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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| "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.
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| 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.
