Upon the Altar of the Nation (63 page)

Sherman did not have to wait long. On July 20, with Sherman’s three armies converging on Atlanta, Hood’s forces burst on Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland at the Peachtree Creek. General Joseph Hooker’s corps caught the brunt of the attack and fought bravely in hand-to-hand combat. Hooker, who could lead a corps if not an army, then brought artillery fire to bear on the Confederates, driving them back to their trenches. Hooker suffered fifteen hundred casualties, but Hood’s losses were far greater, numerically and strategically. Having failed in his first great test as a commander, Hood obliged Sherman by trying again on July 22. A desperate battle ensued throughout much of the day, swinging back and forth from a Confederate advantage to a Federal advantage. But again Hood stumbled badly, and before he retreated to Atlanta, more than ten thousand Confederates lay dead or wounded, alongside only thirty-five hundred Federals.

Despite the victory, disaster struck in the Union general corps. While riding to the front to inspect the enemy’s works, James McPherson, Sherman’s protégé and best general, was shot off his horse and died shortly thereafter. Sherman had shown an enormous professional and personal respect for McPherson. When he had offered McPherson a promotion to major general in the regular army, McPherson refused the honor, believing it should be held up as a prize for the most distinguished commanders in action.

The loss of a genius general—Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, John Reynolds, or James McPherson—was a devestating blow for both sides. Federal generals Thomas and Schofield were solid, but McPherson was special and had the same commanding presence that Grant saw in Sheridan, and Lee saw in Jackson. As they left the battlefield, Sherman remarked to an aide:

Sherman’s comments are revealing. As warrior priests, these military leaders faced their own deaths unafraid, and even expected it. But even warrior priests had to answer to the pressure of public opinion.

With McPherson’s death, General O. O. Howard assumed command of the Army of the Tennessee. When later accused of favoring West Point graduates, Sherman responded, “I was not intentionally partial to any class. I wanted to succeed in taking Atlanta, and needed commanders who were purely and technically soldiers, men who would obey orders and execute them promptly and on time.” Then, in a swipe at the critical officers, Sherman argued, “I regarded both Generals [John] Logan and [Francis] Blair [political generals] as ‘volunteers,’ that looked to personal fame and glory as auxiliary and secondary to their political ambition, and not as professional soldiers.” But that still left Hooker to contend with. Upon learning that he had been passed over for Howard, Hooker indignantly applied to be relieved of his command, which General Thomas
“heartily
recommended.” Sherman agreed as well and replaced Hooker with General Henry Slocum, feeling a distinct “sense of relief” that Hooker was gone.
¹⁸

With Howard in command of the Army of the Tennessee, Sherman’s relentless war machine was ready to march on Atlanta. Unwilling to waste time on a siege, Sherman began shelling the city into submission with two thirty-pound Parrotts able to hit any target at will. Yankee artillerists would, Sherman assured General Henry Halleck, quickly turn Atlanta into a “used up community.” By this time Halleck too had abandoned not only the West Point Code but, worse, even Lieber’s Code, which stipulated that “[c]ommanders, whenever admissible, inform the enemy of their intention to bombard a place, so that the non-combatants, and especially the women and children, may be removed before the bombardment commences.” But of course all laws were negotiable and subject to “military necessity.” The shelling continued for three weeks, as often as not over the heads of Hood’s soldiers into the town’s houses and stores. Terrified citizens hid in dugout caves or “bomb proofs” in their backyards, sometimes receiving direct artillery fire.
¹⁹

At the gates of Atlanta, facing a running army, John Emerson Anderson exulted in the terror his forces struck:

Forced to choose between flight or fight, Hood withdrew his forces from the garrisoned city, allowing Sherman to occupy it unopposed on September 2. In reporting to an ecstatic President Lincoln, Sherman announced, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Summarizing Sherman’s achievement, his commander and friend General Grant observed: “The campaign had lasted about four months, and was one of the most memorable in history.” Beyond military annals, Grant realized another consequence of Sherman’s victory. It “probably had more effect in settling the election of the following November than all the speeches, all the bonfires, and all the parading with banners and bands of music in the North.”
²¹

For the citizens of Atlanta the bonfires were quite different. In his photographic history of Atlanta’s destruction, the photographer George Barnard documented the utter desolation left behind. What Sherman’s shells did not destroy his troops did as they filed into the city (and later out of the city), blowing up houses, public buildings, and rail lines. On Atlanta’s main thoroughfare, Whitehall Street, only one building was left standing. Throughout the city up to five thousand buildings were destroyed with only four hundred houses left intact. These damages could one day be repaired; the civilian casualties could not. No exact figures survive, but in a letter to General Hood, Sherman estimated that five hundred “rebel” civilians were killed and twenty-five hundred wounded. Given the source, one can assume these figures are significantly understated.
²²

Boxcars loaded with civilian “refugees,” 1864. As part of his campaign to “break the will” of the South, General Sherman expelled Atlanta’s citizens from the city.

 

Atlanta represented Sherman’s first great conquest, and he was not done. With the city captured, there ensued one of the most morally fraught decisions of the war. Unwilling to either feed civilians or protect himself from them, Sherman determined to turn Atlanta into a military base. He ordered all the citizens to leave the city and go either north with his support or south on their own. All the still-standing houses of Atlanta would be used for military storage and occupation.

In a letter to General Halleck announcing his purpose, Sherman concluded: “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.” By considering Southern civilians as, in effect, belligerents, Sherman could proceed “with the absolute certainty of its justice.” Furthermore, he asserted, “I knew that the people of the South would read in this measure two important conclusions: one, that we were in earnest; and the other, if they were sincere in their command and popular clamor ‘to die in the last ditch,’ that the opportunity would soon come.”

In the ensuing days, more than 700 adults and 860 children were “sent south” with as many of their belongings as Hood could accommodate. The sight was pathetic, the event dangerous. In most cases, these were Atlanta’s young, females, and elderly, and many had no place to go.

Sherman’s order would spark controversy for a century and longer. While actions against civilian “irregulars” or bushwhackers could be justified by the laws of war, no immediate attacks on Federal forces in Atlanta had occurred to justify forced expulsion of an entire population who surrendered to the invader. In a plea for mercy, Atlanta’s mayor begged Sherman to reconsider because “it will involve in the aggregate consequences appalling and heart-rending ... we know of no such instance ever having occurred—surely never in the United States—and what has this helpless people done, that they should be driven from their homes, to wander strangers and outcasts, and exiles, and to subsist on charity?”
²³

Sherman was unmoved and lectured the town fathers on the nature of war: “You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war.”

Hood was outraged. In the letter war that followed between the generals—reprinted in both Southern and Northern presses—each spoke on behalf of his nation and lectured the other on the morality of the war’s conduct. For his part, Hood saw in Sherman’s expulsion of every citizen regardless of age, gender, or health an unspeakable outrage on a civilian population. Sherman’s sole purpose was national self-interest at the expense of any moral standard: “You announced the edict for the sole reason that it was ‘to the interest of the United States.’ This alone you offered to us and the civilized world as an all-sufficient reason for disregarding the laws of God and man.”
²⁴

For Hood, Sherman’s decision to expel civilians and destroy property was made by a general who deliberately sought to terrorize innocents: “And now, sir, permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war. In the name of God and humanity, I protest, believing that you will find that you are expelling from their homes and firesides the wives and children of a brave people.”

Outraged himself by Hood’s “impertinence,” Sherman made his case in equally strong moral terms. By positioning his interior lines near Atlanta’s civilians during the bombardments of the city, Hood was, in effect, using his own civilians as human shields: “You defended Atlanta on a line so close to town that every cannon-shot and many musket-shots from our line of investment, that overshot their mark, went into the habitations of women and children.” As for invoking God:

For Sherman, God had long ceased to be the governor of this war. The cause was just and indeed holy, but the conduct profane and disconnected to God and the Suffering Savior. Sherman’s religion was America, and America’s God was a jealous God of law and order, such that all those who resisted were reprobates who deserved death. To make this war work, Sherman argued in a follow-up letter to Assistant Secretary of State Charles Dana, “We must and will harden our hearts. Therefore when preachers clamor, and sanitaries wail, don’t join in, but know that war, like the thunderbolt, follows its laws, and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous and charitable stand in its path.”
²⁵
Thus absolved of all responsibilities or accountability, Sherman could blame the enemy for anything and everything that happened to them. They deserved it.