On a rise twenty miles north of Atlanta, eight thousand Union soldiers charged into a storm of Confederate fire. The defenders of the Army of Tennessee, outnumbered but entrenched, waited until the Yankees closed within forty yards, then unleashed a crossfire so ferocious that one Tennessee soldier later said the cannons bellowed like mad bulls. With their backs to Atlanta, the Confederates atop Cheatham Hill fought like men who believed victory and southern independence were still within their grasp. The bloodbath was part of a larger struggle known as the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
On May 1st, 1864, one hundred thousand soldiers under Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched south from Chattanooga into northern Georgia. Sherman’s goal was to destroy the Confederate Army of Tennessee, and the prize beyond it was Atlanta itself, an industrial town of ten thousand people whose rail network bound together the remains of the Confederacy. Throughout the campaign, Sherman had tried to avoid pitched battle by outflanking the rebels. At Kennesaw Mountain, the Confederates dared him to attack, and Sherman obliged, ordering a disastrous frontal assault on Pigeon Hill and Cheatham Hill.
It was, by nearly every account, a gigantic blunder. Just before the assault, Colonel Dan McCook inspired his men with verses about the warriors of ancient Rome. How can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods. McCook and his 52nd Ohio ran the gauntlet straight into the teeth of the Confederate defenses, a march into near-certain death, the likes of which recalled Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg or the Federal assault at Fredericksburg.
Why did soldiers make such charges, ones that appear to us as murder? They did it out of love of comrades and a sense of duty, without a question. But they also did it because they knew that if they did not, they could be estranged from their comrades, disowned by the people back home for not fighting manfully, punished within their own army, humiliated. What carried them into battle was the bitter truth that they had little choice, because the consequences of refusal were so severe.
The assault carried McCook and his men to a section of earthworks that would soon earn the name the Dead Angle, where the Confederate line protruded at a sharp angle. Sherman hoped the Union forces could punch through and split his enemy in two. Ironically, the safest place for the Union soldiers on Cheatham Hill was just below the earthworks, where the Confederate rifles in the headlogs above could not point downward at the Yankees only a few feet away. Against all odds, McCook and a handful of others made it to the Dead Angle.
Alongside him was Private Samuel Canterbury of the 86th Illinois. When I looked up, Canterbury later wrote, Colonel Dan was standing on the headlog above me. Colonel Dan, for God’s sake, get down. They will shoot you.
McCook turned partly around and said, Damn you. Attend to your own business. Then a gun was fired. Had I not pulled on his coat, I believe he would have fallen inside the rebel works.
At the Dead Angle, the battle turned its most savage. One Confederate wrote that hell all broke loose in Georgia. Despite their heroic charge, the Union attackers were driven back. Yet some of the Federal survivors refused to leave the hill.
Just below the Dead Angle, they dug into a fold of the slope, concealed from the enemy thirty yards above. For the next three days, they lay pinned down in the blistering heat of a Georgia summer. For Sherman’s troops, the frontal assaults at Kennesaw Mountain were nothing short of butchery. More than three thousand Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing.
Behind their earthworks, the Confederates were bloodied but victorious. First Lieutenant Thomas Mangy summed up the defense with a simple phrase: Stand we must, and stand we did. President Abraham Lincoln received news of the Union debacle with a heavy heart. Victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga had disintegrated into stalemate and uncertainty in Virginia and Georgia.
There was a great anti-war movement in the North. People were tired of it. They were not concerned about abolition. They were concerned about their sons, brothers, and fathers not coming home, and they were beginning to question the cost.
After more than three years of war, the cost was more than three hundred thousand Union casualties, and for many northern voters, the sacrifice was becoming too much to bear. In the summer of 1864, even Lincoln began to lose hope, because it was an election year. He would have to submit to the test of re-election, and the Democrats were nominating one of the most popular generals who had ever served in the Union Army, George McClellan, the same McClellan who had always been a critic and opponent of the Lincoln administration. The two men could not have been more different.
Lincoln firmly believed the Union could not be restored until total victory on the battlefield was achieved. McClellan, the former commander of the Army of the Potomac, also favored Union, but believed it should be achieved by negotiating with the Confederacy, even if it meant abandoning emancipation. Many in the North stood with McClellan. People were sick and tired of learning that their sons and husbands had been killed in these massive battles, and for what, they asked, for a bunch of slaves.
Since the war began, over half a million had escaped bondage, but nearly three million remained enslaved. If Lincoln was defeated, his Emancipation Proclamation would likely be overturned. Lincoln was balanced way out on a political limb, and that limb was already beginning to show signs of cracking. Unless something changed very dramatically and very quickly in the war situation, the branch was going to crack under the sheer weight of public weariness.
McClellan and Lincoln had been at odds almost since the day Lincoln appointed him commander in 1862. When McClellan failed to pursue Robert E. Lee after the Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln fired him. Now, in 1864, the two adversaries would meet again, this time on the political battlefield.
Two days after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Confederate and Union forces remained in a standoff near Cheatham Hill. More than eighteen hundred Union dead rotted in the hundred-degree heat. For some, a fate worse than death was to lie wounded along the Confederate earthworks, under the broiling sun with no food and no water for more than forty-eight hours. On the morning of June 29th, a white flag was raised near the Dead Angle, not by Union troops, but by Confederates.
The stench from the Union dead was overwhelming. The Confederates offered a truce to bury the fallen. Slowly and cautiously, negotiating parties from both sides emerged, and the officers agreed to a two-hour truce. Together, Union and Confederate soldiers began the gruesome task of burying the dead.
During that truce, there were no Yankees and no rebels on Cheatham Hill. There were only Americans. It was the better angels of humanity exhibiting themselves when the darker angels seemed to be in command. One Confederate remarked on the strange sight of peace and unity.
After the two-hour truce was over, another soldier remembered, both sides resumed their efforts to kill and maim. The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain was the latest in a series of fights in the Western Theater. In the East, the armies had seen titanic battles but little ground exchanged. In the West, the opposite was true.
Battles had been decisively won and lost, great distances covered, and crucial territory gained. By June 1864, the Union was on the doorstep of Atlanta. But in this election year, the Confederacy had an unexpected ally, time. What had to happen, one historian noted, was that the South simply had to survive.
The North had to win, and in the summer of ’64 it looked like there was a chance the North would not be able to win, and the South would have held out long enough. That, in part, explained the Confederates’ next move. On day seven of the standoff, a detachment of Union soldiers emerged from the defenses to investigate an odd silence coming from the Confederate earthworks. Despite achieving a tactical victory, General Joseph Johnston had little choice but to withdraw his outnumbered Confederates to a defensive position along the northern reaches of Atlanta.
Johnston’s caution infuriated Confederate President Jefferson Davis. On July 17th, Davis relieved Johnston and replaced him with one of the most impressive officers in Lee’s army, Lieutenant General John Bell Hood. Hood had been wounded at Gettysburg and had lost a leg at Chickamauga. Sherman’s immediate reaction was one of relief.
This is great, he reportedly said, because Hood had a reputation as an aggressive general who would not simply fall back the way Johnston had. Hood was rash to the point of being overly rash, bold, and certain to fight. Even as Hood took command, Sherman was already in motion, swinging his troops for another turning movement. Sherman aimed to destroy Atlanta’s railroads, the supply lines to and from the rest of the Confederacy.
The coming battle for Atlanta would be one of the most important battles of the entire war. To take the city, Sherman split his force into three. The Army of the Tennessee swung to the southeast. The Army of the Ohio moved in from the northeast to destroy the Georgia Railroad.
And the Army of the Cumberland crossed Peachtree Creek to attack from the north. Just as Sherman’s troops crossed the creek, Hood proved he would indeed fight. The Union force was bloodied but held off Hood’s savage attack, and Hood’s soldiers fell back to Atlanta. At the Battle of Peachtree Creek, the Confederates lost twenty-five hundred men, nearly three times as many as the Union.
Two days later, Hood again went on the offensive, sending almost his entire army on a fifteen-mile march to attack the flank and rear of the Union Army east of Atlanta. In what became known as the Battle of Atlanta, Union commander James B. McPherson was killed, the highest-ranking Union officer to die in battle during the war. As at Peachtree Creek, the Confederates fought desperately, and again Hood’s beaten force was driven back to the defenses of Atlanta.
In a single day of fighting, Hood lost eight thousand more men. It was the bloodiest battle of the Atlanta campaign. John Bell Hood in Atlanta was a disaster for the Confederates, one historian observed. He did not have the wherewithal, strategically or tactically, to do what he wanted to do.
What Hood had done was show Sherman that Atlanta would not be taken without a desperate struggle, and already Sherman had lost more than five thousand soldiers. In nearby Marietta, the Masonic Hall had been transformed into a field hospital. Among the nurses was Emma Stevenson, born a slave in the border state of Kentucky. Emma had been emancipated when she joined Sherman’s army as a nurse in the spring of 1864.
She chose to serve humanity, both black and white, despite the brutalities and horrors of an institution meant to denigrate people into objects. Here was a woman who rose above that, who chose to be of service, who chose to show compassion. One of the soldiers under Emma’s care was Asa Sofore of the 30th Illinois. Mother, I take my pen in hand to write you a few lines, he wrote.
I hope you are well. I am in a building and dry. The few nurses here work all day and night. We have a slave woman who cares for us on this floor.
She has kindness and treats us with tender care. But my only hope is to come home to you. Asa Sofore never made it back to Illinois. He died from his wounds in the summer of 1864.
Emma Stevenson succumbed on July 16th, most likely from disease, and was buried amongst the soldiers she served. During the Civil War, more men died from dysentery, typhoid, and other diseases than from battlefield wounds. Six hundred miles to the north, near Richmond, Generals Grant and Lee were engaged in bitter trench warfare at Petersburg, a critical rail center connecting Virginia to Atlanta and the Confederacy. Grant attempted to bomb the enemy into submission, but he could not finish Lee off.
Sherman, therefore, became very central. Could he take Atlanta? At the beginning of August, the answer was unequivocally no. The Battle of Atlanta had been a Union victory, but the city itself remained in Confederate hands, ringed with earthworks and defenses.
After the disaster at Kennesaw Mountain, a frontal assault was out of the question. Another Hood attack west of Atlanta at Ezra Church resulted in yet another Confederate bloodbath, but again the southern forces escaped to their defenses. Atlanta’s supply lines south of the city remained open. Like Grant at Petersburg, Sherman’s assault had turned into a stalemate.
While his troops recovered from Hood’s reckless attacks, Sherman turned to his artillery, vowing to make the inside of Atlanta too hot to be endured. In the spring of 1864, people in the North had been confident that Grant’s campaign in Virginia and Sherman’s campaign in Georgia would bring an end to the war. Three months later, many were losing hope. Henry Raymond, the editor of the New York Times, wrote that unless some prompt and bold step was taken, all was lost.
Like the Confederates in Virginia and Georgia, Lincoln, too, was under siege. When military operations stalled, Lincoln thought his presidency was doomed. The northern public turned against him, his administration, and his generals. With Atlanta and Petersburg under siege, delegates from around the North descended upon Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.
It was a bitter, raucous affair, but the delegates unanimously nominated George McClellan. In a way, that election season may have been the most critical juncture in the nation’s history. If someone had been wagering in August of 1864, the smart money would have gone with George McClellan. In its party platform, the Democrats declared the war a failure and called for a negotiated peace, stating that the war was being fought under the pretense of military necessity and that the Constitution itself had been disregarded.
The platform boldly called for an immediate ceasefire with a view to an ultimate convention of all the states. Had McClellan been elected, he would have faced insurmountable pressure within his own party to bring the conflict to a premature close, a close that could have very well resulted in two separate nations, one of them still clinging to the institution of slavery. The idea of McClellan’s election and its impact on the war, emancipation, and slavery was the kind of thing that made historians want to put their heads in their hands. Had McClellan gone to the negotiating table with the Confederates, they would have folded their arms and said there was no way under the sun they would come back into the Union without their slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation would have been set aside as an aberration, an unlawful seizure of power. Take it out of the picture completely. On the very day the Democrats nominated McClellan, Sherman was taking the prompt and bold move that Henry Raymond had called for. Many in Atlanta, including Hood himself, believed Sherman was in retreat and that the battle for Atlanta was won.
Sherman was indeed on the move, but not in retreat. He sent most of his Union force on a wide sweep west and south of Atlanta. Twenty miles south at Jonesboro, they began destroying the Macon and Western Railroad, cutting Atlanta off from the rest of the Confederacy. Hood again responded by attacking.
At Jonesboro, the Union forces were ready, and a Yankee soldier described the approaching Confederates as an infuriated mob. The Federals unleashed what one soldier called a murderous fire of great shrapnel and musketry. After desperately defending Atlanta for six weeks, the Confederates had little fight left. The two-day clash at Jonesboro left the outnumbered and bloodied Confederates on the brink of exhaustion.
The federal rout left Hood and the battered Army of Tennessee no choice but to abandon Atlanta. On September 2nd, 1864, Union forces entered the devastated city. Before evacuating, Confederate officers had ordered the destruction of five locomotives and eighty-one boxcars packed with ammunition. For the residents of Atlanta, the blast was a thunderous exclamation point to the Union victory.
On September 3rd, Sherman wired Washington with news that reverberated throughout North and South. Atlanta is ours, and fairly won. Atlanta’s loss was a blow to the southern psyche. It signified to ordinary southerners that their own armies could not defeat the enemy, could not even protect a city as important as Atlanta.
The fall of Atlanta was like a spout of cold, clear water in the middle of the Sahara Desert, politically speaking. It was exactly the thing that refreshed northern public opinion, gave it confidence, and made it clear that the war was in fact being won and should be seen through to its conclusion. It was the greatest political gift Abraham Lincoln could ever have received, and northern public opinion understood it that way, because in the end, nothing succeeds like success. For Lincoln, success was not limited to Atlanta.
Federal victories in the Shenandoah Valley and at Mobile confirmed in people’s minds that the war’s end was within reach. They went to the polls and overwhelmingly voted Abraham Lincoln to a second term. In November, Lincoln achieved something he had failed to do in the 1860 election. He won the popular vote.
More than three-quarters of Union soldiers fighting the war voted for Abraham Lincoln. With the election decided, Sherman convinced Lincoln and Grant to let him deliver a final crushing blow in the deep south, one that he said would make Georgia howl. On November 15th, 1864, Sherman’s force of sixty thousand began a 250-mile march towards Savannah and the sea. By design, the march was largely unopposed.
Union soldiers freely and systematically descended upon farms, took livestock and feed from newly harvested crops, tore up railroads, and destroyed anything that could aid the southern war effort. What Sherman was saying to the Confederates by marching to the sea was that they did not have a prayer. If they did not surrender, their infrastructure and interior would be destroyed. There was no hope.
They must quit. He got into the psyche of the Confederate civilian and soldier, and some historians argued he got into that psyche so deeply that he is still there in some areas today. On December 22nd, Sherman telegraphed Washington with news that Savannah had been captured, offering the city and twenty-five thousand bales of hay to the president as a Christmas present. Yet Sherman’s triumph was mired in controversy and tragedy.
Upon leaving Atlanta, his army was followed by a growing number of escaping slaves, and for some Union officers, the refugees became a burden. Twenty-five miles outside of Savannah, Union engineers constructed a pontoon bridge over Ebenezer Creek. After the last soldier crossed, the bridge officer ordered the bridge dismantled. Stranded on the other side were some five thousand terrified refugees.
In close pursuit was Confederate cavalry under the command of Joseph Wheeler. Terrified, some of the escaping slaves jumped into the creek’s icy waters. Many drowned. Soon Wheeler’s cavalry arrived, and some of the refugees were reportedly shot.
Wheeler ordered the rest to be returned to their masters. None of the officers responsible for the tragedy at Ebenezer Creek were ever reprimanded. Sherman may have been victorious at Atlanta, but he had not destroyed Hood’s army. While Sherman made his march to the sea, Hood’s force moved in the opposite direction towards Nashville.
There was a Confederate army of some thirty thousand that was still mobile and still a threat, and truly it was Hood’s army that was the last hope of anything for the Confederacy. It was a very desperate time. Once again, Hood would fight, this time along the Harpeth River in the small town of Franklin, Tennessee. As he had done time and again in Atlanta, Hood ordered his men into a frontal assault.
The Confederates made a desperate, some said suicidal, attack on the entrenched Union Army. Hood’s army was essentially destroyed, crippled on the field south of Franklin. What you see at Franklin is the last gasp, one historian observed. Twenty thousand Confederate soldiers who had been at Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Jonesboro, and Kennesaw had been everywhere.
What you saw at Franklin was a very emotional, dark, sad look into who we were as Americans. These were men who had been through hell and back, willing to put it all on the line one last time. Surrender was not an option. Death was preferable.
They saw their way of life disintegrating in front of their eyes, and they were correct, because America changed fundamentally because of this war. The slaughter at Franklin prompted memories of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. The Confederates lost sixty-two hundred men, including six generals. Private Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee called it the blackest page in the history of the war.
Two weeks later, what was left of Hood’s army was soundly defeated at Nashville. For all intents and purposes, the Battle of Nashville was the end of the Army of Tennessee. Its commander, John Bell Hood, soon resigned. With his nemesis subdued in Tennessee, Sherman launched a final punishing blow.
In January 1865, his force turned north from Savannah and blazed a path of destruction through the Carolinas. To Sherman’s north was Petersburg, where Lee’s battered Army of Northern Virginia had been under siege for nine months. Lee had to think about the fact that Sherman was coming with a hundred thousand veterans, and within a few weeks, Sherman’s men would join Grant, nearly doubling the size of Grant’s force. On April 2nd, 1865, Lee evacuated Petersburg and Richmond, escaping west.
At Appomattox Courthouse, his exhausted army was run down by Union cavalry. On April 9th, Lee surrendered to Grant. Seventeen days later in Durham, North Carolina, Sherman accepted the surrender of thirty thousand Confederates, including what remained of the Army of Tennessee. In the South, the war left unimaginable destruction to homes, farmsteads, and cities.
Also in ruins was its economy. But the destruction was insignificant compared to the loss of human life. In May 1861, the First Tennessee had marched from Nashville with one thousand men. When they surrendered four years later, only sixty-five remained.
Sam Watkins was one of them. He wrote that the bones of our brave southern boys lie scattered over our beloved South. Watkins made it back to his Tennessee home. Some 250,000 Confederate soldiers never did.
With the end of the war, nearly four million human beings were no longer considered property. The Thirteenth Amendment stated that slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist except as punishment for a crime. There was a moment of hope right after the Civil War that the country could become what Jefferson had imagined. The Fourteenth Amendment, written to protect civil rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the government from denying citizens the vote, were also ratified within five years of the war’s end.
The progress was short-lived. By the end of Reconstruction, many of the same politicians and soldiers who supported the Confederacy were elected back into office. They started passing laws limiting black freedoms. Violence against African-Americans was permitted.
The law turned a blind eye. By the time Reconstruction ended in 1877, there would be ninety years of a different struggle, where African-Americans would once again have to fight for their freedoms, culminating in the modern civil rights movement after World War II. Thirty-six days before his death in 1865, Abraham Lincoln expressed his vision of a reunited nation. In his second inaugural address, he spoke of binding up a nation’s wounds in the smoldering ash of civil war.
His was a message of forgiveness and hope. With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us establish a just and a lasting peace. It was a novelty that Lincoln wanted to end the war without mass trials, without political executions, without revenge. People looked at that and said that was not what they wanted.
They wanted blood and vengeance. But Lincoln said there has already been too much blood and too much vengeance. Let us admit our guilt. Let us look at each other and see that we are all sinners and have fallen short.
The price of those sins was staggering, more than one million Union and Confederate casualties. The sacrifice was not limited to white Americans. More than twenty thousand Hispanics fought for North and South, as did some twenty-eight thousand Native Americans. Two hundred thousand African-Americans also joined the Union cause, many of them former slaves.
Some forty thousand died defending their right to be free. In many ways, 150 years later, the wounds have not yet healed. The Civil War is not that far in our past. Many families still feel very closely tied to those who fought.
The meaning of that war, slavery, emancipation, freedom, is something we are still wrestling with today. It was those who fought who took the first steps to bind the nation’s wounds. On the anniversaries of the great battles of the Western Theater, the veterans would gather at places like Shiloh and Vicksburg. Their legacies were the preservation of the grounds consecrated with the blood of their fellow soldiers.
In 1895, Chickamauga became the first national battlefield to be created. Shiloh and Vicksburg soon followed. The battlefields of the Civil War are powerful reminders of the loss, but they are also powerful symbols of the freedoms gained, a nation where now all men are created equal. By all historical rights, the Civil War should have destroyed the nation.
It should have been possible to look back and say democracy was an interesting moment, a wonderful theory, but that people cannot get along on their own. Every wise head in Europe wagged and said the Americans thought they could create a democracy, but even they could not make it work. Instead, the Civil War was a trauma that the nation emerged from with democracy intact. Not only intact, but stronger, able to stand up to the world and say democracy is not inherently defective.
Democracies do not fall apart at the first pressure. Democracies are so important that ordinary people are willing to die to preserve them, willing to die in the name of a proposition that all men are created equal. Democracy is something transcendent, something worth dying for, something that trumps even race. The nation won against all odds, and it went forward.
Democracy has almost become what we now think of as the default position, what people normally should desire. No one thought that in 1860. It could have been lost, not only for the nation, but for the entire world. But the Civil War showed that under the greatest stress imaginable, a democracy could live and prosper and emerge stronger.
That was the greatest accomplishment of all.
