Authors: Noah Andre Trudeau
Left Wing
The region through which the Twentieth Corps marched had already been well scoured during Atlanta’s two-month occupation, so prospects for grub were slim. “We have found but little forage today as the country has been foraged over before,” grumbled a Wisconsin soldier.
The village of Decatur barely registered with most of the Yankee boys, though it lay square in their path. A Connecticut soldier thought it “a small and insignificant place.” A New Jersey quartermaster who paused there for dinner had time for a more complete survey. Decatur, he noted in his journal, had “its Court House, a dilapidated enclosure in the square where the marketing is done, with the usual amount of stores and taverns around the square, and also a church and some 40 or 50 other buildings.”
*
The stop-and-go slogging pace meant idleness for portions of the Twentieth Corps column, which in turn meant time for mischief. “As our advances was slow and the night very damp, several deserted houses along our route were burned,” wrote an Illinois soldier. The officer commanding the 33rd Indiana noted that after his unit passed through Decatur at dusk, “many of the buildings were wrapped in flames.” The Illinoisan, who put the number at “several,” opined that the incendiarism ended when “guards were stationed through the town.” Further down the road, some unoccupied outbuildings of a small farm fell victim to vandals. Recalled a Connecticut soldier, “I remember one very pretty girl weeping with her family over the ruins of their stable, expressing a wish ‘that you’uns were millions of miles away.’”
The head of the Twentieth Corps column went into camp late in the afternoon near an impressive natural landmark known as Stone Mountain. A very awed Ohio boy described it as “a vast body of granite rock devoid of vegetation which rises abruptly & majestically from a large plain to a towering height.”
†
“Standing thus isolated and rising to such a height, it forms a very striking feature in the landscape,” seconded a New Yorker. Another from the Empire State added that the sight excited the “surprise and wonder of our boys whose homes were in the shadows of the Adirondacks; when home, they looked at mountains every day but they never saw a mountain like this.”
The Left Wing covered some thirteen to fifteen miles today. Orders for the next day projected the advance even deeper into Georgia, but as the soldiers bedded down for the night, most eyes were oriented toward Atlanta. An Illinoisan observed that “the western sky was
lighted up with a more brilliant glow than that imparted by the sun’s declining rays; it was the light of burning buildings.” “I suppose ‘Atlanta’ is one of the things that were but is not,” quipped an Ohio soldier. The thoughts of an Indiana officer were apocalyptic. “Dies irae, Dies irae filled the air,” he reflected, “and fell upon the hearts of the inhabitants of doomed Georgia.”
Right Wing
The sots who had so infuriated Brigadier General Force were still out cold when the trailing division marched past them. “I saw 4 or 5 drunk men lying beside the road,” an Iowan noted in his diary. Few in the tail end of the two columns were enjoying the day. “The wagons, being rather heavily loaded our progress as rear guard is very slow,” griped one of them. His regiment, the 64th Illinois, was the end of the end, the last in line in the last brigade of the last division in today’s rotation. This meant they had to drive forward all the stragglers they encountered. Another in the ranks found their job “a disagreeable task, for, in the case of a large army like ours, it must be that some, from accident, sickness or otherwise will be found far in the rear of their respective commands; in consequence, our duty necessitates us to urge them on farther than their physical strength will oftimes permit them.” The fate of the drunks is unrecorded.
Sweeping south just to the west of the Fifteenth Corps, Kilpatrick’s cavalry encountered enemy positions on full alert near Jonesboro. The Confederate commander, Wheeler, had been in the town as late as 2:30
P.M
., when he sent off his only summary of today’s movements, reporting that the Federals (units unidentified) “advanced with infantry, cavalry, artillery and wagons early this morning. Have driven our cavalry back to this place. Enemy have burned many houses in Rome, Marietta and Atlanta; they also destroyed railroad and burned railroad bridges over Chattahoochee [River].” Right after sending this, Wheeler moved his headquarters to the next line of resistance, near Griffin, leaving a rear guard covering Jonesboro.
*
This force was engaged late in the afternoon by Kilpatrick’s vanguard, consisting of the 8th Indiana Cavalry and the 5th Kentucky Cavalry. The Confederates, fighting from behind earthworks backed with some artillery, were holding the Indiana troopers at bay until the Kentucky regiment rushed in from a side road. At this point, recorded a proud Hoosier cavalryman, “We charged them and drove them back in confusion.” The Rebels retreated to another prepared position just south of the town, formidable enough to deter further pursuit. “I deemed it best to retire,” reported the careful Union Kentucky commander.
There was more combat to the east as first the Seventeenth and then the Fifteenth Corps pressed against the long line held by some 1,000 members of the Orphan Brigade. When the riders screening the Union infantry struck the Orphan position, the Yankees found themselves under fire and out of carbine range, as the recently mounted Confederate infantrymen had retained their rifles. The resulting fight was more noisy than deadly, though acting major Weller, up from his visit to the Stubbs farm, was certain that his boys “were hitting some one every now and then.”
The two Right Wing infantry columns, which departed Atlanta by separate routes, were converging now, and even as the badly outnumbered Kentucky rebels were gamely preparing to resist the whole Seventeenth Corps, leading elements of the Fifteenth appeared suddenly on their left flank. Like the Orphans, this was another body of infantry mounted on horses. The 29th Missouri numbered about 115 men, but unlike the Orphans, they were armed with shorter-range cavalry carbines. “We made lots of noise, but didn’t hurt the ‘rebs’ much; neither did they hurt us much,” recalled a member of the unit. With the Yankees in large numbers flooding in from front and flank, discretion triumphed over valor as the Confederate combat veterans retreated toward Stockbridge.
The Orphan Brigade’s withdrawal was part of a general pullback of Confederate forces south of Atlanta. Most of the Georgia militia gathered around Lovejoy’s Station on the Macon and Western line. Altogether, some 2,400 soldiers made a weary night tramp toward Macon, stopping at Griffin. “We had a very hard march…,” one militiaman wrote his wife. “We rather skeddadled, I think.”
From Griffin, Georgia major general Howell Cobb promptly forgot
anything Jefferson Davis had said about not counting on outside help. Cobb shot off a brief report of affairs to Richmond, indicating that all local forces were in the process of concentrating at Macon. It was there, Cobb informed the distant Confederate officials, “where re-enforcements should be sent at once.”
Also today, Major General Joseph Wheeler made it official regarding a matter that would become a controversial aspect of the coming campaign—the treatment of Georgia civilians by his men. When he had left Hood’s army, Wheeler’s instructions were to “destroy everything from which the enemy might derive sustenance.” The cavalry commander now significantly scaled back these orders, limiting his men to wrecking factory machinery and driving off stock, but only if they were in the enemy’s path. No foraging of civilian supplies or burning of buildings was authorized. However, Wheeler’s directives ignored the fact that his command lacked a supply system, so his men would have to live off the land. Additionally, it was Confederate policy that cavalrymen were individually responsible for replacing animals lost in action. All this, coupled with the loose control Wheeler exerted over his far-flung units, would seriously limit his enforcement of these new guidelines.
The Right Wing columns marched through the briefly held Rebel defenses before finding sufficient water and camping space for the night; the Fifteenth Corps near the South Fork of the Cotton River, the Seventeenth on Upton Creek. As the tired men moved about their bivouacs, their gaze was drawn irresistibly northward. “The whole region for miles was lighted up with a strange and indescribable glare,” recollected an Ohio soldier. “Atlanta on fire—Ah! cruel war,” echoed another Buckeye, “and cruel it has become.”
Atlanta
One major miscalculation this day was the assumption that the Fourteenth Corps and the Fourth Division of the Fifteenth Corps—both still in Atlanta—could be effectively resupplied. Thanks to the empty shelves reflecting the goods already shipped north or snagged by the columns now under way, plus the constantly expanding blazes, it was proving difficult for those still in town to restock. A staff officer in the
Fourteenth Corps recalled that things went relatively smoothly until after 3:00
P.M
., when the spreading fires prompted frustrated supply clerks to tell the “soldiers to go in and take what they wanted before it burned up.” “As we left the town the Quartermasters were throwing clothing into the streets for the boys rather than have them burned up as the flames rapidly approached,” seconded an Illinois man in the Fifteenth Corps.
The members of a regiment who replaced their worn outfits with new had to perform a maneuver that wasn’t in the drill book. “It must have been a weird sight to see this horde of excited men frantically trying to change clothing while on the march, the officers at the same time attempting to maintain a semblance of discipline,” remembered one soldier in the ranks. “Guns at all angles, bundles under arms, one foot shod, the other with sock only, pants on backward, everything askew but all good natured.”
Captain Poe’s men had done their jobs to his exacting satisfaction, enabling him to report that for “military purposes the city of Atlanta has ceased to exist.” Poe also derided those “lawless persons, who, by sneaking around in blind alleys, succeeded in firing many houses which it was not intended to touch.” In his diary, Poe branded these unauthorized actions a “great scandal of our army.” The result was what one Ohio soldier called “smoke, dust, bustle and confusion.” “This has b[e] en a dreadful day,” scribbled the young diarist Carrie Berry. “Things have b[e]en burning all around us.” When darkness fell, the Berrys were relieved to see a provost guard assigned to their house, yet the whole family still sat up all night, fearfully watching for flying embers and other flaring debris.
Punctuating the crackling inferno was the uneven staccato of exploding munitions. Some Union soldiers thought this was dud U.S. ordnance from the brief siege and bombardment back in August, while others put the blame on hidden caches of Confederate stores. “Every instant there was the sharp report, or the smothered burning sound of exploding shells and powder concealed in the buildings, and then the sparks and flames shooting away up in the black and red roof, scattering the cinders far and wide,” observed an Illinois soldier.
Which buildings survived and which were lost was sometimes a matter of luck and sometimes the result of courageous personal initiative. Thanks to the vigorous protests of Father Thomas O’Reilly, pastor
of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, soldier squads were detailed to protect it and several other houses of worship as well as at least one public building. It took an inspired ruse by Dr. Peter Paul Noel D’Alvigny to preserve the Atlanta Medical College from the flames. When a Federal work party arrived to begin torching the structure, D’Alvigny showed them a ward full of patients not yet evacuated. The surprised officer in charge agreed to postpone the job until morning. D’Alvigny gambled (rightly) that his hospital would be overlooked in the hurry to leave town the next day. Only after the kindling had been extinguished and the Yankees gone did the doctor dismiss the hospital attendants he had pressed into service for his charade.
In his later years, when he had a lot to say about the incidents of his military career, William Tecumseh Sherman was tight-lipped about the burning of Atlanta. Neither his campaign report (written on New Year’s Day 1865) nor his
Memoirs
(published in 1875) justifies it. His recently added staff officer, Major Henry Hitchcock, captured a fleeting vignette of Sherman watching the flames this night with the comment that the glare would be “probably…visible at Griffin, fifty miles off.” An Ohio officer in the Fourteenth Corps added this recollection: “I saw Gen. Sherman walking about the streets of the blazing city paying no heed to the flames seemingly nothing.” Concluded this officer, “I don’t believe he has any mercy in his composition.”
A round of especially fiery spasms erupted between 8:00 and 10:00
P.M
. “The [blazing] waves rolled from house to house and from block to block like the waves of the sea,” wrote a New York soldier. One of Captain Poe’s detachment, watching from a good observation point, thought the scene before him “was truly superb with a touch of the terrific. Nearly the whole business part of town, where all the large buildings were, was in flames…. Great tongues of flame shot up fifty ft. above the roofs & constantly the walls would fall in with a crash which sent a cloud of cinders up among the stars.” A Massachusetts soldier long remembered the “strange light, and the roaring of the flames that licked up everything habitable, the intermittent explosions of powder,…the crashing of falling buildings, and the change, as by a turn of the kaleidoscope[,] of strong walls and proud structures into heaps of desolation.”
To this spectacle was added the dramatic underscore of music. The 33rd Massachusetts was one of the few regiments that still maintained
a band at this late stage of the war. It came by Sherman’s headquarters early in the evening for a concert that included the “Miserere” from Verdi’s opera
II Trovatore
. In future years Major Hitchcock avowed that hearing it “always will…carry me back to this night’s scenes and sounds.” A requested favorite was “John Brown’s Body.” Listening to the melody played by the band illuminated by the burning buildings, another member of Sherman’s staff declared, “I have never heard that noble anthem when it was so grand, so solemn, so inspiring.” The 33rd’s band wasn’t the only one in town this night. The First Brigade of the Third Division in the Fourteenth Corps boasted a group also, this led by a S. V. W. Post. As the ensemble set up for its performance, its leader joked to the audience: “Nero made music while Rome burned, why not Post make a little while Atlanta burns.”