September 2, 1864---"Atlanta is ours, and fairly won."

SEPTEMBER 2, 1864:      

It had indeed taken all summer, and the line upon which General Ulysses S. Grant was fighting it out was still contested; but far away in Georgia, Grant’s red haired compatriot, General William Tecumseh Sherman was able to telegraph Washington D.C. the immortal words, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”

Atlanta Mayor James Calhoun surrendered the city to Sherman in a formal note, saying, "The fortune of war has placed Atlanta in your hands." The 2nd Massachusetts Regiment reached downtown first and raised the American flag over City Hall even as John Bell Hood’s dispirited troops turned their back on the Second City of the South. A horde of refugees followed in Hood’s wake, leaving the old, the poor, and the unprotected to face whatever fate the Yankees decreed for them.

The loss of Atlanta was devastating to the Confederacy by whatever measure can be applied. Although Atlanta was not as large or as important as it would become postbellum (Milledgeville remained the State Capital until 1868), it was the economic capital of Georgia and the economic powerhouse of the lower Confederacy. Its loss was as terrible a blow to the Southern cause, if not more so, than the 1862 loss of New Orleans.

Atlantans prepare to evacuate the city ahead of the Yankee occupation

  In losing Atlanta, the Confederate States of America lost (excepting Richmond-Petersburg) its major remaining rail hub and telegraph hub. Communications networks and supply networks in the lower South were simply cut off.
 

The Confederacy lost (again excepting Richmond-Petersburg) its largest centralized civilian and military manufacturing center. Essentially whatever weapons of war and supplies the Confederacy had on hand suddenly became all it would ever have. 

The Confederacy lost (yet again excepting Richmond-Petersburg) its last major mercantile and banking center, throwing the Confederate economy, already balanced on the knife edge of collapse, into complete turmoil. With no resilience left in the economy, literally overnight Confederate bonds lost whatever value they had. Confederate currency suffered a massive inflationary spike and the South’s shaky cotton market fell into an abyss.

John Bell Hood's enervated troops abandon Atlanta

Politically, the loss of Atlanta was calamitous. The C.S.A. was fragmented into Gray islands in a rising sea of Blue. With Atlanta gone, southeastern Georgia and Florida were as isolated from Richmond as the Trans-Mississippi. With Atlanta gone, the inland Confederate-held enclaves of the Cotton States of Alabama and Mississippi were cut off from the inland Confederate-held enclaves of the Tobacco States of North Carolina and Virginia, their only direct connection being a land bridge through the Union-friendly Nickajack region. 

The Southern armies had no way to communicate with each other, and Richmond had no way to coordinate their movements by way of mutual support. While the various Confederate forces were still regionally to be reckoned with, the Union’s strategic focus could now shift from the taking of territory to the encirclement and sequestration of bodies of troops.

Many wounded and sick, unable to be moved, were left for Sherman to care for

The fall of Atlanta was most cataclysmic by far to the Southern psyche, marking the moment when the Confederacy was defeated psychologically if not militarily. Atlanta was one of the great epicenters of secessionism, and its fall presaged the failure of Southern nationalism.

Thriving Atlanta in early 1864

In the fourteen months between the battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Atlanta Confederates had been buoyed by one hope, that the war could be continued at great cost to the Union at least until the U.S. Presidential election of 1864. Almost everyone on both sides of the border, even “Old Abe” himself, expected Lincoln’s defeat and a (dis) honorable peace in November, particularly during the heady summer months when Jubal Early raided Washington, Lee flummoxed Grant outside of Petersburg, and Sherman was stalled in front of Atlanta. 

The sudden shift in the fortunes of war was tectonic, and knocked everything that had come before into a cocked hat. General George McClellan, the Democratic candidate for President, promised to keep fighting anyway in the aftermath of Atlanta, but Lincoln’s cadaverous popularity became massively muscular in the North literally in a day, assuring his re-election and killing Southern hopes for a new Federal Administration in their cradle. All Southerners were forced to recognize at last (even if they publicly denied it) that The Cause was doomed.

Confederate desertions skyrocketed after the fall of Atlanta, reaching a peak of over 30% in late 1864. The government in Richmond promised to forgive these “French leaves” if only the men would return and fight. Threadbare, hungry, impoverished, and dispirited, few of the men accepted the offer. They quit the war and went home to care for their struggling families. Virginian troops in Virginia and Georgians in Georgia simply vanished en masse from the ranks. An anti-Confederate rebellion broke out in Floyd County, Virginia, which was put down violently.

Southern deserters either worked their way home or entered Union lines looking for food

Regardless of the outcome in Floyd County, the Rebel Cause spawned its own rebels throughout the South in the fall of 1864, men who fought, if not for the Union, then against the tottering Confederacy in order to protect their homes and loved ones. Confederate military desperation drove many local militias to brigandage, and skirmishes erupted between men in varying shades of gray. Hidden Unionists unfurled their flags. Other groups of men simply surrendered to the until-recently hated bluebellies; a square meal was in the offing for the price of a loyalty oath.

"May God bless us and save us all from the Yankees . . . "

On the home front, the living conditions of average Confederate civilians, already severely depressed, worsened appreciably over the months following the fall of Atlanta. Inflation in the South ultimately caused prices to rise by 9000%.  The South’s internal economy became a barter economy. Imports, what few there were, were now limited to blockade runners coming through heavily-invested Wilmington port. With only one remaining door to the sea, the incidence of interdiction went from 1 in 6 ships to 4 in 5. The odds of loss drove prices up astronomically, many runners quit the business, and such goods as were delivered had to be paid for in specie. The Confederacy’s gold and silver reserves shriveled away within weeks. Slaves were sold off, often for pennies on the dollar. Buyers, realizing that humans were going to be a lost investment in a very short time, were few.  The last valuables, often family heirlooms descended from Patriot grandfathers, vanished.

Ruined Atlanta, after the bombardment, late 1864

When the few dollars  so earned were spent (paid in gold or, increasingly, in Union greenbacks), the poorest Confederates were reduced to eating dandelions or begging food from the Yankee soldiers that were occupying what had been inviolable Southern soil. The Confederate will to fight evaporated as did their loyalty to the ever more impotent government in Richmond. The Civil War had entered its last phase.