On September 2, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln received a telegram from General William Tecumseh Sherman that read, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” This was more than a victory. It was deliverance.
All summer Atlanta—like Petersburg, Virginia—had been a city under siege, and as these two stalemates dragged on, the prospects for the president's reelection grew bleaker. They were dismal enough that at one point he said he expected to “be beaten, and beaten badly.” The war had gone on so long, and the casualties had been so severe, that enough voters in what remained of the Union were inclined to elect former general George McClellan, a Democrat, and trust him to make the best deal he could. There would, then, be no conclusive victory reestablishing the Union and ridding it of slavery. The bleeding would be stopped. But the return on all the suffering would be meager.
Atlanta had been holding out for some six weeks after Sherman's army had defeated the forces under J. B. Hood in a series of bloody battles that pushed the Confederates into defensive positions inside the city where they, and the civilian population, were supplied by a single rail line. When that was cut in the battle of Jonesboro, Atlanta was doomed, and Hood took his troops out of the city, lest they starve there as John Pemberton's army had at Vicksburg. On his way out, Hood put all useful military supplies to the torch, a scene that was dramatized 75 years later in Gone with the Wind.
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