"The Burning of Atlanta" Topic
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Tango01 | 10 Nov 2014 10:43 p.m. PST |
"On the evening of Nov. 15, 1864, Union Lt. Col. Charles Fessenden Morse sat on the roof of a house and watched Atlanta burn. It was a "magnificent and awful spectacle," he wrote later to his brother Robert. "For miles around the country was as light as day, … the flames shooting up for hundreds of feet into the air." Earlier, over the roar and crackle of the flames, Morse had heard the 33rd Massachusetts band serenade Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who ordered the city torched. "It was like fiddling over the burning of Rome." The next morning, nothing was left of the city "except its churches the city hall and the private dwellings. You could hardly find a vestige of the once splendid R.R. depots, warehouses, &c. It was melancholy," Morse lamented, "but it was war, prosecuted in deadly earnest." Morse, an officer in the Second Massachusetts, had volunteered for the Union war effort at the first opportunity in April 1861. He and his comrades fought in the Eastern Theater from 1861 to 1863; Morse was promoted to captain in Company B and, after Gettysburg, to lieutenant colonel. He and his men then took trains to Tennessee and served under Henry Slocum in Sherman's Georgia campaign. When he arrived on its outskirts in the summer of 1864, Atlanta was intact. Morse yearned to see "that devoted city," whose "spires and towers [rose] in plain sight above the everlasting forests" of northern Georgia. He participated in the siege and watched the lit fuses of shells as they arced over Union camps and disappeared into the city's streets, exploding and kindling large fires. During the battles for Atlanta that fall, Morse had a couple of close calls. "One shell burst within ten feet of me throwing me flat by its concussion and covering me with dirt," he told Robert. And another time, "while I was trying to eat a little breakfast a shot struck the board which my plate was on and sent things flying."…" Full article here link Amicalement Armand |
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