1 They drew a dreadful picture of war, and the sufferings that must be endured in the removal of the citizens from Atlanta. Sherman replied, assuring them that they could not qualify war in harsher terms than he would, and that it was in the power of those who made the war to have peace, by submission to the rightful authority of the Government they had wickedly assailed. The Government, he said, was resolved to put down the rebellion by force of arms. To secure peace, rebels must stop war. “Once admit the Union,” he said, “once more acknowledge the authority of the National Government, and instead of devoting your houses. and streets, and roads, to the dread uses of war, I, and this army, become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may.” The civil authorities of Atlanta made no further appeals.
2 No distinction was made between the families of the friends or foes of the Government, in furnishing means for transportation. Those who preferred to go south numbered 446 families, with an aggregate of 2,085 souls. These were transported in wagons, at the National expense, with furniture and clothes averaging 1,651 pounds for each family, to Rough and Ready, ten miles from Atlanta, while those who preferred to go North were taken at the Government cost by railway to Chattanooga. So humanely was the righteous act performed, that General Hood, through Major Clan, of his staff, tendered to General Sherman,
Sept. 21. |
3 It was at about this time that Jefferson Davis hastened from Richmond to Georgia to view the situation, and in a speech at Macon, on the 23d of September, he talked to them with the air of a Dictator, as he tried to, be, using the personal pronoun as freely as an autocrat. He was much disturbed by the condition of affairs in that region, and the evident distrust of himself by the people; and, while admitting that great disasters had befallen the cause of the Conspirators that he met them as “friends drawn together in adversity,” he endeavored to feed their hopes upon the husks of promises of great disasters that were to befall Sherman. He spoke of the disgrace because of Johnston's falling back from Dalton to Atlanta, and said, with the fact before him that Hood's rashness had ruined the army, “I then put a man in command who I knew would strike a manly blow for the defense of Atlanta, and many a Yankee's blood was made to nourish the soil before the prize was won.” He advised the young women to marry an empty sleeve rather than a young man who had “remained home and grown rich;” and, to give them an idea that he, like King Louis, was “the State,” told them that if they knew of any young man who kept away from the service, who could not be made to go in any other way, to write to him. “I read all letters,” he said, “sent to me.” He admitted that not many men between eighteen and forty-five years of age were left. Then, with low cunning, he tried to give an excuse for the detention of their friends as captives, and the horrors of Andersonville, the wailings from which might almost have reached his ears, by pretending that it was the fault of the United States Government that prisoners were not exchanged. Imitating the vulgarity of Beauregard, he said: “Butler, the beast, with whom no commissioner of exchange would hold intercourse, had published in his newspapers that if we would consent to the exchange of negroes, all difficulties might be removed. This is reported as an effort of his to get himself whitewashed, by holding intercourse with gentlemen.” The whole speech was full of the evidences of the desperation of a charlatan, satisfied that his tricks were discovered. He felt the chill of the silence and contempt of the thinking men and women who listened to him; and he went on to the Headquarters of Hood, at Palmetto, on the Atlanta and Lagrange railway, with the most gloomy forebodings of the future.
4 See page 391.
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