The Yards

I have been asked about Atlanta more often than about anything else in this account, and by more kinds of people: by officers who were not there and by ladies who were, by members of the Commons on both sides of the question, by a clergyman in Philadelphia who wished me to say that it was a crime and by a banker in Boston who wished me to say that it was not. I have said the same thing to all of them, which is that I was there, and that I cannot judge it, and that the first of those facts is the reason for the second. None of them has been satisfied. I do not expect Your Majesty to be satisfied either. But I will tell you what I saw, as exactly as I can, and leave it with you, which is where everything else in this account has been left.

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I went west in May.

The army in the interior, which had been fighting its way through Alabama and into Georgia since the winter, against the railways and the foundries and the arsenals rather than against the rebel armies, wanted engineers, and in particular it wanted an engineer who knew the Georgia coast, because its general meant, when he had taken Atlanta, to go on. He did not say where. Nobody who knew where he meant to go would say it aloud. But the department knew that I had spent a year on the brickwork at Pulaski and two at Sumter, and knew every channel and every battery from Charles Town in South Carolina to the southern end of the Georgia coast, and it sent me, with my company.

I should explain my company, since it was with me for the rest of the war. It was a company of the engineer battalion, a hundred and twenty men, most of them from the iron towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio, rail men and boiler men and bridge men, who knew more about locomotives than I did and a good deal more about blowing things up. They had a lieutenant who had been a surveyor on the Pennsylvania railway and a first sergeant who had been a foreman in a rolling mill in Pittsburgh, and between the two of them they could have built a railway or destroyed one in about the same time. I had commanded them for a month on the Colonel’s works before we went. I came to think a great deal of them, and I have reason to think that most of them came to think tolerably well of me, which is more than I can say of myself, as Your Majesty will see.

The Colonel saw me off from the farmhouse door on the morning I left. He had the department’s order in his hand, and he read it through again as though he had not already read it twice, and gave it back to me.

He said, “You will see a good deal, Mr Ashton.”

I said that I supposed I would.

He said, “You will write to me.” And then, as he had said it when he sent me west to the General in 1862: “Tell me exactly.” And he went back into the farmhouse, and I rode down off the heights with my company behind me to the railway, and did not see him again until the autumn.

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I came up with the army in the north of Georgia in the last week of May, and I met its general on the second day.

He was not at all like the General. I had expected, I think, another small silent man in a private’s blouse; and General Sherman was tall and thin and untidy, with red hair cut short and a short red beard going grey, and a face lined and creased like a map that had been folded too often, and he was never still. He walked about while he talked, and he talked all the time: to his staff, to his orderlies, to the officers who came in with reports, to me. If the General put the thing he wanted first and then stopped, General Sherman put the thing he wanted first and then went on, very fast, about everything else, about the railways and the weather and the newspapers and the politicians in the capital and the price of mules, with a cigar in his hand that he forgot to smoke; and then, in the middle of it, he would say the second thing he wanted, and you had to be listening, because he would not say it twice. I liked him. I want to set that down before the rest, because it is true, and because it would be easy to leave it out. Nearly everybody who served under him liked him, and was afraid of him, and trusted him to bring them through, and he did bring most of them through.

He looked at me for a moment when I was brought in, and said, “You’re Lee’s engineer.”

I said that I was one of them.

He said, “Good. I want the coast.” And then he talked for a quarter of an hour about other things, the harbours and the rivers and the railways from Atlanta to the sea, and asked me questions about all of them, very fast, and did not wait for all the answers; and at the end of it he said, “And I want every rail between here and there bent so that no smith in Georgia can straighten it. You’ll see to that,” and went out to look at a horse.

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We came to Atlanta at the end of June.

I will not give Your Majesty the campaign, because it was a campaign of railways, and a railway campaign is a matter of cutting lines one after another until the place at the centre of them has nothing coming in, and it does not make a story. Atlanta was the centre of all of them. It was the junction where the railways of the interior met, from the north and the east and the west and the south, and its shops and foundries and rolling mills made the rails and the cars and a great deal of the iron that the rebel armies fired at us, and its depots fed them. When the last line into it was cut the rebel army that had been covering it fell back out of it to the south rather than be shut up in it, and on the Saturday, the twenty-seventh, a party of the city’s own council came out along the road under a white flag and surrendered it.

I mention that, because it matters later, and because I have heard men speak since as though the city had been stormed. It had not. It was given up, by its own people, to an army that had cut it off, and the army marched in on the Monday, the twenty-ninth of June, in column, with the bands playing, through streets where people stood at their doors and windows and watched us go by and did not say anything at all.

My company went in with the first brigade, because we had been given the rail yards, and I wanted to see them before anybody else did.

They were the finest I had ever seen. I had been in the yards at Baltimore and at Pittsburgh and at Liverpool, and these were not as large, but they were newer and better laid out, and they had been worked harder; there was a roundhouse with stalls for thirty engines, and car shops, and machine shops with their lathes and their boring mills still warm, and a rolling mill beside them that had been rolling rails for the rebellion until the week before, and sidings full of cars and depots full of cotton and corn and bacon and harness and shot. My first sergeant walked through the machine shops with me, very slowly, touching the lathes, as a man walks through a church in a strange town; and when we came out at the far end he said, “It’s a shame, Captain,” and I knew exactly what he meant, and so did every man in the company.

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The order came on the second of July.

I did not see it written. I saw it read, by a colonel of the general’s staff, at the general’s headquarters in a house on the hill above the yards, to the officers who were to carry it out, and I give Your Majesty the substance. The military and industrial capacity of the city was to be destroyed: the railways and the yards and the shops, the foundries and the mills, the arsenal and the depots, and every building that served any of them, so that the city could never again be of any use to the rebellion as a junction or a workshop or a storehouse. And the people of the city, all who were not of the army, were to leave it within five days, with what they could carry, by the roads to the south and the east.

I do not know whether the general believed that the second part of the order would prevent the first part from going further than he meant. I have heard it argued both ways by men who knew him better than I did. I know that he gave both parts of it, and that he gave them himself, and that nobody had asked him to and nobody had told him he might. He did not ask the ministry. He did not ask the General. The telegraph was still open to the north on the day he gave it, and he did not use it for that.

They went out on the roads over the next five days.

I saw them go, because the roads to the south ran past the yards, and we were at work in the yards. They went in carts and in wagons and in carriages, and in handcarts and on foot, with their furniture and their bedding and their children and their old people, and with their servants, some of them, and some of the servants went with them and some did not; and they went down the roads into the country, towards the rebel lines and the towns beyond them, in a stream that did not stop for five days. Nobody had made any provision for them. I do not mean that the provision was poor. I mean that there was none. The army had no rations to give them and had not been told to give them any, and no wagons, and no escort, and no notion of where they were to go or how they were to live when they got there; and they went anyway, because they had been told to, and the army watched them go and went on with its work.

I gave a woman some bread on the third day. I record it because it was the whole of what I did, and because I have caught myself telling it since as though it were something.

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My company did the yards in four days.

I am going to tell Your Majesty how it was done, because I did it, and because I did it well, and because I want it understood that what happened afterwards was not a thing that happened to the yards. The yards were destroyed exactly, by men who knew how, and nothing was done in them that the order did not require.

We tore up the track, every line in the yards and a mile out along each of the railways, with bars and with teams; and we stacked the cross-ties in piles and laid the rails across the piles and fired them, and when the rails were red in the middle we took them off with tongs and twisted them round the trunks of trees, or round each other, so that no rolling mill in the rebellion could have straightened them without melting them down. That was the general’s wish, and my first sergeant had a way of doing it that the whole army copied afterwards. We ran the engines in the roundhouse into one another and fired the roundhouse over them. We broke the lathes and the boring mills with sledges and then blew up the machine shops with powder, one at a time, with the company standing back and the lieutenant timing the fuses on his watch. We blew up the rolling mill. We fired the depots after the army had taken out of them what it could carry.

It was very thoroughly done. I signed the return for it on the evening of the sixth, and I have the copy. It lists every building we destroyed, with its use and its size and the means of destruction, and it does not list any building that was not on the order, because there was none.

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The fire came on the night of the seventh.

I have tried to set down how it happened, and I find that I can say how it began and how it ended, and that what lies between is the part I do not know. It began in the depots and the shops along the railway, which were burning by the order, and in the mills and the foundries, which were burning by the order too. There was a wind that night, out of the west. It had been dry for a fortnight. And there were a great many men in the city, soldiers, of whom some had been drinking and some had not, and of whom some had been told what to burn and some had not been told anything, and who knew that the city had been ordered destroyed, and did not know, or did not care, which part of it.

By midnight it was in the streets beyond the railway. It went through them house by house, and street by street, with the wind behind it, and the sparks going up over the roofs and coming down two streets farther on; and it took the houses, and the shops, and the churches, and a school, and the market, and the streets where the people who had been ordered out had lived until four days before, and some of whom, I learned in the morning, had not gone. I saw soldiers setting fire to houses that nobody had ordered burned. I saw an officer stop some of them, with his sword drawn, at the door of a church, and I saw another officer, at the end of the same street, watch others do it and say nothing. I saw men carrying furniture out of houses that were about to burn and putting it in the street, where it burned. I saw a great many men working all night with buckets and axes to stop it, and some of them were the same men who had started it.

My company was in the yards, at the edge of the streets. When the fire came up to the street on the east side of the yards, where there were a row of small houses and a Methodist chapel, I took the company out of the yards and we pulled down a line of sheds and fences across the end of the street, to make a break, as I had seen it done at a fire in Fredericksburg when I was a boy. It held for an hour. Then the wind came round a little and took the fire over it, across the chapel roof, and the row of houses went, and the chapel, and we stood in the street with our axes and watched. My first sergeant said that we had done what could be done. I said that we had. I think it was true. I do not know that it was.

In the morning it was out, or out enough. A great part of the city that had not been on the order was gone, and a great part of it was still standing, and I could not have told Your Majesty then, and cannot now, by what principle the one had gone and the other stood. I walked through it in the afternoon, with my lieutenant, to see what was left of the railways’ outlying buildings, which was my duty. The streets were full of smoke and of chimneys standing up by themselves out of the ashes, the way chimneys do, and of people, some of whom had come back from the roads to look for what had been theirs, and some of whom had never gone. An old man was sitting on a trunk in the middle of a street of chimneys, with his hands on his knees, looking at nothing. I asked him whether he needed anything. He looked at my coat and did not answer.

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The general reported it to the ministry afterwards. I did not see the report, and I do not know what it said; I know only that the rebel cavalry had cut the railway and the telegraph north of the city two days after the order was read, so that nothing went out quickly, and that the report went out at last by courier, round by the west, and that by the time it reached the capital the thing it reported was nine days old. He had not asked. He told them, when it was done. And nobody, so far as I ever heard, then or since, told him that he should not have done it, or took his command from him, or asked him to explain. The ministry did not, and the General did not, and I do not think anybody in the army expected that either of them would.

I have been told since, by officers who were there, that it shortened the war. They say that the rebellion could not fight without Atlanta, and that a general who leaves an enemy his workshops pays for them with his own men, and that a war that was killing men by thousands every month in the camps and on the fields was brought to an end by exactly this, and by what came after it; and I think that most of that is true. I have been told by others, some of whom were there too, that it was a crime: that no soldier has the right to burn a city on his own judgement, without his government’s leave, whatever it costs to refrain, and that a country which lets him do it has given away something it will not get back; and I think that most of that is true as well. I have listened to both, many times. I have read both in the newspapers and heard both in the Commons. I was there, and I cannot choose between them. I destroyed the rail yards exactly, as I was ordered to, and I am not ashamed of it; and I stood in a street with an axe and watched a chapel burn that nobody had ordered burned, and I am not ashamed of that either, because I tried; and I gave a woman some bread. That is my part of Atlanta. I do not know what the rest of it was. I do not believe anybody does who was there.

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We were in the city for a week after the fire. In that week the news came, in pieces, with the rebel prisoners and the people coming in from the country, that there had been a great battle in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the month, three days long, and that it had gone badly for the rebels; and some of them said that Jackson had been killed, and some of them said that he had been wounded, and some of them said that he had won. We did not know. The wire was cut and the railway was cut, and there was no newspaper in the city that anybody believed, and we could not find out.

And the people came in from the country.

They had begun to come in as soon as the army came near the city, and after the fire they came in more and more, from the plantations round about, at night, walking, with what they could carry, as they had come in at Falmouth and at the works on the heights, and as I suppose they came in wherever an army of the Crown came near enough to walk to. Nobody had sent for them. The army did not know what to do with them, as no army ever had. It set the men to work, and fed them when there was food, and called them contrabands, and did not ask them anything.

On the fifteenth of July we tore down what was left of the wire ourselves, and burned the last bridge north of the city behind us, and marched east, away from everything, with no line of supply behind us and no news, and nobody in the world knowing where we were except ourselves. The city was still smoking when we left it. And behind the column, a mile behind it, and then two miles, and then more, came the people from the plantations, walking, in their thousands, following us to the sea.