On the last day of August 1864, there was a battle between Union and
Confederate forces in the small town of Jonesboro, 20 miles south of Atlanta.
It wasn't the largest battle in the Civil War nor the bloodiest, but it was
one of the most important. Here's why.
*Drums and Flute*
In the spring of 1864, General William
Tecumseh Sherman ordered his army to march south into Georgia and the
Confederates fought them every step of the way. They battled in Dalton and
Resaca, in Allatoona and Kennesaw Mountain, and all the while Sherman had
one objective and the rebels knew it: Atlanta. A small town by today's
standards about 20,000 people but there were factories here and three major rail
lines. That's why Sherman wanted it. From
Atlanta came the guns and ammunition and uniforms and medicine and food that kept
alive the struggling Confederate Army.
By August the city was under siege and
nearly surrounded. There was only one supply line still
open to the south the Macon and Western Railroad in Jonesboro.
*Gunfire, Cannon Fire, and Yelling*
The federal troops had 70,000 men, the rebels only about 20,000. On the first
day of the battle of Jonesboro. On the second day the Confederates had only
half that many. They were outnumbered six to one.
*Gunfire and Yelling*
And you know the battle lasted
all day, the Confederates fighting back, attack
after attack after attack. Men began to pile on top of men. The wounded on the
bottom are being laid on by a dead man another wounded man stacking them as
they say like cordwood, like a stack of firewood beside your house in the winter
time. So they laid on top of each other till it was just, it was almost
impossible to move. History records again and again where the soldiers couldn't
even walk for the bodies in different battles and this was one of them.
*Gunfire* We got them on the run! Whooo! *More gunfire*
On the second day, the Confederates fought behind the protection of a trench and
they made the advancing Federals pay for every foot of ground. In the Civil War
fighting was brutal and life was hard, both in battle and before in camp. The
men wouldn't see their families for months or even years. Their food was
often rotten and covered with flies. The hardtack biscuit issued to the men was
tough enough to stop a bullet and the bullets were huge. They were made of soft
lead that would shatter a bone into a dozen pieces. Often if you were wounded,
that meant amputation.
And they amputated a lot. When letter bearers would go out
into battlefields looking for wounded men, if you were shot anywhere in the
torso you were called mortally wounded, which meant you were going to die and so
they'd look for soldiers who were shot in either the arm or the leg and they
would bring those back to the surgeon because the surgeon had a pretty good
chance of saving them. A soldier had a 1 in 10 chance of surviving without an
amputation. They had a 7 in 10 chance surviving with one
which is why amputations were so common.
But the worst enemy wasn't
bullets it was bacteria, germs. The men lived outdoors, there were
bathrooms, no clean drinking water. Oftentimes men didn't stop to wash their
hands, their dishes, their clothes, or themselves.
During the Civil War, far more
men died of disease and illness and sickness than were ever killed by a
bullet or a cannon or bayonet.
In fact in the Civil War about two hundred thousand
men were killed in battle but almost 400,000 Union and rebel
soldiers died of disease.
Well back to the Battle of Jonesboro. By the end of
the second day the outnumbered Confederates were overrun by federal
troops and the battle ended at nightfall. The Confederates were forced to move
back. In fact the whole Confederate Army had to be evacuated from the city of
Atlanta because they were now surrounded and their supplies were cut off. The next
day General Sherman moved into the city. Atlanta,
its factories, its warehouses, and railroads, lost to the Union Army. It was
September 1864, an election year, and many believe that if Atlanta had not fallen,
Abraham Lincoln would not have been elected to his second term as president
and today instead of a United States, there would be two countries north and
the south. After the Battle of Jonesboro some of
the surviving Confederates under the command of General Patrick Cleburne went
north to Nashville to fight their last fight. Claiborne was Irish and after a
battle, it was his custom to have his bagpipers play Amazing Grace as a kind
of funeral prayer for the men who died. In that last battle south of Nashville
after the fall of Atlanta, again the Confederates were outnumbered. They knew
that they were going to lose, that many would die, but they followed orders
they fought anyway.
But this morning, as they're ordered to drive the Yankees
from the field, as they marched out on the field through the mist the Yankee
said we saw the flag the blue and white flag of Clayburns men and he said we
knew we were in for a fight and he said but there was something else that we
just couldn't quite distinguish, something there. As they moved closer
they began to hear it first subconsciously and then in their ear. A
wine, a whining noise. As they move closer they
recognized it. It was the bagpipes of Claybournes men
and this is what made their hair stand on end. When they recognized the tune, it
was Clayton's band. They were marching out on the field with bayonets ready to
drive the Federals overwhelming numbers from the field as they were ordered but
the bagpipes were playing Amazing Grace and the Federals said our hair stood on
the backs of our necks because we knew then that they were marching out to
their own funeral dirge and these men were ready to die.
And they did. Almost
7,000 Confederates were killed or wounded. A month later the army disbanded
and many of the men just went back home and five months later General Lee
surrendered in a courthouse in the small town of Appomattox. The bloodiest war in
our history was over.
*Patriotic Drums*
*End Screen Music*