Part 2 . The Bald Hill and the Fight South

Bate’s and Walker’s divisions (Walker’s being led by Brigadier General Hugh Mercer with the general’s death) composed a formidable force many thousands strong, despite “straggling” from the previous night’s march. And they surged forward over a landscape of rolling vine and brush-choked forests run through by a swampy creek [view the battle map by clicking on the choice in the top left-hand column, or at the base of this page]. Today, the same area contains a county park, a high school, half dilapidated shopping centers along bustling avenues, quiet neighborhoods of lower and middle class residences, all of which is run through by the frenetic Interstate 20. 140 years of urban progress have buried this battlefield beneath widely varying degrees of successful economic / social progress. And so my role on July 22, 2004, developed into as much historical archeology as the making of a documentary. In ancient cities the world over, there is literally history beneath your feet. Though no physical ruins lie beneath the east side of modern Atlanta – aside from lead bullets, no doubt by the tens of thousands – its history is embedded in the landscape nonetheless.

The southern sector of the battle raged in two main vicinities: along modern-day Memorial Drive and across the village of East Atlanta, with extensive troop movements and fighting also rolling across Ormewood, Brownwood, Reynoldstown, Kirkwood, even East Lake. In 1864 this area, thick with residential roads and main thoroughfares today, consisted of only a few farms set back from the few country roads that ambled through what was an otherwise rural setting. The general path of modern Moreland and Flat Shoals avenues are the only roads that bear much semblance when comparing modern maps to historical ones. Yet both were main roads in and out of the small but vital transportation hub that made Atlanta a signal target of Union strategists. Roads were often a deciding factor in how / where Civil War battles were fought: the intersection of key “highways” that led to / from a strategic place. This was especially true of the western theatres, where movements were wide-ranging and strategic cities sparse. But in 1864, Atlanta was both the target and the inspiration for defense; and the roads / railroad beds into and out of the city funneled this second major battle for Atlanta (the Battle of Peachtree Creek was fought two days earlier to the north, along what is the modern corridor of Collier Road / Howell Mill in south Buckhead) to the city’s eastern edge. This sector is known as the Battle for the Bald Hill, also Leggett’s Hill for the U.S. commander whose force defended the hill’s previously logged and, as a result, “bald” crest. Obviously, southern recollections refer to the former, northern references the latter. Bald Hill itself no longer exists, but for a knoll sporting a dive hotel and package store, most of it leveled to accommodate the sprawling ramps and bridgework of Moreland’s interchange with I-20’s ten east / west lanes. Getting to the historical markers posted there was a “mortal” challenge [view the historical marker map, including a picture and the location of each individual marker, by clicking on the choice in the top left-hand column, or at the base of this page].

The fighting began in earnest just after noon. Sensing the element of surprise might be lapsing with the appearance of Dodge’s reinforcements, Hardee aimed his Confederates at the two U.S. brigades of Rice and Mersy. Rice’s brigade was positioned perpendicular to modern Memorial Drive facing east, the marker “Rice’s Brigade” across Memorial near Wilkinson. Mersy was in position parallel to Memorial and facing south, the marker “Mersy’s Brigade” situated in the parking lot of a car wash where Dixie Street meets Memorial. At the angle where the two came together, two batteries of artillery (twelve guns) were posted on a low rise. This was Sweeny’s Division, aligned by Dodge himself – which “drew the ire” of Sweeny (this and the larger battle scene is depicted, with some interpretation, in a famous painting by Civil War battlefield artist: James Taylor). Arrayed along the southern end of modern Kirkwood, this force watched the Confederate advance emerge from the cover of forests and advance over open fields: Bate’s men from the east, Walker’s / Mercer’s from the southeast. Confederate artillery opened from the rear of the advance in support of their infantry, Sweeny’s guns answering with accuracy – their elevated position giving them command of the field. The advance closed on the isolated Union position. Then, in the battlefield tactic of the day, they halted, squared up and began to pour fusillades of rifled musketry into the Union position, which held. A Union soldier described it as a “square face-to-face grapple in open field . . .” But the U.S. artillery was devastating, carving bloody mutilated holes in the Confederate lines. Hardee’s men retreated to the relative safety of the wood line, reformed and charged again. John Fuller’s brigade of Dodge’s XVI, in line a few hundred yards to the right of Mersy, performed a difficult about-face maneuver under fire to face the left of the C.S. attack – the brigade of States Rights Gist (his real name). Fuller himself grabbed and bravely planted a national flag to mark the new position. Sweeny and Fuller’s troops, combined with their artillery, mauled each successive attack. Sweeny’s brigade commanders both ordered limited, yet successful counterattacks that resulted in the mass capture of men from both Bate’s and Walker’s divisions. Southern casualties were mounting with little to show, the general attrition of such human decimation continuing to drain pale the Confederacy’s ability to replace those killed, wounded or captured in the field – a charge that would be levied against the aggressive Hood in light of the carnage amassed in his “offensive” defense of Atlanta. But far from being lost, this fight to the south was tilting in favor of the Confederates. . . . . Major General Patrick Cleburne was one of the most intrepid intelligent field commanders the southern military would produce during the war. His and George Maney’s divisions were right then pouring across modern-day Glenwood and Flat Shoals into the area of today’s East Atlanta village, Fuller’s right flank and the rear of the entire U.S. Army of the Tennessee’s line in their sights. Hardee still saw Hood’s plan coming to fruition.

Squeezing in lunch before the next phase of my tour came to fruition at about 1 o’clock. The revitalization of East Atlanta (along with Decatur’s Oakhurst only a few miles further east), is one of the best additions that the general revitalization of Atlanta’s intown has produced. Along with a number of eclectic shops, an equal array of eclectic bars / pubs, the requisite coffee house and the two most independent music venues in the city (one botched its liquor license and was closed in late 2004), East Atlanta sports a range of choices for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I chose the Good News Café, whose diverse menu offers something for everyone – from “meat-and-potatoes” to vegan (the café also closed in late 2004, but has been replaced). It was also the first air conditioned space I’d been in all day, the stop-start nature of intown touring having rendered air-conditioning the truck cabin a bad idea (unless overheating was an end goal, which it was not). I fueled up with a turkey reuben and as much ice water as I could put down, referencing the heavily marked and fraying Atlanta street map – circled intersections and roadsides noting state historical markers – that I used to plot my tour. I jotted down margin notes in between bites, planning routes and gauging times for the rest of my day. I finished quickly and made my way a hundred yards east to Haas Avenue, just north of Glenwood. I picked up my tour at the marker “Cleburne Outflanked Left Wing, (U.S.) 17th Army Corps.” The temperature read 94° on the truck cabin’s thermometer. The day would produce one of the highest temperatures of the year, the hottest part of that day yet to come. And as I geared up, the thought re-entered my mind: if I was that uncomfortable in shorts and a t-shirt, how about a long-sleeved flannel uniform – coat and all – while enveloped in the choking sulfuric fog of gunsmoke? The thought kept my introspective complaining to a minimum as the afternoon wore on.

It was between 1.00 / 2.00 p.m. when the fighting erupted around “the bald hill.” Cleburne and Maney’s divisions, the remainder of Hardee’s corps, were to pitch into the left-flank of Blair’s XVII Corps in loose coordination with Bate and Walker a half-mile east. Due to the mentioned formidable terrain Maney’s Confederates came up with difficulty, confronting the entrenched Union position of Giles Smith’s Division – which faced south and west throughout what is now the heart of East Atlanta’s commercial district. But Cleburne’s men in line to Maney’s right, had no difficulty and fell on the Union position in search of its sought-after flank. The alignment of Smith’s troops was wisely bent back at its end like a fishhook. Here the line faced east to protect against such a flank attack. And here the fighting raged. Cleburne’s Division had earned perhaps the fiercest reputation of all the battle’s participants. They advanced with predictable ferocity and quickly realized the gap between the U.S. XVII Corps and XVI Corps reinforcements. Blair, sensing that his flank was about to be overrun, sent off an urgent request to McPherson for help. And so precipitated the tragic end to a young commander’s life.

Following the rapid placement of Dodge’s reinforcements, McPherson and his staff had eaten lunch in an area near the intersection of modern DeKalb Avenue and Oakdale Road; the marker “Noon Under the Trees” documents the gathering, and what came next (the marker is only a few hundred yards west of a converted pickle factory, now residential lofts, on DeKalb where I lived between 1996 / ‘97; that marker was the inspiration for this tour). On hearing the earth-thumping din of Walker and Bates’ assault, McPherson had ridden into position on a hilltop to oversee the fighting. The men of Sweeny and Fullers’ brigades operated as an efficient machine in repelling Hardee’s initial assault. But it was obvious via Blair’s urgent calls that the left of the XVII Corps was coming unglued before a more concentrated, well-aimed attack. McPherson dashed off an order to “Black Jack” Logan directing him to double-quick a brigade from his corps to plug the gap; and then McPherson himself rode towards the trouble spot, the marker “McPherson’s Last Ride” along the margin of Memorial Drive at Walker Park (a memorial to the fallen Confederate) documenting the fateful ride. He had not gone far when he ran into skirmishers out in front of Cleburne’s main force. They demanded his immediate surrender. As the story goes, he tipped his hat “as if to salute a lady,” wheeled his horse and galloped off in the direction from which he had come. The Confederate skirmishers shot him out of the saddle, wounding or capturing the rest of the reconnaissance party. McPherson’s wound was mortal. He would be dead inside a half-hour. I-20 now runs through the Bald Hill battlefield, splitting the route of the final ride: Walker Park to the north of the interstate, the monument marking the Union commander’s death just south on an island where McPherson and Monument avenues come together. Streets all along this stretch were split with the coming of the controlled access highway. East Side Avenue runs north from Glenwood until it dead ends at I-20, the road picking up past the interstate and running along the margin of Walker Park before ending at Memorial. Along the general route of modern East Side, the far-right regiment of Fuller’s Brigade – having traded shots with the lead elements of James Smith’s C.S. Brigade, Cleburne’s Division – changed front again and charged into what was, in 1864, a wooded area. They discovered their commander, lifeless. Fuller’s men held this area just long enough to permit removal of McPherson’s body to the rear (a historical marker used to note the position of Fuller’s flank in East Atlanta, but was struck years ago and the base demolished; it has yet to be replaced). McPherson would be the only Union army chief killed in action during the war. Word arrived quickly at Sherman’s HQ, a few hundred yards east of where the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center now stands north of Little Five Points near the Poncey-Highlands neighborhood. On hearing of his young protégé’s death, Sherman broke down in tears. But given the rare ability to distance oneself from grief and the emotional dislocation of war’s horror embedded in sound military leaders, Sherman gathered himself, named John “Black Jack” Logan in line of succession; and then on hearing that a second Confederate assault was gathering to the front of Logan’s XV Corps – straddling the Georgia RR north of Bald Hill – sent off this dispatch to his new field-promoted commander: “Tell General Logan to fight ‘em, fight ‘em, fight ‘em like hell.”

Yet despite the appearance of another C.S. corps then filing out of Atlanta’s formidable ring of defenses a half-mile to Logan’s front, there was still Patrick Cleburne and his band of recklessly brave – some today might insert a more colorful adjective – southerners to contend with. And at that moment, just after 2 o’clock, July 22, 1864, they had found the gap and were pouring in.

My time schedule that day coincided almost dead on with the timetable of the actual battle’s events. Major assaults like Atlanta were more often planned and unleashed “en echelon,” a series of overlapping, staged, successive blows (singular large-scale coordinated assaults, for which the Civil War has become infamous, were actually rare). Hood’s plan took on, at least initially, the former strategy. If it had unfolded that way, my touring schedule would have been more general. But 140 years later I was “on location” most everywhere, while staying true to history. This is an interesting side note. As sure as the sun rises eastward, every major defeat throughout the Civil War brought about a bitter “blame-game.” Often enough it was warranted; but shrill personal attacks were just as frequent, with military and government officials on both sides of the conflict roiling up loud partisan denunciations of this or that general. In hindsight, we can look at the near impossibility of what was asked of Hardee: to complete a fifteen mile hike through rural unfamiliar countryside, in the dead of night – when these men would normally be asleep – coordinate a strike force and be ready to attack by dawn. Hood was furious that Hardee launched his assault so late. Had a dawn attack in fact been set, the plan may have come off. But such is the tenuous relation between such planning and the unpredictable reality of conditions, especially during warfare. So it’s somewhat ironic when, in the aftermath of their defeat here, Hood would openly state a lack of efficiency on the part of Hardee was to blame: the irony being that instead of ordering Cheatham’s Corps forward in a frontal assault of the Union line “en echelon,” the Union troops then being hard-pressed and showing signs of breaking to the south, Hood himself waited over two hours before unleashing the second phase of his plan. If Cheatham had advanced in concert with Hardee to the south, Logan would have been reluctant, possibly unable to supply reinforcements to Blair’s XVII Corps. But such was not the case and here the speculation ends, for Logan’s reinforcements were then rushing south to help plug the gap.

The “gap” was precisely where I was just after 2 o’clock, 140 years later: the north end of East Atlanta. James Smith’s Texans had been like bloodhounds in sniffing out the gap as they gained steam and drove the temporary lodgment of Fuller’s men back into the area of modern Walker Park. The left side of Cleburne’s assault was then veering left in trapping the U.S. XVII Corps troops, who were savagely fighting their way back to Mortimer Leggett’s line. Daniel Govan’s brigade, comprised mostly of Arkansans, finally succeeded in collapsing this exposed position, collecting a number of artillery pieces and hundreds of prisoners – including an entire regiment: the 16th Iowa (this occurred near the historical marker mentioned earlier: “Cleburne Outflanked Left Wing, (U.S.) 17th Army Corps”). With the relentless pressure of Maney’s four brigades on the “salient” angle where the Union line bent back to the east and Cleburne’s men now in behind them, Giles Smith’s routed division had to fall back on Bald Hill, or be annihilated. They did so precipitously, taking heavy casualties. In the end, they were lucky that the entire command was not cut off, the pincers of Hardee’s left having come together and crushed the exposed flank. On Bald Hill, Leggett bent back his left most regiments, under fire, to allow Smith’s retreating men to come in line. There they formed a new defensive position in parallel with modern I-20, what would have been the south slope of Bald Hill. The area of the Moreland interchange with I-20 was the new “salient” in the Union line. More compact and elevated, it would be a much stronger position – fortuitous for the Union forces that day, since Cleburne had yet to be fully dealt with. Leggett’s division and the routed remnants of Smith’s were right then taking fire from three sides: west, south and east. A portion of Leggett’s line literally turned in the opposite direction (east), away from Cheatham’s gathering columns, in order to help repel Cleburne’s plunge into the gap. Fighting here was fierce, Union troops firing in multiple directions and compounding the existing adrenal-anxiety and confusion of mass death and noise that must be any battlefield. U.S. artillery also changed front; and from under a thundering din they pounded Cleburne’s men. In open defiance of their own bloodletting these southerners staged multiple intrepid, in reality suicidal charges. Giles Smith’s men had backpeddled into their new position. There, they met a fresh brigade of Union troops. Logan’s XV Corps reinforcements, fulfilling McPherson’s final order, had arrived – filling the gap between Fuller and Smith / Leggett. They wasted no time and pitched into the Texans in their front. This whole Union line, now a compact solid wall of blue, poured it on. Cleburne’s right was now exposed, no reinforcements were available and they were being punished. James Smith was wounded; and as many of his regimental commanders had also gone down, the attack began to drift. No doubt feeling the effects of an all night march, plus two hours of brutal conflict, Cleburne’s troops began to fall back – in character – grudgingly. And though Cleburne’s and Maney’s troops would continue to press this new Union flank, the fighting to the south waned just as the fighting to the north was ramping up.

The last piece to my tour of this sector was the mentioned Moreland / I-20 interchange. It was about 2.30 p.m. when I exited East Atlanta via McPherson, parking in the lot of a closed fast-food joint along Moreland. The immediate vicinity of this interchange – from Glenwood’s outlet onto Moreland a few hundreds yards south, to Hosea Williams’ outlet onto Moreland a few hundred yards to the north – is a prime example of the schizophrenic character of this area of town: a ligament between enterprising gentrification and careless blight. The controversial construction of a massive “big-box” shopping center, including all the requisite big warehouse chains, on the grounds of what was for decades a complex for the Atlanta Gas Light Co. along Moreland just south of DeKalb Avenue and the CSX / MARTA lines (core battlefield land in the fight between Cheatham’s Confederates and the U.S. XV Corps), could yet prove to be the commercial lifeline that neighborhoods to the south have long needed: Grant Park, Ormewood, Brownwood, East Atlanta, Edgewood and especially Reynoldstown. But then the success of this style of commercial development has proven inconclusive as far as promoting regional socio-economic progress. Such development here, in “intown” areas, has more often co-opted hard progress won by local business advocates and long-time residents. In fact recent studies across the country show this style of development equally responsible for obliterating home-grown business districts and inducing commuter dominated sprawl, alongside any kind of economic stimulus it may provide (hence the outcry from advocate groups in nearby Little Five Points during their unsuccessful attempt to block the “big box” shopping center). Despite this, I think they’ll coexist if for no other reason than many people will take convenience over “smart growth.” Time will tell, I guess. My main beef is that it’s going up on battlefield land just as hallowed as the “Sunken Road” @ Fredericksburg, the “Hornet’s Nest” @ Shiloh and “Tunnel Hill” on the north end of Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga – those being just a few among the thousands of others already preserved for all time. But in the never-ending, contentious, often fatalistic battle between developers and preservationists: you win some and lose some. My hope is that we lose a little less than recent development trends would indicate.

I thought about all this as I waited for the I-20 off-ramp outlets onto Moreland to clear, before recklessly sprinting across them onto the sidewalk leading over the bridge. Just to the south side of the span stand two historical markers that, let’s just say, are difficult to access. One marks the southern end of Atlanta’s “outer defense line,” which had been rendered untenable with Union victory at Peachtree Creek and Sherman’s own Army of the Tennessee showing up here to the immediate east of the city’s inner defenses. The other marker, though, was integral to my tour – marking the location of “Leggett’s Hill.” As I stood where “the bald hill” once did, looking out over the first hints of rush hour gaining steam on I-20 below, I was again infused with a sense of importance behind what I was up to that day. The fight to preserve the Battle of Atlanta’s fields was one lost over a century ago; but I was winning the fight to document both the battle and what has come since, one historical marker at a time.

[view this section's image tour by clicking on the image viewer in the top left-hand column, or at the base of this page]


End Part II > Part III: Cheatham's Attack, Logan's Counterattack