100 Significant Civil War Photographs - Atlanta Campaign - Sample Content

100 Significant Civil War Photographs ATLANTA CAMPAIGN

by Stephen Davis

© 2019 Historical Publications LLC, All Rights Reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.

Names: Stephen Davis, 1948–author.

Title: 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign / Stephen Davis Description: Charleston, SC: published by: Historical Publications LLC, [2019] Includes introduction, bibliographic references, index, 100 Library of Congress Civil War photographs

by George N. Barnard with captions, maps.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-61850-151-6 eBook: ISBN: 978-1-61850-152-3 Subjects: 1. History – Military 2. America – History – American Civil War – Antiquities Published by:

Historical Publications LLC

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Contact Information: Jack W. Melton Jr. jack@jackmelton.com All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

The author invites comments, corrections, and additional information from the readers. New information is most appreciated and will be acknowledged in future editions.

First Edition. Printed 2019.

Layout, design and images edited by Jack W. Melton Jr. and Squeegie Jenkins.

Cover designed by Squeegie Jenkins.

All photographs in this volume are from the Library of Congress or the Orlando M. Poe Collection at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY. Sole exception is the photograph on page 89 courtesy the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

Table of Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 George Norman Barnard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Atlanta Campaign: An Overview. . . . . 7 Confederate Generals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Braxton Bragg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Benjamin Franklin Cheatham. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Patrick Ronayne Cleburne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 William Joseph Hardee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 John Bell Hood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Joseph Eggleston Johnston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Stephen Dill Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Leonidas Polk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Joseph Wheeler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Sherman and his Generals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Jacob Dolson Cox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 John White Geary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Oliver Otis Howard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 John Alexander Logan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 James Birdseye McPherson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 John Newton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 John McAlister Schofield. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 William Tecumseh Sherman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Thomas William Sweeny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 George Henry Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

War Scenes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Thomas’ Army Headquarters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 The John Ross House. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Thomas’ Headquarters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Resaca–1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Resaca–2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Allatoona Pass. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 New Hope Church. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Pine Mountain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Kennesaw Mountain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Battlefield of Peachtree Creek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Where McPherson Met his Death–1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 McPherson’s Death Site–2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Barnard Under the Microscope. . . . . . . . . 55 Boxcars and Wagon Train–1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Boxcars and Wagon Train–2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Freedpeople on the Boxcars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 The Intelligencer Office on Whitehall Street. . . . . . . . . . . 58 Camp of the 2nd Massachusetts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Looking Up Washington Street. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Looking Up Peachtree Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Alabama Street. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Confederate Fortifications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Rebel Fort east of Peach Tree Street. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Captain Grant and His Map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Battery K–Cannon in the Embrasure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Battery K–“Rebel Fort on Peach Tree Street”. . . . . . . . 66 Peachtree Battery–Another View. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Battery K–4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Battery K–5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Battery K–Peachtree Street Fort–6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Barnard's Darkroom Tent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 A Northern Gun Crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Another View–The Same Crew. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 View from First Rebel Fort West of Peach Tree . . . . . . 74 Fort D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Fort G. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Fort Hood–1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Fort Hood–2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Fort Hood–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Fort Hood–4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 “Rebel Fort on Marietta Street”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Looking toward Fort W. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 “Like Great Hair Combs”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 West of Peachtree Street. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Rebel Fort North of Atlanta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Rebel Fort East of the W. & A. Rail Road. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Ponder House. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Effect of Northern Shells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Federals in Atlanta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Union Officers at the Windsor Smith House–1. . . . . . . 89 Union Officers at the Windsor Smith House–2. . . . . . 90 Sherman and Officers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Sherman on “Duke”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 A Picket Post Southeast of the City. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 The Slave Mart on Whitehall Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Looking Up Peachtree from the Railroad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Within minutes….. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 George Barnard’s Stereoscope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Camp of the 111th Pennsylvania. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Camp of the 2nd Massachusetts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Atlanta Scenes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Boutelle residence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Atlanta’s Skyline in 1864. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Northern Wagons and a Train–1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Wagons and Train–2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Wagons and Train–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Wagons and Train–4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 The Car Shed and Downtown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Car Shed–Looking East. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 The Western & Atlantic Roundhouse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 The W. & A. Freight Depot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 “Sherman’s Sentinels”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Wreckage of Hood’s Ordnance Train–1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 A Less Familiar View. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Looking Past John Neal’s House. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Downtown Church. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Alabama Street. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Corner of Alabama and Whitehall Streets. . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Decatur Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 A Street in the Suburbs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 A Bombproof. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 A Fine Residence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Ruins of the Atlanta Lard Oil Factory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Peachtree Street, a Year Later. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

Wrecking Atlanta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Northern Engineers Prying Up Track. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Destruction of Atlanta’s Railroads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Ruins of the Car Shed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Sherman’s Men at Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

Introduction: A Foray into Barnardiana We’re about to embark on a great adventure—a foray into the photographic masterpieces of George N. Barnard.

“Civil Warriors” have long seen the photographs of Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan and other cameramen, published in the innumerable pictorial histories of the American Civil War. They are mainly images from the war’s eastern theater—the operational area of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and its Federal opponents.

The western theater had its photographers, too. Chief among them was George N. Barnard (1819–1902).

Barnard had established himself as a daguerreotypist in New York before the war. In 1863 he was hired by the Union army to take photographs of Tennessee cities. After Sherman captured Atlanta in September 1864, he was summoned there by Federal engineers to photograph fortifications in the area.

He did more than that. Barnard took several hundred views of Atlanta’s houses and streets, Northern soldiers about town and in the Rebel works, and Sherman’s engineers wrecking factories and tearing up railroad track before “Cump” left Atlanta in his “march to the sea.”

It is ironic that all we know about how Atlanta looked in 1864 was due to a Northern civilian cameraman hired by the Union army.

His work establishes George N. Barnard as the premier photographer in the Civil War’s western theater.

See for yourself.

George Norman Barnard

George Norman Barnard (Dec. 23, 1819–Feb. 4, 1902)

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign Born near Hartford, Connecticut on Dec. 23, 1819, Barnard began working with daguerreotypy, an early form of photography in the 1840s. He opened a daguerreotype gallery in Oswego, New York in 1843, and moved it to Syracuse in 1854.

Barnard, like most cameramen, switched to collodion wet-plate photography in the 1850s. When the Civil War started, Barnard joined Mathew Brady’s team of cameramen.

With James F. Gibson, he took pictures of the Manassas-Washington area.

In December 1863 he was hired by Capt.

Orlando M. Poe, chief engineer for the Union Military Division of the Mississippi, to run the army’s photographic operations, based in Nashville. Poe had Barnard take pictures of Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga in the spring and summer of 1864.

On September 4, two days after Northern troops entered Atlanta, Poe telegraphed Barnard: “join me at Atlanta, with Photographic Apparatus. Bring your assistants, and materials with you.”

Barnard took several hundred photographs while he was in Atlanta, from early September to mid-November 1864. Then he accompanied Sherman’s army in its march across Georgia to Savannah. He did not follow Sherman into the Carolinas, but in the spring of 1865 traveled to Charleston to take pictures of that city.

Returning to New York, Barnard began planning an album of his wartime photographs. He returned to the South in the spring of 1866 to take pictures of Georgia battlefields.

Barnard produced only about a hundred copies of his Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaigns, which came out in late 1866. Each of the sixty-one plates in the book had to be hand-mounted on the album pages.

The photographer moved to Chicago in 1871 and opened a gallery. He was in the city at the time of the great Chicago fire, and took numerous pictures of its burned wreckage.

Barnard also acquired a gallery in Charleston in 1873, and in the following years took more pictures of the city and its people.

The photographer retired from his profession in 1888. A few years later with his wife he returned to Syracuse. He died there on Feb. 4, 1902.

Credit: George N. Barnard. Photographer Mathew B. Brady, c. 1865. Albumen silver print.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Larry J. West.

The scope of Sherman's campaign, from Chattanooga to Atlanta.

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

T

he “Atlanta” Campaign might be a misnomer, if only because in his instructions to Sherman, Grant never mentioned the city at all. “You I propose to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up and to get into the enemy’s country as far as you can,” Grant wrote on April 4, 1864, “inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.”

Sherman clearly had the numerical advantage. His forces assembled as an army group: 110,000 men split into the Army of the Cumberland (Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas—61,600 infantry); Army of the Tennessee (Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson—22,300 infantry) and Army of the Ohio (Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield—9,200 infantry). Thomas’ was by far the largest (IV, XIV and XX Corps). McPherson had the XV and XVI Corps. Schofield’s “army” was really only the XXIII Corps. Cavalry, mostly in Thomas’ army, numbered 12,400. 4,500 artillerymen served 254 guns.

General Joseph E. Johnston had half that strength on April 10. The infantry and most of the artillery were divided into two corps, commanded by Lt. Gens. William J. Hardee (21,947 officers and men present) and John B. Hood (22,953). HQ staff and cavalry (8,959) made for a total of 54,500 men, plus 144 field pieces.

When Sherman began to advance, Johnston planned to fix his army in a strong defensive position and hope to be attacked.

Sherman had no intention of doing this. Rather, he would approach the Rebel lines, spar at it with bombardments and recons-in-force (usually Thomas and Schofield), while using McPherson’s army as the column of maneuver—sending it around Johnston’s flank (often the Rebel left) to threaten the railroad that both sides used as their supply line, the Western & Atlantic, which ran 138 miles from Chattanooga to Atlanta.

Sherman got his troops moving on May 5.

During the winter Johnston had arrayed his army north of Dalton, and west of it along an imposing Rocky Face Ridge. Sherman spent a few days demonstrating against the Confederate position while McPherson’s army flanked it by marching through Snake Creek Gap, a dozen miles south of Dalton on May 9. When they emerged from the gap, McPherson’s advance troops were less than six miles from the W. & A. But he hesitated to push forward. A disappointed Sherman reinforced his column and McPherson again threatened the Rebel left flank. Johnston had to retreat in the night of May 12-13.

He took up a new position at Resaca, sixteen miles (by railroad) south of Dalton. Here again Sherman kept Johnston busy with brisk assaults, May 14-15 (with Confederates delivering a few of their own). The Federals took a couple of key positions, but for the most part the Southerners held their lines and thus technically won a defensive tactical victory.

Casualties for the two days of fighting led to about 4,000 Federals hors de combat, and probably close to 3,000 for the Confederates. The key event, however, was when a Union division of McPherson’s managed to cross the Oostanaula River well to the west of the Rebels’ left flank. This lodgment forced Johnston to order his army once more to retreat during the night of May 15-16.

The Southerners were giving up ground, but gaining strength. Earlier in the year the Richmond authorities had promised Johnston reinforcements if he would assume offensive operations. Now recognizing the importance of holding Sherman back from Atlanta, they began to send more troops to the Army of Tennessee. After Sherman shifted forces from

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The Atlanta Campaign: An Overview Mississippi to his army group, Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk’s Army of Mississippi logically followed. By the third week in May, Polk’s three divisions had joined Johnston, becoming his third infantry corps. Garrison troops from Charleston, Savannah and Mobile were also sent, so that the army’s returns on June 30 showed 62,747 officers and men present for duty.

Johnston’s Army of Tennessee was now the largest in the Confederacy, stronger than Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Johnston’s troops marched through Calhoun and Adairsville, with army engineers unable to find suitable ground for another defensive line. Near Cassville, more than twenty miles

Federal Captain Orlando Poe’s map of Atlanta, fall 1864, showing Federal entrenchments and the Confederate defensive perimeter around the city.

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Confederate Generals

Confederate Generals

Benjamin Franklin Cheatham (Oct. 20, 1820–Sept. 4, 1886)

“Frank” Cheatham was one of four Civil War generals to bear the name of the famous Founding Father from Pennsylvania.

Born in Nashville in 1820, he fought in the Mexican War and became major general of the Tennessee state militia.

He was appointed a Confederate brigadier general in July 1861 and major general eight months later.

Though he rose to brigade, division and eventually corps command in the Army of Tennessee, he was never commissioned lieutenant general.

Cheatham’s reputation today is blemished by accusations that at Spring Hill, Tennessee on Nov. 29, 1864, he acted dilatorily—perhaps disobediently—in carrying out Hood’s plan for an attack on John Schofield’s troops as they were escaping during the night back toward Nashville.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Joseph Eggleston Johnston (Feb. 3, 1807–Jan. 21, 1891)

26

Confederate Generals

They were born three weeks apart early in 1807, just a hundred miles from one another in Virginia. Both of their fathers had served as officers in the Continental Army. Each won appointment to the Military Academy and they graduated together in 1829. Two decades of army service for both included stints in Texas with the 2nd U.S. Cavalry and promotions to lieutenant colonel. When Virginia seceded in April 1861, both cast their lot with the Confederacy.

But at that point, the careers of Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee diverged. While Lee sat behind a desk in Richmond, Johnston got a field command and helped Beauregard win at Manassas. Johnston then took charge of the Army of the Potomac (as he called it). When McClellan advanced up the Peninsula in the spring of 1862, Johnston opposed him. In the battle of Seven Pines/Fair Oaks, May 31, he took shell fragments in the chest and thigh. Lee took over from him and with the Army of Northern Virginia forged an unparalleled record of achievement. Some cynics thus smirk that Joseph E. Johnston’s greatest contribution to the Confederacy was taking that wound at Seven Pines.

The general notified the War Department on Nov. 12, 1862, that he was fit to return to duty. With Lee firmly in charge of forces in Virginia, the government had no other field army for Johnston to command. President Davis instead created a large super-department, stretching from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and gave it to Johnston. Unhappily he complained that Bragg’s and Pemberton’s armies were too far apart, and that he had no real authority over either of them.

In the spring of 1863 Davis gave Johnston 20,000 men in central Mississippi to operate against Grant, then besieging Vicksburg. Johnston failed to act, however, leading the president later to remark that Vicksburg fell for “want of provisions inside, and a general outside who wouldn’t fight.”

Nevertheless, following Bragg’s resignation after Missionary Ridge, the administration pulled Johnston out of retirement, placing him in command of the Army of Tennessee in December 1863.

Sherman thus had his opponent as the Atlanta Campaign opened at Dalton in May 1864.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Joseph Wheeler

(Sept. 10, 1836–Jan. 25, 1906) Joe Wheeler earned his nickname, “Fightin’ Joe,” fightin’ Indians.

He added humor to history by mixing up his enemies. In the Spanish-American War he volunteered and as major general served in Cuba. In one engagement, fighting alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” the Americans were forcing Spanish troops to retreat when Wheeler slipped up, yelling, “We’ve got the Yankees on the run!”

In the U.S. Capitol, where each state gets two statues, one has been placed to Joseph Wheeler* by Alabama, his postwar home. (The other is to Helen Keller.)

Because of his service in the U.S. Army, Wheeler is one of only 400 Confederates buried in Arlington National Cemetery. *At least for the time being. In 2018, the Florida legislature voted to replace its statue of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith with one of Mary McLeod Bethune, the civil rights activist.

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Sherman and his Generals

Sherman and his 65,000 troops were in Washington in late May 1865 for a “grand review.” Mathew Brady prevailed upon the general to round up his key officers for a group photograph at his studio in the capital. They all showed up on time—except one, Frank Blair. After waiting for nearly an hour, Brady went ahead and photographed the group.

After General Blair arrived, Brady photographed him and added Blair to the group negative.

Barnard used the retouched image (with Blair) in his Photographic Views. This is Brady’s unretouched, original photograph. Left to right: Oliver O. Howard; John A. Logan; William B. Hazen; William T. Sherman; Jefferson C. Davis; Henry W. Slocum; Joseph A. Mower.

All are Federal major generals save Davis, who was at the war’s end only major general by brevet. He was not promoted after his murder of Union Maj. Gen. William Nelson in September 1862.

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

James Birdseye McPherson (Nov. 14, 1828–July 22, 1864)

“McPherson dead!” Sherman exclaimed on July 22, 1864. “Can it be?”

It was, and it’s not too much to argue that Cump’s own decisions led to his friend’s death.

On the afternoon of the 21st McPherson’s army was approaching Atlanta from the east.

Sherman at that point ordered Union Brig. Gen. Kenner Garrard’s cavalry division, with McPherson, off to tear up railroad track.

The problem for “Mac,” as Sherman called him, was that Garrard’s horsemen were guarding the left flank of McPherson’s army, which would be left “in the air’’ by Garrard’s departure.

McPherson tried to dissuade Sherman, but to no avail.

General Hood soon learned of the situation, and planned an attack on July 22 against— you guessed it—the enemy left.

The next morning, McPherson arrayed his forces to meet the assault he correctly feared was coming. But Sherman was still focused on tearing up track.

Sure enough, when Hood’s infantry attacked and McPherson rode to the sound of the firing, he was shot through the chest and died within minutes.

“I have lost my best friend,” Sherman grieved.

He should have listened to his best friend.

36

Federal Generals

William Tecumseh Sherman (Feb. 8, 1820–Feb. 14, 1891)

“A splendid piece of machinery with all the screws a little loose.”

Thus did a fellow officer once characterize William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of Union forces in the Atlanta Campaign.

“Cump,” as he was called by friends, started out in the Civil War in a manner that seemed

39

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign to show that his screws were indeed a little loose.

Before the war he couldn’t find a steady vocational calling. Born in Ohio in 1820, he graduated from West Point in 1840. After thirteen years in the army, he resigned his commission. He tried banking in San Francisco until the financial crisis of 1857. Then his foster father, Thomas Ewing, appointed Sherman as manager of his landholdings near Leavenworth, Kansas. He served as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Seminary in Baton Rouge, 1859–1861, resigning a week before Louisiana’s secession. He was commissioned colonel of the 13th Illinois Infantry Regiment a month after Fort Sumter.

Soon he was transferred to Virginia and given command of a brigade in Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s army outside Washington.

He saw action in the battle of Manassas, July 21, 1861; was promoted to brigadier general, and sent to Kentucky as second-in-command to Brig. Gen. Robert Anderson, head of the Union Department of Kentucky. When Anderson fell ill, Sherman succeeded him on October 8. Days later he met U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron in Louisville and declared that he needed 60,000 men to defend the state and 200,000 to assume the offensive.

“Great God!” Cameron exclaimed; “where are they to come from?”

Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Scott declared “Sherman’s gone in the head, he’s luny.”

The press got word of the Louisville meeting and picked up the unkind characterization.

“GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN INSANE,” blared the headline of a story in the Cincinnati Commercial of December 11.

Sherman was at the time what we would call clinically depressed. He was sent to St. Louis, where his friend Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck gave him a safe drillmaster’s job at the local barrack while he recovered himself.

In mid-February 1862, Halleck placed Sherman in charge of the Department of Cairo in western Kentucky. There began his friendship with Brigadier Ulysses S. Grant, a relationship that essentially started Sherman’s military career on the course to national fame. Years later he remarked that Grant “stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

Under Grant he fought at Shiloh and was promoted to major general, effective May 1, 1862. He then rose from division leader to commander of the XV Corps, fighting with Grant all the way to Vicksburg.

When Grant was given command of the Military Division of the Mississippi in midOctober 1863, Sherman took charge of the Army of the Tennessee. When Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general and brought him east as general-in-chief of all Union forces, Sherman succeeded him to the Military Division post. In this capacity he commanded the three armies—those of the Tennessee, the Cumberland and the Ohio—which he would lead in his successful campaign to capture Atlanta, May-September 1864.

After the war Sherman befriended both of the Confederate generals who had opposed him in Georgia, Joseph E. Johnston and John B. Hood. After the death of Hood’s wife in August 1879, Sherman wrote him a letter of condolence: “all we can do is to bow to the inevitable, and go on with the duties of life till we ourselves mark the Common destiny the Grave.”

Sherman met his common destiny on Feb. 14, 1891. He died in New York City.

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Thomas’ Army Headquarters When George Barnard began work, on December 28, 1863, for the U.S. Army’s Topographical Branch of the Department of Engineers, Army of the Cumberland, one of his main duties was the photographic duplication of the engineers’ maps. Another was to take pictures of the landscape involved in army operations.

In February 1864 Barnard began photographing scenes around Chattanooga. Among these was the headquarters of Maj. Gen. George Thomas, commanding the Army of the Cumberland (an appropriate choice by the cameraman: the HQ of the commander of the outfit that’s hiring you).

Thomas ordered a reconnaissance-in-force against the Rebels’ position on Rocky Face Ridge, February 24-26. The major find of the operation was Federals’ discovery that twelve miles south of Dalton, a pass existed through the formidable ridge.

The path for Sherman’s flanking movement of Johnston’s Dalton line had thus been laid down.

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Allatoona Pass “I am short a cheekbone and one ear, but am able to lick all hell yet.”

So declared Union Brig. Gen. John Corse after his troops had repulsed a Confederate attack at Allatoona Mountain, thirty miles northwest of Atlanta, on Oct. 5, 1864. The battle occurred as Hood’s army marched into north Georgia, hoping to cut the railroad from Chattanooga, blocking supplies going to Sherman’s forces in Atlanta.

Maj. Gen. Samuel French’s division, 3,276 strong, attacked Corse’s garrison of 2,025, which had the advantage of fortifications on the mountaintop. After almost three hours of fighting, French broke off the attack and withdrew.

Losses for the Federals totaled 706 killed, wounded and missing; Confederate casualties reached 897.

General Corse was struck at the tip of his cheekbone; the bullet passed through the ear. He remained on the field and in command.

George Barnard’s photograph looks north along the Western & Atlantic Railroad. The Clayton plantation house to the left still stands.

48

War Scenes

Kennesaw Mountain In his visits to north Georgia battlefields in the spring of 1866, George Barnard took several photographs of the Confederate works at Kennesaw Mountain. For his Photographic Views (1866) he chose a picture taken from the Southerners’ line on the top of the mountain.

This view is less well-known. It looks from the Union trenches east toward Little Kennesaw Mountain and Pigeon Hill.

Some writers have claimed that at Kennesaw Mountain, June 27, Sherman ordered the only Union attacking battle of the entire campaign.

But at Resaca, New Hope Church, Pickett’s Mill, and again at Kennesaw Mountain, the Federal commander ordered frontal attacks against entrenched enemy infantry.

After the bloody repulse of his troops at Kennesaw Mountain, General Sherman wrote his wife, Ellen, back at St. Louis, “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of a morning dash.”

Such a statement may have been meant by Sherman as some crude way of impressing his wife of his manliness. Yet one is hard pressed to find such an unflattering comment made by any officer on either side of the war.

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War Scenes

Where McPherson Met his Death–1 Arriving in Atlanta in mid-September 1864, in one of his first photo excursions George Barnard visited the scene on the battlefield east of the city where Hood had attacked the Army of the Tennessee on July 22. His purpose was to photograph where General McPherson had been killed early in the battle.

Because Northerners had been able to retrieve General McPherson’s body, they had carved on a nearby tree: “Maj. Gen. J. B. McPherson/Atlanta/July 22d, 1864.” Federals also marked the site with a wooden plaque nailed to the tree with similar handwritten wording.

Barnard titled this image “View of the Spot where Maj. Gen. McPherson was killed July 22, 1864.” It is unclear whether the photographer altered the scene by carrying a wagon wheel to be included in his picture. The artillery projectiles to the left appear to be deliberately clustered together.

Yet it is also likely that debris of the battle would still have been near at hand two months later: soldiers’ clothing, skeletal remains of a horse.

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Boxcars and Wagon Train–1 Barnard took several views of the train being loaded in the last days of Sherman’s occupation.

The views have sometimes been captioned “last train from Atlanta.” The last northbound train in fact departed on November 12. Barnard did not date his photographs, but the fact that the handbills shown in these views advertise concerts on November 7 and 8, suggest that it is unlikely that this is the “last train.” Since there is no baggage on top of the train cars this photograph precedes the one on the following two pages.

Barnard Under the Microscope

Freedpeople on the Boxcars On top of the boxcars are African Americans seeking to flee Atlanta before the Federals leave. Their belongings are piled high; the cars themselves would be filled with army stuff.

The poster on the wall of the car shed promotes an entertainment at the Atheneum scheduled for Monday, November 7.

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Rebel Fort east of Peach Tree Street

This photograph, #65 on Poe’s list at West Point, was taken in October 1864. Its caption reads “View from rebel Fort east of Peach Tree Street, looking somewhat north of west.”

In other views, Barnard demonstrated that he had access to Lemuel Grant’s map of fortifications drawn in April 1864, with its alphabetic designation of the twenty artillery batteries in the perimeter. Thus it is unfortunate that the photographer did not consult it when taking this and other pictures of Confederate fortifications. Consequently, we have to figure out which fort he was visiting.

Because Barnard was clear in labeling the fort in the photograph as the one “east of Peach Tree” (as opposed to his captions for battery “K,” “rebel fort on Peach Tree”), one may infer that this is Confederate fort “L,” almost half a mile southeast of “K.” A visual clue is the cleared field of fire in front of the earthen parapet. Slave laborers constructing Grant’s line had months to chop down trees and strip away underbrush, none of which is seen in this view.

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Captain Grant and His Map Lemuel Pratt Grant was born in Maine in August 1817. He started working on Pennsylvania railroads as a teenager and in 1840 came to Georgia as construction engineer for the railroads being built there. Residing in Atlanta, he began buying hundreds of acres of land.

Throughout the 1850s he worked on a number of railroad projects across the South.

After the war began, Grant became chief C.S. engineer in Atlanta, despite his lack of military experience. In May 1863, apprehension for Atlanta’s safety against enemy cavalry raids led the city council to recommend the construction of fortifications at the Chattahoochee River crossings. The Chief Engineer’s office in Richmond expanded the scope, and directed Captain Grant to survey for a full line of fortifications around the city.

On April 12, 1864, Grant submitted this map of the work that had been completed up to that time. A 10.5-mile line of entrenchments encircled the city. Because he originally had laid his northwest sector too close to Atlanta’s suburbs, he subsequently located five forts on hills in the area; they had as yet not been connected by rifle pits.

This map appears in the Official Records Atlas as Plate LI-2.

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Confederate Fortifications

Battery K–Cannon in the Embrasure Barnard took at least six photographs of Battery K. This view is the only one taken from outside the battery parapet. In his Photographic Views album, he included this image over the caption, “REBEL WORKS IN FRONT OF ATLANTA, GA., No. 3.”

The photographer dated this picture as taken in October 1864, during the Federal occupation. In the Poe collection of Barnard photographs at West Point, this one is titled, “View from rebel Fort on Peach Tree Street, north of Atlanta, looking south toward the city.”

Recently, photo-sleuths have magnified the picture to get a read on the gun muzzle. It is a U.S. Model 1857 12-pounder Napoleon smoothbore, serial no. 211, manufactured by the Revere Copper Company in Massachusetts. Weighing 1,229 pounds, the bronze tube was cast in 1863 and inspected by “T.J.R.”—Thomas Jackson Rodman, U.S. Artillery officer.

Remarkably, the cannon barrel was not melted down after the war, and found its way among the National Park Service’s Civil War military parks.

Park officers arranged a swap, and cannon barrel #211, mounted on a reproduction carriage, is now on display at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.

Geary’s “White Star” division manned the north sector of the Confederate line during the occupation. The tent marked “20” behind the cannon therefore probably belonged to a soldier in the 20th Connecticut—the only so-numbered regiment in the 2nd Division.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

A Northern Gun Crew Soon after succeeding Johnston on July 18, General Hood directed his army’s chief engineer, Lt. Col. Stephen W. Presstman, to inspect the city’s defensive line and report on its fitness.

On the morning of July 21, Presstman’s assessment came in: portions of Lemuel Grant’s works to the northeast were too close to the city, and the ground was too low.

Hood therefore instructed Presstman to build a northeast salient, which added hundreds of feet of entrenchments and two artillery forts to Captain Grant’s original perimeter, bringing it from an estimated 10.5 miles to now more than twelve.

Confederate authorities had been in the practice of impressing slaves to build the primary line of works encircling the city; for this eleventh-hour work, they did the same, even more feverishly.

Federals could see this activity from afar, or at least heard of it. A Northern cavalryman later recalled, “Negroes were brought in from all directions and made to work night and day.”

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Confederate Fortifications

Fort Hood–3 It is the central identifying tree, seen beyond the Confederate fortified line, that allows us to locate this Barnard photograph of Fort Hood.

Here the focus is not on the Union soldier sitting casually on the parapet in the previous view, but the officer standing erect on it. Seven crewmen appear to be listening to another speaking.

This fort came to be called Fort Hood sometime during the campaign. A Confederate artilleryman, Sgt. Edmund T. Eggleston of Cowan’s Mississippi Battery, recorded in his diary for August 28, “we left Fort Hood today and moved to the left to join our division.”

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

West of Peachtree Street “#118: View of rebel lines N.W. of Atlanta, between the W. & A. R.R. and Peach Tree Street.”

After he succeeded Johnston, Hood set soldiers and slaves working to connect forts that Grant had sited into a northwest salient. Writing of Fort Hood, local historian Wilbur G. Kurtz has written, “not until the night of July 21 did this isolated battery emplacement become an integral part of the defense line of Atlanta. This fort, and a few others eastward, were then in feverish haste, strengthened and connected by rifle pits, obstructions and palisades, the negro laborers and the soldiers working all night.”

The revetments—walls holding up the earthen parapet—are quite different from the sawed boards one sees, for instance, in Battery K/the Peach Tree fort. Barnard’s photograph shows timber and post fencing as well as wattle and post (vertical stakes interwoven with tree branches) as revetments.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Effect of Northern Shells Ellen Ponder had abandoned her house well before it came under Federal artillery fire because of its unlucky location so close to Confederate lines.

Sherman ordered a heavy bombardment of Atlanta and the Rebel works for August 9.

That day, Union Lt. W. W. Hopkins, a signal officer perched in a tree near the lines of Brig.

Gen. John W. Geary’s division of the XX Corps, reported “the most noticeable effect of the shelling was in front of General Geary’s division at a fort and house. The fort was struck; also the works near it, and the house had a large hole knocked in it besides being riddled.”

Several days later, a reporter for the New York Times reported, “Bundy’s battery (Thirteenth New York) has been making a target of one very fine house, until now it presents a very ventilated appearance.” Bundy’s 13th New York battery was attached to Geary’s division.

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Union Officers at the Windsor Smith House–1 Here Barnard shows Col. Henry Barnum and his staff officers at the L. Windsor Smith house in southwest Atlanta.

The group is on the house porch. In the 1940s a copy of this photograph was given to Atlanta historian Wilbur G. Kurtz. It came from the Onondaga Historical Society in Syracuse, N.Y. On its back were the names of the officers, probably written by one of them.

From left to right: Capt. O. L. F. Brown, 149th New York, Brigade Topographical Engineer; Capt. Lester D. Wilson, 60th New York, Brigade Inspector General; Dr. James V. Kendall, 149th New York, Brigade Surgeon; Col. Henry A. Barnum, commander, 3rd Brigade, 2nd Division, XX Army Corps; Capt. O. T. May, 149th New York, Assistant Adjutant General; Capt. Moses Summers, 149th New York, Brigade Quartermaster; Capt. Winchester, Brigade [Kurtz wrote, “can’t make it out”]; Lieut. Loren Fuller, 60th New York, Brigade Aide-de-Camp.

To the author’s knowledge this is the first time this photograph has been published.

Federals in Atlanta

Sherman and Officers Some of the most famous Barnard photographs repose both at the Library of Congress and at West Point. This is one of them (LOC 033382a and LOC 03384a; Poe #82).

During their occupation, Federal engineers remodeled some of the Confederate forts and gave them numeric designations. This is Federal Fort 7, located west of wartime Atlanta. (It had been Confederate Fort E in Grant’s lines.) The site today is on the campus of Atlanta University.

In late September 1864 Sherman and his officers traveled to the fort, where Barnard took several pictures of them. The commanding general knew that he would be photographed; normally careless in attire, Sherman is wearing a dress uniform coat with yellow sash.

On September 28 Captain Poe, the Federal chief engineer, wrote his wife Eleanor: “Nelly Dear I enclose a couple of pictures of Genl. Sherman & staff, taken in one of the Atlanta redoubts….In the cards I send you will have no difficulty in recognizing Genls. Sherman & Barry….I will name them, from left to right, leaving out Genl. Sherman who leans on the breach of the 20 pdr Parrott gun, and Genl. Barry who leans on the wheel of the gun carriage.—” No. 1—Captain Dayton, A.D.C. No. 2. Dr. Kittoe, Lt. Col. Med. Inspector, leans on the muzzle of the gun.

No. 3 Col. Beckwith Chf Commissary No. 4. Cap. Poe, Chief Engineer No. 5. Lt. Col. Warner, Inspr. General

No. 6. Capt. Marshall (Gen. Barry’s staff) No. 7. Capt. Baylor, Chief of Ordnance No. 8. Capt. Nichols, A.D.C. No. 9. Lt. Col. Ewing, Inspr General No. 10. Maj. McCoy, A.D.C.

(Poe Papers, Library of Congress)

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

The Slave Mart on Whitehall Street In the wartime Atlanta Intelligencer, the city’s daily newspaper, Crawford, Frazer & Co. advertised its firm on No. 8, Whitehall Street. “Our Negro Yard and Lock-Up, at No. 8, are Safe and Comfortable,” one ad announced.

In the fall of 1864, during the Federal occupation of Atlanta, the slave mart was a target of Northern soldiers’ animosity.

In this picture, Barnard photographed an African American in Federal uniform seated with musket at his side, and reading a book. The latter two activities—possessing a firearm and displaying literacy—were against the law for blacks in the antebellum South.

Sherman had no United States Colored Troops among his forces at Atlanta, so this black man may have acquired his uniform for Barnard’s picture.

Hence the question: was George Barnard “staging” this photograph as an ironic affirmation of the death of slavery?

The cameraman himself declined to answer. This image, #138 on West Point’s Poe listing, is only captioned, “view near the foot of Whitehall Street, Atlanta.”

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Federals in Atlanta

George Barnard’s Stereoscope In the 1850s a new form of photography became popular, the stereograph—a doublepicture that when seen through a special viewer gives a three-dimensional sensation.

George Barnard took many stereoscopic photographs in Atlanta, and gave Federal soldiers the opportunity to look at them. In the center of this picture, men are seen huddled around a stereoscopic viewer on tripod, gazing at Barnard’s productions.

But there’s a lot more in this image.

This picture was taken ca. November 8, as the broadside on the Intelligencer office wall advertises an entertainment to be held that evening.

The train in front of the Atlanta Hotel is being loaded with commissary and quartermaster stores that Sherman’s army would not take in its forthcoming march across Georgia.

Crowded atop the train cars are African Americans who are seeking to get out of town before the Federal troops leave—and the Rebels return.

Also visible on the loading platform is firefighting equipment the Federals wanted to send north. “The fire engines were about being shipped for Chattanooga,” wrote Capt. David Conyngham, a correspondent for the New York Herald. But then, on the night of November 11, the first fires set by Union soldiers broke out on Decatur Street; the engines were whisked away to help put out the blazes.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Camp of the 111th Pennsylvania This photograph, #146 on Captain Poe’s list, is labeled in the Library of Congress as LOC 1s02508u, 1s02512u and 03306a. It shows the area of encampment occupied by the 111th Pennsylvania during the occupation; the camp was sited in the north part of State Square (the park around the Car Shed) looking toward Decatur Street.

It shows the Trout House, Atlanta’s premier hotel, and the Masonic Hall. In the fires of November 15, the hotel would be burned but the lodge would be left standing.

During their time in Atlanta, an Ohio officer among the occupying troops wrote, “all around the city you’ll see a hundred soldiers carrying away windows, shutters, flooring, weather boarding, studding, etc. to fix up quarters in adjoining camps.”

Evidence is seen in the soldiers’ cabin in front of the Masonic Hall. Barnard’s photograph, magnified, shows how Federals had torn down planks from McMillen Fleming & Co. and White & Powers (both downtown produce merchants) and used them to build their shanty.

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Atlanta’s Skyline in 1864 “Panoramic view at Atlanta, from the top of the female seminary, extending from the Medical College on the South East around by the South, to a point on Peach Tree Street a little North of West. Three prints joined.”

This is Barnard’s caption to perhaps his most famous photograph of Atlanta. To get it, the cameraman hauled his equipment to the top of the three-story Female Seminary at Collins and Ellis Streets. He took three separate views of the city on a clear autumn day and linked them together.

The panorama takes in everything from the medical college’s domed building at the far left at Jenkins and Butler Streets (now Grady Memorial Hospital) to Austin Leyden’s residence on Peachtree, north of Ellis—an area of at least seven blocks, and a line a half-mile long.

The girls’ school was demolished during Federals’ construction of a shorter fortified line inside the city itself. Captain Poe wrote, “desire to save the building but fear it will be impossible.” On October 23, pulling on ropes and tackles, soldiers brought the structure down with “an awful crash,” according to one engineer.

The house on the previous page is an enlargement of the house of John F. Boutelle. Born in Massachusetts in 1814, he and his wife moved to Atlanta in 1852. He is listed as an architect in the city directory of 1859.

In 1864 the Boutelle residence was on the corner of Collins (now Courtland) and Ellis Streets. Today one can ascend the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel on Courtland to obtain the same visual perspective that George Barnard had when he took these photographs in the fall of 1864.

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Northern Wagons and a Train–1 Atlanta had scarcely been occupied by Union troops when Sherman began thinking of his next campaign. “I can sweep the whole of State of Georgia,” he wrote Grant on September 10. “I would not hesitate to cross the State of Georgia with sixty thousand men,” he added on the 20th.

Hood simplified things when he led the Army of Tennessee from southwest of Atlanta north, across the Chattahoochee, and heading off to cut the Western & Atlantic, Sherman’s rail supply line. Sherman sent Thomas and Schofield back toward Nashville with the IV and XXIII Corps; they were to attend to Hood if he ventured that far north.

Grant was won over by October 11, and Sherman began planning “my big raid.” In early October he took his XIV, XV and XVII Corps into north Georgia to keep an eye on Hood’s movement into northern Alabama. He left behind the XX Corps to hold Atlanta.

During their occupation, commissary and quartermaster officers were ordered to send back by train all stores and supplies not needed for the upcoming march to the sea. “Have on hand thirty days’ food but little forage,” Sherman instructed Col. Amos Beckwith, his chief commissary officer. He expected his army’s men and thousands of horses and mules to subsist off the country. “Convey to Jeff. Davis,” he wrote to U.S. War Secretary Edwin Stanton, “my personal and official thanks for abolishing cotton and substituting corn and sweet potatoes in the South.”

In this view the Northern wagons appear loaded with sacks of grain, perhaps unloaded from the empty train cars beside the Car shed.

Note that the train cars have no bundles or boxes on top.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

The Western & Atlantic Roundhouse George Barnard took several pictures of the area of the Western & Atlantic Roundhouse in downtown Atlanta. The image numbered 64 in Orlando Poe’s listing is titled “Engine House and Machine Shops of the Western & Atlantic R.R.” The W. & A. essentially led to the founding of Atlanta. In 1836 the Georgia legislature incorporated the railroad as a state-owned utility that would link Ross’ Landing (soon to be Chattanooga) with a point to be surveyed south of the Chattahoochee River. In 1837 engineer Stephen H. Long fixed the southern rail terminus seven miles from the Chattahoochee. The site is today at the heart of downtown Atlanta.

In September 1845 the Georgia Railroad connected the point with Augusta. By then the village of Terminus had been renamed Marthasville; in late 1845 the borough was renamed again as Atlanta. A year later the Macon & Western connected Atlanta still further. Finally, in 1850 the Western & Atlantic was completed. The Atlanta & West Point, eventually connecting the city with Montgomery, Ala., became its fourth rail line in 1854.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

“Sherman’s Sentinels” George Barnard photographed the twin chimneys of this building, located near the Western & Atlantic freight depot (to the right). The structure had probably been destroyed by fire during Sherman’s shelling of the city, July 20-August 25.

Some Northern batteries fired “hot shot,” solid iron cannonballs deliberately heated to set fire to wooden buildings. Capt. Cullen Bradley’s 6th Ohio Battery of 12-pounder Napoleon guns, attached to the IV Corps north of the city, was one of the first to fire hot shot. On August 10, Bradley recorded that his men “erected temporary furnace for heating shot and threw six shot into the city, also four shell filled with port fire.”

The heated metal did its work. An observer in Atlanta counted three fires in town during the night of August 23 and into the next day. Another recorded, “the dwelling house of Mr. Daniel Flake, near the State road shop, was consumed by fire, destroying nearly everything.”

The next day, August 24, Confederate Maj. Gen. Samuel G. French entered in his diary, “the enemy fired hot shot on the city all last night, and to-day they set on fire some cotton, and burned a few houses.”

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Atlanta Scenes

Alabama Street Barnard’s view looks eastward along Alabama Street from its corner with Whitehall.

The prominent building at center is the “Franklin Printing House & Bookbindery,” as broadcast by the arched sign at its top.

The three-story structure had been commandeered as a military hospital in the spring of 1862.

During the Federal artillery bombardment of Atlanta, July 20-August 25, 1864, the Atlanta Intelligencer reported that “a white man and a mule were killed and two negroes wounded in the street before Franklin Printing Office.”

When Union troops entered the city on Sept. 2, 1864, a Confederate banner was flying from the flagstaff at the top of the Franklin Printing House. A Union chaplain, John Potter, observed that someone raised the Stars and Stripes over the building, from whose flagpole “a few hours before, had floated the Confederate rag.”

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Atlanta Scenes

Decatur Street Barnard’s caption for this photograph is “View of Decatur St., Atlanta, showing Masonic Hall and the ‘Trout House.’”

With our focus on the tall buildings, we sometimes miss the big picture. This is Decatur Street, in the heart of downtown Atlanta, yet the street is deserted save for some soldiers, their horses, and a few wagons.

Just days after his troops entered Atlanta, Sherman had officers announce that the civilian population—estimated at the time to be perhaps three thousand—would be forced to leave.

Those wishing to go south would be transported by wagon to a point established between Union and Confederate lines. Those heading north would be given train conveyance to Nashville or points beyond.

People could take limited possessions, but they would have to go.

In the end, maybe fifty families were allowed to stay. Beyond that, however, by the end of September 1864, Atlanta was without a civilian populace.

“A few citizens still remain,” observed one Northern soldier; they “walk the streets with a mournful absent look or stand like statues gazing at the ‘Boys in blue’ as they pass.”

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Atlanta Scenes

A Bombproof After Sherman’s artillery opened fire on downtown Atlanta on July 20, residents who could not seek shelter in basements or cellars dug subterranean “bombproofs” in their yards.

During their occupation, Northern soldiers were struck by them. Capt. Alfred Hough wrote home on Sept. 18, “almost every house has what we call a ‘gopher hole’ attached to it.”

“Almost every garden and yard around the city has its cave,” observed Capt. David Conyngham. “They were sunk down with a winding entrance to them, so that pieces of shells could not go in. When dug deep enough, boards were placed on the top, and the earth piled upon them in a conical shape, and deep enough to withstand even a shell. Some of these caves, or bomb-proofs, were fifteen feet deep, and well covered.”

Local historians have identified the site in this Barnard photograph as that of the Charles E. Grenville Flour Mill.

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100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

A Fine Residence Barnard seemed to be impressed with some of Atlanta’s residential architecture.

After Sherman expelled most of Atlanta’s civilian population in mid-September, maybe fifty families were given special dispensation to stay: prominent Union-sympathizers, wealthy folk, or those related to both.

This stately mansion belonged to one of the above. We don’t know the name of its owner, although Barnard probably did. He evidently called its occupants out for this photograph.

A count discloses a quite extended family indeed: nearly thirty persons in all. The paterfamilias and his wife stand on the middle level. His progeny, mostly of young age, appear to be nine in number.

The property owner was a wealthy man: one may count fifteen enslaved African Americans.

Sherman did not allow U.S. Colored Troops to be included in his combat forces. Nor did he evidence zeal to implement the Emancipation Proclamation. During the Federal occupation of Atlanta, he therefore allowed families staying in the city to retain their slave property.

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Northern Engineers Prying Up Track Shadow dating is the practice of timing a photograph by studying its shadows.

Barnard’s view in this image looks northwest up the railroad. The engineers’ shadows are to the right—leading one to deduce that this picture was taken on the afternoon of November 14, after the Car Shed had been knocked down. The Concert Hall and Georgia Railroad Bank Agency are still standing—they were destroyed in the fires of November 15.

This photograph was rendered into a drawing by Walton Taber for the famed Battles and Leaders series of the 1880s. When the men of the 1st Missouri Engineers (one of Poe’s two engineer regiments at Atlanta) saw the Taber illustration, they apparently recognized themselves, to the point of reprinting the drawing in their regimental history of 1889 with the caption, “the First Missouri Engineers destroying a railroad showing the use of hooks made by them for the purpose.”

100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign

Destruction of Atlanta’s Railroads

General Sherman and Captain Poe were quite specific that their troops were to knock down, blow up or burn only those structures related to Atlanta’s manufacturing and railroading capacity.

That categorization, however, included much of the downtown business district. In the papers of Col. William Cogswell, post commandant during the occupation, is a map showing that the 33rd Massachusetts, one of the provost regiments in the city, was to destroy the “Brick Block”—both sides of Whitehall Street south of the railroad. Sherman, as it was learned, wanted all buildings built of brick to be wrecked so returning Rebels could not use them for warehouses or factories.

Federal soldiers, aware that Atlanta was doomed, started setting their own unauthorized fires as early as November 11. “We were fritened almost to death last night,” wrote young Carrie Berry on the 12th; “some mean soldiers set several houses on fire in different parts of the town.”

Sherman’s three infantry corps that had accompanied him into northwest Georgia were marching back into the city at the time. Realizing that the engineers were destroying downtown structures, they joined in the mayhem. “The pioneers were having all the fun,” as one put it.

“We arrived in the suburbs of Atlanta at 2 p.m.,” wrote an Ohio officer in his diary for November 15. “No sooner did we arrive than the boys commenced burning every house in that [northwestern] part of the town.”

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For More on the Work of George N. Barnard and Civil War Photography George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman’s Campaigns.

By Keith F. Davis. Kansas City MO: Hallmark Cards, Inc., 1990. The best book on the photographer, bar none.

Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign: George N. Barnard.

With a New Preface by Beaumont Newhall. New York: Dover Publications, 1977. Reproduces Barnard’s Photographic Views (1866).

“George N. Barnard’s Atlanta: Burned and Reborn.”

By John Kelley and Bob Zeller. Battlefield Photographer, vol. 12, no. 3 (December 2014), 10-19. Examines with magnification several of Barnard’s photographs taken during the Federal occupation of Atlanta.

“Sherman Strikes a Pose.”

Civil War Times Illustrated, vol. 8, no. 9 (January 1970), 15-17. Assembles four of Barnard’s photographs taken at Federal fort no. 7 in late September 1864.

The Photographic History of The Civil War. Ed. by Francis Trevelyan Miller and Robert S. Lanier. 10 vols. New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1911. The granddaddy of all Civil War photography books.

The Image of War: 1861–1865.

Ed. by William C. Davis and Bell I. Wiley. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1981–84.

Volume I includes a chapter by Frederic E. Ray, “Photographers of the War.” The chapter on the Atlanta Campaign in volume 5 includes many Barnard photographs.

Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War. Ed. by J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Prof. Stephen Berry’s article, “The Book or the Gun?” ponders Barnard’s famous staged photograph of the uniformed African American in front of Atlanta’s slave market and asks what was the more important prop, the rifle beside him, or the book he was reading? “‘Transcends the Bounds of Sober Belief ’: American Photography before the Civil War.”

By Stephen Davis. Civil War News, vol. 45, no. 3 (March 2019), 4-5.

Stephen Davis, raised in Atlanta, is author of four books on the Atlanta Campaign. Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions (2001) offers a narrative of the campaign. What the Yankees Did to Us (2012) recounts Sherman’s bombardment of Atlanta (July 20-August 25) and the Union occupation till mid-November. A Long and Bloody Task (2016) is the first of a two-volume account of the Atlanta Campaign; this one takes events to the Chattahoochee River in mid-July. All the Fighting They Want (2017) explains what happened after Gen. John B. Hood took command of the Army of Tennessee.

Dr. Davis, who took his Ph.D. degree at Emory University, has for years studied Barnard’s views of Atlanta that have been in print since 1911, with the publication of Francis Trevelyan Miller’s ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War. Despite the ubiquity of Barnard’s photographs, the scholarly literature on them is actually juvenescent. In some cases we are still trying to figure out (and agree upon) his Atlanta views. For this study, we have adhered to the captions as written for the photographs in the Orlando M. Poe Papers, Special Collections, USMA Library.

The Atlanta Campaign

The American Civil War was the first war in which both sides widely used entrenchments, repeating rifles, ironclad warships, and telegraphed communications.

It was also the first American War to be extensively photographed.

Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan are famous for having made iconic photographs in the Civil War’s eastern theater.

George N. Barnard deserves to be ranked in this top tier for his photographic work in the war’s western theater.

A civilian photographer hired by Gen. William T. Sherman’s chief engineer to take pictures of fortifications around Atlanta, Barnard took several hundred of them in and around the city in the fall of 1864. His most famous is the site of Union Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson’s death in the battle of Atlanta, July 22, 1864.

Thus far, no comprehensive, definitive listing has been made of the photographer’s work.

The Library of Congress has 130 images; the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, has at least 98 photographs, donated by Captain Poe’s widow.

Other repositories, such as the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City, have smaller collections.

For this book we have chosen a hundred images we deem “significant,” though other students may wonder at some of our selections.

ISBN 978-1-61850-151-6

$19.95

51995

We hope that this work will stimulate further interest in Barnardiana, and that other scholarly volumes are yet to come.

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