The Bonfire

IN MID-OCTOBER 1863 Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Military Division of Mississippi and fired Gen. William Rosencrans. He personally came to Chattanooga to assume overall command of the besieged Union army there. His arrival sent a shudder all the way down to Atlanta. The master of mass warfare surveyed the Confederate foe. The rebels were dug so deeply into the natural and man-made rises in the earth overlooking Chattanooga that anything short of a volcanic eruption would not shake them from their position. Grant was not a particularly imaginative strategist. He believed in increasing the weight of the army he brought to bear upon the enemy’s defenses until they snapped like an overburdened shelf. He plotted the eruption of men he would need to overflow the landscape. He promoted his friend and protégé Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to command of the Army of the Tennessee and brought his new force up to help the Army of the Cumberland’s new commander, Gen. George Thomas, in breaking out of Chattanooga. While Grant amassed the armed weight he needed for almost two months, the warring sides engaged in artillery shooting matches, lines of men shifted, and sharpshooters took out any poor skirmisher who dared show his head. The picket lines were close enough for soldiers to converse about their shared misery as Confederate and Union soldiers mostly left off shooting and kept one another company.

A month later, at the front on November 20, A. J. Neal reassured his parents, “Prospects continue dull.” With the armies likely to camp in position for the winter, he told his mother he hoped soon to receive a ten-day furlough and eagerly looked forward to a Christmastime reunion with his family in their big brick mansion on Washington Street. Delighted, the Neals shared their son’s encouraging letters with their neighbors. That undoubtedly sparked an idea that quickly took root in the Clayton household. War still held a fascination for citizens; they recalled the glory and pageantry attending Atlanta companies each time they departed from the car shed. Their much-missed sons and brothers wrote of victories or, if pushed back, stable fronts and readiness for tomorrow’s battles. The upbeat reporting in the newspapers and encouraging rumors in some circles heartened diehard Confederate supporters.

The Clayton family wanted to see for themselves what they imagined to be the romance of the battlefield. The impregnable Confederate heights outside Chattanooga seemed a perfect grandstand. In the crisp fall days of November, Missionary Ridge on the far side of Chickamauga offered “a beautiful view” of Chattanooga and the surrounding countryside. Sallie Clayton’s mother’s cousin, Anne Semmes, too, was visiting the Clayton family in Atlanta for a family wedding. She was the beautiful wife of Adm. Raphael Semmes, already legendary for the scores of Union vessels his CSS Alabama had captured and burned. Their son Spencer Semmes, a captain in the Confederate navy, was also on hand. Demonstrating an appalling naivety or a cat’s ignorance of curiosity’s dangers, Anne Semmes suggested they take a family outing. With Spencer and some other officers on leave on hand to serve as guides, they should know how to stay clear of any danger. Soon, a twenty-member party was made up, among them several children, including Sallie, now a young woman, and three of her little sisters and two brothers. They boarded a Western & Atlantic Railroad train at the car shed on the evening of November 21, 1863, and traveled overnight through the old Cherokee country.

ARRIVING ON A CLEAR, bright morning, they alighted at a stop four miles from Gen. Braxton Bragg’s headquarters on Missionary Ridge. The festive party boarded ambulance wagons that carried them the length of the ridge. On this perfectly clear fall morning, they feasted on an autumn view of the entire seven-mile front, the Union camps and entrenchments across the valley, and the invested Chattanooga three miles distant. Reaching Bragg’s headquarters in a small plank house on the crown of the ridge, they walked about and enjoyed a pleasant afternoon dinner. They could see the distant spark of the skirmish rifles and watch cannons flash along the ridge flanks. Smoke drifted up like quick cigar puffs.

The group planned to return home that evening, but the solicitous General Bragg convinced them to stay in the headquarters compound overnight with the promise of a musical serenade and a visit to Lookout Mountain, which stood directly opposite the town, the next day. There they would have the chance, for “those who wished to do so, [to] fire cannon.” It would all be very entertaining.

The following morning, the group started out for Lookout Mountain in the ambulance wagons fitted out for a picnic. The artillery exchanges, though, seemed to be heating up. They watched as shells began falling and bursting about a wagon train heading up the road in front of them. When a shell landed near them, an officer accompanying them decided to turn back, which Sallie Clayton thought sensible. “I did not want to be one of the dead women to roll out of one of the ambulances when it was struck by a Yankee shell,” she recalled. They traveled back along Missionary Ridge and, nearing Bragg’s headquarters, saw him and several others looking anxiously through field glasses towards Chattanooga. They joined him to watch the “long rows of soldiers” marching outside the town. The general enjoyed parade reviews. Here, he thought the advancing blue masses, regimental banners flapping and bands playing, were marching in a display intended for Grant. The rebel lines had not been reinforced when the parade began to move forward en masse. A staff member near Bragg soon noticed a litter corps following behind. “That,” he said, “is not done for dress parade.” The soldiers were intending to fight. Grant’s parade was camouflage for an attack.

Sallie’s mother called for the visiting party to be on its way, but General Bragg still urged his guests to stay. There was time for dinner, he assured them, and asked the group to join him in his quarters. At the same moment they took their seats at the table under a big tent, Sallie heard “the sound of a volley of musketry from the valley below.” Feeling like so many Cinderellas who “had overstayed [their] time at the ball,” the visitors leaped up and hurried to their waiting wagons. As they took their seats, word came that the picket line had already been pushed in, and the hungry and weary men, with little confidence in their commander, were scrambling up the ridge for safety among the rocks. The Atlanta party raced down the rough and steep road toward the railroad station. They went without an escort. On the way, they passed through the main camp, where “wild confusion” had broken out. “The men,” recalled Clayton, “were seizing their arms, and were almost running over one another, in their hurry to reach the front.”

As the Atlanta party neared the station behind the ridge and out of artillery range, the sun was setting. They waited for their train back to Atlanta and “had a splendid view of the beautiful light above the trees caused by the cannonading which we employed ourselves by watching.”

THE “BEAUTIFUL LIGHT” BROUGHT death to thousands. A. J. Neal was “amazed to see our troops steadily driven up the mountainside.” His rapidly firing cannons were giving the advancing Yankees “fits,” but the weight of the Union army’s eruption out of Chattanooga and elsewhere across the Tennessee River drove in the Confederate front lines. Neal watched the panicking infantry retreat until they “rushed over us pell-mell & we could do nothing” to halt the enemy charge. “My men . . . would have stood with me to the guns until we were bayoneted,” he insisted, but “valor was vain.” His battery brought up the rear of the retreat. As he helped drag a munitions limber back, he grabbed at a sickening hot flash of pain in his shoulder. He was now doubly grateful for the heavy overcoat his parents had recently sent him. A minié ball had blown a “huge hole” through it, but the thick wool had muffled the bullet’s impact enough that it only stung and bruised his flesh. Still, he could barely lift his arm enough even to write about its miraculous salvation.

The battle for Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain raged for two days until the routed Confederates finally fell back into Georgia. The federal forces tried to chase down the rebels, but they pulled back into the rugged ridgelines that sliced through the northwestern Georgia corner. The bluecoats were turned back at Ringgold Gap mountain pass, where under a withering fire from previously heavily fortified highpoints, the far-outnumbered Confederates mowed down Yankees charging up the slopes. After the battle, Pvt. Sam Watkins described a

scene unlike any battlefield I ever saw. From the foot to the top of the hill was covered with their slain, all lying on their faces. It had the appearance of the roof of a house shingled with dead Yankees. They were flushed with victory and success, and had determined to push forward and capture the whole of the Rebel army, and set up their triumphant standard at Atlanta—then exit the Southern Confederacy. But their dead were so piled in their path at Ringgold Gap that they could not pass them.

IN ATLANTA, the crushing implications of the defeat at Chattanooga and the retreat into Georgia by the Army of Tennessee were starting to sink in. The Army of Tennessee was now driven out of that state, and the Union pursuers had crossed Georgia’s borders. “I am less hopeful for a speedy end of the war than I was a year ago—much less,” Samuel Richards fretted. “The foe encroaches upon us so, holds on so constantly to whatever he does gain and seems so determined to subdue and exterminate us.” In the Intelligencer, even John Steele could not escape the changed nature of his city. He recalled previous Sabbath days marked by “peace, happiness, contentment and prosperity . . . a few years ago.” All had changed. “The Sabbath day comes enveloped in gloom and sadness. The Churches are filled with gentle women all clad in black.” Their husbands and sons were no longer there to lean on. From the hospitals and houses filled with the wounded, “the wail of the dying breaks the solemn stillness of the Sabbath day. . . . Poverty walks abroad in her worst forms and the Sabbath day is broken upon by the starving widow and her children in an appeal for charity. All, all is changed.”

He urged his readers, though, to fight on, not to believe the rumors about the “partial defeat” at Chattanooga. He called the accounts of Confederate losses “exaggerated” and was dismayed that “our people who, credulous as they are, eagerly swallowed every word of it, and half believed that our army has suffered an overwhelming defeat.” He condemned those who now openly criticized General Bragg’s leadership. “We detest such creatures who go about criticizing the actions of Gen. Bragg and his army, when they have never done a soldier’s duty, for one day of their worthless lives.—Bragg wants more soldiers; which of those now censuring will go up to the front, and aid in keeping the enemy out of Georgia?” That very day, President Jefferson Davis accepted General Bragg’s resignation. Not long after, he appointed Gen. Joseph Johnston, an officer far more popular with the troops, to command the Army of Tennessee.

Johnston worked swiftly to resurrect his broken command. He rid it of Bragg’s fatuously rigid roll call, drills, and incessantly harsh discipline. He granted furloughs and released food, clothing, shoes, and other supplies to the desperate men. Desertions, which had been taking place by the hundreds every night, slowed. Johnston was the “very picture of a general,” according to Sam Watkins, one who had driven back Union forces in Virginia and intended to do the same now. The men loved him. “The private soldier once more regarded himself a gentleman and a man of honor,” Watkins recalled. “We were willing to do and die and dare anything for our loved South, and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.”

On Christmas morning, the Intelligencer reported on the great revival of the Army of Tennessee under its new commander. The renewed army was no longer hemorrhaging men but still needed fighters. “The people’s time has now come—every man is called upon to take up arms in his country’s defense, if he would win Liberty and Independence.” In the same issue, the paper published news that its demand for every man now to take up arms had become law. The state legislature’s new Militia Act now authorized the enrollment of all white males not otherwise exempt, ages sixteen to sixty, in the district’s militia. Anyone refusing enrollment would “be tried and punished as a deserter.” Col. George W. Lee’s Confederate Conscript Bureau army gathered young boys and old men alike. With Grant likely to move on Georgia sooner rather than later, Gov. Joseph Brown placed the colonel in command of a 6,550 state militia battalion Lee ordered into Atlanta to prepare for its defense.

TWO BATTERED ARMIES HUNKERED down for the winter. The Confederate army kept pickets on their new lines through to Ringgold, while the main body, William Lowndes Calhoun’s Forty-second Regiment of the Georgia Guards among them, withdrew to its winter encampment at Dalton, Georgia. Grant pulled his army back to Chattanooga. Both sides knew what lay before them in the spring. The whole of Tennessee was now in federal hands, and Yankee troops had tasted the promising sweetness, if briefly, of Georgia’s piney air. A few days after the Union army had pushed the Army of Tennessee down into Georgia, Col. Charles Fessenden Morse of the Second Massachusetts, now part of Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Corps in the Army of the Cumberland, looked toward Atlanta, within four days’ march. He had been fighting with the Union army since the early days of 1861 and knew victory and defeat with the Army of the Potomac at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Among the few north-easterners in the western Union army, the twenty-five-year-old Boston architect recognized what the entire nation had come to understand: “Atlanta is our important point now. Get that, and we have again cut the Confederacy in two, and in a vital place.”

A short march away from Morse’s camp, the twenty-seven-year-old small-town Florida attorney turned artillery battery captain A. J. Neal sat down amid the lengthening shadows of early December. He dashed off a letter to his sister ninety miles south in Atlanta. The Yankees would not have an easy time of it, he wrote. When the fighting renewed in the spring, he was certain Confederate forces would redeem themselves. “This army will fight with all the desperation and valor displayed at Chickamauga for they are heartily ashamed of their conduct at Missionary Ridge. When we next meet the story of the conflict will be appalling.” He gave up on the idea of coming home for Christmas. “I never want to leave this army till we have punished the Yankees who drove us from Missionary Ridge.”