The Bonfire

The Bonfire

Though William Tecumseh Sherman may never have actually uttered the line, “War is hell,” those words have forever become associated with one of the most controversial military measures in American history, Sherman’s decision to destroy Atlanta. Now in The Bonfire, Marc Wortman gives us an absorbing narrative history of the destruction of this key Confederate city, and tells the stories of some of the citizens and soldiers who lived through it.

It’s the story of Atlanta’s mercurial rise in the years immediately before the war, as the city became a rail hub in the South. With the coming of war, Atlanta’s industrial base, which had been created to service railroad needs, offered a ready foundation for Southern military manufacturing. Overnight, a town that was barely on the map a mere 15 years before became one of the South’s most important war materiel production centers.

Wortman tracks the military activity that ultimately led General Sherman to target Atlanta, and explains how by the summer of 1864, the conquest of the city had become a political imperative: If Atlanta could hold out, Lincoln would lose the upcoming presidential election, and the peace party would triumph in the North.

The Battle of Atlanta itself became the bloodiest single day’s combat in and around any American city in history, yet it took six more weeks of the greatest siege in the nation’s history before Union troops actually occupied Atlanta. Sherman then ordered the complete evacuation of all residents of the city before burning it to the ground.

Much of The Bonfire is told from an Atlanta point of view, and Wortman focuses on two citizens of the city to bring a human scale to the sweeping drama. First is Atlanta’s mayor James Calhoun, a cousin to John C. Calhoun, the U.S. senator, two-time vice president and presidential aspirant, and Wortman relates the whole Calhoun family saga, explaining how the cousin of the pro-slavery, pro-secession John Calhoun came to be the pro-Union mayor of a city that would ultimately be destroyed by the Union. And second is a slave named Bob Yancey, who changed his name to Robert Webster when he learned he was the son of the great orator and statesman Daniel Webster. When Calhoun rode out with a group of leading citizens to surrender Atlanta to Sherman, Webster rode in their midst.

The losses involved in the capture of Atlanta were staggering: Union forces suffered 31,687 men killed, wounded or missing during the campaign; the Confederates, 30,976. Yet Atlanta not only survived, but thrived, becoming a growth center in the years after the war, and a rail hub once again. And in the end, The Bonfire is not only the story of unprecedented destruction; it’s the story of how the ashes of Atlanta became the birthplace of the new South.

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Perseus Books Group ( July 01, 2009 )

Item #: 33-7638

ISBN: 9781586484828

Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 x 1.14 inches

Product Weight: 21.0 ounces