MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
Traveling from Chattanooga to Atlanta the mind inevitably reverts to the American Civil War, for in 1863 the victory of the North marched from Chattanooga and the famous battle of Lookout Mountain to the taking of Atlanta and the discomfiture of Georgia. The glorious Stars and Stripes came victoriously out of the Northern horizon, climbed each hill, dipped and climbed again, with a clamorous, exultant Northern soldiery behind it. General Sherman began to gather his great fame, while General Lee, the adventuresome Southern leader, allowed himself to be cut off in Virginia. The efforts of the South had been very picturesque, like the play of a gambler with small resources and enormous hopes, but the shades of ruin gathered about her and began to negative the charm of her beginnings. Lincoln had proclaimed the freedom of the slaves. The South pretended that in any case slavery could not survive the war, and in token of this she enlisted Negro soldiers, making them free men from the moment of enlistment. In military extremity policy promises much which afterwards ingrate security will not ratify. The Southern planter might have obtained some measure of indemnification for the loss of his slaves had he come to terms in time. But he hoped somehow he might win the right to manage his Negroes as he wished without interference. There was the same violent state of mind on the subject of the Negroes as slaves as there is now on the subject of the Negroes as free men. All that was missing was the white-woman talk. Though originally the colonists had been generally opposed to the introduction of slavery, yet slavery had taken captive and then poisoned most men’s minds. The South chose to fight to the end rather than sacrifice the institution prematurely. There was a pride, as of Lucifer, in the Southerner, too, a belief in himself that foredoomed him to be hurled into outer darkness and to fall through space for nine days. Sherman’s army, when it burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia laying the country waste, was inspired with something like the wrath of God.
In order to see the ex-slave and ex-master to-day, it is necessary to dwell not only in cities but in the country, and I chose to walk across the State of Georgia as the best way to ascertain what life in the country was like. And I followed in the way Sherman had gone. There, if anywhere, it seemed to me, the reactions of the war and of slavery must be apparent to-day.
Sherman was something of a Prussian. He was a capable and scientific soldier. From an enemy’s standpoint, he was not a humanitarian. War to him was a trade of terror and blood, and he was logical. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said he. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” And when he had captured Atlanta he ordered the whole population to flee.
If they cared to go North, they would find their enemies not unkind. If they thought there was safety in the South—then let them go further south to whatever protection the beaten Southern Army could afford.
So North and South they fled, the people of Atlanta, but mostly South, for they were bitter; and the roads filled with the pitiful array of thousands of men and women and children with their old-fashioned coaches, with their barrows, with their servants, with those faithful Blacks who still heeded not the fact that “the day of liberation had arrived.” All under safe-conduct to Hood’s army.
What complaints, what laments, as the proud Southern population took the road. A lamentation that is heard till now! And when the people had gone, the city of Atlanta was set on fire. Sherman had decided to march to the sea, and he could not afford to leave an enemy population in his rear, nor could he allow the chance that secret arsenals might exist there after he had gone. It was a never to be forgotten spectacle, “the heaven one expanse of lurid fire, the air filled with flying, burning cinders.” “We were startled and awed,” says a soldier who marched with the rest, “seeing vast waves and sheets of flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty billows—a gigantic sea of fire.” Small explosions arranged by the engineers were punctuated by huge explosions when hidden stores of ammunition were located, and while these added ruin to ruin in the city they sounded as lugubrious and awful detonations to the soldiery on the road. Depots, churches, shops, warehouses, homes flared from every story and every window. Those who remained in the town were few, but it was impossible not to be stirred if not appalled. A brigade of New England soldiers was the last to leave, and marched out by Decatur Street, led by the band of the 33rd Massachusetts regiment, playing
John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in his grave
His soul is marching on—
the lurid glare of the fire gleaming upon their bayonets and equipment, inflaming their visages and their eyes which were already burning with the war faith of the North.