Fought on July 28, 1864, the Battle of Ezra Church was a dramatic engagement during the Civil War's Atlanta campaign. Confederate forces under John Bell Hood desperately fought to stop William T. Sherman's advancing armies as they tried to cut the last Confederate supply line into the city. Confederates under General Stephen D. Lee nearly overwhelmed the Union right flank, but Federals under General Oliver O. Howard decisively repelled every attack. After five hours of struggle, 5,000 Confederates lay dead and wounded, while only 632 Federals were lost. The result was another major step in Sherman's long effort to take Atlanta. Hess's compelling study is the first book-length account of the fighting at Ezra Church. Detailing Lee's tactical missteps and Howard's vigilant leadership, he challenges many common misconceptions about the battle. Richly narrated and drawn from an array of unpublished manuscripts and firsthand accounts, Hess's work sheds new light on the complexities and significance of this important engagement, both on and off the battlefield.
On July 20, 1864, the Civil War struggle for Atlanta reached a pivotal moment. As William T. Sherman's Union forces came ever nearer the city, the defending Confederate Army of Tennessee replaced its commanding general, removing Joseph E. Johnston and elevating John Bell Hood. This decision stunned and demoralized Confederate troops just when Hood was compelled to take the offensive against the approaching Federals. Attacking northward from Atlanta's defenses, Hood's men struck George H. Thomas's Army of the Cumberland just after it crossed Peach Tree Creek on July 20. Initially taken by surprise, the Federals fought back with spirit and nullified all the advantages the Confederates first enjoyed. As a result, the Federals achieved a remarkable defensive victory. Offering new and definitive interpretations of the battle's place within the Atlanta campaign, Earl J. Hess describes how several Confederate regiments and brigades made a pretense of advancing but then stopped partway to the objective and took cover for the rest of the afternoon on July 20. Hess shows that morale played an unusually important role in determining the outcome at Peach Tree Creek--a soured mood among the Confederates and overwhelming confidence among the Federals spelled disaster for one side and victory for the other.
Following a skirmish on June 28, 1864, a truce is called so the North can remove their dead and wounded. For two hours, Yankees and Rebels mingle, with some of the latter even assisting the former in their grisly work. Newspapers are exchanged. Northern coffee is swapped for Southern tobacco. Yanks crowd around two Rebel generals, soliciting and obtaining autographs.
Draws on diaries, unpublished letters, and other archival sources to trace the events of the Civil War campaign that sealed the fate of the Confederacy and was instrumental in securing Abraham Lincoln's reelection.
While fighting his way toward Atlanta, William T. Sherman encountered his biggest roadblock at Kennesaw Mountain, where Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee held a heavily fortified position. The opposing armies confronted each other from June 19 to July 3, 1864. Hess explains how this battle, with its combination of maneuver and combat, severely tried the patience and endurance of the common soldier and why Johnston's strategy might have been the Confederates' best chance to halt the Federal drive toward Atlanta.
First publsihed 1911. Dodge was a Union army officer on the frontier and during the Civil War, a U.S. Congressman, businessman, and railroad executive who helped construct the Transcontinental Railroad.
Atlanta 1864 brings to life this crucial campaign of the Civil War, as federal armies under William T. Sherman contended with Joseph E. Johnston and his successor, John Bell Hood, and moved steadily through Georgia to occupy the rail and commercial center of Atlanta. Sherman's efforts were undertaken as his former commander, Ulysses S. Grant, set out on a similar mission to destroy Robert E. Lee or drive him back to Richmond. These struggles were the millstones that Grant intended to use to grind the Confederacy's strength into dust. By fall, Sherman's success in Georgia had assured the re-election of Abraham Lincoln and determined that the federal government would never acquiesce in the independence of the Confederacy. Richard M. McMurry examines the Atlanta campaign as a political and military unity in the context of the greater struggle of the war itself. Richard M. McMurry is an independent scholar and the author of John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Nebraska 1992) and Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History.
Combines official histories and on-the-scene reports, orders, and letters from commanding Union officers with specially-drawn maps depicting the terrain within which they fought in May 1864. Includes easy-to-understand routes for tourists to follow.
Like Chicago from Mrs. O'Leary's cow, or San Francisco from the earthquake of 1906, Atlanta has earned distinction as one of the most burned cities in American history. During the Civil War, Atlanta was wrecked, but not by burning alone. Longtime Atlantan Stephen Davis tells the story of what the Yankees did to his city. General William T. Sherman's Union forces had invested the city by late July 1864. Northern artillerymen, on Sherman's direct orders, began shelling the interior of Atlanta on 20 July, knowing that civilians still lived there and continued despite their knowledge that women and children were being killed and wounded. Countless buildings were damaged by Northern missiles and the fires they caused. Davis provides the most extensive account of the Federal shelling of Atlanta, relying on contemporary newspaper accounts more than any previous scholar. The Yankees took Atlanta in early September by cutting its last railroad, which caused Confederate forces to evacuate and allowed Sherman's troops to march in the next day. The Federal army's two and a half-month occupation of the city is rarely covered in books on the Atlanta campaign. Davis makes a point that Sherman's "wrecking" continued during the occupation when Northern soldiers stripped houses and tore other structures down for wood to build their shanties and huts. Before setting out on his "march to the sea," Sherman directed his engineers to demolish the city's railroad complex and what remained of its industrial plant. He cautioned them not to use fire until the day before the army was to set out on its march. Yet fires began the night of 11 November--deliberate arson committed against orders by Northern soldiers. Davis details the "burning" of Atlanta, and studies those accounts that attempt to estimate the extent of destruction in the city.
The battle fought during the American Civil War at Decatur, Georgia, on the Friday afternoon of July 22, 1864, was a small affair, what General William T. Sherman might have called an afternoon dash, but one which killed and mangled only several hundred men. The Battle of Decatur was foredoomed to oblivion as a sideshow to the great and famous Battle of Atlanta. That epic pageant, fought simultaneously that hot summer afternoon six miles to the west of Decatur and involving tens of thousands of combatants, is portrayed vividly in the Atlanta Cyclorama and numerous books. Amidst the later historic drama of the death struggle for Atlanta in the summer of 1864, the Battle of Decatur was seemingly forgotten almost before the gun smoke cleared and the dead were buried. Among the many published accounts of the Battle of Atlanta, the Battle of Decatur is often given only a brief mention or even omitted altogether. The tale has elements of a great story: A smaller force attacked by a much larger force. Tremendous human courage and tragedy. A bayonet charge. AMedal of Honor won. The Battle of Decatur is linked to one of the great horrors of the Civil War, Georgia's Andersonville prison. Most of the Federals captured by the Confederates at Decatur were sent to that hell-hole, and many met their deaths there. The battle is also linked to the greatest maritime disaster in American history, the Sultana explosion, in whicha sidewheel steam ship carrying freed Federal prisoners of war back to their homes blew up on the Mississippi River, claiming more lives thanthe sinking of the Titanic. And most don't know the battle's connection to modern American pop culture: American Idol star Kelly Clarkson'sgreat-great-great grandfather and uncle fought in the battle. One survived, the other died.Other participants in the Battle of Decatur went on to lead notable post-war lives and to become nationally prominent figures who shapedlate 19th century American political, business and military events. Among the Federals, Colonel (later General) John W. Sprague, who commandedthe Federal forces during the battle, later helped settle the American northwest as a founder of the city of Tacoma, Washington. Jeremiah Rusk, second in command of one of the Federal regiments in the battle, later became governor of Wisconsin and the first-ever U.S. secretary ofagriculture. That regiment's commanding officer, Milton Montgomery, founded what's now the oldest law firm in Omaha, Nebraska. Other participantsbecame members of Congress or state politicians. One became a close business associate of the great steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.Among the Confederates, General Joseph Wheeler after the war helped to reconcile the North and South as a member of Congress and played arole in one of the U.S. Army's first overseas invasions in Cuba. Decatur resident Mary A.H. Gay, who was in the town at the time of the battle,later wrote a book based on what she saw that inspired Margaret Mitchell's creation of the character Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With TheWind," one of the top-selling novels of all time.That is the impetus for this book, the first book-length treatment of the Battle of Decatur, its participants and the aftermath it had on them.
