The Burning of Atlanta

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On the evening of Nov. 15, 1864, Union Lt. Col. Charles Fessenden Morse sat on the roof of a house and watched Atlanta burn. It was a “magnificent and awful spectacle,” he wrote later to his brother Robert. “For miles around the country was as light as day, … the flames shooting up for hundreds of feet into the air.” Earlier, over the roar and crackle of the flames, Morse had heard the 33rd Massachusetts band serenade Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who ordered the city torched. “It was like fiddling over the burning of Rome.” The next morning, nothing was left of the city “except its churches the city hall and the private dwellings. You could hardly find a vestige of the once splendid R.R. depots, warehouses, &c. It was melancholy,” Morse lamented, “but it was war, prosecuted in deadly earnest.”

Morse, an officer in the Second Massachusetts, had volunteered for the Union war effort at the first opportunity in April 1861. He and his comrades fought in the Eastern Theater from 1861 to 1863; Morse was promoted to captain in Company B and, after Gettysburg, to lieutenant colonel. He and his men then took trains to Tennessee and served under Henry Slocum in Sherman’s Georgia campaign.

When he arrived on its outskirts in the summer of 1864, Atlanta was intact. Morse yearned to see “that devoted city,” whose “spires and towers [rose] in plain sight above the everlasting forests” of northern Georgia. He participated in the siege and watched the lit fuses of shells as they arced over Union camps and disappeared into the city’s streets, exploding and kindling large fires. During the battles for Atlanta that fall, Morse had a couple of close calls. “One shell burst within ten feet of me throwing me flat by its concussion and covering me with dirt,” he told Robert. And another time, “while I was trying to eat a little breakfast a shot struck the board which my plate was on and sent things flying.”

When Atlanta finally fell on Sept. 2, Morse had an opportunity to observe the wreckage. Most of the buildings had been abandoned and some had been burned by retreating Confederates attempting to keep war matériel out of Union hands. “Our shells destroyed a great deal of property,” Morse noted. “I am sorry now that a single one was thrown into the city. I don’t think it hastened the surrender by a day, it did no harm to the rebel army, the only casualties being twenty harmless old men, women, and children, and two soldiers. There are differences of opinion about this kind of warfare, but I don’t like it.”

Morse’s assessment of siege warfare and his feelings of regret were common in Union camps in 1864. On the one hand, cities played a central role in both Union and Confederate military strategies. It was not enough to have the strongest or largest army in the field; one must take the enemy’s centers of production and politics as well. And under the established laws of warfare, cities were legitimate military targets.

On the other hand, the presence of noncombatants within them complicated the moral calculus of bombardment. In the discussions about “civilized warfare” that circulated during the Civil War, engaging in acts of destruction hurtful to “women, children, sick, wounded, and aged” was disreputable at best and the work of what Southerners called “the Vandal horde” at worst. Morse vacillated on this issue but ultimately embraced the most common defense of siege and hard war tactics: military necessity.

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Morse agreed with Sherman – whom he judged “the most original character and greatest genius there is in this country” – that the citizens of Atlanta had brought destruction upon themselves. Even though the shelling of the city seemed “almost inhuman,” Morse concluded that it was simply “one of the horrors of war.”

In early November, Union Col. William Cogswell, who had been “ordered to prepare this place for destruction,” gave Morse — a trained architect who had studied engineering at Harvard before the war — “charge of about half of it.” Morse submitted a proposal for how to raze the city; he and his men would “mine and blow up two depots larger and finer than any in Boston … [we] also shall blow up some solid stone round houses, freight houses, chimneys &c. the rest of the destruction will be by fire– … For at least two miles along the railroad the buildings are almost continuous. The warehouses cover at least five acres so you see there will be quite a fire.” Morse was proud of his proposed strategy. “This is new business for me,” he admitted to Robert, “but I believe I have made a perfectly feasible plan for it.”

Morse sat up on that roof until the early morning hours of Nov. 16 watching the “grand display” that reduced Atlanta to a city “of no more importance than the most insignificant town in Georgia.” Then he clambered down, gathered his men and marched out of the city toward Decatur. As he did, he turned his back on the smoking ruins of Atlanta, material reminders of the significance of urban areas to military strategy, and of war prosecuted in deadly earnest.

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Sources: Charles F. Morse Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Morse, “Letters Written During the Civil War” (1898) and “A Sketch of My Life” (1927); Anne Sarah Rubin., “Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory”; Marc Wortman, “The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta.”

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian and cultural critic. She is author of “Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War.” Her blog, Historista, examines how people engage with history in everyday life.