Marc Wortman – Bonfire. The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

Автор: Marc Wortman
Название книги: Bonfire. The Siege and Burning of Atlanta
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Америки, Австралии, Океании
Страницы: 465
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Atlanta’s destruction during the Civil War is an iconic moment in American history. Award-winning journalist Marc Wortman depicts its siege and fall in The Bonfire, and reveals an Atlanta of unexpected paradoxes. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it “a tale of divided loyalties, political intrigue, and tremendous human suffering

CIVIL WAR ATLANTA has been wreathed in legends. Made into
the poignant epitome of the defeated South, Atlanta as portrayed
was filled with tragic defeated Southern heroes with nary a
single solitary sympathizer for the Union or for Lincoln. The city’s
black inhabitants appear as passive spectators in a war fought in part
over their freedom. Then, there are what may be the two most famous
quotations associated with the entire Civil War, both supposedly spoken
in Atlanta. Both of them were invented. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t
give a damn,” Rhett Butler’s line of seventy years ago, still ranks as the
most memorable ever uttered on the screen. The other is credited to
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman as he put the torch to Atlanta 145
years ago: “War is hell.” In fact, he probably never said these words,
and if he did, he certainly didn’t while in Atlanta. The story of Atlanta
is more than misplaced one-liners or the saturated colors of
melodrama.
Sherman did write something far more cold-eyed and to the
point when the mayor of the Lower South’s most important Confederate
city appealed to the Union army commander to take pity on his
already destitute and battered citizens and rescind his order expelling
them from their homes. Sherman answered him, “War is cruelty, and
you cannot refine it.” End the war, and the cruelty would end. We
have sanitized modern war in ways that allow us to ignore what Sherman
knew. We forget his words time and again at our peril.
The cruelty the Union armies inflicted upon the Gate City, along
with Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to batter down the defenses of Richmond,
became the great object of worldwide attention throughout
the summer of 1864. However, that cruelty, too, has become mythologized.
Sherman was charged with torching Atlanta, conducting a war
without restraint upon civilians. His “statesmanship” by military
means has since been used as a justification for the modern practice of
total war. In fact, he is unjustly charged with being solely responsible
for the city’s devastation. Two monumental bonfires engulfed Atlanta,
the first set off by its defenders, the second by its invaders. The people
of the United States and the would-be Confederacy played with fire
and ignited a conflagration they could not control. Once the nation
went to war with itself, “you might as well appeal to the thunderstorm
as against these terrible hardships,” Sherman insisted.
War is cruelty. Its bloodshed and destruction—the “hard hand of
war,” as Sherman really did call it—struck Atlanta with a greater ferocity
than it has any American city in history. This is the story of
how Atlanta and its people came to be in the direct line of the whirlwind,
what one of the besieged city’s Confederate defenders called
“a grand holocaust of death.”