Atlanta Burns

Sherman’s men destroy the railroad tracks.

(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS LC-B811-3630)

On September 1, 1864, smoke rose over the city of Atlanta. Long lines of men dressed in gray marched through the streets on their way out of the war-torn city. The army of the rebelling states had lost 12,000 men in the struggle for that one city, and their losses weighed heavily on the remaining 40,000 as they abandoned the prize of their campaign. As they left the Confederate bastion they had tried so long to hold, the defeated Army of Tennessee destroyed Atlanta’s rail yards and set fire to the food supplies and munitions they had to leave behind. Union troops took the city the next day, and they found it much reduced from the critical supply center it had been months before. By nightfall, Atlanta was burning. Lincoln’s army had succeeded in striking a powerful blow in the very heart of Confederate territory. The Civil War was at one of its last turning points.

The fall of Atlanta was the culmination of a campaign that had started early in 1864, aimed at seizing the crucial Confederate supply centers of Macon, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. Led by General William Tecumseh Sherman and a cadre of seasoned, talented commanders, Union forces had relentlessly pushed deep into the South, determined to seize Georgia’s capital. Sherman’s force consisted of the Army of the Cumberland, led by Major General George H. Thomas; the Army of the Tennessee, led by Major General James B. McPherson; and Major General John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio. All told, it numbered over 100,000 men. Sherman would later be remembered as one of the most successful and ruthless leaders of the war. He saw the conflict as a holy war between forces of good and evil and was determined to do his part in carrying the righteous side to victory. “All the people retire before us, and desolation is behind,” he grimly explained to his wife, “To realize what war is, one should follow our tracks.”

Sherman’s adversary that day, the man who ordered the Confederate divisions to abandon Atlanta in the face of the Union’s unstoppable advance, was General John Bell Hood. A tall, dour-looking native of Kentucky, Hood was a fierce fighter. He had sustained terrible injuries at the Battle of Chickamauga; by the time he was given command of the army defending Atlanta, he had only one leg and one functioning arm. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had put him in control of the Army of the Tennessee after becoming convinced, in part by letters from Hood himself, that Hood’s predecessor, Joseph E. Johnston, was opposing Sherman too timidly. But where Johnston was too reluctant to attack, Hood may have been too eager. Emulating the tactics of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, he attempted to hamper Sherman’s advance toward Atlanta with a series of counterattacks beyond the city’s defenses. At Jonesborough, Ezra Church, and Peachtree Creek, Hood’s subordinate commanders launched assaults on Union armies that were all thwarted by superior Union troops and produced heavy casualties.

By the first day of September, Sherman’s troops, having repulsed every Confederate attempt to break their advance, had successfully laid siege to Atlanta. On that day, Sherman destroyed the last supply rail into the city, prompting Hood to order the full withdrawal. In the months of the Atlanta campaign, the Confederacy had gradually shifted resources to other areas; by the time Sherman’s troops marched triumphantly in, Atlanta was no longer the vital link in the Southern supply chain that it had once been. But Sherman’s victory was still a critically important political and military accomplishment. His now-famous cable to Washington, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” reflected how clear it now was that the Union could win the war–and faster than anyone had expected. General Hood, with Atlanta marking a dramatic downturn in his military fortunes, would find only further trouble and turmoil ahead as he embarked on what one historian called the “epic disaster” of the Tennessee campaign. Hood’s army would be beaten and broken by successive defeats at the battles of Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville.

The one person who may have benefited even more than Sherman’s troops from the timely fall of Atlanta was Abraham Lincoln. Though today he is widely idolized, Lincoln, during the summer of 1864, was facing a serious challenge to his leadership. Many Americans were growing frustrated with the ongoing, deadly war between the states. General Grant had just concluded a bitter campaign in Virginia, losing some 70,000 men while barely improving the Union position. Lincoln may have begun to feel uncomfortably like Julius Caesar, as two members of his cabinet, Secretary of State William Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, began to more openly covet his job. Even Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio, the general’s brother, complained: “There are better men for President than Lincoln.” Lincoln’s own former chief military commander, George B. McClellan, had been nominated to oppose him for the presidency by the Democrats and went into the general election campaign on a platform that demanded “an immediate cessation of hostilities.”

With Sherman’s victorious telegram from Georgia and the news, arriving in August, of Admiral David Farragut’s successful campaign in Mobile Bay, the shrill opposition to Lincoln’s war became less persuasive to the American public. And with his military policy vindicated, Lincoln easily won a second term. The fall of Atlanta not only guaranteed Lincoln’s re-election but also secured a strong position for the President’s armies as they began to press the Civil War to its conclusion the next year.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com