Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

[522] discovering two highly-esteemed friends,¹ traveling for the purpose of seeing the country; and he enjoyed their most agreeable companionship many days, until parting at New Orleans. We had just reached the beginning of the more picturesque hill-country of Georgia, which seemed to be peculiarly charming in the region of Crawfordsville, the home of Stephens, the “Vice-President” of the Confederacy, whose house we saw on an eminence to the right. As we approached Atlanta, we noticed many evidences of the devastating hand of Sherman, when he began his march to the sea, in the ruins of railway stations, twisted iron rails, and charred ties, along the road-side. Toward evening the grand dome of Stone Mountain, a heap of granite fifteen hundred feet in height, loomed up a mile or so north of us. From Decatur onward, the earth-works of both parties were seen in thickening lines, and at twilight we were in the midst of the ruined city of Atlanta, then showing some hopeful signs of resurrection from its ashes.

We passed a rainy day in Atlanta, the writer leaving the examination of the intrenchments and the battle-fields around it until a second visit,² which he intended to make a few weeks later, and on the morning of the 8th,

April, 1866.

in chilling, cheerless air, we departed on a journey by railway, to Montgomery, on the Alabama River. We passed through the lines of heavy works in that direction, a great portion of the way to East Point, and from there onward, nearly every mile of the road was marked by the ravages of camping armies, or active and destructive raiders. The country between Fairborn and La Grange was a special sufferer by raids. In the vicinity of Newham the gallant Colonel James Brownlow was particularly active with his Tennessee troopers, and swam the Chattahoochee, near Moore's Bridge, when hard pressed. We crossed the Chattahoochee at West Point, where we dined, and had time to visit and sketch Fort Tyler, the scene of Colonel La Grange's achievements a year before.³ That gallant Michigan officer was kindly spoken of by the inhabitants of West Point, who remembered his courtesy toward all non-combatants.

Between West Point and Montgomery we saw several fortifications, covering the passage of streams by the railway; and ruins of station-houses everywhere attested the work of raiders. At Chiett's Station, near a great bend of the Tallapoosa River, whose water flowed full thirty feet below us, we saw many solitary chimneys, monuments of Wilson's destructive marches. His sweep through that region was almost as desolating as were the marches of Sherman, but in a narrower track. But among all these scathings of the hand of man, the beneficent powers of Nature were at work, covering them from human view. Already rank vines were creeping over heaps of brick and stone, or climbing blackened chimneys; and all around were the white blossoms of the dogwood, the crimson blooms of the buckeye, the modest, blushing honeysuckle, and the delicate pink of the the red-bud and peach blossom.

It was eight o'clock in the evening before we arrived at Montgomery, and found lodgings at the Exchange Hotel, from whose balcony, the reader may remember, Jefferson Davis harangued the populace early in 1861, after