WITHScarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler’s escape from the burning southern metropolis of Atlanta is one of the greatest scenes in film history. The camera sweeps through field hospitals crammed with wounded, follows the last platoon and black slaves trudging towards the nearby front line, and pans across the fallen rebels for a memento mori of the old American south. In the end, the largest set ever erected for a film, with 50 buildings and two kilometers of street frontage, goes up in flames.
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind may be one of the best-selling books of all time, but it was eclipsed by the 1939 epic 1939 film produced by David O. Selznick. With box office earnings of around 3.8 billion dollars, it is – adjusted for inflation – the most successful film in history, which has not failed to receive artistic recognition even with ten Oscars. In it, the author of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel commemorated her hometown of Atlanta and her trauma: the annihilation by the Union Army in the late summer of 1864.
The apocalyptic images that director Victor Fleming created for it quote a reality that accompanied the beginning of the total war of the machine age. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman unfurled large caliber cannons in front of Atlanta, terrorizing the city overflowing with refugees. When his army withdrew, he ordered the evacuation and destruction of all facilities that could be of warfare importance in the broadest sense.
“We can’t change the hearts and minds of these people in the South, but we can make war so terrifying and so alienating to them that they won’t do it for generations to come,” Sherman said. To do this, “we must not only let enemy armies, but also enemy populations and … everyone, old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war”. Atlanta became the first casualty of this total war theory 150 years ago.
war fatigue in the north
The impression that the novel and film made on American audiences can be explained not least by the awareness that the fall of Atlanta marked the great turning point in the American Civil War. So far, the southern strategy had been successful. The blue invading armies, which were finally to bring about the decision in the spring of 1864 after three years of war, had gotten stuck in an indecisive trench warfare. In the east, the Union Commander-in-Chief, Ulysses S. Grant, had led the Army of the Potomac to the Confederate capital of Richmond, but was literally wearing it out in the heat of the summer.
In the West, Sherman wasted three armies trying to take the South’s second largest city and commercial hub. In the face of the ever-growing death lists and the lack of results, war fatigue in the north assumed epidemic proportions, which the peace faction of the Democratic Party wanted to use in the upcoming presidential elections. Their candidate, Union General George B. McClellan, promised a mild, compromise peace. The Republican Abraham Lincoln, who in 1861 called the secession of the 13 slave-holding southern states a rebellion and therefore mobilized the army, seemed to be at an end.
The South therefore relied on holding out until the elections. The pressure to succeed that the Union generals were under was correspondingly great.
Grant, in the eastern theater of war, had the larger army but against him the best strategist of the war in Robert E. Lee. Sherman therefore had the better cards when he began the march south from Chattanooga in May 1866 with almost 100,000 men. He was opposed by Joseph E. Johnston, an experienced defensive strategist who, with half as many soldiers, successfully delayed the advance of the blues by having his gray troops set up field fortifications in difficult terrain. In the rear of the invaders, Confederate horsemen and partisans attacked Union supply lines.
A good 20 miles from Atlanta, the Union advance finally came to a standstill in temperatures of up to 40 degrees at the end of June. Although Johnston reported significantly fewer casualties than his opponent, the Confederate public finally demanded a liberation against the brazen Yankees, who were not particularly careful with the plantations of the landowners who had fled to Atlanta.
“They will wipe us off the face of the earth”
As Johnston stuck to his tactics, he was replaced by the impetuous John B. Hood. He immediately showed what offensive spirit his soldiers possessed – and after losing several battles, he was thrown back onto the defense works of Atlanta, which had meanwhile recruited slaves. “Both Grant and Sherman are on the brink of disaster,” noted a senior Union politician.
Sherman knew that time was against him. To end the stalemate, he resorted to an unusual trick. He withdrew his troops from the siege and marched them south to destroy the railroad lines that supplied supplies to Atlanta. Hood, realizing too late what was being played, sent only part of his troops after the Yankees. They were badly shot.
“In order not to be cut off from the rest of the troops and thus be trapped, Hood decided on September 1 to evacuate Atlanta after destroying everything of military value,” notes Civil War specialist James M. McPherson corrects the depiction from “Gone with the Wind”. She weaves with artistic liberty the horrors of the siege with the terror Sherman would unleash months later, when he gave Atlantans just hours to leave their city. Not much was left of her. It was the prelude to the systematic devastation of Georgia, South and North Carolina, with Sherman giving free rein to his credo: “War is war, not a popularity contest.”
Politically, the fall of Atlanta was the decisive event of the fourth summer of the war. McClellan and the Peace Democrats plummeted, Lincoln received the decisive boost for a second term, and desertions from the Union subsided as many soldiers believed victory was within reach. South Carolina diarist Mary Chesnut summed up the mood in the South: “Since Atlanta, I’ve felt as if everything in me had died away forever. They will wipe us off the face of the earth.”