Category Archives: Civil War

The Civil War in Missouri

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Missouri was a slave state, but never an actual member of the Confederacy. Two factions claimed to represent Missouri’s legitimate government, but only the Unionist one retained control of it. With war looming in 1860, Governor Robert Marcellus Stewart adopted a policy of “armed neutrality” – Missouri would stay in the Union, but send aid to neither side, and resist any attempts at invasion. Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, who took office in January 1861, reaffirmed that policy – but as it turns out, Jackson had Southern leanings and, despite a constitutional convention that voted overwhelmingly to stay in the Union, started plotting to seize the federal arsenal at St. Louis as a prelude to secession. But troops guarding the arsenal, under the command of Captain Nathaniel Lyon, ambushed the Missouri Volunteer Militia as it was maneuvering at Camp Jackson near St. Louis. Lyon’s troops paraded the captured militiamen through St. Louis, to the disapproval of the locals; at one point a shot rang out, prompting a response from Lyon’s troops that left 28 people dead. The next day the Missouri General Assembly authorized the creation of the Missouri State Guard allegedly to resist invasion, but in reality to keep Federal troops locked up in St. Louis; after about a month Lyon, now commander of the Department of the West, ended up chasing Jackson and his legislative supporters out of the state capital at Jefferson City. They reassembled in Neosho, Missouri and enacted an Ordinance of Secession in late October, and a month later the state was admitted to the Confederate States of America. But all this was notional: Jackson’s government may have been legitimate on one level, but back in Jefferson City the reconvened constitutional convention declared that the governorship was vacant, and appointed Hamilton Rowan Gamble, a former Missouri Supreme Court Justice, to the position. Hamilton’s government retained hold of the machinery of state, and began recruiting troops for the Union. Ultimately some 447 regiments fought for it. For its part, Jackson’s government eventually retreated to Marshall, Texas, where it did not do much but did send representatives to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. 

Thirty-five-star US flag, in use 1863-1865, with reflection of the photographer in the glass.

But that didn’t mean that pro-Confederates went away gently. Few formal Civil War battles were fought in Missouri. Instead, the state’s Civil War experience was largely characterized by guerrilla warfare, of a savage and brutal nature. Pro-slavery “Bushwackers” (including William C. Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and a young Jesse James) attacked anyone suspected of sympathizing with the Union cause; in return, Kansas-based anti-slavery “Jayhawkers” did the same thing. In some ways this was a continuation of “Bleeding Kansas” of the 1850s – and such activity continued after the war’s formal conclusion in 1865. It’s really quite amazing how horrible it all was. 

Missouri Civil War Museum, Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Mo.

All of this and more is well presented at the Missouri Civil War Museum at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, which I highly recommend. It was funded entirely by local fundraising and has a great bookstore to boot. 

Confederate currency notes.

Northern Ireland

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Flags and Vexillology.

Today marks the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland, when the Fourth Home Rule Bill went into effect. Someone posted to the Facebook group Flags and Vexillology a photograph of an early flag for Northern Ireland, a blue ensign with six six-pointed stars surrounding a shield of the traditional province of Ulster. This flag, however used, was superseded by the Ulster Banner, taken from the shield of the arms of Northern Ireland, which was granted in 1924. 

Heraldry-wiki.com.

Paul Halsall also draws our attention to an article at West Cork Historical Society Forum, about what happened to the once numerically strong (but still minority) Unionist/Loyalist population of Cork after 1920.

In 1919 the Unionist community in County Cork was prosperous, numerous and committed in varying degrees to the Unionist cause. They had their own newspaper, held parades and maintained a complex social system. Yet by 1923 their community lay decimated, torn asunder by a campaign of murder and intimidation and forced into a supposedly “Free State” which did little to protect them. What brought about such cataclysmic changes? How was the campaign of murder conducted and for what reasons? Did Cork Unionism maintain its identity during those violent years – and can this still be seen today?

The numerical decline between 1911 and 1926 of the Protestant (and mostly unionist) community in Cork, and indeed throughout Southern Ireland, is startling. The historian Hart puts the level of Protestant decline during this period at no less than 34% (the Roman Catholic population declined by merely 2%) and comments that “this catastrophic loss was unique to the Southern minority and unprecedented: it represents easily the single greatest measurable social change of the revolutionary era”

It is difficult to argue with Hart’s assessment that this population decline is unique in British history – representing “the only example of the mass displacement of a native ethnic group within the British Isles since the 17th century”

More at the link. Those who weren’t murdered fled to Northern Ireland or Britain. Reminds me of my own Loyalist ancestors following the American Revolution. 

A Followup

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In October I wrote about the Cassville Affair, which transpired on May 19, 1864. Many of the pictures in that post I had taken in the summer. One historical marker I looked for and missed is marked on this map:

Google maps.

The upper one, entitled “Confederate Line,” is designated as “5” in my previous post. I cruised up and down Mac Johnson Road in search of the second one, and couldn’t find it. I thought that it had been stolen, like the sign for Trahlyta’s Grave. 

But it turns out that all I needed was for the summertime vegetation to die off. Driving on the road again this afternoon I spotted the GHC historical marker, which essentially repeats the information in the “Confederate Line” sign. 

As a bonus there is another marker close by, in the form of a granite block on the ground, with a plaque attesting to the existence of the McKelvey House. Nothing beside remains of this house, although you can tell that there was once something there.

I repeat my statement that if the Cassville Affair is worth so many markers, other things should be entitled to them as well. 

Maps and Flags

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As I was writing earlier about the Cassville Affair, I knew that what I really needed was a Civil-War-era map of this area. Well, thanks to a visit to the Kennesaw Mountain National Park, where I went hiking yesterday, I have found one! On display in the museum there is a copy of a map of north Georgia by “William E. Merrill, Captain, U.S. Army, 1864” – i.e. an essential piece of intelligence used by Sherman when he came through on the Atlanta Campaign. Park Ranger Jacob Boling informed me that, as a Library of Congress document, one can view it online, and the images below are screen shotted from this. 

So here is the triangle of Kingston, Adairsville, and Cassville, the former two connected by the Western & Atlantic railroad, the latter two by a road indicated by a line and a series of dots (there is no legend to indicate what this might mean, although I assume that line-and-dot roads were more developed than mere line roads). 

You will notice two roads leading away from Cassville to the east, with the southern one splitting just above the second S in Cassville. The northern branch, on the larger map, ends up at Pine Log, so I reckon that that is now the Cass-Pine Log Road. The southern branch, I assume, is what Albert Castel called the Canton Road, and the larger map suggests that it may have linked up with what is now Stamp Creek Road in order to get to Canton. The road that extends north-northeast from Cassville I could imagine as the (then) Spring Place Road, because it does eventually get to Spring Place on the larger map.

But note what appears on the road on the way to Adairsville, right underneath the word “Plateau” – another road heading north-northeast, and ending at what is clearly Moesteller’s Mills. So there were two possible roads on which Hood’s troops could have been stationed, waiting to ambush whatever troops came down the Adairsville-Cassville road. 

What actually happened remains a mystery, but it’s useful to have a better sense of the contemporary geography.  

A little to the east, we find notice of Rowland Springs, “most exclusive resort in Georgia,” connected to what is now Stamp Creek Road. Notice the little building on Stamp Creek itself – does this represent one of the furnaces?

A glimpse of the area to the east of Cartersville before the creation of Lake Allatoona. I assume that “Etowah” on the map is only a railway depot, the actual town of Etowah being further up the river, around “Etowah Iron Works.” You can see the railroad spur connecting the Etowah Iron Works with the W&A, which was worked by the Yonah of Great Locomotive Chase fame. I’m not sure what the separate Allatoona Iron Works are, but I guess they are now submerged in the lake? I’m curious to know what “Laffing Gall” was.

Further up the Etowah River we find Canton, the seat of Cherokee County. One road leads to Battle Ground (i.e. Ball Ground), another leads to the “Shoal Creek Post Office,” presumably an early reference to Waleska, which is just south of the intersection of Shoal Creek and what is now GA-140. Note also Buffington, one of the collection points for Cherokee Removal.

Of course, one wonders how accurately this map represents this area as it was in the 1860s.* It was “compiled from the Cherokee land maps, from surveys of the Topl. Engrs., and from the state map of Georgia,” but it would have been very difficult for the Union cartographers to check anything before publication. It has certainly changed since then – unlike in Ohio (or Ontario), Georgia’s roads were not constructed on a grid, but were much more ad hoc in their arrangement, and as new roads were created, old ones disappeared. This process continues to be true to this day. 

* UPDATE: Sure enough, other maps of Georgia from the same era in the Library of Congress collection don’t quite agree with Captain Merrill’s map, nor with each other. Dang.

Henry Schenck Tanner’s 1853 map of Georgia and Alabama has Kingston too far to the north, and Adairsville in Gordon County!

Krebs and Lindenkohl’s 1864 map of Northern Alabama and Georgia features a different set of roads radiating from Cassville.

*********

Also in the museum: flags! As you enter, two variants of the flags of the combatants in the Civil War: one USA flag with gold stars, and a CSA flag with a “couped” and unfimbriated saltire. 

I liked this flag with its Laconic phrase. 

This one is the flag of the Cobb Mountaineers, a version of the Stars and Bars with an unusual arrangement and number of stars. 

The Cassville Affair

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Bartow County’s former seat, Cassville, was the site of some activity during the Atlanta Campaign of the Civil War in May of 1864. The general outline is this: on May 18, 1864, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston retreated from Adairsville, and tricked Union General William T. Sherman into dividing his troops in pursuit. Johnston made it look like the Confederates had retreated to Kingston, when in fact most of them had retreated to Cassville. Sherman thus sent the bulk of his troops to Kingston, while sending a smaller force toward Cassville. The Confederates were hoping to ambush the weakened force at Cassville and annihilate it before Sherman realized what was going on, but they were accidentally discovered on the morning of May 19. Their cover blown, they retreated south of the Etowah River in order to make another defensive stand.

That is the general outline. But every account that one reads about this incident is slightly different, like the accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry in the various Gospels. Here is the account given at Cassville’s WPA “Pocket Park”:

So in this version, we’ve got Union Brig. Gen. John Schofield leading the XXIII Corps from Adairsville to face Polk head-on, with Hood hoping to attack from the east, and Edward McCook’s division of Union Cavalry blowing Hood’s cover. The Pocket Park also includes a map:

I think this map is more schematic than geographically accurate. There is a local Spring Place Road to the east and it may have once linked up with what is now the Cassville-White Road (White being founded after the Civil War). But it does not make sense that Hood’s troops would be hiding behind this road while Polk was just across Two Run Creek – it’s simply too far away to be tactically useful for an ambush. (No roads around here are that straight anyway.)

Here is what the town looks like today, according to Google Maps:

Google Maps.

The Pocket Park is at 4. Points 1, 2, 3, and 5 on the map mark the locations of the following Georgia Historical Commission markers. They provide more detail, but leave some things unexplained. 

Where is McDow’s? Where is the Hawkins Price House? Who composes these things?!

I guess the idea is that Daniel Butterfield’s Third Division of the XX Corps was coming from Adairsville to Cassville, and was to then turn towards Kingston to attack any Confederates there in the rear? So according to this sign, it was Butterfield who discovered the Confederates in wait. Why wouldn’t the Confederates then simply attack Butterfield?

This sign acknowledges McCook’s attack.

This one indicates that Polk retreated in the face of an attack by Butterfield.

And this one shows the regretful aftermath for the Confederates. 

Albert Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (University Press of Kansas, 1992), 199.

Here is a map from a long and thorough book on the Atlanta Campaign. It shows no Spring Place Rd. What is now the Cassville-White Road is designated the Canton Road, which makes sense. Instead of a Spring Place Road heading north, we have a “Road to Martseller’s Mill (Sallacoa),” which also makes sense. According to the map, Hood’s men were supposed to be on this road, waiting for troops to come from Adairsville on the Adairsville Road. Was Butterfield’s division of the XX Corps also marching along this road, accompanying Schofield’s XXIII Corps, in order to make the fateful discovery? The map also has McCook, along with George Stoneman, approaching along the Canton Road. It has the (rest of) the XX Corps coming to Cassville straight from Adairsville. I believe that these troops were under the command of Joseph Hooker. 

And Is “Cox (XIII Corps)” an error? Jacob Cox commanded the third division of the XXIII Corps. 

A marker at Adairsville indicates that Moesteller’s Mills, a “notable plantation and manufacturing center of the 1860s,” may be found five miles to the east of Adairsville on GA-140. I’ve looked for it but apart from “Moestellers Mill Road” there is no indication that it ever existed (Sallacoa, as the name of a settlement, is also completely mysterious). The marker does indicate that both the XXIII Corps and Butterfield’s division both passed through Moesteller’s Mills. 

Jim Miles, Fields of Glory: A History and Tour Guide of the Atlanta Campaign (Rutledge Hill Press, 1995), 52.

This map, from a driving guide to Atlanta Campaign battlefields, is a lot less useful. If nothing else, there is no railroad between Cassville and Adairsville. The tributary to the Etowah River that is labeled “Etowah River” is in fact the Euharlee River.

Russell W. Blount, Jr., The Battles of New Hope Church (Pelican Publishing Co., 2010), 16.

This one is better. It shows Schofield heading south from where Moesteller’s Mills would have been. But there’s no road connecting Adairsville and Cassville, or any indication of who might have traveled on this route.  

I assume that many other people have written about the Atlanta Campaign. If I read those accounts, would a consensus emerge – or at least would I be able to piece together What Actually Happened in detail? I assume that all the primary sources don’t agree – otherwise there would be a lot less ambiguity in the secondary ones. This whole thing surely stands as an illustration of the “fog of war.” In that context, events happen quickly and often under conditions of great stress, with multiple participants who don’t have the time to write anything down until later, and who might flesh out their imperfect memories with self-serving narratives of their own heroism – producing a major headache for anyone trying to discover the truth, if we can even speak of such a thing. 

Links, Various

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• The Conversation: “How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilisation”

Why did we take so long to invent civilisation? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilisation – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilisations appearing 6,400 years ago.

For 95% of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting and gathering. Then, something changed.

We transitioned from hunter-gatherer life to plant harvesting, then cultivation and, finally, cities. Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna – mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer and horses – disappeared. The reasons humans began farming still remain unclear, but the disappearance of the animals we depended on for food may have forced our culture to evolve.

• New York Times: “Marvin Creamer, a Mariner Who Sailed Like the Ancients, Dies at 104”

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.

But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch.He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.

Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

Skills like these, he long maintained, had let the master mariners of antiquity answer the seafarer’s ever-present, life-or-death question — Where am I? — and in so doing sail safely round the world.

“From everything I’ve read, the ancients didn’t feel uncomfortable out there,” Professor Creamer told The New York Times in 1978. “They didn’t have navigational tools, but they didn’t seem afraid to go to sea. I felt they might have known what they were doing, that they might have made predictable landfalls and having once hit a coast could have returned there.”

• Newsmax: “‘Mystery Is Over’ Regarding Lost Colony of Roanoke”

The English colonists who came to what became known as the “Lost Colony” never actually disappeared, according to a new book.

Rather, they went to live with their native friends, the Croatoans of Hatteras, The Virginian-Pilot reports.

“They were never lost,” said author Scott Dawson, who has researched records and dug up artifacts where the colonists lived with the Indians in the 16th century. “It was made up. The mystery is over.”

Dawson’s book, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, which was published in June, highlights his research.

• We Are the Mighty: “The last shots of the American Civil War were fired in Russia”

Historians don’t talk much about naval action during the Civil War, certainly not as much as they do about the ground combat. If it’s not about a riverboat, the Monitor and the Merrimack, or damning torpedoes, it just doesn’t get the same attention.

The CSS Shenandoah did a lot of things worth talking about.

Her flag was the last Confederate flag to be lowered and she was the ship that took the Civil War to the global stage, looting and burning Union merchant shipping from Africa to India to Russia and back.

She took 38 prizes and more than a thousand prisoners, some of them joining the Confederate ship.

Shenandoah was built by the British. A fast, steam-powered screw ship, the Brits transferred her to a Confederate skeleton crew under Capt. James Waddell off the coast of Africa. From there, Shenandoah terrorized American ships in sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Pacific, and into the Bering Sea off Alaska.

At the time, however, Alaska belonged to the Russian Czar. And the Czar was friend to the United States. When Shenandoah began burning American whaling fleets in his territory, the Czar was not at all pleased.

Even after the Civil War was over, Shenandoah continued her Pacific rampage. The skipper just didn’t believe Lee’s surrender ended the war, even when American whaling captains told him so.

Pretty soon, he was the only Confederate still fighting. So he moved to shell the defenseless city of San Francisco. It was on his way to California that he met a British ship who confirmed the news: The Confederacy was gone and the captain and crew of the Shenandoah were going to be tried and hanged.

With every Navy in the world looking for Shenandoah and a hefty bounty on his head, Capt. Waddell disguised the ship, stowed its weaponry, and made a mad dash for Great Britain – the long way around.

Black Bartow County

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Earlier this summer I visited the Bartow History Museum, located in Bartow County’s first postbellum courthouse on East Church Street in Cartersville, right beside the Western & Atlantic train tracks and now overshadowed by a bridge built to span the tracks. Its exhibits are well done. Currently, on the main floor, is a photo gallery of different musical groups from the county, and a feature exhibition about the county’s notable women, in honor of the ratification of the nineteenth amendment one hundred years ago this month. Upstairs, in the Dellinger Family Exhibition Gallery, is a permanent display taking the visitor through the history of the area, starting with the Mississippian Indians who built the Etowah Mounds, through Cherokee removal, white settlement, the Civil War, local industry, commerce, and agriculture, the county’s participation in the World Wars, and the current scene. As I say, it is very well done – except that I couldn’t help but notice that the whole thing gives short shrift to Bartow’s African-American community. 

Slavery is briefly mentioned on a single panel in the antebellum section…

…and on the way in, in a photo montage entitled “A Sense of Place,” one finds a group photograph of some members of the “Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, Mission Road, 1954,” clearly an African-American congregation. And that’s pretty much it.*

I think that Bartow’s Black history deserves more attention than this. Although plantation slavery was not as common in north Georgia as it was in the Black Belt, as the panel above states, by 1840 there were some 2000 slaves in the county, out of a total population of 9340. I have discovered that slaves were occasionally sold on the courthouse steps in Cassville, the original county seat.** What was it like for these people? What did they do when Sherman came though on the Atlanta Campaign, armed with the Emancipation Proclamation? How did they experience this newfound freedom – and the imposition of Jim Crow once Reconstruction was called off? What happened in Bartow County during the Civil Rights movement, and what is the situation of Bartow’s Black population today? These are all stories that deserve to be told.

Fortunately, they are getting some attention in other ways. The Etowah Valley Historical Society sponsors an African-American History Initiative, which was responsible for the sculpture Pathways to Freedom, on display in front of Cartersville City Hall. And the Cartersville-Bartow Convention and Visitors’ Bureau (in alliance with the Cartersville Downtown Development Authority) has helped create an African American Heritage Trail in the county. An abridged description of the trail may be found on the Bureau’s website, and the full version may be found in a pamphlet available at the Bartow History Museum and elsewhere (and downloadable as a pdf). A shout-out to Reinhardt’s Pam Wilson for her contributions to this. 

The pamphlet is quite well done (by my friend Lara Jeanneret of Lara J Designs, whose work I highly recommend). It features an introduction and historical timeline, and details some nineteen historically significant sites throughout Bartow County, eleven of which are in Cartersville. Some of these I have already seen and blogged about this summer, such as the Pathways to Freedom sculpture, the covered bridge in Euharlee (built by Washington King, son of freedman Horace King), the Black Pioneers’ Cemetery in Euharlee (rediscovered and saved from development in 2002), and the gravesite of Michelle Obama’s three-greats grandmother Melvinia Shields in Kingston. Some of the pamphlet’s other sites are somewhat amorphous, like “2. The Clothing Trades” (active on East Church Street in Cartersville) or “7. African American Real Estate Developers” (active on West Main Street). But others are more concrete, and in my last act of local exploration this summer I determined to see some of them. One was quite by accident: I was eating lunch in Ross’s Diner when I read, in the “3. Segregation” section of the Heritage Trail pamphlet:

Both of Cartersville’s historic courthouses had segregated balconies where African Americans were required to sit. The Grand Theatre had a separate entrance for black movie patrons, which led to a segregated seating section. At both Ross’s Diner and 4-Way Lunch, one can still see the separate entrances designated for African American diners, who also were required to sit at segregated counters at the rear of the buildings adjacent to the kitchen areas.

I asked the manager if this was true, and she admitted it was, and directed me outside and to the rear of the building, as if I was going to use the toilet.

Ross’s Diner, front entrance on Wall Street.

Ross’s Diner, rear entrance off the side alley.

The room that one enters from this door is easy to imagine as a secondary dining area; it is now storage, with the main kitchen to the right. The toilet is in a closet off this room. (I assume that Ross’s Diner didn’t always offer toilet facilities, or else the “white” toilets, wherever they may have been, were decommissioned at some point. The races couldn’t possibly have shared toilets.)

After Ross’s, I walked north on Erwin Street to see “9. Vinnie’s Cabin,” which is located behind a fine nineteenth century house, currently occupied by Strands Hair Salon. 

The main house, believed to have been the first one built in Cartersville, was the “townhome” property of Elijah Murphy Field and Cornelia Maxey Harrison Field,*** whose main residence was on a large plantation on Pumpkinvine Creek, worked by slaves. Obviously their townhome would have needed some staff as well, and cabins out back, one of which still stands, would have been where these people lived. The abolition of slavery did not mean that such social relations entirely disappeared, however, and the cabin takes its name from Vinnie Salter Johnson, a Black woman who was born into slavery in 1855 but who was subsequently employed as a cook by the Field family. She lived with her son in what used to be the slave cabin until she made enough money to be able to rent her own home on nearby Bartow St. I do not know at what point the cabin ceased to be occupied by any Field family employees, or why it survived to the present, but I am glad that it did. It is good to retain such mementoes of the past, as uncomfortable as they might make us now. 

An even more important reminder of the old days (and, perhaps, a more positive one) is “12. The Summer Hill Heritage Foundation” on Aubrey Street. Summer Hill is a historically Black neighborhood, and Summer Hill School was the Black school for Cartersville. The school dates from 1889 and taught students from first through sixth grade; a new wooden structure was built for it in 1922, which was replaced by an even larger brick structure in 1956, by which time Summer Hill School offered high school instruction and fielded sports teams. With the fall of segregation in 1968, the school was closed, but the building (as a community center) and sports facilities (a gym, tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and a swimming pool) remain in use. Apparently there is a small museum in the complex, but unfortunately the whole place was closed on account of the plague. 

The disused concrete bleachers of Blue Devil Stadium, hand-built by parents in the community. 

“He who thinks can conquer” statue on the grounds. 

A little further up the street, one encounters “13. Masonic Lodge,” a disused building that at one point functioned as the meeting place for a so-called Prince Hall Lodge. In 1775, Prince Hall and fourteen other free Black men, having been rejected for membership in a colonial Masonic lodge, were initiated by British soldiers into the Grand Lodge of Ireland, and later received recognition as African Lodge No. 1. (Such consideration, it seems, did not convince Hall to support the British during the Revolutionary War.) Out of this act eventually grew an independent branch of Freemasonry for African-American men that spread throughout the North, and then into the South following the Civil War. Like other fraternal organizations, Prince Hall lodges offered fellowship for members and allowed the pooling of resources for charitable work, and were thus an important pillar of the African-American community. Cartersville’s Prince Hall Lodge, designated Mount Zion Lodge #6, was founded in 1896. The pamphlet claims that it is “one of the oldest continually active African American lodges in the state,” although I can find no evidence on the Internet that it still exists, and it clearly does not use this building anymore. In its day it ran the Benevolent Brotherhood Society, into which community members made contributions and could draw on in times of emergency. 

Freemasonry is not as popular as it once was although the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia does seem to be a going concern – with or without the Cartersville chapter. 

But perhaps the most significant African-American site in all of Bartow County is “17. Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center” in Cassville. Noble Hill School (also called Cassville Colored School) was constructed in 1923 with help from the Rosenwald Fund. I had never heard of this before, but it was quite important in its day. Like the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who built all those libraries, Julius Rosenwald, president of the Sears, Roebuck and Co., in partnership with Booker T. Washington, used his wealth for the greater good by helping to fund the construction of schools, many of them for Black children in the segregated South. Rosenwald grants were always matching grants, and it should be noted that only 33% of the cost of the Noble Hill school building came from the Fund; 47% was raised by the local community, with the remainder coming from the Bartow Board of Education. The building featured two rooms, one for first through third grade, the other for fourth through seventh grade – and large windows to take advantage of the natural light, as it was not wired for electricity. The school closed in 1955 when many of Bartow County’s Black schools were amalgamated to form Bartow Elementary School (I do not know where this building was located, or what has become of it since the end of segregation). 

From a display at Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center.

After standing empty for a number of years, the Rosenwald building was resurrected in the 1980s as the site of the Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center, a museum dedicated to the former school and to African-American history in Bartow County. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

Webster Wheeler. noblehillwheeler.org

The “Wheeler” in the institution’s title is the surname of the family most closely associated with Noble Hill: Webster Wheeler (1871-1943) was the school’s main builder; Bethel Wheeler was Webster’s son and assistant; Bertha Wheeler was Bethel’s wife who owned the building and donated it for use as a museum; and Susie Weems Wheeler (1917-2007) was the wife of Webster’s son Daniel, who was an early graduate of the school and who served as the driving force behind the establishment of the museum. 

Dr. Susie Wheeler. “Women of Bartow County” exhibit, Bartow History Museum, 2020.

Susie Wheeler had an accomplished career. She received a bachelor’s degree from Fort Valley State College and eventually an Ed.D. from Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University. She taught in Bartow County and later acted as a Jeanes supervisor, that is, a superintendent of Black schools, for Bartow, Gordon, and Polk Counties. She finished her career as curriculum director for the (now integrated) Bartow County Board of Education, and received the Governor’s Award in the Humanities in 2007. She was also a world traveler and 62-year member of Delta Sigma Theta. 

Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center is also closed on account of the virus, but I was fortunate to be given a private tour by museum curator Valerie Coleman. Some items on display:

This quilt, which received an honorable mention at the Atlanta Quilt Festival, records people who were important to Noble Hill, including Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington on the bottom left, and Webster, Bertha, Bethel, and Susie Wheeler above them. The color picture at the top (underneath the “g” and the “H”) is of another notable local figure: Robert Benham (b. 1946) a native of Cartersville and the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia (1989-2020, with a term as Chief Justice 1995-2001). Justice Benham did not attend Noble Hill, but did graduate from Summer Hill in 1963, and was recruited by Susie Wheeler as a trustee of the Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center. In this capacity he arranged for a session of the Supreme Court of Georgia at the Center in 1992!

Justice Robert Benham and other members of the Supreme Court of Georgia at Noble Hill-Wheeler Memorial Center, 1992.

Dr. W.R. Moore.

The Center also possesses the medical books, photos, and certificates of Dr. William Riley Moore (1881-1954), the first African-American doctor in Cartersville. Dr. Moore came to town from Florida (from the city of Bartow, as it happens) in 1910 and established a practice for himself above Gassett’s Grocery (site 5 on the Heritage Trail) in the African-American business district on West Main Street. He later moved his office to Summer Hill and practiced there until his death in 1954. He delivered almost all the Black babies born in Cartersville (and a few white ones too, although this is not something that he could publicly acknowledge). He was also an important community leader and was instrumental in establishing the Faith Cabin Library in Cartersville for the use of African-Americans. Both he and his landlord John Gassett are buried in the Black section of Oak Hill Cemetery (which, surprisingly, is not a site on the Heritage Trail).

Photo: C.P. McAbee.

My final stop on the Heritage Trail was “16. St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church,” also in Cassville. Like the Prince Hall Masons, the AME Church has its origins in the social prejudices of northern whites against Black people. Tired of the restrictions placed on him, the Black Methodist minister Richard Allen founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia in 1794, catering to the free Black population of that city. Other ministers followed his example, and in 1816 he organized the AME Church as an independent denomination, with himself as first bishop. The AME Church spread throughout the South following the Civil War, ministering to freedmen. An AME congregation was organized in Cassville in the late 1860s; the local Presbyterians bequeathed to it their church building, as they were all relocating to Cartersville, the new county seat.† 

Unfortunately this historic congregation has essentially died out, and the church building is disused and not in the best repair (the photo of the interior was provided by my friend Christopher McAbee, who has done research on St. James). There are other active AME congregations in Bartow County, however, and other Black churches (mostly Baptist). It would be nice if some appropriate use could be found for this building – and for the Summer Hill Masonic Hall, for that matter.

But, some will wonder, why do we need to focus on “African-American History” at all? Why all the fuss about people who possess some arbitrary physical attribute that ought to be as trivial as having freckles or being left-handed? This is a natural attitude for people who grew up in mostly-white communities but who have been programmed against racism by everything in their culture. If “we’re all the same underneath,” as they’ve been taught from birth, then why do we pay so much attention to what’s on the surface? Why do we celebrate Black achievements so vociferously, in a way that we don’t for other discrete categories of human?

The answer, of course, is that for the longest time white people believed that we weren’t all the same underneath. My theory is that Early Modern Europeans always had a slightly guilty conscience about slavery – so they invented racism in order to justify it, and thereby made it worse. Slavery is bad, they thought, but it’s not as bad to enslave morally inferior people, clearly marked by their dark skin – in fact, it might even be good for them! Thus, predictably, just because one gets rid of the slavery, doesn’t mean that one gets rid of the racism. Even white Americans in places that had abolished Black slavery in the eighteenth century, and who invaded the Confederacy in order to end the practice, saw no reason to accept free Blacks as social equals. The “races” generally did not mix, and if there was ever a question of the distribution of resources, it was white people who got the lion’s share, if not the whole thing. (If Black people did not like this dispensation, they could always go “back” to Africa. Whites were never enjoined to go “back” to Europe.)

And if this is how Northerners thought, how much more so did Southerners, who in an act of aggression displacement blamed their former slaves for the devastation wrought upon the South by the North, and once they regained control of their states instituted a panoply of laws known by the collective name of “Jim Crow.” Such laws were largely animated by the principle of segregation, the notion that Black people and white people should occupy completely different social spaces, with this division enforced in various formal and informal ways. As this blog post has indicated, during the Jim Crow era in Georgia, Black people and white people had separate: 

• neighborhoods and commercial areas
• schools
• colleges and universities
• churches
• fraternal organizations
• (areas in) cemeteries
• seating areas in restaurants, theaters, and courtrooms
• professional service providers 

One can think of any number of other areas where segregation was applied:

• sports leagues
• recreational facilities like swimming pools and even state parks (e.g. “10. George Washington Carver State Park for Negroes” on Lake Allatoona)
• hotels
• prisons
• public toilets and drinking fountains

And so on. In fairness, sometimes such things were found far beyond the states of the former Confederacy. (But I’ve always distrusted the cliché that “in the North, it doesn’t matter how big you get as long as you don’t get too close, but in the South, it doesn’t matter how close you get as long as you don’t get too big.” What was segregation if not an attempt at keeping people from getting too close?)

The fundamental justification for segregation is that the “races” really are different from each other, really are like oil and water, and for everyone’s sake ought to be kept apart from each other. And the longer segregation went on, the more self-justifying it became. For not only did people look different, with social separation they had evolved different cultures, with different ways of speaking, different ways of interacting, different bodies of background knowledge, and so on. In this way are the races really more than “skin deep” in the United States – phenotype is generally a marker of culture as well. 

So what is wrong with segregation then? What’s wrong with you hanging out with your people, and I hanging out with mine? We self-segregate along such lines all the time, as any observation of the school cafeteria will indicate. What’s the big deal? Well, the answer is that there is a big difference between doing something because you want to, and doing something because you have to. Much more important, however, is the whole issue of power. White people were in command of all levels of government, and whether by law or social custom, segregation was their project, implemented for their (supposed) benefit. During Jim Crow the races were kept apart – with Black people firmly “beneath” white people in any number of ways. As is apparent by now, the separate facilities for Black people were always crappier than those for whites. It’s not white people who had to use the side entrance to Ross’s Diner and eat in the windowless back room, out of public view. It’s not the white schools that received cast-off textbooks from Black schools. Perhaps most important, it is not white people who had to fear vigilante justice from Black mobs, acting in the knowledge that no jury would convict them. On some abstract level “separate but equal” is a tenable proposition, but in reality it never worked that way. (If nothing else, Black people did not get to vote for Black representatives to a Black legislature, passing legislation binding only on Black people.) Thus did the United States Supreme Court rightly reject it in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). 

And yet… for all its faults, segregation did allow Black people to be in control of their own institutions. Shelby Steele has written about this, personally recalling the camaraderie that existed among African-Americans in the face of institutionalized white racism. Was something important lost when Summer Hill closed its doors and its students sent to Cartersville High? Perhaps, and it is interesting to note how some segregation-era organizations live on. The Negro leagues might no longer be with us, but Black churches, fraternities, and HBCUs certainly are – and are clearly valued as such by their members. For if “African-American” is a culture, then African-Americans should be able to have their own spaces where their own culture prevails, even as segregation is legally and morally forbidden otherwise. And forbidden for a good reason – people might generally want to hang out with people “like them,” but it’s nice to have the option not to, and it is this compulsory aspect of segregation that is so depressing, a blanket statement that cross-racial amity is simply impossible. It’s also just inefficient: imagine having to spend all that effort policing this boundary, and having to provide two of everything. 

I applaud the Cartersville-Bartow Convention and Visitors’ Bureau for creating the Heritage Trail – and I’m pleased to note that the Georgia Downtown Association agrees with me. I have discovered that the Georgia Historical Society has actually replaced the Georgia Historical Commission as the body responsible for the erection of new historical markers, with the specific mandate of correcting some of the biases of the past. I certainly believe that many of the items in the Heritage Trail pamphlet deserve to be memorialized publicly in metal (not just with QR codes). Summer Hill School is surely as important as the precise locations of the troops of Johnston, Hardee, and Polk at 5 P.M. on May 19, 1864. 

* Although in fairness I should note that several African-American women, including Susie Wheeler and Louise Young Harris (pastor of Queen Chapel in Kingston), are included in the temporary Women of Bartow exhibit on the first floor.

** See the section on Cassville in Lisa Russell’s Lost Towns of North Georgia (2016).

*** According to the pamphlet, 118 N. Erwin St. was commandeered in 1864 for use as a post office by Mrs. Field’s cousin, Union Army Colonel Benjamin Harrison of Indiana. Such an action infuriated Mrs. Field and she refused to welcome Harrison into her home ever again… even after he became the 23rd president of the United States!

† The Presbyterian/AME church building was one of only a few to survive the burning of Cassville on November 5, 1864. 

Civil War Galore

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My exploration of the Atlanta Campaign prompted me to take a day trip further north to see some of the other sites in that campaign, in particular Rocky Face Ridge, Resaca, and Rome Cross Roads. But as is usual with such tourism, you always discover other things when you’re out, such as the Chetoogeta Mountain Tunnel and the Monastery of the Glorious Ascension. But there is a lot more Civil War stuff in Georgia too. This post deals with some of it, and how it is memorialized. 

In Catoosa County, almost in Tennessee, one finds the main site for the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. I regret to say that I was completely unaware of how massive (and massively deadly) the Battle of Chickamauga was in the course of the Civil War. Fought on September 18-20, 1863, it featured some 60,000 Union troops fighting 65,000 Confederates – producing, respectively, 16,000 and 18,000 casualties. Only Gettysburg had a higher toll. That this was a victory for the Confederacy in a war it ultimately lost, I suppose, puts it outside the narrative, so to speak, so it does not surprise me that Gettysburg is better known. 

In 1890, Congress authorized the foundation of this park, along with parks for the Battles of Gettysburg, Shiloh, and Vicksburg, in the first wave of federal Civil War preservation. To my chagrin the visitors’ center at Chickamauga was closed on account of the virus, but at 5300 acres, the park provides lots of things to see. These include artillery pieces:

Battlefield markers:

Plenty of signs explaining exactly what went on at various points in the battle (in gray for Confederate movements, and blue for Union):

And lots of monuments, contributed by various parties:

Florida.

Illinois

Indiana.

Kentucky, honoring soldiers who fought on both sides.

Gettysburg is like this too, if I recall correctly from a visit there many years ago. It is good to remember. The more monuments and markers, the better.

Today, this park has five other satellite sites, at Orchard Knob (for a battle fought there on Nov. 23, 1863), Lookout Mountain (Nov. 24, 1863), and Missionary Ridge (Nov. 25, 1863) – all commemorating subsequent Union victories in defense of Chattanooga, counting as part of the Chattanooga Campaign – plus Moccasin Bend (an American Indian site) and Signal Point (a Civil War signal station). But Chickamauga is the showpiece, and I’m looking forward to returning some day when the buildings are open, and when the weather is not quite as hot. 

The final battle in the Chattanooga Campaign was the battle of Ringgold Gap (Nov. 27, 1863), which counts as a Confederate victory because Patrick Cleburne held up Union forces, allowing Confederates and their equipment to escape, although the Union troops occupied Ringgold shortly thereafter. Ringgold Gap is not part of the national park, but one can view this GHC marker just outside of Ringgold, Ga. Do I detect a celebratory tone?

Cleburne certainly merits a statue…

…and outside the Ringgold railway depot flies Hardee’s flag. William J. Hardee was not at Ringgold Gap, but elements of his corps were, and Cleburne’s corps used the flag as well (my thanks to Eb Daniels for telling me about this). Thus does Ringgold accurately celebrate its Civil War heritage, while avoiding the Confederate Battle Flag that causes so much offense. 

Cleburne is noted for something else, which is edifying to our current sensibilities. On January 2, 1864, while stationed at Dalton, he offered up a “Proposal to Enlist Slaves and Guarantee Freedom to All Loyal Negroes.” According to an interpretive sign placed recently by Georgia’s Civil War Commission:

He cited that throughout history, slaves had fought beside master in many conflicts, and that the North was only using the slavery issue as “merely a pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government.” Remove slavery as a war factor and the foundations of the North’s argument would crumble. Cleburne also knew that Great Britain and France would likely recognize the South as a sovereign nation once it emancipated its own slaves.

But another marker, placed by the Georgia Historical Society in 2014 outside the Huff House in Dalton, which was serving as Johnston’s winter headquarters, tells that:

almost all the other generals present opposed the idea of black Confederate soldiers because it violated the principles upon which the Confederacy was founded. Gen. Patton Anderson said the proposal “would shake our governments, both state and Confederate, to their very foundations,” and Gen. A.P. Stewart said it was “at war with my social, moral, and political principles.” Considering the proposal treasonous, Gen. W.H.T. Walker informed President Jefferson Davis, who ordered any mention of it to be suppressed.

So despite the opinion of the Irish-born Cleburne, and some thirteen other officers who endorsed his proposal, it looks like the Confederate States of America really was all about slavery. Eventually the CSA did authorize a version of Cleburne’s proposal… on March 13, 1865, less than a month before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Bit late for that, I guess!

Ringgold Gap was also where Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign began on May 7, 1864. Here is a WPA marker testifying to this event.

Seven miles away, also on May 7, Union forces seized the Western & Atlantic Railroad Tunnel and its namesake town. A GHC sign tells about it, in the usual stilted style. 

Right beside the western entrance to the railroad tunnel stands the Clisby Austin house, which had served as a railway hotel, then a Confederate hospital, and then as Sherman’s headquarters from May 7 to May 12, 1864. 

Google maps.

I made this map to show some of the places significant to the opening days of the Atlanta Campaign. After Ringgold and Tunnel Hill, the next major encounter was at Rocky Face Ridge. The underlined “Rocky Face” on the map in fact denotes Mill Creek Gap, which the Confederates had spent the previous winter fortifying, including by damming Mill Creek. Turns out that this operation was quite effective at keeping Union troops at bay.

According to another sign, Mill Creek Gap earned the nickname “Buzzard’s Roost,” on account of one soldier’s observation that “buzzards are roosting up there, waiting for us to die.” 

But in what became a common occurrence during the Atlanta campaign, Sherman simply used his superior numbers to outflank Confederate defenses. Dug Gap (marked with a blue star on the map) and Snake Creek Gap (marked with a red star) turned out to be just as useful for getting through Rocky Face Ridge. 

Thus did Johnston abandon Dalton and retreat to Resaca, where the pattern repeated itself. An attempt by Union troops against the Confederate line was unsuccessful, so Sherman ordered a flanking movement to the  south, crossing the Oostanaula River with Cumberland pontoon bridges and forcing another Confederate retreat. 

Of the four GHC markers at Resaca, this one is the most lucid.

But the NPS marker is more clear…

…and the WPA marker actually illustrates what happened.

The Battle of Resaca may have been inconclusive, but it produced some 2800 casualties for the Confederacy, many of whom were hastily buried, or not buried at all. When the local Green family returned to their home in 1866, they were shocked by this sight, and Mary Jane Green, who had served as matron in hospital in Macon during the war, decided to do something about it. Through newspaper advertisements across the South she raised $2000, and got her father to grant her 2.5 acres of land, on which she and her family painstakingly reinterred the Confederate war dead, identifying those they could, and placing those they could not around a large granite cross inscribed “For the Unknown Dead.” The dedication of the Resaca Confederate Cemetery took place on October 25, 1866, and is tied with a cemetery in Winchester, Virginia as the first such cemetery in the country. 

The project put Miss Green $500 in debt, so she petitioned the legislature for a grant to cover it – the first woman known to have addressed that body. Not only did they cover the $500, they gave her a further $3500 to rebury the dead of Chickamauga. She died in 1924 and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. 

The next action in the campaign took place at Adairsville on May 17, 1864 – for which see a previous post, and the marker below, which I discovered at the intersection of Cassville Rd. NW and US-41 in Cassville. It gives further details about why Johnston’s attempted ambush of Union troops failed, but gives the credit to Edward McCook (not Daniel Butterfield) for spoiling it. I believe that Spring Place Road on the map is now Cedar Creek Road. 

Old Highway 41, along which most of the Atlanta Campaign markers may be found, had been part of the Dixie Highway, which at one point was the only way to drive from Chicago or Detroit to Florida for the winter. Thus did everyone along the route try to cash in on this traffic, by providing food or accommodation, or some roadside attraction or other reason to stop. See Down the Dixie Highway (56-minute video) for more. The WPA markers seem to be part of this: they are in fact located in “pocket parks” along the route – small parks enclosed by short walls, which would have provided a nice place for a break or a picnic. 

Cassville.

Resaca.

Mill Creek Gap.

It is interesting to see the different “layers” presented at these sites, although nothing quite matches the variety of memorials found at New Hope Church in Dallas. I appreciated the clarity (and neutrality) of the WPA/NPS markers in the pocket parks – it would have been nice if they had built one at Adairsville. The GHC markers are more common, but can also be for pretty obscure things, not written all that well, and occasionally biased towards the CSA. Markers put up by local history societies or the Georgia Historical Society are pretty good, although they’re much less common – and perhaps a bit biased in the other direction.* Best of all are the interpretive signs sponsored by the Georgia Civil War Commission and put up by Georgia Civil War Heritage Trails, Inc., I believe during the sesquicentennial years of 2011-2015. By that point technology allowed the integration of text and colored graphics, and the signs are informative and apparently well-researched, with no marked bias that I could ascertain. I hope that whatever material they are made of ends up surviving the elements.

Two observations in conclusion. When dealing with warfare, one is reminded that “history” is often simply an artificial order imposed on the past to try to make some sense of it. There is a formal list of the battles of the Atlanta campaign, but there were a lot of skirmishes and “demonstrations” that are not included in that list – and you just know that there were all sorts of things that happened that did not make it into the official record at all, given the sheer numbers of men involved and the fact that so many of them did not actually survive. This leads to the second observation: War really is Hell. As peaceful as these battlefields and cemeteries might be today, one cannot help but realize that huge numbers of young men died or were permanently disfigured in particularly gruesome (and often quite avoidable) ways during the Civil War. It is good to remember this, if only so that we can avoid it as much as possible in the future. 

* Note how the Carter center marker claims that Sherman’s troops “only destroyed property used for waging war,” but in the next sentence claims that they “lived off the land, destroying food they could not consume,” as if Southern civilians did not need food. One does not need to be Lost Causer to object to that. 

The Western and Atlantic Railroad

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Google maps. The purple dots delineate the course of the W&A. 

The Western & Atlantic Railroad, or simply the “State Road,” connecting “Terminus” (Atlanta) and “Ross’s Landing” (Chattanooga), was chartered in 1836 and completed by 1850. It has been referenced several times on this blog; much more information is available in Ken Wheeler’s forthcoming book Modern Cronies. The final piece in the W&A puzzle was the construction of a tunnel (largely by slave labor, it must be acknowledged) beneath Chetoogeta Mountain in Whitfield County, marked with a black star on the map. This project gave rise to the nearby settlement of Tunnelsville, later renamed Tunnel Hill. A wider, parallel tunnel was constructed in 1928, leaving the disused original tunnel to serve as a footpath through the mountain. Motion-sensing lights turn on as you walk through, and the ambient temperature is nice and cool, which is a relief on a hot day.

A photo of the entrance to the original tunnel; you can barely see the light at the end of it. To the left, the date “1928” can be seen through the chainlink fence over the newer tunnel (the actual entrance being obscured by kudzu). 

A Georgia Historic Marker gives more detail. I’m glad to note that by the 1990s, the makers of these signs realized that you could fit more text on them if you just decreased its font size, and that they are more appealing when written in standard English. However, according to Bradley Putnam, a local historian with whom had the pleasure of speaking, the first number should be 1477 (not 1447) – he has measured the tunnel’s length himself. 

A museum on the premises gives more information about the W&A. The display in the foreground is of some rails recovered from a local creek in 2011. They are placed over a pile of ties to illustrate how one can do irreparable damage to a railroad if one is interested in doing so during time of war. The sign explains that the ties would be set on fire, and the heat would melt the rails and cause them to droop under their own weight – you can see that this has in fact happened to one of them. If circumstances permitted, for added destructiveness the heated rails could be twisted around a tree – thus acquiring the nickname “Sherman’s Neckties.”

Across the tracks, the old railroad depot still stands…

…and is, indeed, being rehabilitated for a new purpose. 

Further up the tracks in Ringgold, Georgia, stands another railway depot. It is marked with a blue star on the map above. 

This one took some damage during the Civli War and had to be restored, thus its present piebald appearance.

The historical marker tells more, although the building hasn’t been in continuous use as a railway depot necessarily. It is now an event venue available for weddings or other functions.

Wikipedia.

And, of course, one cannot talk about the W&A without mentioning the Great Locomotive Chase of April 12, 1862, “one of the most colorful exploits of the Civil War,” as the first sign says above. 

North of Ringgold the W&A runs parallel to Highway 151, and about two miles out of town (marked with a red star on the map), one encounters a monument at the place where Andrews’ Raiders abandoned their hijacked locomotive The General, having run out of fuel for it.

An artist’s interpretation of this event may be found on Wikipedia. The backwards-running Texas may be seen on the left. All the raiders were captured; spare a thought for the eight who were executed as spies and “unlawful combatants.” 

Allatoona Pass

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The creation of Lake Allatoona in 1950 necessitated a shift in the Western & Atlantic Railroad slightly to the west in places. The abandoned pilings on the Etowah River are one indication of this; the abandoned Allatoona Pass, further to the south, is another. 

Google Maps.

You can see the location of the current track, rendered as a faint horizontal line just below Old Allatoona Road SE. The darker dotted line to the north mostly follows the track as it was in the nineteenth century.

I’m not sure why the railroad ever took this route in the first place, because it necessitated the creation of a deep cutting. But these days it provides a nice setting for a walk. Andrews’ Raiders would have driven the stolen General through here. 

I love the use of little flags as “emojis.”

But the place is far more significant historically for the Battle of Allatoona, fought on October 5, 1864. This took place after Sherman occupied Kingston (in May), after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain (June-July), and after the Battle of Atlanta (which fell September 2) – all engagements in the Atlanta Campaign. (Sherman, who had worked as a young army lieutenant in the region, knew about Allatoona Pass and that it would be “very strong, and hard to force, and resolved not even to attempt it.” So he simply went around it on his way to Atlanta. The Confederates retreated, and the Union troops took Allatoona unopposed on June 1.)

Nineteenth century photograph of Allatoona Pass, from an interpretive sign at Allatoona Pass Battlefield.

The real fighting took place as part of the Franklin-Nashville Campaign, an attempt by the Confederacy to disrupt Union supply lines. Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood abandoned Atlanta to Sherman and retreated to Lovejoy’s Station south of the city. Near the end of September, he moved his troops to Palmetto, Ga. where he met with CSA President Jefferson Davis to devise strategy. They decided that they would retrace the steps of the the Atlanta Campaign, but in reverse – Hood would move his troops north along the Western & Atlantic Railroad, wrecking property now held by the Union and hoping to entice Sherman to follow him, and to force an open battle on ground favorable to the Confederates. As the historical marker makes clear, on Oct. 3, Lt. Gen. Alexander Stewart seized Big Shanty (i.e. Kennesaw) and Acworth, and on Oct. 4 Samuel French moved towards the Union garrison at Allatoona. Unlike Sherman, French was not prepared to outflank it. 

From an interpretive sign at Allatoona Pass Battlefield. Underlining added. 

Union troops occupied positions on the tops of the hills on either side of the cutting. These are “Rowett’s Redoubt” and “Eastern Redoubt” on the map. To the east of Rowett’s Redoubt is the so-called “Star Fort” that Union troops retreated to. To the west of the Eastern Reboubt is “Headquarters – Fourth Minnesota,” a wood-frame “dog-trot” cabin where Lt. Col. John Eaton Tourtellotte stationed himself. The two sides of the railway cutting were connected by a footbridge. 

Contrary to Confederate hopes, Sherman did not give chase to Hood, but did order Gen. John M. Corse to move his troops from Rome, Ga. and to assume command of the defense of Allatoona. Corse and his men arrived by rail just hours before the Confederate bombardment began in the early morning of Oct. 5. After two hours of this, French declared a truce and sent a message to Corse: 

I have the forces under my command and in such positions that you are surrounded and, in order to avoid a needless effusion of blood, I call upon you to surrender your forces at once, and unconditionally. Five minutes will be allotted you to decide. Should you accede to this , you will be treated in the most honorable manner as prisoners of war.

According to Sherman’s memoirs, Corse replied:

Your communication demanding surrender of my command I acknowledge receipt of, and respectfully reply that we are prepared for the “needless effusion of blood” whenever it is agreeable to you.

Such a response is rhetorically edifying, no doubt, which might cause one to suspect whether it actually happened. Certainly, the interpretive sign claims that Corse gave no response, and after fifteen minutes French called off the truce and began a ground assault. 

From an interpretive sign at Allatoona Pass Battlefield.

This map gives a general sense of what happened next. French ordered Francis Cockrell and William Young, commanding troops from Missouri and Texas, to attack from the west, and Claudius Sears, commanding troops from Mississippi, to attack from the north. Troops under Richard Rowett defended the hill on the western side of the cutting, while Tourtellotte’s troops defended the hill on the eastern side.

On the western side the fighting was intense. Union troops made effective use of their Henry Repeating rifles and Napoleon gun, but the Confederates would not quit, and despite taking enormous casualties, they eventually reached Rowett’s Redoubt. Soon “fierce hand-to-hand fighting with clubbed muskets, fists, swords, and even rocks” forced the Union troops to retreat to the Star Fort dragging their Napoleon with them. The fighting continued, even injuring Gen. Corse, who lost a cheek bone and one ear. Despite receiving some supplies and men over the footbridge, by the early afternoon Union troops in the Star Fort were pinned down, out of water, and almost out of ammunition.

(Events unfolded a bit better for the Union on the eastern side of the cutting. From their trenches, Union troops managed to repulse two Confederate regiments and deliver enfilading fire against a third. Some Confederate troops took refuge in a gulley where they could neither attack nor be attacked; they surrendered and were taken prisoner after the battle.)

What brought the battle to a close was not a decisive military maneuver on either side, but the receipt of a piece of intelligence by French, which stated that Union troops were on the march from Big Shanty. Fearing that he would either be overwhelmed by this force or cut off from the rest of the Confederate army encamped at Dallas, Ga., and in need of more troops and supplies for a final assault on the Star Fort, French reluctantly ordered a withdrawal around 2:00 PM. Thus is the Battle of Allatoona considered a Union victory – they held the position, and prevented over one million rations stored there from being taken or destroyed by the Confederates. 

But this victory came at an immense cost. Of Corse’s 2000 men, some 700 (an astonishing 35%) were casualties of the battle. Numbers on the Confederate side were not much better: of 3300 men, 900 were casualties, for a rate of 27%. The Battle of Allatoona was “one of the most deadly and stubbornly contested of the war.” Private Harvey M. Trimble of the 93rd Illinois wrote that:

The scene in that ravine after the battle was ended, was beyond all powers of description. All the languages of the earth combined are inadequate to tell half its horrors. Mangled and torn in every conceivable manner, the dead and wounded were everywhere, in heaps and windrows. Enemies though they were, their conquerors, only a few minutes removed from the heat and passion of battle, sickened and turned away, or remaining, looked only with great compassion, and through tears, upon that field of blood and carnage and death, upon that wreck of high hopes and splendid courage, that hecatomb of human life.

French did get his surviving troops back to Dallas, but the rest of the Franklin-Nashville campaign went about as well as the Battle of Allatoona did for the Confederates. Hood ended up resigning his commission in early 1865, having been chased to Tupelo, Mississippi after a major defeat at the Battle of Nashville (Dec. 15-16, 1864). Sherman, for his part, did not really bother with Hood – he began his March to the Sea on November 15 and took Savannah on December 20. By this point in the war, there was little doubt which side would eventually win it. 

One final detail about this battle deserves mentioning. Communication was possible between Sherman and Allatoona on account of the Crow’s Nest, a signal tower atop a Georgia pine, which could send and receive messages from Kennesaw Mountain (with, presumably, further relays to stations southwards). 

From an interpretive sign at Allatoona Pass Battlefield.

Popular legend has it that either prior to or during the battle General Sherman signaled “Hold the fort, I am coming,” which stiffened Corse’s resolve and dissuaded him from surrendering. Again, this information did not make it onto the interpretive sign, perhaps because no contemporary record or such communication can be found (note the “citation needed” comments at Wikiquote). Apparently, though, this quotation inspired Chicago evangelist Philip Bliss to compose a hymn. I had never heard “Hold the Fort” before, perhaps because such explicitly militaristic hymns are no longer in fashion:

Ho, my comrades, see the signal, waving in the sky!
Reinforcements now appearing, victory is nigh.

Refrain:
“Hold the fort, for I am coming,” Jesus signals still;
Wave the answer back to Heaven, “By Thy grace we will.”

See the mighty host advancing, Satan leading on;
Mighty ones around us falling, courage almost gone!

See the glorious banner waving! Hear the trumpet blow!
In our Leader’s Name we triumph over every foe.

Fierce and long the battle rages, but our help is near;
Onward comes our great Commander, cheer, my comrades, cheer!

Remains of the Star Fort.

Remains of the Eastern Redoubt.

Allatoona is much more tranquil today, of course. It is reforested, and the trenches are faint – and unfortunately iPhone photos do them even less justice. But it is good to be able to see what remains, and remember why they were constructed in the first place. 

The information above has been gleaned from Wikipedia and from the numerous interpretive signs throughout the battlefield. We commend Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites for its historically accurate flag graphic on these signs.

The U.S. flag has 35 stars, for the number of states claimed at the time, the most recent being West Virginia (1863; flag updated July 4 of that year). The CSA flag is its second national flag, which debuted in 1863. They’ve even got the proportions right!

Alas, the canton of the “Stainless Banner” features the ever-controversial battle flag, prompting its effacement on some of the signs. But objecting to its presence in such a neutral and didactic context is just dumb. 

Fortunately, vandalism has not yet been visited upon the Memorial Ground, which features monuments for all the states of the soldiers at the Battle of Allatoona – five Union and six Confederate. Interestingly, Georgia is not represented among them. 

I reproduce photos of some of the monuments below. If I had better software I would edit out my reflection as it appears. (As an aside: isn’t it interesting how Americans love the shapes of their states?) 

Another monument, the Grave of the Unknown Hero, may be found at a location marked by the blue star on the map.

Google maps.

An interpretive sign at the red star on the map gives further information:

Local families once recalled that a few days after the battle, a wooden box addressed “Allatoona, Georgia” arrived at the station with no information as to its origin. Six local women found a deceased Confederate soldier in the box and buried him alongside the railroad in a location lost to history. Local historians believe that the burial on this spot is not the soldier the ladies buried, but Private Andrew Jackson Houston of Mississippi, who died here in the battle and was buried where he fell.

Forgotten to time for several yers, in 1880 this site was marked with an iron fence and a marble headstone inscribed “AN UNKNOWN HERO, He died for the Cause He thought was right.” Railroad employees maintained the grave for many years and later moved the grave to its present site when the rail line was relocated.

It is interesting that nothing Confederate currently decorates the grave of the Unknown Hero – despite that he was originally designated as Confederate by the people who buried him. By the early twentieth century the idea was that he could have been on either side, as expressed in this poem by Georgia Governor Joseph M. Brown – a seeming attempt at “reconciliation.”

From an interpretive sign at Allatoona Pass Battlefield.

But I guess he was ultimately “Unionized.” I assume there’s a lesson of some sort here. 

Most of the other victims of the battle were buried where they died in unmarked graves, although some Union soldiers were eventually reinterred in the Marietta National Cemetery.

The railroad, as my students are fond of saying about various historical things, is “still in use today.”