That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of the Fair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them, as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire. On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in medicine, law, and business in the city. They roll along in the joyous freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is. How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows in their faces!
“We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.
The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some hundreds of lads in white shouting at the top of their voices—they climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in a wild game of “Follow my leader.” Rah, rah, rah, they cry, rah, rah, rah, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time. Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten, and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned.
Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and in its general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds, a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.”[3]
Sherman himself had not decided on what point exactly he would march. But he never intended to march against Lee at Richmond, though the South and his own soldiers believed it. He always designed to reach the sea and reopen maritime communication with the North, and kept in mind Savannah, Port Royal, and even Pensacola in North Florida. So universal was the belief that he was marching on Richmond by way of Augusta that in all the country districts of Georgia where the left wing marched they will tell you still that the enemy was marching on Augusta.
You shall maintain discipline, patience, and courage, said Sherman to his army. And I will lead you to achievements equal to any of the past. We are commencing a long and difficult march to a new base, but all the chances of war have been provided for. The habitual order of march will be by four roads as nearly parallel as possible. The columns will start habitually at 7 a. m. and make about 15 miles a day. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. Horses, mules, and wagons belonging to the inhabitants may be appropriated by the cavalry and artillery freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly. All foragers will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and they will endeavor to leave each family reasonable means of sustenance. Negroes who are able-bodied and serviceable may be taken along if supplies permit. All non-combatants and refugees should go to the rear and be discouraged from encumbering us. Some ether time we may be able to provide for the poor Whites and Blacks seeking to escape the bondage under which they are now suffering. To corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., but the measure of the inhabitants’ hostility should be the measure of the ruin which commanders should enforce.[4]
There was much more said in those very finely written and emphatic orders, but the sentence that captured the imagination of the common soldier was certainly “the army will forage liberally on the country” which at once became a common gag among the men. For it spelt loot and fun and treasure trove and souvenirs and everything else that stirs a soldier’s mind. There is a human note throughout the whole of General Sherman’s orders, but no softness, rather an inexorable sternness. He had no patience with the cause of the Rebels nor with their ways of fighting. He and his staff were not averse from the idea of reading the population of Georgia and South Carolina a terrible lesson. While the march was military it inevitably became punitive. The cotton was destroyed, the farms pillaged, the slaves set free, the land laid waste. It was over a comparatively narrow strip of country, but Sherman was like the wrath of the Lord descending upon it.
So out marched the four divisions (14th, 15th, 17th, and 20th) joyously singing as they went the soldiers’ songs of the war—
One and Free
and