American flag, at which the young women on stage tossed floral “bombs,” bringing the Stars and Stripes to the floor, followed by a bouquet bombardment of a floral model of Fort Sumter. The performance shook “the house with stamping feet and . . . wild shoutings and cheers,” according to a witness.

With many of Atlanta’s leading citizens on hand for the pageant, the school’s founding trustee, Amherst Stone, and his wife, Cyrena, were almost certainly in the audience. Even more than her Union-leaning husband, Cyrena was troubled by slavery and deeply opposed secession. A local writer and essayist of some note, she fought against the radicals’ ascendance as she could, pseudonymously with her pen. Probably reflecting on the girls’ floral desecration of the American flag, writing as “Holly,” Cyrena lamented in the city’s “lively evening paper,” the Commonwealth, the dying of “our country, so long the boast of every one proud to call himself American!” She dreaded what might lie ahead. “The [‘late United States’] fair corse [sic] still ‘lies in State,’” she declaimed, “for it is yet unknown whether her burial should be as her baptism—in the crimson life-blood of thousands—or whether they shall wrap around her . . . the Stars and Stripes that have waved so long over our Washington’s grave—as fitting drapery for the death-sleep of the fairest, the noblest Republic upon which ever shined the Sun.” In the privacy of home, she hoped for a better outcome, “nerv[ing] ourselves against despair, and believ[ing] yet, that this Strife between Truth & Treason must soon end—triumphantly for Truth.”

ON A “BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY,” the second after Samuel Richards learned of the taking of Fort Sumter, the book merchant went to church, where his inspired choir “made a greater display than our church has ever before seen or heard in the musical line.” His objections to secessionists vanished. He sang out boldly for the new Southern republic’s rise. In spite of his spiritual exaltation, he could not help feeling “sad to think that our country is actually at war brother against brother.” The war of brother against brother was, in his case, more than just a phrase. Samuel Richards decried “our traitor brother,” William, who had gone north to preach, and now “his sympathies and his hopes are with the despotic government that is doing their utmost to destroy us and make slaves of freemen.” At this point, he wrote, “I pity him for his blindness and infatuations.” His anger at William built as the gathering violence played out on the coasts and in Virginia. “Our family hitherto has been united in feeling and affection if not in bodily presence, but now we are widely separated indeed and have nothing in common.” He claimed to have formerly been “a strong Union man” as the two sides drew apart with the approach of the election, “but now it has got to have a stinking savor since I have seen what measures are taken in order to save [the Union].”

A week later, he announced he would muster with the Silver Grays, Macon’s new home guard battalion composed of men “whose locks are turning gray with age, as myself,” but with all arms already consigned to other companies, the militia company shortly disbanded. His longtime clerk Asa Sherwood, though, departed for Virginia to join the army.

With gunfire and death came venom and ambition for conquest. On April 24, 1861, Atlanta mayor Whitaker addressed a public letter to Mechanic Fire Company No. 2 accepting their offer to serve voluntarily as a home guard militia for the city. He assured them, “We will teach Mr. Lincoln and his cohorts before this war is over that the South never surrenders, and that the people of the South will never be satisfied until the Capitol at Washington is rescued and our flag raised upon it; and the Confederate States acknowledged to be free and independent of all nations.” The city council soon seconded his sentiments, with a resolution denouncing “one Abraham Lincoln of certain nonslaveholding States of the late old United States having announced its determined policy to subjugate the Slave States.” The council members asserted that “the people of the Slaves States are determined never to be subjugated by such demons as long as there is an arm to raise and a God to rule and to sustain the cause of the Confederate States of America.”

THE HOPE THAT THE WAR wouldn’t last long derived from the smallness of both professional armies. Some believed the Union would let the Confederacy go in a negotiated divorce. The Southern Confederacy called for military restraint, declaring a readiness for a quick end to the conflict. “Justice,” a columnist temperately admonished, “does not require, and no one desires to wage an offensive war against our enemies. We all want peace as soon as it can be obtained on honorable terms; therefore, every indication of it is hailed with pleasure.” The newspaper suspected that the Yankee people could not “fail to discover the utter hopelessness and futility of prosecuting this war” and would soon abandon the fight or vote out their warmongering rulers. While hailing peace rumors, the editors warned “our people” against being “lured from their place of safety on account of it. Don’t, for a moment, slack your zeal—no matter what may transpire, until peace is not only proclaimed, but established. Continue to organize, equip and send out your companies.”

The violence needed to sever the ties of union became clear soon enough. Not long after the Southern Confederacy published its recommended peace terms, the first full-scale clash of Confederate and Union armies took place at Bull Run, near Manassas Junction, Virginia. The Confederate forces routed the Yankee army within a short ride of Washington, D.C. The electricity of the telegraphed news crackled through the South. Still in Macon, Samuel Richards, who had no doubt that “our cause is a just one in His sight,” now shared the “universal” rejoicing in “the direct interference of God, for our force was not half as great in point of numbers as theirs.” When word of the rebel army’s “complete triumph” reached A. J. Neal’s camp, he listened as the news traveled from campfire to campfire and “regiment after regiment took up the shout and hurrahed for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy.” He exclaimed to his mother, “I have never seen anything to equal the enthusiasm created.” He envied the Georgia companies who had “covered themselves with glory” at Manassas and shared the widely embraced view that this “most decisive victory ever achieved . . . ought to put to an end this wicked and unholy war.”