Destination: Atlanta

Disunion

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

One hot August day in 1864, Cpl. Joseph W. Ely of the 19th Michigan sat down in his camp in northern Georgia to write his sister Adelia. Ely’s regiment had been engaged in almost constant marching and fighting since the Atlanta Campaign began three months earlier. Now the men were on the outskirts of Atlanta, hunkered down in trenches under deadly rifle and artillery fire.

Apparently, Ely had read that the folks back home were under the impression that the Atlanta Campaign was all but over. In his letter, he disabused Adelia of that notion:

I see the people in Michigan have been made to believe that we have taken Atlanta, but they are slightly mistaken. It is no child’s play to take it. Many good lives have been lost trying to take it and I fear a good many more will be lost before our army marches into the streets of Atlanta.

Gen. William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, which ended with the city’s fall in early September, has often been described as one of maneuvers more than large battles. While that may be true when compared with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s much bloodier Overland Campaign in Virginia, underway that summer, in fact few Civil War campaigns were as grueling in terms of poor living conditions and daily combat attrition.

Photo
Union troops during the siege of Atlanta.Credit Library of Congress

The 19th Michigan certainly saw its share of the suffering. Mustered into service in September 1862 under Col. Henry C. Gilbert, it was placed in Col. John Coburn’s brigade with the 22nd Wisconsin and the 33rd and 85th Indiana. The men spent nearly a year on occupation duty in Tennessee before being ordered to join Sherman in Georgia.

The regiment’s first significant action took place on May 15, at Resaca, Ga., when Coburn’s brigade was sent forward against a fortified Confederate artillery battery. In the ensuing fight, the regiment helped capture the four rebel cannons, but Colonel Gilbert was mortally wounded, and three color bearers were shot down. In just a few hours of combat, 23 of the 19th Michigan’s soldiers were killed, and 64 were wounded.

After Gen. Joseph E. Johnston abandoned Resaca and retreated to another strong defensive position, Sherman left his railroad supply line and marched southwest toward New Hope Church in an attempt to flank the rebels. Gen. Joe Hooker’s 20th Corps, which included the 19th Michigan, led the march. As they approached New Hope Church on May 25, the men learned that the rebels had discovered their maneuver and were waiting for them somewhere in the dense woods ahead.

The sun had already set by the time Coburn led his men through the thick brush toward the enemy. The dark forest exploded with musket fire just as a violent thunderstorm swept over the area. Blinding sheets of rain pelted the men, jagged lightning lit up the battlefield and the sound of musket fire mixed with ground-shaking peals of thunder. Henry Noble, a member of Ely’s company, described the fight in a letter to his wife:

Forward we went, the front lines falling back as we came up. It was so dark by that time that we could hardly see the confederate lines, but the flash of their guns was a sure guide. There we lay for the space of an hour firing as fast as we could load.

The soldiers nicknamed the area the “Hell Hole.” One Confederate who visited the battleground wrote, “The trees looked as if they had been cut down for new ground, being mutilated and shivered by musket and cannon balls. Horses were writhing in their death agony, and the sickening odor of battle filled the air.”

Photo
The Atlanta Campaign, May to July 1864. View Map»Credit Hal Jespersen

That evening, 51 men of the 19th Michigan were killed wounded. When the shooting slackened that night, Ely, Noble and two other men found one of their comrades, Frederick Campbell, groaning in the mud from a chest wound. Noble recalled carrying him to the rear:

He requested us to let him rest and we laid him down. I held his head until we perceived that he was gone and then we left him. He told me to give his love to his father, brothers & sisters and then died without a struggle.

Both armies dug in and engaged in deadly trench warfare for the next week. On one occasion, Ely’s ramrod was shot from his hands, and the next day Noble was writing his wife when a nearby commotion startled him:

There! A ball from a confederate sharpshooter’s gun came among us and killed the Orderly Sergt. of Co. D not over two rods from where I am writing. I tell you Ruth, life is uncertain here. The bullets are whizzing past us all the time and every few minutes some one is getting either killed or wounded. The same ball that killed the sergt. wounded another man in the leg.

Coburn’s exhausted brigade was finally relieved on June 1. The 19th Michigan had entered the campaign with 717 officers and men. Now, just a month later, it was down to 404. Sgt. Phinehas Hager noted the effect the strain was having:

The boys are all very much tired out, and very much effected by the circumstances under which we are placed. There is not half the levity and profanity that I have usually seen in camp. Few men can look upon death with indifference; and especially upon death under such appalling circumstances, as we view it here.

Accepting the stalemate at New Hope Church, Sherman disengaged and moved back east to the railroad. Johnston followed suit and established a strong line near Lost Mountain. On June 15, near Gilgal Church, the 19th Michigan attacked across a road under heavy artillery fire to support another unit that was being hard-pressed. One shell tore off a sergeant’s leg, and a lieutenant had the skin ripped off his leg from kneecap to hip. Maj. Eli Griffin, the new commanding officer, was shot in the chest, just like his predecessor, and taken to the rear on a blanket. Although surgeons removed the bullet, Griffin died the following morning. Ten days earlier he had predicted to a comrade, “I am going to get killed,” and left instructions for the care of his belongings.

Related
Disunion Highlights

Fort Sumter

Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.

Johnston next withdrew to a line near Kennesaw Mountain, and on June 22 Coburn was ordered to occupy a small hill near Kolb’s Farm. He did so with minimal losses, but among the wounded was Corporal Ely. It was only after the charge was over that he noticed his hand felt warm and saw that his ring finger had been nearly severed at the first joint. Rather than risk returning to the field hospital under fire, Ely cut off the fingertip with his pocketknife and wrapped the stub with a handkerchief. Cyress Wheeler, one of Ely’s comrades, suffered an identical wound to the index finger but chose to return to the rear to let the surgeons amputate it. He contracted gangrene, lost his arm at the shoulder, and died a month later. Ely lived until 1923.

Ely was assigned to the field hospital while his finger healed but dutifully kept a record of his regiment’s casualties. On the Fourth of July he noted in his diary:

Lieut. [Augustus] Lilly was taken sick yesterday, he was sun struck. A number of men were sun struck. … Carlton Norton was wounded to day with a piece of shell. Several were wounded with shells. … I took care of him for three hours. The piece of shell is still inside of him.

Johnston’s constant retreating angered Jefferson Davis, and the president finally replaced him with John Bell Hood. Hood immediately assumed the offensive and launched a vicious attack on July 20 against Gen. George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland as it crossed Peachtree Creek.

One of Coburn’s men happened to see the approaching rebels while beyond the lines picking blackberries and informed the colonel. Coburn immediately formed his brigade and charged the approaching enemy. The fighting was brutal and often hand-to-hand, but the rebels were defeated. During the battle, the 19th Michigan’s Capt. Frank Baldwin charged into the enemy line and captured a Confederate battle flag and two officers, an act for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor (he was awarded a second medal during the western Indian wars).

Afterward, while burying the rebel dead, Pvt. Justin Austin was shocked to find a badly wounded woman in a Confederate uniform. He wrote home, “She was shot in the breast and through the thy & was still alive & as gritty as any reb I ever saw.” The 19th Michigan had taken 300 men into the Battle of Peachtree Creek and suffered 40 dead and wounded. Maj. John Baker, who had replaced the fallen Griffin, was severely wounded and the regimental command fell to the senior captain.

By the end of July, Sherman’s armies were within shelling distance of Atlanta and began firing as many as 3,000 rounds a day into the city. Ely enjoyed watching the bombardment, and in one letter to his sister wrote, “It is a beautiful sight to the see the shells burst over the houses. … It is terrible what those people are going through, but they deserve everything they are getting!”

To break the stalemate, Sherman left the 20th Corps north of Atlanta to guard the railroad, and took the rest of his force around the west side of Atlanta to attack Hood’s supply lines. After several bloody battles, the tactic proved successful, and the city fell on Sept. 2.

Throughout the night of Sept. 1, Coburn’s men heard massive explosions inside Atlanta, but Sept. 2 dawned strangely quiet. At 6 a.m., Coburn took most of the 19th Michigan and parts of other units and crept toward the silent Confederate trenches. He found that the rebels had abandoned Atlanta, and the mayor and a small group of civilians were waiting to surrender the city.

Of the 717 men in the 19th Michigan who started the campaign, 225 had become casualties. Only their sister regiment, the 33rd Indiana, had suffered more, with 242 casualties. But there was still eight months of war to go, and the regiment accompanied Sherman on his March to the Sea and Carolinas Campaign before being mustered out of service on May 24, 1865. During its three years of service, 1,238 officers and men served in the 19th Michigan. Ninety-five were killed or mortally wounded, and 142 died from diseases and other causes.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.


Sources: William M. Anderson, “They Died to Make Men Free: A History of the 19th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War”; Terry L. Jones, “‘The Flash of Their Guns was a Sure Guide’: The 19th Michigan Infantry in the Atlanta Campaign,” in Theodore Savas and David Woodbury, eds., “The Campaign for Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea”; Terry L. Jones, “‘This Cruel War:’ Joseph W. Ely and the Nineteenth Michigan in the Civil War” (M.A. thesis, Louisiana Tech University, 1979); John McBride, “History of the Thirty-third Indiana Veteran Volunteer Infantry”; and United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.


 Terry L. Jones

Terry L. Jones is a professor of history at the University of Louisiana, Monroe and the author of several books on the Civil War.