The Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting is a striking visual spectacle. The huge, circular panorama—371 feet long and 49 feet high—displays in vivid, you-are-there style one of the biggest clashes fought in the final ten months of the American Civil War. Exquisitely restored and reopened in February 2019 at the Atlanta History Center, the painting depicts Union forces repelling massive frontal assaults against their position east of the city on July 22, 1864. At the center of the combat action rides Federal Major General John A. Logan, the largest figure in the picture, charging toward the battle line and rallying his blue-coated troops in a large counterattack in the vicinity of the red brick Troup Hurt House. Logan's troops are shown forcing a mid-battle retreat of Confederate infantry units sent forward by their commanding general, John Bell Hood. The Confederate Army of Tennessee's setbacks at multiple points of attack during their eight-hour clash with the similarly named Federal Army of the Tennessee, coupled with the Yankees' retention of strategic high ground and a key railroad supply line, amounted to a major defensive victory for the Union forces.¹Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 567–568.

At the end of the fighting on July 22, the Union Army of the Tennessee held its entrenched positions within cannon range of Atlanta, and the Confederate Army of Tennessee had lost a tenth of its fighting strength.²Gary Ecelbarger, The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2010), 213–214. The Federal triumph presaged victories at nearby battlefields, Ezra Church and Jonesboro, six days and six weeks later, and the capture of Atlanta's three remaining rail lines by the end of August. Cut off from supplies, Hood ordered his troops to evacuate Atlanta on September 1, and the city's mayor surrendered to a Federal military advance party the next day. After Union troops marched into the city, their commanding general, William T. Sherman, sent a telegram to Washington, DC, announcing that "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won." This resounding end to Sherman's Atlanta campaign, combined with the Confederate loss of Mobile Bay and Union gains in the Shenandoah Valley, cinched Abraham Lincoln's reelection in November 1864 and portended the end of armed combat east of the Mississippi River in April 1865.³James M. McPherson, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014), 205; Brian Holden Reid, The Scourge of War: The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 330. Yet long after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, deep animosities between former Civil War adversaries continued, and paramilitary and mob violence against freedpeople and their descendants and allies went largely unchecked for decades.⁴Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 146, 155, 201; Gregory P. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle Over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 136; Leon F. Litwack, "Hellhounds," in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, ed. James Allen (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1999), 8–37.

The seemingly endless resurrection, retelling, and reenacting of Civil War history, which continues to the present day, amounts to an ongoing contest between politicized versions of the past, the first renditions of which were produced by people for whom the War was a lived experience. Their commemorative creations included a myriad of images, texts, statues, reunions, Emancipation celebrations, and Memorial Days.⁵David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 31–97; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 73–159. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, these inaugural forms of war remembrance mobilized identities, explanations, and emotions, and they framed political discourse about race, citizenship, and nationhood for years to come. Spectacular, immersive paintings of famous military clashes provided mass entertainment and compelling commemorative meanings for US audiences. At the peak of their popularity, from 1883 to approximately 1900, perhaps as many as three dozen Civil War battle panoramas in the cycloramic format toured cities throughout the US, and paintings of the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battles reached Australia and Japan.⁶Chris Brenneman and Sue Boardman, The Gettysburg Cyclorama: The Turning Point of the Civil War on Canvas (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beattie, 2015), 14; Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! (London: Trefoil Publications, 1988), 172. Christ's crucifixion, vistas of the ancient world, and natural wonders and disasters were other popular cyclorama subjects.⁷Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 343; Angela Miller, "The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular," Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (1996): 35–69. The sweeping, proto-cinematic visual spectacles achieved enormous but ephemeral popularity; they anticipated but could not compete with motion pictures as an entertainment experience. Like the movies that followed, panoramas provided "a substitute reality presented with the revelatory force of the real."⁸Miller, "Panorama," 55. Yet, because the paintings presented an "image frozen in time," they lacked "cinema's possibilities for literal reenactment."⁹Alison Griffiths, "'Shivers Down Your Spine': Panoramas and the Origins of Cinematic Reenactment," Screen 44, no. 1 (2003): 1–37. As the popularity of cyclorama paintings waned, many of the enormous canvases disappeared while others were repurposed as theatrical production backdrops or cut up and sold as small remnants.¹⁰Antje Petty, "German Artists—American Cyclorama: A Nineteenth-Century Case of Transnational Cultural Transfer" (presentation, German Studies Association 34th Annual Conference, Oakland, CA, October 7–10, 2010, Oakland, CA), https://mki.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1100/2014/10/Petty_GSA-2010_Panorama.pdf. Today, among all Civil War battle panoramas, the Gettysburg and Atlanta cyclorama paintings are the only survivors on public display, each showcased in a twenty-first-century exhibition space. The Gettysburg panorama is shown at the national military park, located at the battle site in south central Pennsylvania, and the Atlanta image is exhibited at the city's history museum, approximately six miles from where the battle was fought.

This essay explores the history of the Battle of Atlanta painting, a surviving example of a fad that faded, which in its time expressed and exerted influence on Civil War memories north and south of the Mason Dixon line and served as a technological, thematic, and commercial forerunner to epic cinematic narratives, most notably D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. As the original version of the Atlanta panorama and an identical copy circulated from city to city, following debuts in Minneapolis in 1886 and Detroit in 1887, the painting's visual retelling of a famous fight validated martial heroics on each side, which meshed with the continuing devotion of many viewers to their side's cause. At the same time, the Atlanta panorama also celebrated an underlying bond between the white male opponents by suggesting that their shared traits, beliefs, and traditions accounted for a common bravery in battle and a sense of common white Americanness that surged in the nineteenth century's final years. The painting expressed and helped perpetuate a militarized commemorative culture that supported a white national identity and abandoned a commitment to Black Americans' civil rights. Peaking in attendance amid a mounting but far from uniform movement toward sectional reconciliation, the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting was most importantly a spectacle of a resurgent and increasingly militant and racialized American nationalism. Further, the panorama served as a precursor to D. W. Griffith's extravaganza, which depicted the Civil War and Reconstruction as the historical antecedents for a nationwide regime of white supremacy. In an era when spectacle culture rose rapidly and new, immersive visual entertainments competed for public attention, the Battle of Atlanta panorama and The Birth of a Nation illustrate how vivid and enduring images of a cataclysmic era captured the attention of throngs of people and encouraged their commitments to a narrowly configured version of American nationalism.¹¹Susan Tenneriello, Spectacle Culture and American Identity: 1815–1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2–14.

In its heyday, the Atlanta panorama, like other cyclorama battle paintings, was a travelling attraction. A team of European artists working in an American studio produced two identical versions of the Atlanta painting, and promoters moved each canvas from city to city for exhibition. At every stop, riggers installed the panorama in a massive rotunda building, a specially designed structure that enabled visitors to experience "being swallowed up in an imaginary world" while distancing them from their actual surroundings outside.¹²Evelyn J. Fruitema and Paul A. Zoetmulder, eds. The Panorama Phenomenon: Mesdag Panorama 1881–1981 (The Hague, Netherlands: Foundation for the Preservation of the Centenarian Panorama, 1981), 18. A darkened entrance hall, indoor lighting that brilliantly illuminated the sprawling battlefield tableaux, and a faux terrain—foreground settings with three-dimensional objects—connected almost imperceptibly to the bottom edge of the painted canvas served in unison to absorb spectators into an illusory reality. A meticulously realistic depiction of Atlanta's battlefield topography, military uniforms and equipment, combat events, notable commanders, and amassed infantry were popular features. Spectators were inserted within the 360-degree panorama, which provided an immersive, all-encompassing view of a historic clash. The spectacular visual narrative combined convincing optical illusions with vivid documentary realism, minus gory images of the dead and wounded. Although the artists and promoters aspired to authenticity, the battle story they "lifted from life" and told on canvas was by intent a partial view that omitted more than just the horrors of industrial warfare.¹³Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro, Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 11.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Atlanta panorama, along with other Civil War battle paintings, provided an immensely popular attraction for audiences seeking to remember the military heroes and events of the 1860s while leaving much of the War out of the picture. No female figures are included on the huge canvas and a single Black male is depicted in civilian clothing far from the July 22, 1864, battle line. While the Battle of Atlanta, like most of the War's battles, pitted Union and Confederate armies against each other that were exclusively or almost entirely white men, enormous numbers of additional people participated in the War effort, including approximately 200,000 Black soldiers who served in the Federal army and countless women on both sides who were war matériel producers, foodstuff suppliers, health care workers, civil servants, undercover agents, and uniformed combatants.¹⁴William A. Dobak, Freedom By the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, United States Army, 2011), 501; Thavolia Glymph, The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 10; Judith A. Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 4. The awe-inspiring image of the Battle of Atlanta, like other heroic national narratives of the postbellum era, was a "selective celebration."¹⁵Stephanie McCurry, Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 204. It venerated part of the past while marginalizing the significance of race and gender in wartime, in effect affirming a white, patriarchal social and political pecking order that prevailed as the Civil War and Reconstruction receded and the nineteenth century drew to a close. As historian William Blair emphasizes in an insightful analysis of sectional reconciliation and its political implications, reconciliation "involved defining nationalism, and the power relationships within it, resulting tragically in the exclusion of black people in the age of Jim Crow with white solidarity, in part, rallying around traditions in the form of Confederate commemorations."¹⁶William A. Blair, "Reconciliation as a Political Strategy: The United States After Its Civil War," in Reconciliation After Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and James Hawdon (New York: Routledge, 2019), 217–231.

D. W. Griffith's notoriously racist The Birth of a Nation, which premiered in 1915, propagated a narrative account of the Civil War era in which white northerners and white southerners, one-time friends, become unwilling wartime foes but show mutual respect on the battlefield, reconcile after the War, reject the pursuit of Black political equality during Reconstruction, and—led by the Ku Klux Klan—forge a new nation to defend their "common Aryan birthright."¹⁷Robert Lang, ed. The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 134. As historian Leon Litwack observes, the motion picture "mesmerized and misled Americans, revealing the extraordinary power of the cinema to 'teach' history and to reflect and shape popular attitudes and stereotypes."¹⁸Leon F. Litwack, "The Birth of a Nation," in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monson, and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 136–141. Griffith reused multiple images and tropes that debuted decades earlier and, aided by his filmmaking virtuosity, persisted long after his motion picture was first shown. The Birth of a Nation was a sensational visual spectacle that provided a blueprint for the Hollywood historical film.¹⁹Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 26. "The panoramic battle scenes" were a "cinematic triumph," Michael Rogin notes in his appraisal of the film. Griffith's depictions were "distant, beautiful, and otherworldly."²⁰Michael Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 150–195. Camera shots taken from a tower sixty feet above battling troops gave moviegoers a "sense of both wide scope and elevated historical perspective," as James Chandler points out.²¹Milton MacKaye, "The Birth of a Nation," Scribner's Magazine 102, no. 5 (1937): 40–46; James Chandler, "The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood: Scott, Griffith, and Epic Film Today," in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 237–273. The Birth of a Nation showed audiences how sprawling action sequences, crowd scenes, close ups, and star performances could be woven into a captivating feature-length narrative.²²John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 15; Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 97. Griffith's creation also served as a forerunner to Gone With the Wind, which bore striking similarities to the earlier extravaganza in its production scale, fictionalized historical narrative, melodramatic mode, humiliating images of Black men and women, push back from civil rights activists, and runaway box office success.²³Ruth Elizabeth Burks, "Gone With the Wind: Black and White in Technicolor," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21, no. 1 (2004): 53–73; Jenny Barrett, Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 35; Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 157–160.

The title of Griffith's film announced his animating concern: nation building. His message was that sectional reconciliation called for white solidarity, paramilitary acts of racial terror, and political and economic oppression of Black people. He deployed Lost Cause historical interpretations and perpetuated derogatory caricatures of Black and multiracial people that originated in the nineteenth century. The Birth of a Nation's "black marauders" and "mulatto villains," according to American Studies scholar Davarian Baldwin, helped justify "a so-called Southern Solution that stood as a form of governance, a system of labor management and land assessment, and an intellectual and cultural master trope."²⁴Davarian L. Baldwin, "'I Will Build a Black Empire': The Birth of the Nation and the Specter of the New Negro," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 4 (2015): 599–603. The film's disparaging images prompted vigorous but largely unsuccessful protest campaigns waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other critics who sought to prevent exhibitions of the movie or censor its most vitriolic content.²⁵Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of the "Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–170; Cara Caddoo, "The Birth of a Nation's Long Century," in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 33–45. Their efforts were blunted in part by President Woodrow Wilson, a former academic historian and past president of the American Historical Association, who tacitly endorsed The Birth of a Nation when he viewed it in the White House in February 1915.²⁶Mark E. Benbow, "Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and 'Like Writing History With Lightning,'" Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (2010): 509–533. For all of the film's white supremacist convictions and grotesque stereotypes, as cinema and media scholar Michael T. Martin emphasizes, Griffith's "filmic manifesto" reflected a prevailing historical interpretation of the Civil War era and a widely held belief early in the twentieth century that "race solidarity" was "the organizing principle for the nation's renewal."²⁷Michael T. Martin, "Revisiting (As It Were) the 'Negro Problem' in The Birth of the Nation," in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 33–45.

The Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting and The Birth of a Nation formed part of what anthropologist Benedict Anderson describes as a "vast pedagogical industry" that worked to convince Americans that the hostilities of 1861–65 were "a war between 'brothers' rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states."²⁸Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 2006), 201. The visual narratives invited their audiences to recognize what Anderson describes as "a deep, horizontal comradeship" that makes it possible for human beings, even without face-to-face contact, to imagine themselves as a single political community and participate in a common culture of nationalism.²⁹Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. The "figure of the soldier" is central to this storyline, serving as an embodiment of communal values and encouraging Americans, or at least most of the country's white population, to embrace a shared national identity.³⁰Nicola Cooper and Martin J. Hurcombe, "The Figure of the Soldier," Journal of War and Culture Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 103–104. Military memories conveyed by the Battle of Atlanta panorama and The Birth of a Nation acted as catalytic agents that contributed to a big burst of nationalistic energy.³¹Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation Into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 155. Linked compositionally and thematically, the cycloramic and cinematic renditions of the Civil War dramatized a version of nationalism that idealized sectional unity while dividing the population by race, ethnicity, and gender. The images provided popular accounts of a storied past and demonstrated Elisa Tamarkin's precept that "nationalism, as a form of feeling, an ideology, and a set of practices, works every bit as seriously at bringing some aspects of the outside in, as it does in keeping others out."³²Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xxvi.

The nation that emerged in the fin-de-siècle US was more than "just an imagined community," as historian Charles Maier observes. It also was a "materialist and armed community," and the US military services forcefully demonstrated their reach in the last decade of the century.³³David Armitage, Thomas Bender, Leslie Butler, Don H. Doyle, Susan-Mary Grant, Charles S. Maier, Jörg Nagler, Paul Quigley and Jay Sexton, "Interchange: Nationalism and Internationalism in the Era of the Civil War," Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 455–489. In December 1890, in the largest military operation since the Civil War, nearly a third of the nation's army descended on the Lakota in South Dakota and suppressed armed Indian resistance to white incursions. A confrontation between the Lakota and the US Seventh Cavalry near Wounded Knee Creek ended in the massacre of about 250 Native Americans.³⁴Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 11; Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 378. In July 1894, the US Army again demonstrated its coercive power when nearly 2,000 troops, deployed to Chicago and joined by US marshals and local police, broke the Pullman strike.³⁵Clayton D. Laurie and Ronald H. Cole, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1877–1945 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1997), 145. Once more the Seventh Cavalry went into action, this time on city streets, and striking workers were likened to the "savages" who the soldiers had slaughtered at Wounded Knee several years earlier.³⁶Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 431. American military forces extended their reach beyond the nation's shores in 1898, when the US defeated Spain in a five-month war and took control of Spain's colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific.³⁷A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 337. The war followed what American Studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson describes as a "protracted national discussion of what was demanded by America's rising national status as a world economic power—markets, bases, coaling stations, perhaps a canal."³⁸Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 42. President William McKinley, in a December 1898 visit to Atlanta, hailed the victory over Spain as evidence that America had "proved itself invincible" and "will remain indivisible forevermore." Speaking at the municipal auditorium, McKinley proclaimed: "Under hostile fire on a foreign soil, fighting in a common cause, the memory of old disagreements has faded into history." In the spirit of sectional reconciliation, he proposed to another Atlanta audience that the national government begin honoring Confederate dead, whose public remembrances were limited at the time to commemorations by individual states and voluntary associations. "Every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American valor," McKinley declared.³⁹William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley, From March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1900), 159–160.

A surge in militant, white nationalism and the growing capacity of the US nation-state to project massive force were part of what historian C. A. Bayly describes as a vigorous, "global stirring of nationality" in the late nineteenth century. Bayly notes that despite a "hardening of boundaries between nation states and empires," people found "ways of linking, communicating with, and influencing each other across those boundaries."⁴⁰C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 199. Battle cults and cycloramic images of famous war scenes, which flourished first in France and Germany, were among the influential transnational exchanges.⁴¹Petty, "German Artists," 1. Profit-oriented European stock companies, geared to growing their international business, bankrolled panoramas of famous battles and shipped some of the most popular paintings across the Atlantic for showings in the US.⁴²Fruitema and Zoetmulder, The Panorama Phenomenon, 28. These exports included a sprawling image of the Battle of Sedan, a major German victory in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, which was shown in New Orleans and Cincinnati in the mid-1880s after a successful debut in Frankfurt, Germany.⁴³Peter C. Merrill, German-American Artists in Early Milwaukee: A Biographical Dictionary (Madison, WI: Friends of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 1997), 64; Kevin M. Kurdylo, "Investigating an International Treasure: The Diaries of Panorama Artist F. W. Heine," Max Kade Institute Friends Newsletter 17, no. 4 (2008): 7; Beth Irwin Lewis, Art for All?: The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34. Louis Braun, a Munich art professor who led the team that produced the Sedan painting, was known for creating battle panoramas with strong nationalistic overtones.⁴⁴Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1999), 164.

One of Braun's acolytes was August Lohr, an Austrian painter who worked with him in Munich on the Sedan project and other battle panoramas before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1885 to help entrepreneur William Wehner launch the American Panorama Company.⁴⁵Merrill, German-American Artists, 64. In a prime example of what historian Antje Petty describes as a "wholesale transfer of European panorama art and craft" to the US, Wehner and Lohr persuaded a group of well-known painters from art schools in German-speaking countries to join them in Milwaukee and produce Civil War cyclorama paintings.⁴⁶Petty, "German Artists," 3; Merrill, German-American Artists, xi. Their first recruit was Friedrich Heine, an experienced battle painter and former war correspondent and illustrator from Dresden, Germany, who joined his long-time friend Lohr as codirector of panorama production in Wehner's studio.⁴⁷"The Artists of Atlanta: The Men Who Have Painted the Panorama," Battle of Atlanta Monthly 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1886): 1. Specialists in painting landscapes, human figures, and animals comprised the rest of the artistic team.⁴⁸Manual of the Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta (Detroit, MI: Detroit Cyclorama Company, 1887), 1. Together with Lohr and Heine they painted both versions of the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama panorama.

Wehner and his company's artistic team placed a high priority on creating a historically accurate representation of the battle. Promotional materials and souvenir brochures that described the paintings emphasized their verisimilitude and educational value. Old soldiers often visited battle panoramas with family and friends and pointed out where and how they contributed to their side's cause.⁴⁹Comment, Painted Panorama, 129. The slightest inaccuracy detected by discerning panorama spectators, such as veterans or other eyewitnesses to the battle, would collide with claims that viewers would see a faithful reproduction of the battlefield and combat action. To help meet the paying public's expectations for authenticity, Wehner and his lead artists enlisted the expert assistance of Theodore R. Davis, a former Civil War sketch artist for Harpers Weekly who had witnessed the battle from General William T. Sherman's field headquarters.⁵⁰Wilbur G. Kurtz, The Atlanta Cyclorama: The Story of the Famed Battle of Atlanta (Atlanta, GA: City of Atlanta, 1954), 25. Davis shared his recollections of the fighting, and he helped the panorama team gather additional information from sketches, photographs, military maps, written records, and eyewitnesses. In the summer and fall of 1885, he accompanied the team on a site visit to Atlanta and its eastern suburban neighborhoods, where the battle was fought.⁵¹Manual of the Cyclorama, 2. Several artists completed sketches of the battle area from a forty-foot high wooden tower near the site of the Troup Hurt House and close to the Georgia Railroad, where intense combat action swirled on July 22, 1864. The painters' elevated perch provided an unobstructed view of the proximal battleground landmarks and the surrounding terrain. According to Wehner, local citizens "were astonished to find that their brethren of the North were in possession of facts that enabled them to clearly define every circumstance of the battlefield." Former Confederate officers, Wehner reported, appreciated the efforts to make a "historical painting" and took "special pains to verify statements concerning their positions."⁵²Manual of the Cyclorama, 2.

By design, the geographic spot that the Milwaukee-based artists chose for their aerial studies of the Atlanta battle area corresponded to the central vantage point in the cyclorama rotundas where their circular paintings were subsequently exhibited. This compositional strategy enabled the painters to transfer their outward radiating, 360-degree sightlines and elevated perspective to panorama audiences.⁵³Graham F. Watts, "'The Smell O' These Dead Horses': The Toronto Cyclorama and the Illusion of Reality," University of Toronto Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2005): 964–970. As a result, spectators standing in the middle of a rotunda's raised platform commanded sweeping views of each battlefield event depicted on canvas. Multiple military actions, represented as though they were simultaneous and instantaneous, created the impression of a dramatic continuum across the vast Atlanta battlegrounds.⁵⁴Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 76–77; Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 216.

Making a Spectacle of Nationalism

Theodore R. Davis explained in an 1886 article, "How A Great Battle Panorama is Made," that as soon as cyclorama visitors reached the central viewing platform they would seemingly "stand in the midst of a real battle."⁵⁵Theodore R. Davis, "How a Great Battle Panorama is Made," St. Nicholas 14, no. 2 (1886): 99–112. The simulated, bird's-eye view of the Battle of Atlanta placed audiences just behind the Federal Army of the Tennessee's generals, junior officers, and soldiers and closest to where a hard charging Confederate brigade had broken the Union infantry line at the Troup Hurt House and Georgia Railroad. Federal Major General John A. Logan is shown galloping toward the battlefront, spurring on his troops as they surge forward in a counteroffensive that restores their line and retakes a famed group of cannons, the DeGress battery, that temporarily changed hands. Logan's vivid likeness and his pictorial prominence far surpass the representation of his commanding officer, General William T. Sherman, who is barely visible on a high hill above the battlefield, observing the action below from the grounds of his field headquarters. The Confederate army's commander, John Bell Hood, does not appear in the Battle of Atlanta painting.

When the Battle of Atlanta panorama premiered in Minneapolis in July 1886, promotional placards with a tagline of "Logan to the Front!" depicted the general known as Black Jack in full gallop, his raven mane and handlebar moustache flowing as he held out his broad-brimmed hat at arm's length to encourage his surging troops. "Logan's Great Battle" was the advertising pitch in a Detroit newspaper when a copy of the "most reliable Panorama on earth" opened at that city's cyclorama rotunda in February 1887.⁵⁶Advertisement, Detroit Free Press, February 27, 1887, 3. Black Jack's panoramic image and the accompanying promotional publicity burnished his reputation as one of the most successful Civil War generals on either side who did not attend West Point. He was the consummate Volunteer Soldier of America.⁵⁷Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 193. Logan parlayed his military fame and his close identification with the winning side into a long, postwar career as a powerful and steadfastly partisan Illinois Republican who served in the US House and Senate and was a prime mover of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest Union veterans group. Logan's most enduring act as the GAR's commander-in-chief was his order in 1868 calling for all GAR posts to set aside May 30 as Memorial Day.⁵⁸James P. Jones, John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican From Illinois (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1982), 19. His ambitions for higher political office culminated in the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 1884, when he ran on the losing ticket headed by James G. Blaine. At the time of Logan's unexpected death at age sixty in December 1886, he was a leading contender for his party's top spot in the next presidential election. In the words of Logan's twentieth-century biographer James P. Jones, Black Jack "fought in the political arena with the ferocity he exhibited on the battlefield."⁵⁹Jones, John A. Logan, 227. Yet because of his personal financial straits, the oft-repeated story that Logan commissioned the Battle of Atlanta painting to further his political ambitions is almost certainly apocryphal.

The panorama and its initial publicity in midwestern cities featured Logan's rousing leadership in the thick of battle. Although partial to the Union army's famous general and the troops he spurred on, the painting celebrated soldiers on both sides and their fervent commitments to their respective military missions. Each army faced a formidable foe, and the vivid display of combat mettle by clashing Federal and Confederate forces added luster to their individual martial reputations. This pictorial salute to the rank and file appealed to many white Americans who, beginning in the 1880s, avidly sought detailed visual and text accounts of Civil War military events and heroics but also eagerly put aside divisive sectional issues such as slavery, secession, and emancipation.⁶⁰Timothy P. Caron, "'How Changeable Are the Events of War': National Reconciliation in the Century Magazine's 'Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,'" American Periodicals:A Journal of History and Criticism 16, no. 2 (2006): 151–171. As a broadening but still incomplete embrace of "reconciliation through recollection" gathered national momentum, according to historian David Blight, the ideological divides of the war faded from view.⁶¹Blight, Race and Reunion, 164, 217. The upshot was that "nationalism displaced the emancipatory meaning of the war," writes Thomas Bender in A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History. The hagiographic treatment of battle-tested Union and Confederate veterans instrumentalized the solider as the embodiment of the nation. As Bender explains: "All were brave; all fought for what they believed. All the old soldiers were heroes."⁶²Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 180.

The drama of a heroic commander was a central element in the Battle of Atlanta painting: "Logan to the Front!" However, the even bigger picture was the panorama's portrayal of courageous soldiers amassed against each other in a powerful display of collective battlefield moxie. The Gettysburg painting, like its Atlanta counterpart, combined the "energy and the bravery of the many" with the "drama of the hero."⁶³Peter Paret, Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 66. No Black soldiers fought at Gettysburg, but several Black male laborers are depicted on the Union side in the panorama.⁶⁴Brenneman and Boardman, Gettysburg Cyclorama, 188. The absence of a Black combat role in the battle meant that in the "telling and retelling of events," as historian Kenneth Nivison notes, "Gettysburg became . . . an icon of selective remembrance."⁶⁵Kenneth Nivison, "Fields of Mighty Memory: Gettysburg and the Americanization of the Civil War," in The Battlefield and Beyond: Essays on the American Civil War, ed. Clayton E. Jewett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 291–309. The sprawling tableaux commemorated the most famous battle of the Civil War by hailing the bravery of white soldiers on both sides, The panorama also paid monument-like homage to a heroic general on horseback, foreshadowing his postbellum political career.⁶⁶Benjamin T. Arrington, The Last Lincoln Republican: The Presidential Election of 1880 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 110–112. Premiering in Chicago in 1883, three years before the Atlanta painting opened in Minneapolis, the visual narrative showed Major General Winfield Scott Hancock astride his horse, urging his infantry and artillery forward after their line was attacked by Confederate troops. The bold assault on the Union center, part of what is now known as Pickett's Charge on day three of the battle—the High Water Mark of the Confederacy—was met with a devastating response, and the entire attack failed in the Civil War's most hallowed combat encounter. After the war, Hancock, who was severely wounded at Gettysburg, capitalized on his military fame to remain a heralded public figure and, like Logan, pursue national office. In 1880 Hancock was narrowly defeated when he ran as the Democratic party's candidate for President. The Union war hero carried all the former slave states but only a single northern state, New Jersey, in his presidential lost cause.⁶⁷Charles W. Calhoun, From the Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 75.

When the Atlanta and Gettysburg panoramas circulated from city to city, they offered a popular commemorative formula—"two brands of the same valor"—that attracted an enormous number of spectators.⁶⁸Nivison, "Fields of Mighty Memory," 292. Over 286,000 paying customers viewed the Atlanta painting during its approximately eighteen-month Detroit run.⁶⁹"The Cyclorama," Detroit Free Press, October 28, 1888, 20. Notwithstanding "many cracks in the plaster of national reunification," to borrow historian John R. Neff's succinct description, the Civil War combatants in the paintings exemplified the "deep horizontal comradeship" that enabled many late nineteenth-century white Americans to imagine themselves as members of a single community.⁷⁰John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 205. The soldiers are portrayed as "the model of manly character," which historian Kristin Hoganson describes as a set of traits—including loyalty to one's fellows, fearlessness, and a calibrated combination of belligerence and chivalry—that elicited popular acclaim for veterans of both sides.⁷¹Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 24. The combatants shown in the cyclorama paintings function as a "point of origin" for the larger imagined brotherhood, as evidenced by the broad political authority conferred on Civil War veterans in the postbellum years. "The soldier is a foundational figure," Nicola Cooper and Martin J. Hurcombe explain in their interpretation of the warrior's role in society. Cooper and Hurcombe add that "he" "is central to the history, self-image, and identity of the nation."⁷²Cooper and Hurcombe, "Figure of the Soldier," 103.

After the War, according to Hoganson, a "military style of politics" emerged from "the idea that the state rested ultimately on soldier-citizens," and even nonveterans who vied for political office cited "the military valor of men from their class, race, region, or ethnicity or their own soldierly attributes." Hoganson emphasizes that this style of politics "made American political culture more inclusive for men" while carrying with it "exclusionary implications for women."⁷³Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 25–26. And, just as celebratory memories of male military service sidelined full citizenship for females, selective commemorations that omitted or minimized the wartime roles of Black Americans contributed to mainstream indifference or outright hostility toward racial equality.⁷⁴Cecilia E. O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 129. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Martin A. Berger observes in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, whites harboring racially discriminatory attitudes and beliefs unselfconsciously transferred their values onto the images around them. The art of exclusion was among the creative ways that "silently reinforced" Jim Crow practices, which denigrated and did violence to Black people for years to come.⁷⁵Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 173–174.

The Civil War battle scenes on sprawling paintings expressed the increasingly dominant narrative of national belonging that encouraged audiences to transcend sectionalism and coalesce around a common white identity.⁷⁶Jimmy L. Bryan, "Introduction," in The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare, ed. Jimmy L. Bryan (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 1–11. Vivid, smaller-scale versions of this panoramic theme, included on the canvases themselves or accompanying souvenir programs, cast a spotlight on comradery and common Americanness. In their painting, the Atlanta panorama artists foreground a poignant depiction of a Union warrior sharing his canteen with a wounded Confederate soldier. This image of battlefield magnanimity amid the chaos of combat illustrated the possibilities for intersectional, postwar harmony. The emotionally compelling connection between erstwhile enemies, legendarily siblings who rediscovered each other under dire circumstances, represented in a condensed, visual form the four years-long "brother's war" and the opportunity for reunion of a national "family." Canteen sharing with foes or friendly troops suggested a common humanity or, in other words, "white male unity," as historian Lauren K. Thompson points out in her study of soldier fraternization during the Civil War.⁷⁷Lauren K. Thompson, Friendly Enemies: Soldier Fraternization throughout the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 154. In another emblematic and evocative image, a souvenir program for the Gettysburg cyclorama depicted soldiers from the two sides clasping hands. This oft repeated symbol of mutual respect and sectional affinity expressed in a single gesture an underlying bond between white, wartime opponents that gained new cache in the century's final years. In the century to come, the images of canteen sharing and hands clasping also served as visual and thematic through-lines to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and other cinematic Civil War narratives.

At the peak of the cyclorama vogue in the US, four versions of the Gettysburg panorama and two copies of the Atlanta painting circulated simultaneously from city to city.⁷⁸"Watching Pickett's Charge," New York Times, March 5, 1887, 3; "The Battle of Atlanta Today," Detroit Free Press, February 26, 1887, 5; Battle of Atlanta advertisement, St. Paul Daily Globe, March 8, 1887, 3. They toured at the same time as other Civil War battle panoramas, and the intense competition for viewers prompted promoters to take down the gigantic paintings and replace them with new ones at a rapid pace.⁷⁹Oettermann, Panorama, 239. In a span of six years, the Battle of Atlanta panorama initially exhibited in Minneapolis also was shown in Indianapolis, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, where it has remained on display almost without interruption since 1892. As impresarios moved the panoramas from one city to another, they sometimes altered images to increase their appeal to a local audience. Paul Atkinson, an entrepreneur who bought the Battle of Atlanta panorama in 1890, prepared it for exhibition in Chattanooga by commissioning an artist to convert a group of Confederate prisoners to retreating Union soldiers. Atkinson recalled that when the alteration was completed, "he had a bunch of Yankees running like the mischief."⁸⁰Alma H. Jamison, "The Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta," The Atlanta Historical Bulletin, no. 10, July 1937, 58–75. The ruse continued when Atkinson moved the painting to its final stop, where the Atlanta Constitution heralded the attraction as the only Civil War battle panorama "in which confederate soldiers are shown in the moment of victory." The newspaper reported that "Mr. Atkinson, who is always on the stage, will give away any information desired in regard to the battle, and he is remarkably well up on his history, and tells many interesting stories of incidents in the fight."⁸¹"Right at Home," Atlanta Constitution, February 23, 1892, 9.

Try as they might, promoters could not keep the cyclorama boom going, and the paintings fell out of fashion at the turn of the century.⁸²Comment, Painted Panorama, 257. They "acquired a certain aura of quaintness," according to historian Angela Miller.⁸³Miller, "Panorama," 58. An early indication of the downturn was the low sales price for the Battle of Atlanta painting when it changed hands in its namesake city eighteen months after its opening. "It Went for a Song," the Atlanta Constitution announced, fetching just $1,110.⁸⁴"It Went for A Song," Atlanta Constitution, August 9, 1893, 7. The panorama trade was a risky business, and a painting that did not make a profit in one city could leave promoters without the means to dismantle and move the canvas to a new location. It might be left to languish where it was last displayed. Yet some entrepreneurs continued to invest in cyclorama paintings until their commercial appeal declined precipitously.⁸⁵Fruitema and Zoetmulder, The Panorama Phenomenon, 28. The mammoth canvases were particularly vulnerable to rapidly increasing competition from motion pictures. Movies were more easily distributed and displayed, offered an immersive viewing experience, and surpassed cyclorama paintings by adding photographic realism and movement to the mix.⁸⁶Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 363; Miller, "Emergence of the Spectacular," 41–42, 58. Still, the rapidly ascendent medium inherited important elements from its predecessor. Long shots of landscapes combined with close-ups of human figures and a seamless blending of different scenes into a single composition linked the two media to a common visual grammar.⁸⁷Griffiths, "'Shivers Down Your Spine,'" 21. During cinema's early years, from 1894 through approximately 1908, panoramic shots of natural or human-made wonders were among the most popular subjects.⁸⁸Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 216. "Film was quick to embrace the panorama," according to media scholar William Uricchio, who cites evidence (possibly incomplete) that in the first years of motion pictures "panorama" or "panoramic views'" were the leading copyright entry recorded for movies in the US.⁸⁹William Uricchio, "A 'Proper Point of View': The Panorama and Some of Its Early Media Iterations," in Early Popular Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2011): 225–238. However, films at that time were too short, some less than a minute, to tell the story of famous battles that had been depicted so vividly in cyclorama paintings.⁹⁰André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, "Introduction" in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 1–21. Filmmakers concentrated on exhibiting brief, attention-grabbing visual novelties and snippets of sensational events that comprised what film historian Tom Gunning describes as the "cinema of attractions."⁹¹Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 6.

D. W. Griffith was at the forefront of the transition from short movies that "show" to longer films that "tell." His work, beginning with his directorial debut in 1908, typified what Gunning refers to as the "cinema of narrative integration."⁹²Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 6. Griffith used a variety of innovative filmmaking techniques to narrate events and develop his characters. His methods included displaying two or more simultaneous events in rapid succession to connect story lines, panoramic shots to depict scenes of expansive action, and close-ups to draw attention to individual performers. Griffith did not introduce these techniques, but he experimented with them, and he was among the first American directors to anticipate the popular appeal of multiple-reel, feature-length films.⁹³Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, 74–77; Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film, 25. He also recognized the Civil War's cinematic potential, which increased as the semicentennial of the War approached and then peaked as veterans' reunions and other commemorative activities marked the fiftieth anniversary of major events.⁹⁴Robert Jackson, "The Celluloid War Before The Birth: Race and History in Early American Film," in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, ed. Deborah Barker (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011): 27–51; David W. Blight, "Quarrel Forgotten or a Revolution Remembered? Reunion and Race in the Memory of the Civil War, 1875–1913," in Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, ed. David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997): 151–217. Between 1908 and 1915, Griffith directed twelve Civil War movies, culminating in his three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation, which was made to celebrate the golden anniversary of the War's end.⁹⁵Paul C. Spehr, The Civil War in Motion Pictures: A Bibliography of Films Produced in the United States Since 1897 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1961); Belton, American Cinema/American Culture, 125. When it was released in February 1915, according to Leon Litwack, "the motion picture as art, propaganda, and entertainment came of age."⁹⁶Litwack, "The Birth of a Nation," 136. For the newly revived Ku Klux Klan, the movie's release and distribution were a boon for membership recruitment.⁹⁷Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13.

Griffith and movie producer Roy Aitken led a promotional campaign for The Birth of a Nation that film historian Bruce Chadwick describes as unprecedented in scope. They hired public relations director Ted Mitchell, and "the trio seemed to think of everything," according to Chadwick.⁹⁸Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 130. Advertising blitzes for the motion picture began two weeks before the film arrived in towns on its national tour. Publicity managers heralded the film's opening with parades that featured performers dressed as Klansmen. Promotional materials included widely distributed postcards that displayed Union and Confederate soldiers clasping hands as they held their rifles at rest. Movie programs sold at theaters listed the film's cast and described how Griffith made his motion picture extravaganza. Aided by President Woodrow Wilson's implicit endorsement and despite vigorous protests by the NAACP, the film played to packed theaters nationwide and reaped enormous profits. It produced more than $60 million in revenue in its first run, and its biggest box office business was in northern and western cities, where, according to historian Gary Gallagher, "patrons likely were dazzled by Griffith's technical skill and masterful staging and little bothered by his racism."⁹⁹Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 281; Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 132; Gary W. Gallagher Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 45.

Griffith tells his version of the Civil War and Reconstruction by recounting the epic saga of two fictional, white families, the southern Camerons and the northern Stonemans. The two clans represent the temporarily divided sides in the "house of the nation," which, in Griffith's melodramatic tale, were destined to reunite and reassert white supremacy after a cataclysmic war and a tragic, postwar era of Black domination.¹⁰⁰Elisabeth Bronfen, Specters of War: Hollywood's Engagement With Military Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012): 26; Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon, "Sincere Fictions of the White Self in the American Cinema, The Divided White Self in Civil War Films" in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 263–280. The hero is Ben Cameron, who serves as a Confederate army colonel during the movie's first half and then forms and leads the Ku Klux Klan in the immediate postwar years, which are covered in the film's second half. Griffith's Civil War segment repeats images and themes that appeared thirty years earlier in cyclorama battle paintings, including a canteen-sharing moment in which Ben Cameron provides succor to a Union soldier. More broadly, Griffith followed the panoramic formula by combining the "drama of the hero" and the "energy and the bravery of the many" into a unifying story that transformed America's bloodiest conflict into a "brother's war." Sweeping battle scenes shot from afar blur the distinction between the opposing sides. Dramatic close-ups of hand-to-hand combat and striking displays of selfless acts provide evidence of bilateral gallantry. The causes for which the Union and Confederate armies fought do not enter the picture. "As important as the Civil War was," historian Stephen Weinberger explains, "Griffith does not present it as a conflict between right and wrong or good and evil."¹⁰¹Stephen Weinberger, "Austin Stoneman: The Birth of a Nation's American Tragic Hero," Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 3 (2012): 211–225.

To a large extent, the cycloramic-cinematic parallels end when The Birth of a Nation picks up the story of Reconstruction in its second half. Griffith presents the postwar period as a contest between right and wrong, and the combatants are as markedly different, literally black and white, as the Civil War contestants were similar.¹⁰²Ibid., 213. Black people and women take center stage, a notable contrast with their nearly complete absence from the cyclorama paintings. Griffith portrays Black characters as "incapable of self-government or self-control."¹⁰³Barrett, Shooting the Civil War, 130. His white women are vulnerable and victimized; they must be protected and rescued by chivalrous white heroes. Ben Cameron's leadership of the Ku Klux Klan's vigilante violence against "black villains," including a lynching, is a portrayed as a legitimate exercise of power in defense of "white women in distress."¹⁰⁴Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 153. Cameron is a "hero on horseback," Griffith suggests, the leader of an invisible army whose bravura performance and legacy equal or surpass the achievements of the generals who appear in Civil War panoramas. In Griffith's telling, Ben Cameron is a foundational figure around whom the forces of a divided nation coalesce, just as his own family reconciles with their northern counterparts in pursuit of a common cause. Cameron's paramilitary conquests are followed by a celebratory Ku Klux Klan parade and two Cameron-Stoneman weddings, which strengthen the bond between the fictional families and serve as Griffith's allegorical summation of how white southerners and white northerners reunite and give birth to a nation. In the movie's final moments, a title card appears that cunningly and ironically transforms a wartime rallying cry for the Union—which originated with Daniel Webster's famous 1830 Senate oration—into a white nationalist vision of American civilization predicated on racial purity and hierarchy: "Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!"¹⁰⁵Christopher Childers, The Webster-Hayne Debate: Defining Nationhood in the Early American Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 112–113; Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 81.

The history of militarized commemorative culture in the US is lengthy. It began long before the Battle of Atlanta panorama circulated from city to city, and it endures long after The Birth of a Nation's multiple runs in movie theaters nationwide. From the revolutionary era to the present day, war stories—including visual narratives—have helped spawn American nationalism and shape the national polity.¹⁰⁶Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 6–7; Gerald R. Webster, "American Nationalism, the Flag, and the Invasion of Iraq," The Geographical Review 101, no. 1 (2011): 1–18. The US experience is not unique; military commemorations, even for lost causes, have spurred nationalistic commitments in many places and eras. War is unique; it has a singular capacity to inculcate or invigorate links between large numbers of people who would otherwise have little reason to cohere into a national "community" or continue to participate in one.¹⁰⁷Raymond Haberski, "War and American Thought: Finding a Nation Through Killing and Dying," in American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times, ed. Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 183–197. During the nineteenth century, as described by historian Susan-Mary Grant, "in Europe as in the United States, nations increasingly came to understand themselves and trace their origins through the wars they had fought and the military leaders [who] exemplified their particular brand of nationalism." Artistic and literary representations of battles and heroes expressed the national stories.¹⁰⁸Susan Mary-Grant, "Constructing a Commemorative Culture: American Veterans and Memorialization from Valley Forge to Vietnam," Journal of War and Culture Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 305–322. The Atlanta panorama and The Birth of a Nation helped shape that story in the US by providing popular forms of a "spectacle pedagogy" that taught many Americans how to see and think nationalistically about the Civil War.¹⁰⁹Charles R. Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, "The Spectacle of Visual Culture," Studies in Art Education 45, no. 4 (2004): 298–312. The shared viewing experience and famous military subjects of these vast pictorial spectacles served to instill and express a national identity, albeit one that excluded many people.

The cycloramic and cinematic wartime commemorations helped communicate who qualified in post-Civil War America for full membership in the nation and who did not. As nationalistic spectacles, the two visual narratives brought some aspects of the outside in while keeping others out. However, the painting and the movie differed in how they excluded large numbers of people from the national picture. While the Battle of Atlanta panorama displayed indifference, The Birth of a Nation showcased violent intolerance. In the years between their premiere showings, over a span of three decades, a militarized and racialized nationalism gained increasing traction in the US before tightening its grip even more during and after World War I.¹¹⁰O'Leary, To Die For, 242–245. One hundred years later, the extent to which that grasp continues its hold on the country is an open question, with some indications that a more inclusive American nationalism is fitfully gaining strength or at least proponents. Still, plenty of evidence points to the enduring power of an exclusive and militant nationalism, traceable to antecedents in the post-Civil War era and taking a toll today in myriad ways, from endless wars to mass deportations, targeted voter suppression, police militarization, extrajudicial killings of Black men and women, xenophobic terror attacks, and demagogic political leaders who use false narratives and racist rhetoric to incite nativist violence.

About the Author

Daniel A. Pollock, MD, is a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, where he leads a unit responsible for national surveillance of healthcare-associated infections and COVID-19's impact on healthcare facilities. Since arriving in Atlanta in 1984, he has pursued an independent scholarly interest in the city's Civil War history, and he has conducted nearly 200 tours of Battle of Atlanta sites.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to colleagues in the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and the Southern Spaces editorial staff, with special thanks to Wayne H. Morse, Jr., Allen Tullos, Kayla Shipp, Jay Varner, Steve Bransford, and Michael Page. Thank you as well to Tesla Cariani at ECDS and Paige Knight at Emory University Libraries for their assistance. Use of the Battle of Atlanta panorama images in this monograph was made possible through ECDS's partnership with the Atlanta History Center (AHC). Thanks to Gordon Jones and Jesse Garbowski at AHC for their lead roles in that partnership.

A New Era for "School Choice" and Vouchers

The United States has never been closer to adopting a nationwide program in which the state and federal governments spend billions of tax dollars to finance largely unaccountable private schools to educate children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. By the beginning of 2019, more than half of the fifty states had enacted a variety of voucher programs diverting public funds to private schools and in some places to home-schooling—often for the purported purpose of improving the education of low-income African American and Hispanic students. These programs use state appropriations or tax credits to divert public monies to support self-governing private schools, often with few requirements or restrictions.

The states have steadily enlarged these programs during recent decades as a result of persistent, intense lobbying from school choice advocates. Often, programs have started modestly with special-needs children, then expanded to a broader student population. School choice programs are spread across the nation, although the South has more than anywhere else.¹"Interactive Guide to School Choice Laws," National Conference of State Legislatures, June 15, 2017, http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/interactive-guide-to-school-choice.aspx; "School Choice in America," EdChoice, last modified April 9, 2019, https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/school-choice-in-america/. Twelve of the twenty-six states with voucher programs using direct appropriations, indirect tax credits, or tax savings education accounts are in the South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. State programs vary in form and scope, but some, like Georgia, permit state tax dollars to be diverted for home-schooling. All charts and maps with labels indicating "South" in this article refer to a fifteen-state South, which includes the twelve states listed above as well as Kentucky, Texas, and West Virginia. In 2018, more than $2.1 billion dollars in state funds went to support private schooling—a sum larger than the annual state appropriation for public schools in any of thirteen states across the nation.²School Choice Guidebook 2017–2018 (Washington, DC: American Federation for Children Growth Fund, 2018), 7–9, https://www.federationforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AFC_School_Choice_Guidebook_2017-18_10.3.pdf; "2016 Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finance Data," Annual Survey of School System Finances, US Census, last modified May 17, 2018, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2016/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html.

In addition, there is growing support in Washington for establishing school choice nationwide. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump declared:

Education is the civil rights issue of our time. (Applause.) I am calling upon members of both parties to pass an education bill that funds school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African American and Latino children. (Applause.) These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious, or home school that is right for them.³"Trump's Speech to Congress: Video and Transcript," New York Times, February 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/us/politics/trump-congress-video-transcript.html. During his speech, the President also introduced an African American student who had received a tax credit voucher.

During his campaign, Trump pledged that he would become the "nation's biggest cheerleader for school choice" and would provide states with the means to use $20 billion in federal money to create vouchers allowing children to attend the private schools of their choice. "There is no policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly," he said, "[that] has trapped millions of African American and Hispanic youth" in failing schools.

Trump's secretary of education, Elizabeth "Betsy" DeVos, a wealthy donor to Republican causes and a leading advocate of public funding of religious private schools, stated in May 2017 that the Trump administration would propose "the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation's history" because the "cause is both right and just." The Trump administration proposed to divert more than $1 billion to private schools in the 2019 budget in order to fund "scholarships to students from low-income families that could be used to transfer to a private school." But DeVos has so far been unable to convince Congress to fund such programs directly.⁴Jane Mayer, "Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary," New Yorker, November 23, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-education-secretary; Emma Brown, "DeVos Promises 'the Most Ambitious Expansion of Education Choice in Our Nation's History'—but Offers No Details," Washington Post, May 22, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/betsy-devos-promises-the-most-ambitious-expansion-of-education-choice-in-our-nations-history--but-offers-no-details/2017/05/22/ae90f55e-3f03-11e7-8c25-44d09ff5a4a8_story.html; Valerie Strauss, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Moriah Balingit, "DeVos Seeks Cuts from Education Department to Support School Choice," Washington Post, February 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/02/12/devos-seeks-massive-cuts-from-education-department-to-support-school-choice; Laura Meckler, "The Education of Betsy DeVos: Why Her School Choice Agenda Has Not Advanced," Washington Post, September 4, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-education-of-betsy-devos-why-her-school-choice-agenda-has-crashed/2018/09/04/c21119b8-9666-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html; US Department of Education, Fiscal Year 2019 Budget: Summary and Background Information, last modified February 12, 2018, https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget19/summary/19summary.pdf.

Support for federal funding of private schools is not a phenomenon only of the Trump administration. In 2012, the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, issued an education "white paper" proposing public financing of tuition costs in private schools as the centerpiece of a new national education reform. The Romney for President position paper proposed to overhaul the primary federal funding of K–12 public schools "so that low-income and special-needs students can choose which school to attend and bring their funding with them. The choices offered to students under this policy will include . . . private schools if permitted by state law."⁵Romney for President, "A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney's Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education," May 23, 2012, Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, Georgetown Law Library, https://web.archive.org/web/20180624193755/http:/cdm16064.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p266901coll4/id/3980. The white paper was endorsed in a foreword by former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

In 2014, US senators Tim Scott of South Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (ranking Republican on the committee for education) introduced legislation to enable federal funding for low-income and special-needs students in public schools to attend private schools. Alexander explained: "Allowing $2,100 federal scholarships to follow 11 million children to whatever school they attend would enable other school choice innovations, in the same way that developers rushed to provide applications for the iPhone platform."⁶Motoko Rich, "Bill to Offer an Option to Give Vouchers," New York Times, January 27, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/education/senator-to-propose-school-vouchers-program.html; American Enterprise Institute, "Senators Lamar Alexander and Tim Scott Unveil Ambitious Proposal to Expand School Choice," January 28, 2014, http://www.aei.org/events/senators-lamar-alexander-and-tim-scott-unveil-ambitious-proposals-to-expand-school-choice/; Lamar Alexander, "Weekly Column by Lamar Alexander: The 'Scholarship for Kids' Act," Weekly Columns, Lamar Alexander: United States Senator for Tennessee, February 18, 2014, https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2014/2/weekly-column-by-lamar-alexander-the-scholarships-for-kids-act; See also CHOICE Act, S. 1909, 113^th Cong. (2014) and Scholarships for Kids Act, S. 1968, 115^th Cong. (2017).

This momentum for vouchers found its way into the major federal tax overhaul enacted in 2017. Congress expanded the use of "529 savings plans" beyond paying for college costs so that tax-advantaged funds can now be used to pay up to $10,000 annually for costs of elementary and secondary education in K–12 private schools.⁷Ron Lieber, "Yes, You Really Can Pay for Private School With 529 Plans Now," New York Times, December 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/your-money/529-plans-taxes-private-school.html. This federal change supplements the Coverdell Education Savings Accounts passed first in the Clinton administration and expanded during the George W. Bush administration. It allows a limited use of federal tax dollars to support attendance at private elementary and secondary schools. See Coverdell Education Savings Accounts, 26 U.S.C. § 530 (2006). Most private schools, as non-profit organizations, receive contributions that are deductible for donors from federal income taxes. They also are exempt from income taxes and often local property taxes. This change promises to become quite significant, especially for wealthier households. It opens up a fund—$328 billion and growing—from which monies can be diverted yearly to private K–12 schools.⁸"529 Plan Data," College Savings Plan Network, June 30, 2018, http://www.collegesavings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/June-2018-529-plan-data-10.15.18.pdf.

Civil Rights Rhetoric Echoes in "School Choice" and Vouchers

"School choice" has no traditional or intrinsic meaning in the field of education, but over the last several decades it has become a political slogan for the claim that government should finance children's education from pre-kindergarten through the twelfth grade in schools outside the public system in order to provide parents with a choice. In recent years, charter schools have been included as a "school choice" option because many local districts and some states now authorize private profit-making or non-profit entities to operate these schools independently, often without meeting requirements and rules that public schools must follow. In 2015, there were 2.8 million students in charter schools and 5.8 million students in private elementary and secondary schools across the United States.⁹"Public Charter School Enrollment," The Condition of Education 2018, National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cgb.pdf; "Private School Enrollment," The Condition of Education 2018, National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cgc.pdf. Also, see Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin Jr., "Education for All? A Nationwide Audit Study of Schools of Choice" (working paper 25396, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2018). This article examines the history of government support for private schools as both the origin and primary foundation for the current movement for "school choice."

In claiming private "school choice" as right and just, President Trump and Secretary DeVos echo rhetoric that others have used to argue that publicly financed vouchers for children to attend private K–12 schools are a moral imperative. In articles such as "How School Choice Helps Advance Martin Luther King's Legacy," the Heritage Foundation has insisted that vouchers continue the civil rights movement. In 2011, the founder of the tax credit voucher program in Florida declared that school choice for low-income families "is one of the most important social justice issues of our time."¹⁰John Kirtley, "Facing a Harsh Truth When Fighting for a Bipartisan Cause," RedefinED, May 20, 2011, https://www.redefinedonline.org/2011/05/facing-a-harsh-truth-when-fighting-for-a-bipartisan-cause/; Katie Nielsen, "How School Choice Helps Advance Martin Luther King's Legacy," My Heritage, Heritage Foundation, August 28, 2013, https://www.myheritage.org/news/how-school-choice-helps-advance-martin-luther-kings-legacy/.

One of Dr. King's children, in fact, joined the cause of vouchers for private schools in Florida to give "black, Latino, and Hispanic" children the same options as others. "This is about justice," Martin Luther King III stated in 2016. "This is about righteousness. This is about freedom—the freedom to choose for your family and your child."¹¹Kristen M. Clark, "Thousands Rally in Support of Program Opposed by Union," Miami Herald, January 19, 2016, www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article55454785.html. Martin Luther King III attended and graduated from the private Galloway School, created in Atlanta in 1969. Earlier, his parents attempted to enter him into another Atlanta private school when he reached school-age in the 1960s, after they were misinformed by an Episcopal priest that the all-white, private Lovett School would accept their son. Their written application for his admission was denied without reference to a reason, although the chairman of the school board later stated that he believed that both the "negro and the white man has some individual rights." "Diversity and Inclusion at Galloway," The Galloway School, accessed March 27, 2019, https://www.gallowayschool.org/community-life/diversity-inclusion; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 175–177.

The political movement for "school choice" is employing the icons and language of civil rights and social justice to advance private school vouchers that fifty years ago were primary tools for segregationists to preserve unequal education for African American and Hispanic children. President Trump's call for a national program of "school choice" echoes the language of George Wallace and others who demanded the federal government and US courts permit Alabama and the South to administer "freedom of choice" for elementary and secondary schools.

These apparent contradictions emerge from the unexamined legacy of segregationists who designed and developed effective, lasting strategies that frustrated and blocked K–12 school desegregation. It is a legacy that turns the icons and language of civil rights inside-out while thwarting the national goal of an effective, equitable system of education for all children.

Forgotten Segregationists

Historically, the methods and forms of segregation have been neither monolithic nor inert.¹²See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Pauli Murray, States' Laws on Race and Color (Cincinnati, OH: Women's Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, 1951), 3–20; J. Mills Thornton III, "Segregation and the City: White Supremacy in Alabama in the Mid-Twentieth Century," in Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement, eds. Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 52–55. Southern segregationists held differing notions about the best ways to preserve school segregation along with their beliefs in racial superiority. As Sylvan Meyer observed in 1960, southern segregationists included "all those whose views varied from a mild belief that the South would be better off maintaining as much racial separation as possible to those advocating insurrection rather than 'surrender' to any compromise whatsoever."¹³Walter Spearman and Sylvan Meyer, Racial Crisis and the Press (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council, 1960), 47. Many segregationist leaders who designed and implemented plans for school choice have been forgotten, as have their plethora of rationales, strategies, and tactics. They were never widely known, and popular culture has narrowed the cast to a small rogues' gallery.

Prevalent images include segregationists such as Alabama governor George Wallace, Birmingham police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, and a bevy of other white leaders such as Mississippi senator James Eastland who endure as premiere political symbols—in large part because their defiant images in multiple confrontations with and condemnations of federal officials often were captured as television came of age in the 1960s.¹⁴See Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006), 56, 301–325, 376–379. A few, such as Wallace and North Carolina's Jesse Helms, remained on the national political stage for more than a decade.¹⁵See Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 451–468. Wallace prompted controversies over "free speech" rights on college campuses into the 1970s and remains today a popular reference for personifying the southern segregationist. See Peter Salovey, "Free Speech, Personified," New York Times, November 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/opinion/free-speech-yale-civil-rights.html.

But George Wallace was only one type of segregationist—and hardly a representative figure for those more successful over time in frustrating and blocking school desegregation. Segregationists with other styles and backgrounds built the more lasting terms, tools, and tactics that obstructed the Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education¹⁶Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). outlawing segregated public education. This wider cast of white supremacists competed fiercely in shaping how and where segregated schools could be preserved. When political self-interest and racial ideology aligned, they occasionally cooperated. At times they shared a vocabulary against Brown, depicted as a federal edict to force the South to create "mixed schools," never to create equitable, desegregated or integrated schools.¹⁷Spearman and Meyer, Racial Crisis and the Press, 19, 25, 46–48, 52. Meyer explains how "mix" was a "scare word." Justin Driver, "Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto," Texas Law Review 92 (2014): 1082, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles/4043/.

These white men included die-hards, such as those found in the middle-class Citizens' Councils who usually pushed to abandon all public schooling rather than accept any desegregation. Some Citizens' Council leaders, however, came to recognize exceptions to absolute, complete segregation. Ku Klux Klanners, especially in the Deep South, were also dead-set against a single Black child entering an all-white school and were willing to use extra-legal intimidation and violence. Others, such as South Carolina governor Jimmy Byrnes, believed that the impact of Brown could be postponed indefinitely or avoided in large measure by building new Black schools so that separate schools appeared closer to equal.

Political leaders such as Georgia's Ernest Vandiver won office by campaigning on a slogan of "No, not one" African American child would ever be allowed in a white school but discovered after entering the governor's office that complete, absolute segregation was impossible to achieve—and counter-productive to preserving as many virtually segregated schools as possible. There were segregationists such as Alabama state senator Albert Boutwell—who later as a "moderate" mayoral candidate defeated "Bull" Connor—and Birmingham corporate attorney Forney Johnston. While Wallace began as a white liberal before shifting his politics to become governor, Boutwell and Johnston were the first segregationist leaders to develop a variety of strategies, tactics, and rationales for school choice that often delayed and defeated the promise of Brown.

Resistance to school desegregation differed across the states of the former Confederacy according to class, geography, religion, and political ambition.¹⁸David L. Chappell, "The Divided Mind of Southern Segregationists," Georgia Historical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 45–72; James Graham Cook, The Segregationists (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), 5–6; Clive Webb, ed., Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8–9. The different factors influencing all policy issues, including race, in the segregated South were detailed by state in V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). These different factors also were evident in southern white attitudes toward African American education. See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 893–900. For an example of class divisions during desegregation, see Karen Anderson, "The Little Rock School Desegregation Crisis: Moderation and Social Conflict," Journal of Southern History 70, no. 3 (August 2004): 603–636. Only by recovering and understanding the work of a wider cast of white actors who crafted enduring tools and strategies protecting segregation can the reactionary heritage of today's school choice become clear. As Justin Driver has found, the efforts of these segregationist leaders "to maintain white supremacy were often considerably more sophisticated, self-aware, and nuanced than the cartoonish depiction of southern stupidity and hostility would admit."¹⁹Driver, "Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto," 1079. These forgotten and ignored strategies help explain how today's proponents of public financing of private schools can employ the language of civil rights without widespread discredit. They also reveal how the origins and historical development of "freedom of choice" have shaped and continue to define the impact and role of "school choice" and vouchers in public education across the nation.²⁰This study is, of course, not the first essay to explore the southern segregationist origins of private school vouchers for elementary and secondary schools. See, for example, Chris Ford, Stephenie Johnson, and Lisette Partelow, The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, July 12, 2017), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2017/07/12/435629/racist-origins-private-school-vouchers/, and Mark A. Gooden, Huriya Jabbar, and Mario S. Torres Jr., "Race and School Vouchers: Legal, Historical, and Political Contexts," Peabody Journal of Education 91, no. 4 (2016): 522–536.

School Choice and Vouchers Become Segregationist Tools

During the middle of the twentieth century, K–12 private schooling became intertwined with race and ethnicity as the Supreme Court issued opinions outlawing segregated graduate and professional public education.²¹Dick M. Carpenter II and Krista Kafer, "A History of Private School Choice," Peabody Journal of Education 87, no. 3 (2012): 336–338. For a review of the Court's decisions leading up to Brown, see Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 256–284; Sam P. Wiggins, Higher Education in the South (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Pub. Corp., 1966), 169. There is an earlier history of school choice in the United States, when Catholic schools competed with public schools, often decidedly Protestant in nature, that carried forward into the twentieth century. See Robert N. Gross, Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Yet, Gross largely ignores the pivotal period of Reconstruction when African American representatives helped to write new southern state constitutions mandating public schools as an essential duty of state governments. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: MacMillan, 1992), 637–669. These decisions had no impact on elementary and secondary public schools, but they signaled the direction the Court was moving.

From 1940 to 1950, private school enrollment in the South rose by more than 125,000 students—a 43-percent increase, and, for the first time since private enrollment numbers were documented, the rate of growth doubled that of the rest of the nation.

From 1950 to 1965, US private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates while the South's rate again exceeded the nation's. Whites in record numbers fled to traditional and newly formed private schools. From 1950 to 1958, the South's private school enrollment increased by more than 250,000 students. By 1965, there were nearly one million southern private school students. Almost all were white.²²See Norman Dorsen, "Racial Discrimination in 'Private' Schools," William & Mary Law Review 9, no. 1 (1967): 46, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol9/iss1/4/.

Legislatures passed laws authorizing vouchers and other means of transferring public assets and monies to private schools.²³Reaction to Brown was comparatively muted outside the South since the Supreme Court struck down only school segregation established by law, and most segregation laws were in southern states. There was widespread de facto school segregation outside the South but only in a relatively few places did the law erect a dual system of publicly financed education based on race or ethnicity. See Murray, States' Laws on Race and Color; Robin M. Williams Jr. and Margaret W. Ryan, eds., Schools in Transition: Community Experiences in Desegregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954); Will Maslow, "De Facto Public School Segregation," Villanova Law Review 6, no. 3 (1961), https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/vlr/vol6/iss3/2/. In November 1953, as it appeared the Supreme Court might strike down school segregation, white South Carolinians voted to repeal a section of their state constitution that provided for a "liberal system of free public schools"—to clear the way for establishing a private school system. Georgia became the first southern state to pass a constitutional amendment enabling the legislature to send state, county, and municipal funds to "citizens of the State for educational purposes, in discharge of all obligation of the State to provide adequate education for its citizens." A month later, white Mississippians voted for a constitutional amendment granting the legislature power to close public schools and finance private ones. By the end of 1956, Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina passed similar measures.²⁴W. D. Workman Jr., "The Deep South," in With All Deliberate Speed: Segregation-Desegregation in Southern Schools, ed. Don Shoemaker (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 97–100; House Resolution No. 225, Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1953, November–December Session, vol. 2, 241; Molly Townes O'Brien, "Private School Tuition Vouchers and the Realities of Racial Politics," Tennessee Law Review 64, no. 2 (1997): 359–407. Louisiana adopted a constitutional amendment in 1954 affirming its police powers to prevent desegregation of public schools, and this amendment apparently was interpreted to provide the state legislature will the power to fund private schools. See Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, 275 F. Supp. 833 (1967).

From 1954 to 1965, southern legislatures enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions attempting to discredit, block, postpone, limit, or evade school desegregation. A large number of these acts allowed the re-direction of public resources, including school resources, to benefit private schools.²⁵Tom Flake, "475 Legislative Actions Pertain to Race, Schools," Southern School News, May 1964, B-1. In 1956, the Georgia legislature permitted the leasing of public property to segregated private schools. Five years later, the state enacted a law to provide vouchers for students to attend any non-sectarian private school, boldly declaring the act was to advance "the constitutional rights of school children to attend private schools of their choice in lieu of public schools."²⁶For a full treatment of the methods and strategies of resistance, including diverting public resources to private schools, see Thomas V. O'Brien, The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900–1961 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 99–198.

The North Carolina legislature enacted eight bills, the first of which was a constitutional amendment to authorize vouchers for private education and to allow whites to close public schools through a local referendum. In Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, legislatures passed laws to publicly fund vouchers for private schools and to transfer public school property to private educational organizations. Citizens' Councils were active in setting up private schools, especially in Mississippi. The Virginia legislature declared its support for this "freedom of choice" movement by enacting a system of vouchers for private organizations and citizens.²⁷Arthur Larentz Carlson, "With All Deliberate Speed: The Pearsall Plan and School Desegregation in North Carolina, 1954–1966" (master's thesis, East Carolina University, 2011); Jim Leeson, "Private Schools Continue to Increase in the South," Southern Education Report 2 (November 1966): 22–25; Walter F. Murphy, "Private Education with Public Funds," Journal of Politics 20, no. 4 (November 1954): 636–637; Lester Tanzer, "Private School Push: Integration of Virginia Public Schools Spurs Growth of Private Units," Wall Street Journal, February 6, 1959; Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 297–304; Mary Ellen Goodman, Sanctuaries for Tradition: Virginia's New Private Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council, 1961).

In addition to direct transfers of public funds and assets, some states employed tax schemes, including tax credits, to build and finance private school systems. In the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, after President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to call out federal troops to protect a handful of Black children attempting to attend Central High School, Governor Orval Faubus funneled public monies through contracts and tax credits to the Little Rock Private School Corporation until the federal courts stopped the subterfuge (along with further attempts by Arkansas to enact vouchers). In 1959, Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver led the legislature in passing the six segregation bills, including one that supported "the establishment of bona fide private schools by allowing taxpayers credits upon their State income tax returns for contributions to such institutions."²⁸Clay Gowran, "Faubus Tells 'Legal Plan' To Segregate," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1958; Journal of the House of Representatives, State of Georgia, Regular Session, 1959, 80; "'Resistance' Laws Urged in Georgia: Governor Offers 6 Measures Designed to Strengthen Segregated Schools," New York Times, January 16, 1959; "Georgia Asked To Strengthen Segregation: Six Bills Offered by Governor," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 16, 1959.

In the same year, Florida governor LeRoy Collins successfully opposed a legislative initiative to pass a constitutional amendment to allow state tax credits for private school contributions. In Prince Edward County and other locations in Virginia, officials used both direct payments and tax credits to build private schools until the federal courts halted both. In Mississippi, after federal courts struck down a direct tuition grant to private schools, Governor John Bell Williams proposed a state tax credit as he searched for the "ways and means of rendering assistance" for white flight to private schools.²⁹"May Veto Plan To Sell Segregation," Daily Defender, June 8, 1959; Lester Tanzer, "Private School Push: Integration of Virginia Public Schools Spurs Growth of Private Units Norfolk Academy, Others Will Expand; State Aids Shift, Authorizes Tuition Grants A Pattern for Solid South? Private School Push: Integration in Virginia Spurs Growth of Units," Wall Street Journal, February 6, 1959; Raymond Moley, "Children Are the Real Victims of the School Integration War," Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1961; Jon Nordheimer, "Integration Raises the Issue of Coeducation in South," New York Times, June 4, 1970.

By 1965, seven states had enacted some type of voucher that enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South's history. Yet, vouchers as a preferred and essential method of resistance to Brown did not stand alone but worked most effectively through larger plans that emerged from the different states. These plans were not uniform, but most incorporated strategies and language that have evolved and endured as the ways and means by which vouchers, school choice, and private schooling have escaped the stigma of their segregationist origins without losing much of the same purpose or effect.

Preserving Virtual School Segregation through Vouchers

During the era of massive resistance, several state legislatures and governors established committees or commissions to develop options for preserving segregation. These strategy groups were often known by the name of the persons chairing them—usually a senior legislator or well-known businessman. In Alabama, it was the Boutwell Committee, led by a prominent, well-to-do state senator. In South Carolina, a wealthy state senator chaired the Gressette Committee. The Pearsall Committee in North Carolina was named for its businessman leader; an Atlanta business leader guided Georgia's Sibley Commission. In Virginia, both of its strategy commissions were named for their prominent businessmen chairs.

The strategy groups issued recommendations in written reports explaining the imperatives for segregation, the rationale for preserving it, including arguments for why segregation was advantageous to Black families, and the different tactics of resistance. These reports demonstrate that segregationist leaders came to understand that vouchers and other forms of aid to private schools worked best in conjunction with a variety of other tactics and strategies for defeating Brown.

Alabama: "Big Mules" Develop a Freedom of Choice Plan

In October 1954, barely five months after Brown, the Boutwell Committee became the first strategy group to lay out a complete, multifaceted plan of resistance. As a moderate segregationist, state senator Albert Boutwell did not believe it feasible or advisable to maintain old segregation laws and disavowed the use of force.³⁰Boutwell's reputation as a moderate grew larger after he ran against and defeated Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor in a race for mayor. "Albert Boutwell Lieutenant Governor: 1959–1963," Alabama Department of Archives and History, last modified August 20, 2009, http://www.archives.state.al.us/conoff/Boutwell.html. Perhaps the Boutwell plan's chief architect and certainly its primary intellectual force was Forney Johnston, a brilliant segregationist and corporate attorney in Birmingham who represented Alabama's "Big Mules"—coal companies, railroads, and wealthy industrialists and investors who profited from Birmingham's exploitative heavy industries. As a backroom politician and former governor's son, Johnston adroitly maneuvered in politics and law to protect the corporate interests he represented and to preserve his notion of segregation. He had managed a 1924 presidential campaign, mounted major legal challenges to New Deal economic reforms, and worked behind the scenes to secure pardons for the "Scottsboro Boys"—but only to prevent growing national support for federal intervention in "states' rights."³¹Edward R. Crowther, "Alabama's Fight to Maintain Segregated Schools," Alabama Review 43 (1990): 209–210; Thomas Jasper Gilliam Sr., "The Second Folsom Administration: The Destruction of Alabama Liberalism" (PhD diss., Auburn University, 1975), 107, 116, 194, 384. Johnston played a behind-the-scenes role in Alabama on racial matters. As a life-long white supremacist, he worked with state political and business leaders after both world wars in developing laws and strategies to thwart the expectations and aspirations of returning Black soldiers. Yet after managing a presidential primary campaign, Johnston nominated Alabama senator Oscar W. Underwood as the anti-Klan candidate for president at the Democratic National Convention of 1924. John W. Davis, who later argued before the US Supreme Court on behalf of southern states in Brown, won the nomination over Underwood after an unprecedented number of ballots. Johnston was a formidable and talented legal opponent. Steve Suitts, Hugo Black of Alabama (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2005), 235–236, 462–472; "Roosevelt Stand on Policies Asked; Forney Johnston Urges Chamber to Seek Clarification of President's Objectives," New York Times, May 1, 1935; "Graves Is Accused in Scottsboro Case," New York Times, December 25, 1938; John Temple Graves, "The Wage-War Between the States," Nation's Business, June 1934, 42; Frank W. Boykin to Mrs. Forney Johnston, June 7, 1962, Frank W. Boykin Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

The Boutwell report decried "forced integration," claiming it would lead to "violence, disorder, and tension for the state and its children." It warned that if the federal courts pursued "coerced integration," white employers would fire Black employees involved in such efforts and the federal courts would prompt inevitable violence among "the least stable and least mentally matured and responsible members of both races." The report also suggested that "compulsory integration" would devastate public school finances by estranging "white people, who pay by far the greater part of taxes which maintain the schools."

The Boutwell plan sought to assure two goals ("Education for all children of the state" and "No compulsory mixing of races in our schools") by proposing four basic strategies:

• Eliminate any "prohibition against the operation of mixed schools, attended by both races" in the current state constitution and laws. In other words, Alabama laws would "concede the right of white and negro families to send their children to mixed public schools." This change would enshrine "the principle of freedom of choice" to enable parents to select the school their children should attend—within certain predetermined conditions and qualifications.
• Remove any suggestion from the state constitution that there is a right of education or an obligation of the state to fund public schoolchildren and establish a "policy of the State of Alabama to foster and promote the education of its citizens in a manner and extent consistent with its available resources, and the willingness and ability of the individual student [emphasis added]."
• Invest the legislature with constitutional powers to enable local school officials to determine the conditions and qualifications for "eligibility, admission, and allocation of pupils, including the power to refuse admission to individuals or groups whose deficiencies in scholastic aptitude would compel undue lowering of school standards."
• Grant the legislature the constitutional power to provide vouchers and other tax funds in "support and furtherance of education in other ways than the operation of public schools" for both Black and white children.

In effect, the plan would establish in the name of school "choice" a three-school system, instead of a dual school system. The new system would enable children to attend all-white schools, all-Black schools, or desegregated schools in a state-financed system of public and private schools.

With only one "nay" vote, the legislature passed the proposals to revise the state constitution, and white voters of Alabama ratified the amendments in 1956 to set up the plan's framework. Alabama's Citizens' Council (called "manicured Kluxism" by the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser) worried that the proposals were weak. The Council's leader, state senator Sam Engelhardt, had earlier proposed legislation to close all public schools and use vouchers for white parents to enroll in private schools in order to "keep every brick in our segregation wall intact." Alabama governor James E. "Big Jim" Folsom opposed all of these measures. "I wouldn't want to sign a bill that would let rich folks send their kids all to one school and the poor folks to another school," the populist Folsom declared.³²Fred Taylor, "'Freedom of Choice' Bill Seeks School Solution in Alabama," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 12, 1956; Fred Taylor, "3-School System Amendment Expected to Pass in Alabama," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 26, 1956; Crowther, "Alabama's Fight," 214; "Georgia," Southern School News, September 3, 1954; Carter, The Politics of Rage, 83.

While the constitutional amendments recommended by the Boutwell Committee were pending before the legislature, Forney Johnston gave a speech to the Alabama Bar Association that identified the plan's legal underpinnings: "the liberty of parents to direct the basic conditions under which their children shall be educated." Quoting from the 1925 US Supreme Court opinion that struck down an Oregon statute requiring all disability-free children to attend a public school,³³Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). Johnston declared: "This parental liberty, like other liberties, is not absolute; but is limited only by an overriding necessity for community order or welfare, reflected not in some remote Federal pronouncement, but in the grass-root exercise of state police power, by the State acting in its sovereign capacity."

Johnston argued that the Boutwell plan provided freedom of choice without regard to race and, in that context, the federal courts could not require white parents to send their children to a desegregated school, although some white parents could decide to do so. "If the 14^th Amendment now says that a state cannot inhibit the freedom of negroes to attend schools with white people, what does it say about the freedom of white people to choose not to go to school with negroes?" Johnston answered his own question. Virtually segregated schools could continue through this freedom of choice in a new system of education where the government financed both public and private schools, where there was "ordinary and customary geographical districting" for public schools, and where the independent "application of accepted educational tests and standards" by both private and public schools were the terms for admitting students.

This type of school system would permit parental choice for a desegregated school, all-white school, or all-Black school within a structure and standards that were expressly non-racial. "If the members of a race are thereby deprived of access to a school attended by the other race," Johnston observed, "the result is attributable not to compulsion by the state but to the inconsistent choices of free citizens. Under such circumstances, the state is obliged to give effect to the desire of parents without compulsion against either side."³⁴Joseph F. Johnston, "Schools, the Supreme Court, and the States' Power To Direct the Removal of Gunpowder," Alabama Lawyer 17, no. 3 (1956): 3–10.

The full details of the Boutwell plan failed to become law in 1955 in large measure because of the direct and behind-the-scenes opposition of Governor Folsom, who downplayed the Brown decision and fought on many other issues with Black Belt politicians and Birmingham's "Big Mules" and their lawyers such as Johnston. Folsom also vetoed a handful of local bills that attempted to punish Black teachers if they voiced support for desegregation, but the legislature passed the segregationists' pupil placement bill by a veto-proof margin.

The new pupil placement law for public schools was sponsored by Senator Sam Engelhardt, the Citizens' Council leader who had come to embrace the Boutwell Committee's concepts and strategies. The law asserted it had nothing to do with segregation, but aimed to advance each child's education:

To establish a practical school system whereby the state's school program can be adapted to each pupil's ability to learn. To this end it provides a modern school placement system, so that pupils can be so grouped that the less advanced pupils shall not be penalized by being placed in the class with pupils who are more advanced or capable of learning at a more rapid rate, and conversely, that exceptionally bright and able pupils shall not be held back to a level below their ability to learn.

The law empowered local school boards alone to make decisions about which school each student was assigned to attend based on the following factors: tests of student aptitude and ability as well as the distance of school from a pupil's home; a pupil's educational background and home environment; a student's long-established ties of friendship or the dangers of placing a pupil in hostile surroundings absent former friends and "associates"; a pupil's own wishes as evidenced by a written request from his parents or guardian to be assigned to a particular school; and whether, in the judgment of the school board, the assignment would cause or tend to cause a breach of the peace, riot, or "affray." The law provided for a complicated, costly appeal process, if parents disagreed with the board's decision. Not one word in the legislation mentioned segregation, integration, or a child's race.³⁵Fred Taylor, "School Segregation Problem No. 1 on Ala. Legislature List: Measures Proposing Varied Plans Readied for Extra Session Call," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 2, 1955; "Alabama," Southern School News, February 3, 1955, 3; J. Tyra Harris, "Alabama Reaction to the Brown Decision, 1954–1956: A Case Study in Early Massive Resistance" (PhD diss., Middle Tennessee State University, 1978), 208–209.

A year later, with the Montgomery bus boycott threatening to end segregated seating in the state capital, the federal courts ordered the admission of Autherine Lucy, a Black woman, into the University of Alabama, and white-led race riots broke out in Tuscaloosa.³⁶Lucy was summarily suspended "for her own safety" after a series of riotous events on campus following her attendance. Charles Morgan Jr., A Time To Speak (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 37–39. Lucy remembered in 2017 at a university ceremony dedicating a historical marker in her honor that whites had chanted: "Hey, Hey, Ho! Where in the Hell did the nigger go?" See Jessa Reid Bolling and Rebecca Griesbach, "Autherine Lucy Foster Memorialized with Historical Marker," The Crimson White, September 18, 2017, 3, http://now.dirxion.com/Crimson_White/library/Crimson_White_09_18_2017.pdf; AL.com, "Autherine Lucy Foster Monument Unveiled," YouTube video, 1:56, September 17, 2017, https://youtu.be/6jriSBIwSHg. Afterwards, the legislature decided it was time to place before voters the basic parts of the Boutwell plan or, as it was publicly called, the "Freedom of Choice Plan." Folsom declared the legislation "hogwash" and many of his supporters opposed it. It also was opposed by die-hards such as Asa Carter, a Citizens' Council (and soon Klan) leader, since the proposal removed all constitutional requirements for the complete separation of the races in the schools.

Alabama's virtually all-white electorate approved the "freedom of choice" amendments to the constitution with 61 percent of the vote, and the Boutwell plan's key elements became the operating terms for the strategy to resist and slow school desegregation in the Heart of Dixie.

John Patterson won the race for governor in 1958 as a hard-edged, proven segregationist who, as Alabama attorney general, had attempted to put the NAACP out of business through a series of persistent, harassing lawsuits—an attack commenced after a strategy meeting that included Forney Johnston. As governor, Patterson assured white Alabamians that "I would not agree under any circumstances to operate an integrated school," but, with Boutwell serving as lieutenant governor, he followed the spirit and letter of the Boutwell-Johnston strategy. It proved remarkably successful. During Patterson's four years in the governor's mansion, the US Supreme Court upheld Alabama's pupil placement law on its face as constitutional and, as Patterson later boasted, no Alabama public school was ever desegregated while he was governor.³⁷Harris, "Alabama Reaction to the Brown Decision," 226–229, 241–249; Gilliam Sr., "The Second Folsom Administration," 316–321, 374–384, 423–436; Joseph M. Bagley, "School Desegregation, Law and Order, and Litigating Social Justice in Alabama, 1954–1973" (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2013), 104–105; Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham Board of Education, 162 F. Supp. 372 (1958) affirmed by Shuttlesworth v. Board of Education, 358 U.S. 101 (1958); "Alabama: Governor Renews Vow to Resist Integration," Southern School News, February 1961, 14; Warren Trest, Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama's Youngest Governor (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2008), 260, 303–306; William Warren Rogers et al., Alabama: A History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 547–548.

Alabama's approach to controlling school desegregation changed dramatically in 1963 after George Wallace won the race for governor by making good on his promise—uttered after losing to Patterson in 1958—that "no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again."³⁸Carter, The Politics of Rage, 96–109. Wallace defeated Folsom, Boutwell, and "Bull" Connor, among others. In his inaugural speech written by Asa Carter, Wallace proclaimed words that have resounded across the decades:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood. . . . Let us . . . send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. . . . I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.³⁹George C. Wallace, "The Inaugural Address of Governor George C. Wallace," January 14, 1963, Alabama Textual Materials Collections, Alabama Department of Archives and History, transcript, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2952.

Governor Wallace kicked off an orchestrated, theatrical performance of massive resistance a few months later when he stood in the schoolhouse door to decry federal encroachment on state sovereignty and to protest the admission of two Black students to the University of Alabama, which had a total enrollment of almost ten thousand students. Afterwards, Wallace led the state government in replaying strategies used earlier in Mississippi and Louisiana, including the formation of state spy commissions to monitor and intimidate civil right activists. His administration coordinated with the Klan and the Citizens' Council, and Wallace's frequent public pronouncements left little doubt that Alabama's school program had nothing to do with the Boutwell Committee's earlier stated purposes of advancing "each pupil's ability to learn" and everything to do with preserving absolute segregation.

Buoyed by national news coverage and by the enthusiastic support of white Alabamians that came as a result of Jim Crow grandstanding, Wallace had no intention of permitting any Alabama official to accept or implement token integration in the schools without an opportunity for him to publicly display his fight for complete segregation. The governor called out state troopers to surround school buildings in several Alabama towns—even when local white school boards had decided to permit a small number of Black children to cross the color line.

In response, civil rights attorneys returned to federal court with new evidence from Wallace's statements and actions that the school laws and their enforcement were intended to block Brown, and the courts began striking down the state's education laws—including its private school voucher law—and ordering school desegregation. As his lawyers lost in the federal courts, Wallace kept racial politics center stage, creating an environment for violence and capturing the adulation of the white die-hards. He also attracted the nation's attention by expanding and amplifying the provocative rhetoric of total, massive federal resistance. Wallace became in the political imaginary one of the nation's enduring southern segregationist icons.⁴⁰Carter, The Politics of Rage, 133–293; Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Boston, MA: Addison Wesley, 1994), 244–253; Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458 (1967); Allen Tullos, Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 233–241.

The Other Southern States: "Freedom from Compulsory Association" by Any or Many Means

Six other states—Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—also created strategy groups to block school desegregation. Each group had its own distinct design and role within the dynamics of how each state built massive resistance to Brown, but most shared similar characteristics and tactics. All adopted vouchers for private schools.

In Mississippi, white voters approved state constitutional changes recommended by Governor Hugh White's advisory group that authorized state funding for children to attend their parents' choice of a private school and for transferring public school properties to private schools. Afterwards, the strategy committee did little more since Mississippi's white leaders employed other groups and strategies as their first line of defense. The legislature approved small funding increases forBlack public schools in an attempt to convince Black citizens that the state would move closer to "separate but equal" facilities.

Mississippi's primary strategies to block school desegregation involved private and public agencies that undertook economic and social intimidation, behind-the-scenes spying, physical threats, and violence. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission kept tabs on "agitators" in conjunction with the Citizens' Council, the Klan, and other vigilante groups.⁴¹"Mississippi," Southern School News, September 3, 1954; Charles C. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 65–68, 75–88; McMillen, The Citizens' Council, 15–32, 360–361; John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 45–72; Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 34–37.

Other states used legal and extra-legal tactics to keep schools segregated, but, as one author wrote, "Mississippi verged on totalitarianism."⁴²Michael J. Klarman, "Why Massive Resistance?" in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27. "This is a fight for white supremacy," declared the editor of the Jackson Daily News, returning to public language often abandoned by segregationists elsewhere. "[T]here will be no room for neutrals or non-combatants." Local Black leaders such as Leake County sisters Winson and Dovie Hudson faced combatants as they continued to challenge school segregation, despite economic reprisals, physical threats, and more than one bombing of their own homes. "I'm going to stay here and pay the cost, no matter what it is," Dovie Hudson assured Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, who soon afterwards was murdered in his own driveway in Jackson. Anyone connected to school desegregation or civil rights work in Mississippi ran a real risk of being fired from work, thrown out of their house, beaten, bombed, or shot at. Several were killed.⁴³Dennis J. Mitchell, Mississippi Liberal: A Biography of Frank E. Smith (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 130; Constance Curry, "A Right to Be There," Southern Changes 14, no. 1 (1992): 18–25, http://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/sc14-3_1204/sc14-3_005/; Winson Hudson and Connie Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 47–73; Marin Noel and Roderick Wright, "Mrs. Murtis Powell: On the Front Lines of Battle," in Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, an Oral History, ed. Youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 110–115.

As a result, school desegregation moved very slowly in Mississippi. In 1969, fifteen years after Brown, the US Supreme Court found that Mississippi had made hardly any strides in undoing "segregated conditions" and ordered every school district in the state "to terminate dual school systems at once." Aided by Citizens' Council chapters, segregation academies sprung up across the state, and Mississippi's public schools desegregated only when and where civil rights lawyers won their day in federal courts.⁴⁴Survey of School Desegregation in the Southern and Border States, 1965–1966 (Washington, DC: United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1966), 33–42, https://www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12sch611.pdf; Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 US 19 (1969); McMillen, The Citizens' Council, 302; Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 169–186.

The strategy group in Louisiana was headed by long-time state senator William M. Rainach, who also spearheaded the creation of Louisiana's Citizens' Councils.⁴⁵Jim Carl, Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 26–28; "Louisiana," Southern School News, September 3, 1954, 13; Charles A. Reynard, "Legislation Affecting Segregation," Louisiana Law Review 17 (1956–57): 104–114. For a brief time, Rainach later became head of the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission, the primary state apparatus to spy on and harass civil rights activists and supporters. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 37, 46. The Rainach Committee became a coordinating agency as much for action as for legislative strategy. It helped to mount legal roadblocks to school desegregation, orchestrated legal attacks on Black activist organizations, and spurred efforts to remove or block Black voting in close collaboration with the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission. Like many other state agencies across the South, the committee condemned integration as the work of communists.

Following the Rainach Committee's recommendations, the legislature in 1958 authorized public schools to become private education cooperatives and a voucher program for white students to attend non-religious private schools.⁴⁶Carl, Freedom of Choice, 29–32; "Supreme Court Approves Invalidation of Louisiana's Pupil Placement Law," Southern School News, July 1957, 7. In New Orleans, the Catholic schools were uniquely more willing to integrate sooner than the public schools. As early as 1956, the Archbishop publicly declared that segregation was morally wrong. Local NAACP leader Daniel Boyd suggested to national legal director Thurgood Marshall that "the Luzanna legislature will keep ignoring any and all court decisions until a number of them are jailed."⁴⁷Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 247. In 1960, refusing further delays, federal district judge Skelly Wright ordered the desegregation of New Orleans's 9th Ward elementary school. Amid death threats, a six-year-old Black girl, Ruby Bridges, entered the previously all-white school with an escort of federal marshals amid a mob of angry, screaming white men and women. Senator Rainach abandoned his role as strategist in order to appear publicly more attractive as he campaigned to become governor. "Let's use the 'scorched earth policy,'" he proclaimed at a Citizens' Council rally.

Jimmie Davis became the newly elected governor and quickly disbanded Rainach's committee. Following other southern governors, Davis pushed the legislature to revoke all overt segregation laws and pass race-neutral programs for advancing freedom of choice for parents. A new voucher law also made no mention of race; it allowed any Louisiana child eligible to receive a state-funded voucher to attend a non-profit, non-sectarian private school.⁴⁸Carl, Freedom of Choice, 47–48; "State Again Fails To Get Control of Orleans Schools," Southern School News, February 1961, 6.

The race-neutral program began in 1962, operated for four years, and distributed more than fifty-five thousand vouchers. The vast majority of state funds went to the families of white students, although existing records show that about 7 percent of all vouchers supported students from Black families. All voucher-supported private schools were segregated by race—either all-white or all-Black.

After the voucher law was challenged in federal court, four all-Black private schools joined the state government in defending the program. The legislature renamed its voucher commission the "Louisiana Education Commission for Needy Children" with the professed purpose of addressing the problems of juvenile delinquency and school dropouts as well as the special needs of "retarded children" as it declared "that the parent, not the State of Louisiana, shall be the determining force which shall decide on the type of education ultimately received by the child." A federal court panel, however, found the "necessary effect of the Louisiana tuition grants [was] to establish . . . a system of segregated schools for white children, in violation of the equal protection clause."⁴⁹Carl, Freedom of Choice, 48–53; "Louisiana Legislators Go Home; Teachers Miss Pay," Southern School News, January 1961, 1, 8–11; Poindexter, 275 F. Supp. 833.

Thomas J. Pearsall, a North Carolina attorney, businessman, and former Speaker of the House, chaired the North Carolina strategy committee responsible for finding a response to Brown. The Pearsall Committee originally had three African Americans among twenty members. Its first report proposed only a pupil assignment act mirroring the basics of Alabama's law. It empowered local school officials to assign students according to factors such as community relations, student ability, school capacity, and geographic location—without any mention of race.⁵⁰John E. Batchelor, Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 32–42; Carlson, "With All Deliberate Speed," 55–59.

Hardline segregationists such as Jesse Helms, later US senator, dismissed the report, arguing that the state had to choose between "integrated public schools and free choice private schools." North Carolina attorney general Beverly Lake, also later a US senator, made the same argument urging the closure of public schools and the provision of vouchers for white children to attend totally segregated private schools.⁵¹Batchelor, Race and Education, 36–40.

In a second report in April 1956, the now all-white Pearsall Committee declared that it would "preserve a segregated system" like the one in the past and suggested ways to move from a "segregated-by-law system" to a segregated-by-choice system. The report reminded local school officials that, due to the US Supreme Court, there can be "no racial segregation by law," but nothing prohibited them from making "assignment according to natural racial preference and the administrative determination of what is best for the child." It recommended vouchers wherever "a child cannot be conveniently assigned to a non-mixed public school," regardless of the child's race, so long as the child's parent did not want a desegregated school. The committee insisted that while the Supreme Court had struck down laws "compelling the separation of the races in public schools," no court could compel "the mixing of the races."

Over the next decade, most North Carolina schools slowly admitted a token number of Black students in previously all-white schools, although many small, rural school districts in eastern North Carolina resisted until a court order required the admission of a token number of Black children in previously all-white schools. The Pearsall Plan began to crumble when North Carolina civil rights attorney Julius Chambers persuaded a federal three-judge panel in 1966 that "the payment of tuition grants is clearly state action, and unquestionably impermissible." A year earlier, Chambers's home had been bombed twice and his car firebombed once as a result of his willingness to openly challenge school segregation. Following his own advice to others—"Keep fighting"—Chambers convinced the federal court that the "state may not circumvent the Constitution by giving financial encouragement to individuals to follow a course which defeats desegregation."⁵²Batchelor, Race and Education, 76–110; Carlson, "With All Deliberate Speed," 72; Douglas Martin, "Julius Chambers, a Fighter for Civil Rights, Dies at 76," New York Times, August 6, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/us/julius-chambers-a-fighter-for-civil-rights-dies-at-76.html; "Hawkins v. North Carolina State Board of Education," Race Relations Law Reporter 11 (1966): 745, 747.

In Virginia, there were two strategy commissions. The first was chaired by businessman and state senator Garland Gray. In November 1955, it recommended the three basic methods of resistance first outlined by Alabama's Boutwell Committee: 1) investing local school officials with broad discretion to assign public school students on the basis of apparently non-racial factors such as availability of facilities and transportation, health, and aptitude of the child; 2) authorizing vouchers and other payments to private schools; and 3) permitting parents, without regard to race, to receive state-funded vouchers to attend private schools if their children were assigned to desegregated schools.

The Gray Commission's proposals implied that it would preserve only virtual segregation, not total segregation—an approach that many Virginia politicians defiantly opposed.⁵³Joseph J. Thorndike, "'The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation': James J. Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign against Brown," in The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, eds. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 70. Bowing to the hardline segregationists, state leaders rejected the Gray Commission's recommendation in favor of massive resistance. The legislature declared desegregation a "clear and present danger" that required closing public schools when necessary. The new law also discarded the Gray Commission's recommendation to give local school boards the authority to make pupil assignments on terms without expressly mentioning race. The state board of education was specifically authorized to prevent assigning white and Black students in the same school.⁵⁴Carl W. Tobias, "Public School Desegregation in Virginia During the Post-Brown Decade," William & Mary Law Review 37 (1996): 1269–1271.

Lindsay Almond became Virginia's new governor in 1957 after a campaign in which he supported the hardline approach. "I'd rather lose my right arm," he proclaimed, "than to see one nigra child enter the white schools of Virginia." But, once in office, Governor Almond was persuaded by business leaders and others to establish a second commission, named after its chair, state senator Mosby Perrow, a prosperous lawyer and farmer. The Perrow Commission's report echoed the Gray Commission's "twin principles of local determination and freedom of choice." It also recommended adopting the strategies of the earlier Gray Commission and Alabama's Boutwell Committee: abandon any mention of race; allow local, flexible pupil placement on factors without explicit mention of race; create vouchers or so-called "scholarships."

The Perrow report did not specify exact terms for proposed legislation in each area since its members were not certain at that moment if a "three school plan," first envisioned in Alabama five years earlier, would be successfully defended in the courts. It did recommend a new uniform testing program—but testing only for the public schools, not for the private schools supported by vouchers.⁵⁵Commission on Public Education, "Report of the Commission to the Governor of Virginia" (Richmond, 1959). This report is also referred to as the Perrow Report in reference to the chairman of the Commission, Mosby G. Perrow Jr.

Not all local jurisdictions followed the Perrow report. Some, such as Prince Edward County, maintained absolute segregation by closing the county's public schools and providing county tax credit scholarships to supplement state vouchers for white children to attend private schools. In 1964, however, Justice Hugo Black issued the Supreme Court opinion outlawing the die-hard segregationists' schemes. The Court ordered the public schools reopened on a desegregated basis and held that both tax credit and direct vouchers were unconstitutional.⁵⁶"Report of the Commission to the Governor of Virginia," 21–25; "Virginia: State Commission Draws Up New Legislative Proposals," Southern School News, April 1959, 16; George M. Cochran, "Virginia Facing Reality: The 1959 Perrow Commission," Augusta Historical Bulletin 42 (2006), http://mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov/va_school_closings/pdfs/Cochrane%20Augusta%20Historical%20Bulletin.pdf; Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218 (1964) at 233.

Senator Marion Gressette, chair of the South Carolina Segregation School Committee—first created by Governor Jimmy Byrnes and the state legislature in 1951—led resistance to court-ordered desegregation for more than twenty years. The Gressette Committee believed the best defense against the federal courts was to move "with caution and with a minimum of publicity" and to report publicly as little as possible.⁵⁷John W. White, "Managed Compliance: White Resistance and Desegregation in South Carolina, 1950–1970" (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2006), 152.

Before Brown, Governor Byrnes initiated an aggressive statewide building program of segregated schools for Black children to bolster the legal argument that "separate but equal" was equal and constitutional, but the passage of a state constitutional amendment two years before Brown also permitted South Carolina to close its public schools—a clear message to the Black population to leave segregation as it had been.

After Brown, Byrnes suspended the Black school construction program, but restarted it once persuaded by the Gressette Committee that the program remained a useful incentive for Black parents to keep their children in segregated, all-Black schools instead of seeking admission to all-white public schools.⁵⁸Stephen Harold Lowe, "'The Magnificent Fight': Civil Rights Litigation in South Carolina Federal Courts, 1940–1970" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 193–201; White, "Managed Compliance," 43–61; "South Carolina," Southern School News, September 3, 1954, 12.

Following the Gressette Committee's recommendations, the legislature also passed a pupil assignment bill giving local school boards the authority to make all decisions about attendance based on a family's geographic location and a child's scholastic aptitude (e.g., "each child shall be considered individually") without mention of race. Gressette understood that this color-blind standard in pupil placement could be a barrier to widespread school desegregation because of residential segregation. As the staff director of the Gressette Committee privately observed, local school boards could also decide, even where housing segregation did not preserve separate schools, that "there are few Negroes educationally qualified to go to schools with similarly aged white children."⁵⁹White, "Managed Compliance," 151–153. "Academic standards" without any reference to race or skin color also were used to assure that African American teachers did not receive equal pay with white teachers, despite a federal court order to equalize teachers' salaries. Also see R. Scott Baker, "Testing Equality: The National Teacher Examination and the NAACP's Legal Campaign to Equalize Teachers' Salaries in the South 1936–63," History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1995): 49–64 and R. Scott Baker, "The Paradoxes of Desegregation: Race, Class, and Education, 1935–1975," American Journal of Education 109, no. 3 (May 2001): 320–343. The Gressette Committee also attempted to convince the NAACP lawyers that geography, not the state government, was responsible for school segregation. See Maxie Myron Cox Jr., "1963—the Year of Decision: Desegregation in South Carolina" (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 1996), 166.

The president of the South Carolina Farm Bureau echoed the analysis made earlier by Alabama corporate attorney Forney Johnston when he observed: "If Negroes are to have the right of free choice in attending separate or mixed schools if they wish, then even the Supreme Court cannot deny to white people that same free choice of sending their children to separate or mixed schools."⁶⁰"South Carolina," Southern School News, January 6, 1955, 14.

The state's acceptance of token desegregation in order to keep schools virtually segregated did not satisfy South Carolina's hardliners, but the Gressette Committee's approach prevailed even as escalating racial violence and state-sponsored intimidation against Black and white activists, especially the NAACP, continued.⁶¹White, "Managed Compliance," 166–265. Over time, and without mentioning race, the South Carolina legislature repealed compulsory attendance in public schools, pushed decision-making about school enrollment and school closing to local districts, permitted white students living in racially diverse areas to transfer to a nearby virtually segregated school district, and established tax exemptions for children attending private schools.⁶²"South Carolina," Southern School News, February 3, 1955, 3; "South Carolina," Southern School News, March 3, 1955, 14; "South Carolina," Southern School News, July 1955, 4. Even bills proposing confrontational tactics, such as closing public schools, often did not mention race. For example, a bill in 1955 proposed to close any public school where a student was admitted by court order. See "South Carolina," Southern School News, May 4, 1955, 6. In 1960, on advice of the Gressette Committee, the legislature removed the phrase "for racially segregated schools only" from its appropriations bill. See Cox Jr., "1963—the Year of Decision," 15.

On January 28, 1963, following a federal court order, Harvey Gantt became the first African American since Reconstruction to enroll in a state university in South Carolina when he was admitted to Clemson without incident. Gantt had attended college in Iowa but decided: "I was homesick for the South, I was a child of the South, and that's where I wanted to go."⁶³"Clemson College Admits Negro in State's First Desegregation," Southern School News, February 1963, 1; Interview with Harvey B. Gantt by William R. Ferris, September 28, 2015, C-0367, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/27218/rec/2.

The next day, South Carolina's new governor, Donald Russell, announced that the state would provide parents with vouchers or "scholarship grants" to send their children to non-sectarian private schools. Russell did not mention race. He argued that vouchers would require public schools to compete with private ones for students and "this competition would stimulate progress in public education." The Gressette Committee reported that vouchers would "offer to all our citizens the broadest possible freedom of choice."⁶⁴"Clemson College Admits Negro on Order of Appellate Court," Southern School News, February 1963, 8–9.

In May 1968, after hearing arguments on the voucher program from Matthew Perry and Ernest Finney Jr. (two African American attorneys who later became judges), a panel of three federal judges declared the "purpose, motive and effect of the Act is to unconstitutionally circumvent the requirement . . . that the State of South Carolina not discriminate on the basis of race or color in its public educational system."⁶⁵White, "Managed Compliance," 390–391; Brown v. South Carolina State Board of Education, 296 F. Supp. 199 (1968).

In Georgia in 1950, more than two hundred African American students and parents filed a lawsuit claiming unequal education on account of race and seeking admission to all-white schools in Atlanta. Governor Eugene Talmadge warned, "Our rifles are ready" to resist any court desegregation order. Roy Harris, an influential political operative and head of the Citizens' Council, called for the closure of the state's public schools and the creation of a tax-funded private school system.⁶⁶O'Brien, "Private School Vouchers and the Reality of Racial Politics," 79–92.

Over the next few years, the General Assembly passed laws cutting off funding to any public school that a federal court ordered to desegregate. It also passed laws increasing school funding for segregated Black schools and, after Brown was argued in 1953, additional laws enabled white voters to approve a constitutional amendment to permit vouchers for private schooling. Georgia's attorney general, Eugene Cook, assured white Georgians that any plan to "subsidize the child rather than the school" was lawful.⁶⁷O'Brien, 105–108; "Georgia Attorney General Says Supreme Court Will Mix Schools," Chicago Defender, October 31, 1953, 5; Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1956, vol. 1, 10–11, 13–15. These laws followed the passage of a 1955 law mandating that in Georgia "no State or local funds shall be in any manner appropriated or expended for public school purposes except for schools in which the white and colored races are separately educated." See Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1955, vol. 1, 174–176.

In 1958, Ernest Vandiver became governor after promising white voters: "Neither my child nor your child will ever attend an integrated school during my administration. No, not one!" Afterwards, the legislature enacted tuition tax credits for families whose children attended private schools, barred using local property taxes to finance desegregated public schools, and empowered the governor to close either school districts or individual public schools as needed.⁶⁸Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1959, vol. 1, 7, 15, 157; "Georgia: Teachers Endorse Separate-But-Equal; Decision Awaited In State Test Case," Southern School News, April 1959, 7. During this period, Atlanta's NAACP attorney Donald Hollowell, who advanced many of the court challenges to Georgia's school segregation, stated that he would not predict the outcome of any court case, but added that he fully expected the color line to fall.⁶⁹"Motion to Dismiss Is Overruled," Atlanta Daily World, December 16, 1958.

Facing a federal court order for the token desegregation of four Atlanta public schools, Governor Vandiver considered accepting virtual segregation, earning the outrage of political kingmaker Roy Harris, who declared: "If one little Negro is entitled to go to Henry Grady High School in Atlanta, then all Negroes are entitled to go to some high school with whites."⁷⁰O'Brien, "Private School Vouchers and the Reality of Racial Politics," 174. Vandiver tried having it both ways: he recommended bills to continue absolute segregation while creating a Committee on the Schools, later called the Sibley Commission, to explore best options.

Atlanta businessman and corporate attorney John Sibley led the new commission in holding public hearings across the state. Afterwards the Commission recommended that public schools remain open and, in effect, that the state manage a slow process of token desegregation: "Those who insist upon total segregation must face the fact that it cannot be maintained in public schools by state law." The report's plan was designed "to effectuate voluntary association." Recommended strategies included freedom of parental choice, local decisions for pupil placements and pupil transfers, and tuition grants to private schools—the pillars of Alabama's earlier Boutwell plan.⁷¹O'Brien, 171–181; Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1960, vol. 1, 1187; Jeff Roche, Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 163–172; "Here's Text of Majority Report by Sibley Committee," Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1960; "Text of Minority Report," Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1960; Paul Delaney, "Judge Hooper to Study Sibley Report Monday," Atlanta Daily World, May 8, 1960.

In January 1961, shortly after two thousand angry whites surrounded the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students admitted to the University of Georgia in Athens,⁷²Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 87–89. Governor Vandiver announced he would follow the Sibley report. He proposed to repeal race-specific laws of massive resistance and promised every Georgia child "his God-given right to freedom of association" through a new amendment securing "the constitutional rights of school children to attend private schools of their choice in lieu of public schools" through public financing.⁷³O'Brien, "Private School Vouchers and the Reality of Racial Politics," 189–191, 199–201; "Gov. Ernest Vandiver Asks 4-Point Child Protection Defense Package," Atlanta Daily World, January 19, 1961; "U.S. Judge Rejects Contentions of Georgia Officials," Southern School News, February 1961, 8; Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1961, vol. 1, 35.

In August 1961, two Black students desegregated Atlanta's Grady High School without incident. Atlanta's peaceful acceptance of token integration at Grady and the city's other all-white high schools became, in the words of the New York Times, a "new and shining example of what can be accomplished" in the South. President John Kennedy said afterwards: "I strongly urge all communities which face this difficult transition to look closely at what Atlanta has done."⁷⁴Kruse, White Flight, 150–156. That one day in 1961 burnished the city's growing international reputation as the "City Too Busy to Hate," while, in fact, it set in motion a process of pupil assignments that preserved virtual segregation across the entire school system.⁷⁵Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 104–105.

In 1962, Georgia financed vouchers for more than fifteen hundred students in private schools. In addition, the legislature aided white teachers in leaving public for private schools by allowing them to remain in the state retirement system. None of the new laws specifically mentioned "race" or racial segregation. In the aftermath of its "shining example," the Atlanta school board routinely denied requests by scores of Black parents to transfer their children to all-white schools. Attorney Donald Hollowell assured the public "we will appeal," but courtroom challenges could not catch up with the school board's delaying tactics. By December 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. publicly condemned "something strange and appalling"—not a single Black child was attending Atlanta's all-white elementary schools and only 153 of more than 14,000 Black high school students attended classes with whites.⁷⁶Bruce Galphin, "40 Negro Students File Appeals for Transfers," Atlanta Constitution, June 14, 1961; Bruce Galphin, "38 Negroes, White Girl Lose Transfer Appeals," Atlanta Constitution, July 7, 1961; Tomoko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 307.

With each passing year throughout the 1960s, legal strategies and tools of resistance to Brown became less important in Atlanta and other metropolitan areas as white flight to suburban counties increased—illuminating another highly effective option for preserving the "freedom of white people to choose not to go to school with negroes." Georgia's voucher program petered out after a couple of years—once it became obvious that the program would not survive review by the courts and after the discovery that many of the program's beneficiaries were already attending private schools.⁷⁷Kruse, White Flight, 9–17, 161–177, 234–235; John H. Britton, "Fear of Increase in Taxes Is Blamed for Bond Measure Defeat: Negro Votes Favored Most Bond Proposals," Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1962; "$206,640 Granted Students to Attend Jim Crow Schools," Atlanta Daily World, October 17, 1962.

The Limits of Lawsuits: Toppling Voucher Programs but Not Segregated Schools

By 1965, most voucher programs, which had been enacted only in southern states, had been declared unconstitutional or were under serious attack, no matter whether the programs involved indirect expenditures such as tax credits or were shrouded in non-racial language. Each law financing private schools was soon invalidated by a federal court (or abandoned in the case of Georgia before it could be struck down) because the efforts were perceived to evade or disrupt public school desegregation and to "significantly encourage and involve the State in private discriminations."⁷⁸See these federal cases: Coffey v. State Educational Finance Commission, 296 F. Supp. 1389 (S.D. Miss. 1969); Griffin v. State Board of Education, 296 F. Supp. 1178 (E.D. Va. 1969); Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, 296 F. Supp. 686 (E.D. La. 1968); Brown v. South Carolina State Board of Education, 296 F. Supp. 199 (D.S.C. 1968), aff'd, 393 U.S. 222 (1968); Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, 275 F. Supp. 833 (E.D. La. 1968), aff'd, 389 U.S. 571 (1968); Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458 (M.D. Ala. 1967); Hawkins v. North Carolina State Board of Education, 11 Race Relations Law Reporter 745 (W.D.N.C. 1966); Griffin v. State Board of Education, 239 F. Supp. 560 (E.D. Va. 1965); Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 231 F. Supp. 743 (E.D. Ala. 1964); Pettaway v. County School Board, 230 F. Supp. 480 (E.D. Va. 1964), aff'd, 339 F. 2d 486 (2d Cir. 1964); Hall v. St. Helena Parish School Board, 231 F. Supp. 649 (E.D. La. 1961), aff'd, 368 U.S. 515 (1962); Aaron v. McKinley, 173 F. Supp. 944 (E.D. Ark. 1959), aff'd sub nom, Faubus v. Arron, 361 U.S. 197 (1959).

A vital component in states' strategies to preserve segregation, vouchers operated differently depending on state politics, federal court decisions, and the values and judgments of the strategy committees. Exchanging ideas and information, these committees functioned separately, shaped and reshaped by the dynamics of a state's political and business leadership and without a coordinated sectional effort.

In their final reports, most strategy committees adopted methods and means that evaded any exact definition of what preserving school segregation meant as an expression of racial subordination. Like Georgia Governor "No, Not One" Vandiver, states adapted to the reality that absolute or total segregation could not be preserved in the face of federal enforcement of Brown. Sooner or later, white leaders such as Tom P. Brady, the Mississippi politician credited with the idea of forming the Citizens' Council, were willing to accept virtual segregation. Others, including Alabama corporate attorney Forney Johnston, knew at the time of Brown that virtual segregation with its token exceptions could preserve white supremacy so long as conservative white leaders kept control of schools, politics, and the economy.⁷⁹Tom P. Brady, "Segregation and the South," October 4, 1957, Citizens' Council Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries; McMillen, The Citizens' Council, 265–266; Thomas P. Brady, interview by Orley B. Caudill, March 4, 1972, Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern Mississippi Libraries. In 1962, Arnold Rose, who assisted Gunnar Myrdal, wrote a postscript in the 1962 edition of An American Dilemma (New York: McGraw Hill, xxxv–xxxvii) where he discussed how the initial monolithic response to Brown by southern whites changed and adapted to fit the times.

Starting in the mid-1960s, civil rights lawyers were able to use new national anti-discrimination laws to challenge a wider range of white supremacist laws and practices. The civil rights movement moved away from the courtroom as the primary venue for creating change. Before Brown, the NAACP and other civil rights lawyers led the way by using the words of the Constitution to take down the wall of segregation, beginning in the schoolhouses, one student at a time. Privately, NAACP chief attorney Thurgood Marshall laid out the legal approach: "Those white crackers are going to get tired of having Negro lawyers beating 'em every day in court."⁸⁰Harry S. Ashmore, Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), 214. Publicly, it was the hallmark of attorneys such as Donald Hollowell, known in Georgia as "Mr. Civil Rights," to remain reserved and dignified—what Hollowell later remembered with a wink as "courtly"—using only federal filings to argue with white society about segregation, even as white state officials brazenly belittled, condemned, and harassed them.⁸¹Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 336; Donald Hollowell, conversation with the author, May 1978. This strategy confronted white stereotypes and rendered Brown as the law of the land, but alone it proved too slow and inadequate to halt relentless white efforts to stop change or to keep pace with growing Black demands.

The emergence of the student movement and direct action as strategies for challenging private and public segregation was in part a reaction to the slow, back-and-forth pace of litigation. In some places, even "the twin avenues of civil rights protest—legal and direct action—did not have a catalytic effect" in advancing desegregation. By the middle of the 1960s, school desegregation was no longer the civil rights spearhead. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed about his own town: "In the absence of legal, political, economic, and moral pressure, not even a city as enlightened as Atlanta is likely to grant the Negro his constitutional rights."⁸²Brown-Nagin, 307–309.

Most of the South's white leaders were discovering that a more fluid definition of segregation was their most effective defense. Increasingly, they realized the efficacy of moving away from "No, not one" or a stand in the schoolhouse door toward strategies that could do almost as much as absolute segregation. As early as 1956, the founder of the Citizens' Council had suggested that members should redefine their way of life as far more than complete separation of the races: "Segregation represents the freedom to choose one's associates, Americanism, state sovereignty, and the survival of the white race."⁸³Robert B. Patterson, 2^nd Annual Report (Greenwood, MS: Association of Citizens' Councils of Mississippi, August 1956), 2.

As for the public schools, it did not matter that all the tools for preserving segregation could not withstand the scrutiny of the federal courts or that the civil rights leaders were employing new strategies. A decade after Brown, the architects and advocates of private school vouchers had discovered the means to permit only a symbolic semblance of desegregation. If only by trial and error in some states, "southern anti-integration efforts during the post-Brown era were more often characterized by creativity and flexibility than by obstinacy and intransigence."⁸⁴Driver, "Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto," 1093. While discussing the ideas and strategies voiced by southern federal officials, Driver illuminates the components of segregationists' plans of resistance that "play a role today in maintaining the paucity of meaningful integration in the nation's public schools." See pages 1094, 1097–1099.

By the end of the 1965 school year, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—the seven states that had adopted voucher programs—maintained the South's lowest rates of school desegregation. That year, fewer than 2 percent of all Black students in each of the seven states were attending public schools with white students.⁸⁵Statistical Summary: School Segregation–Desegregation in the Southern and Border States (Nashville, TN: Southern Education Reporting Service, 1966–67), 43.

Milton Friedman and "Government Schools"

In 1955, almost a year after Albert Boutwell released the Alabama legislative report proposing private school vouchers as a key element in his committee's plan of "freedom of choice," libertarian economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago published "The Role of Government in Education."⁸⁶Milton Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education," in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 123–144. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 for his work on monetary policy. It introduced academicians to an economic rationale for school vouchers. Friedman believed parents would get the best education for their children when private schools competed for enrollment. Advancing a theory he and others would repeat over decades, Friedman argued that "competitive private enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than nationalized enterprises" in education.⁸⁷Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education," 129.

Friedman's advocacy for a system of government-financed vouchers to replace "government schools," as he called them, was grounded in his free market beliefs. However, in a page-long footnote he acknowledged that essentially the same proposal "has recently been suggested in several states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation"—a development Friedman said came to his attention after he had largely completed his essay. The economist assured readers that he deplored segregation and racial prejudice, but he also opposed forced "non-segregation" no less than forced segregation. (Friedman also opposed a federal fair employment commission that would prohibit racial discrimination in private employment and, later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition against racial discrimination by private businesses.⁸⁸Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 111–115; "Friedman Cautions Against Rights Bill," Harvard Crimson, May 5, 1964.)

Friedman acknowledged that vouchers would allow a system where there could be "exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to." He was at best agnostic about ending segregation in schools. He noted that the government could decide to make public funds available to private schools only if they were segregated schools, as some southern states proposed in 1955, or only if they were non-segregated schools. His proposal for vouchers was "not therefore inconsistent with either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation."⁸⁹Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education," 131, fn. 2.

Had he cared enough to inquire about southern segregation, Friedman would have discovered that many white supremacists had already adopted the same outlook and conceptual framework to make vouchers instrumental in maintaining segregated schools. A year earlier, in response to Brown, Mississippi politician Tom P. Brady gave a speech (later expanded into a book) that became an informal manifesto for the Citizens' Council and other southern segregationists. In Black Monday, Brady wrote:

The public school is a socialized or politically monopolized institution, and suffers from weakness inherent in all monopolies. The only thing that prevents the public school from decaying completely is the fact that it is not a complete monopoly. Local control of the school gives the taxpayer and parent some say in its management. . . . Nothing will do more to better education in America than the breaking of the public school trust. . . .

This is not a proposal to abolish public schools. It is a proposal to put them into competition with free enterprise schools, so they can prove their worth. And this can be done by the remission to parents of the taxes they are compelled to pay to support politically-controlled schools, in an amount comparable to what they pay for private schooling. The method of effecting this remission—whether by deduction from income taxes or allowances from local levies—is a technical matter; if the principle established that a parent has the right to buy the educational service he deems best for his child, the fiscal problem of tax remission could be solved.⁹⁰Tom P. Brady, Black Monday (Winona, MS: Association of Citizens' Councils, 1954), 56; Brady, interview.

Similarly, the Alabama "freedom of choice" plan—the first segregation strategy report, published a year before Friedman's essay—was built on the foundational philosophy that when "members of a race are thereby deprived of access to a school attended by the other race, the result is attributable not to compulsion by the state but to the inconsistent choices of free citizens." As Alabama's Forney Johnston explained, under his segregation plan "the state is obliged to give effect to the desire of parents without compulsion against either side" or, as Milton Friedman wrote, without "either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation."

Johnston foresaw that his Alabama plan would lead to the same place Friedman envisioned—moving from a dual school system to a three-school system with "exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools." And Johnston was confident that, so long as white parents had access to vouchers for private schools and segregationist leaders established and implemented pupil placement, his plan would preserve segregation in some form for most white students in his state.⁹¹Johnston, "Schools, the Supreme Court, and the States' Power," 3–10.

Friedman's analysis not only echoed segregationist plans but helped to revive a new non-racial defense of segregation. Within four years of the publication of Friedman's essay, a large number of southern segregationists were advancing the theory of individual freedom as the leading rationale for vouchers and school choice. Perhaps the most prolific, active disciple of this libertarian approach was Virginia newspaperman Leon Dure, who converted Friedman's advocacies into a constitutional argument for freedom of association.

As tactics of massive resistance began to fail in Virginia, Dure urged state leaders in 1958 to adopt school vouchers and his principles of freedom of choice or freedom of association as the most effective means for limiting desegregation. The plan offered every child "of whatever color, of whatever means" a voucher (called a "scholarship"). Echoing Johnston and Friedman, Dure argued that "the South accepts the right of all people to associate, but it insists on the right of all people not to associate." On these terms, Dure wrote, "the southern white case is not compulsory segregation; it also is individual liberty," which he believed was protected in federal and state constitutions' guarantees of the right to assemble. Oliver Hill, the Virginia NAACP's leading attorney who had brought one of the original cases involved in Brown, told Dure that his proposal would do little more than mask racial discrimination.⁹²James H. Hershman and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, "Leon S. Dure (1907–1993)," Encyclopedia Virginia, last modified October 6, 2016, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Dure_Leon_S_1907-1993; Leon Dure, "Virginia's New Freedom," The Georgia Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 4; Leon Dure, "The New Southern Response: Anatomy of Two New Freedoms," The Georgia Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 1961): 401–409, 412; James H. Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro-Public School Majority," in The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, eds. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 128. Dure seemed especially delighted that the US Supreme Court had recognized the "right of association" in a case where the Court prevented the Alabama attorney general's assault against the NAACP. See NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958). Dure was also influenced by the writings of Virgil Blum, a political scientist at Marquette University who advocated for school vouchers for private schools, including parochial schools, on a philosophy of free-markets and freedom of religion. See Carl, Freedom of Choice, 91–92.

When Virginia's Perrow Commission issued its report, reversing the openly defiant tone and recommendations of earlier governors and legislatures, it embraced tactics of local control and freedom of association. As one politician wrote to Dure, there was now complete "agreement that the Freedom of Choice plan is . . . not based on segregation or integration but that any child in Virginia may obtain a tuition grant"—an equal opportunity to all children to freely disassociate.⁹³Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match," 127–130; C.F. Hicks to Leon Dure, June 22, 1961, Leon Dure Papers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Dure also helped to convince white leaders in Georgia to reverse their approach for preserving segregated schools. Dure's frequent correspondence with John Sibley and others helped Governor Vandiver's administration understand how embracing "freedom of association" held the best promise for justifying and preserving virtually segregated schools. The exact language of the new state constitutional amendment approved by the white voters of Georgia stated: "Freedom from compulsory association at all levels of public education shall be preserved inviolate." During the same period, Louisiana's white leaders also attempted to rescue their strategies to resist desegregation through a similar approach.⁹⁴Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match," 127–128, including fn. 52; Carl, Freedom of Choice, 91–92. The Georgia amendment became Section VIII of Article VIII of the Georgia Constitution and remained in the constitution until removed twenty years later as a "vestige of the past," although many in the early 1980s had no notion of what the provision represented. See Committee to Revise Article VIII, "Transcripts of Meetings," 22 May 1980, State of Georgia Select Committee on Constitutional Revision, 1977–1981, vol. I, 9.

Just as Friedman adopted the term "mixed schools," the segregationists' favorite scare phrase for desegregated schools, die-hard segregationists adopted Friedman's language. In 1964, the Mississippi administrator of the Citizens' Council, William Simmons, abandoned his earlier primary defense of segregated schools as a matter of constitutional "state rights" and began condemning the monopoly of "government schools." In the Council's newsletter, echoing both Brady and Friedman, Simmons wrote that that public schools "can no longer be considered public—they have become government school systems." Afterwards, the White Citizens' Council focused primarily in Mississippi on developing a private school system of choice, as their leaders condemned government schools as "socialism in its purest form."⁹⁵Michael W. Fuquay, "Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971," History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 163–164, 178–179. Parroting Friedman, right wing radio and media personalities such as Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity have hammered for years at "government schools." Neal Boortz, "Government Idiocy in Action at Schools," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 8, 2009, https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/neal-boortz-government-idiocy-action-schools/mQCmFIfvMZ36Nwc2t2YoDI/; "Sean Hannity Attacks Social Security and Public Schools as Ineffective Programs Exploiting People's Fears," Media Matters for America, January 3, 2019, https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/01/03/sean-hannity-attacks-social-security-and-public-schools-ineffective-programs-exploiting-peoples/222411.

Friedman never joined forces with segregationists, but he remained indifferent about how his libertarian economic arguments aided their strategies. Over several decades he continued to promote the concepts and framework that segregationists in the late 1950s and early 1960s believed were their best chance and best arguments. Long after southerners abandoned their segregationist rhetoric, Friedman's advocacy shaped how future scholars, advocates, and the general public would see vouchers and "freedom of choice" as acts of consumerism rather than segregationist tactics. "For whites moving into the new suburbs," writes historian James Hardman Jr., the term "carried the popular consumer phrase 'choice,' and gave the impression that simple economic choice, not morally questionable racial prejudice, was behind the segregation in their communities."⁹⁶James Hardman Jr., "Virginia on the Cusp of Change," in Historians in Service of a Better South, eds. Robert J. Norrell and Andrew H. Myers (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2017), 80. It was a redefinition of choice that most of the South's private schools, even those started as "segregation academies," came to embrace and propagate as they persisted and expanded in the decades that followed.

Challenging Tax Benefits of Segregated Private Schools

Civil rights organizations recognized during the 1960s the danger that governmental support posed in helping to build segregated systems of private schools even after the courts had dismantled voucher programs. These groups pushed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to deny tax-exempt applications of "segregation academies." This federal tax status enabled whites to reduce their taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools. But, in 1967, the IRS announced that it would grant tax deductions for contributions to any southern private school, even self-avowed segregation academies, because "the school is private and does not have such degree of involvement with the political subdivision as has been determined by the courts to constitute State action for constitutional purposes."⁹⁷Green v. Kennedy, 309 F. Supp. 1127 (1970) at 1130.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued the IRS in 1969 and obtained a court order requiring it to "affirmatively determine" that a private school in Mississippi is not "operated on a racially segregated basis as an alternative to white students seeking to avoid desegregated public schools." The three-judge federal court found that the "tax benefits under the Internal Revenue Code mean a substantial and significant support by the Government to the segregated private school pattern."⁹⁸Green, 309 F. Supp. 1127 (1970) aff'd sub nom, Cannon v. Green, 398 U.S. 956 (1970); Eileen Shanahan, "Schools in South May Avoid Taxes," New York Times, August 3, 1967; Eileen Shanahan, "Private Schools That Bar Blacks to Lose Tax Aid," New York Times, July 11, 1970. After its ruling was affirmed without opinion by the US Supreme Court, the court issued a permanent injunction restricting the IRS from granting a tax exemption to any and all Mississippi private schools that applied for the tax benefit.⁹⁹Green v. Connally, 330 F. Supp. 1150 (1971), aff'd sub nom, Coit v. Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971).

Afterwards, the IRS revoked the tax exemptions of more than one hundred private schools and scrutinized applications for tax exemption from others; however, it took eight years before the agency proposed specific administrative regulations to implement the non-discrimination policy adopted in 1970. During this time, the IRS faced a backlash from private schools and their supporters, including southern members of Congress, and, in this political environment, went back and forth with proposed administrative procedures and congressional hearings. When the Nixon administration issued final guidelines, the Lawyers Committee, the US Civil Rights Commission, and others criticized the IRS's rules, procedures, and enforcement as inadequate.¹⁰⁰"Proposed Rules on Tax Exemptions for Private Schools Eased by IRS," New York Times, February 10, 1979; IRS Tax Exemptions and Segregated Private Schools: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 2d Sess. 39 (1982); also see Tax-Exempt Status of Private Schools: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. 39 (1985).

Despite the regulation's shortcomings, a significant number of religious private schools in the South objected to the new IRS rules on the grounds of religious freedom, claiming that the government could not oversee their operations under any circumstances, even if they engaged in practices of segregation and racial discrimination. In 1983, the US Supreme Court disagreed and upheld the application of the IRS rules on religious schools in a case involving Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that "the Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education—discrimination that prevailed, with official approval, for the first 165 years of this Nation's constitutional history. That governmental interest substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners' exercise of their religious beliefs."¹⁰¹Julia Malone, "Those Tax Breaks for Segregated Schools Stir Storm," Christian Science Monitor, January 14, 1982; Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983); Strat Douthat, "Some All-White Academies Struggle," Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 18, 1986.

After Bob Jones, the IRS required tax-exempt private schools to demonstrate non-discriminatory policies and operations. But the requirements proved minimal—involving little more than adoption of a policy statement by the school's founders or board, publication of the policy (in brochures and catalogues), and some way of demonstrating that the school had abandoned total, absolute segregation.¹⁰²Terry Berkovsky, Andrew Megosh, Debra Cowen, and David Daume, "Private School Update," 2000 EO CPE Text, Internal Revenue Service, 2000, www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicn00.pdf. The IRS rules suggest that a school must evidence that "it currently enrolls a meaningful number of racial minority students, or that its promotional activities and recruiting efforts are reasonably designed to inform students of all racial segments in the general communities within the area of the availability of the school." But, as a matter of practice, citing language in the Bob Jones case that denial of tax exemptions should be made "only where there is no doubt that the organization's activities violate fundamental public policy," the IRS and the US Tax Court has denied tax status only when a school maintains total segregation. See Calhoun Academy v. Commissioner, 94 T.C. 284 (1990).

Private schools in the South began to publish non-discrimination statements and many began a slow process of admitting a token number of Black or other students of color. It was a replay of the most effective tactics that segregationists had deployed in the public schools several years earlier. This change did little more than end all-white segregation in order to sustain virtual segregation. The practices satisfied the IRS requirement and allowed subsequent federal administrations to claim that private schools had shown "clear and specific factual evidence" of non-discrimination.

The private school movement grew rapidly. After the 1969 Supreme Court ruling that "every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once" in Mississippi,¹⁰³"Private Schools on Rise in the South," New York Amsterdam News, November 8, 1969; Kitty Terjen, "The Segregation Academy Movement," in The South and Her Children: School Desegregation, 1970–1971, ed. Robert E. Anderson Jr. (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council, 1971), 69–71; "Civil Rights: Segregation: Federal Income Tax Exemptions and Deductions: The Validity of Tax Benefits to Private Segregated Schools," Michigan Law Review 68, no. 7 (June 1970): 1410–1414; Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969). white parents responded. From 1965 to 1980, private school enrollment increased by more than 200,000 students across the South—with about two-thirds of that growth occurring in the states that had created voucher programs.¹⁰⁴Steve Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools: Private School Enrollment in the South and the Nation (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2015), 7–8.

There were no government surveys reporting race or ethnicity for private school enrollment at the start of the 1980s, but the Southern Regional Council, which monitored the movement after Brown, estimated that virtually segregated private schools in the eleven states of the former Confederacy enrolled between 675,000 and 750,000 white students. When computed with overall enrollment data for those states, these estimates suggest that somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of the private school's white students were virtually segregated by the early 1980s.¹⁰⁵Hearings on IRS Tax Exemptions and Segregated Private Schools, Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, 97th Cong. (1982), 69; Digest of Education Statistics, 1981 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 1981).

Overall, the southern states' white flight from public schools in the wake of desegregation from 1940 through 1980 helped to quadruple the number of students attending segregated private schools. As Jason Morgan Ward aptly observed, "[T]he end of the Jim Crow era rendered segregation, like white supremacy before it, a doomed battle cry. But it was not a dead proposition."¹⁰⁶Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 183.

The "Post-Racialist" Standards Movement

Most of the South's private schools that started during massive resistance survived without vouchers—but with federal tax exemptions. Many increased their enrollments and resources as they embraced the old-line segregationists' non-racial language and reasoning. This transformation of stated purpose from preserving segregation to meeting children's needs for a quality education through choice involved an initial phase when headmasters and other promoters of private schools struggled to abandon their original meaning and adopt a new, non-racial script about motives and purposes.

Dr. T. E. Wannamaker, for example, founder of the South Carolina Independent School Association, explained in 1966 the reasons for his organization and schools: "We're here because we have convictions and we're going to stay. It's not token integration we're concerned about, but the effects mass integration will have on our schools in the future." Earlier, Wannamaker had described himself as "an old-time conservative. I believe it's heredity first and environment second. Many (Negroes) are little more than field hands." In 1970, he became the first leader of the Southern Independent School Association.¹⁰⁷Terjen, "The Segregation Academy Movement," 76; Margaret Rose Gladney, "I'll Take My Stand: The Southern Segregation Academy Movement" (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1974), 80. An Alabama private school advocate told a journalist in 1969, "We really didn't do it on account of segregation. We done it for a better education."¹⁰⁸Kitty Griffith, "New 'Segregation Academies' Flourish in the South," South Today, October 1969, 1.

By the 1970s, as many public schools in the South were being desegregated for the first time, promoters of private schools were developing a more consistent line of reasoning: the schools may have begun over the "racial question," but were now operating to provide "quality education." "I've been fighting to take the race question out of the Independent Schools," a member of the Louisiana Private School Association said in 1973. "I've run a segregated school for 33 years. . . . I want nice people in my school. We're trying to sell quality education."¹⁰⁹Gladney, "I'll Take My Stand," 80.

The headmaster of Prince Edward Academy (which five years earlier had been denied the continued benefit of vouchers and tax credits due to racial discrimination) told a researcher: "This school came into being because we love our children and want the best education in a controlled environment." A leader of Louisiana's private schools expanded this new language of transition: "I think people would be able to accept integration if it did not mean lowering of academic and moral standards. But they know it means it; therefore, they resort to private schools." And the head of the Alabama Independent School Association told researcher Rose Gladney in 1972: "Our primary interest is educating people basically of like learning capacities. We adopt a school system to meet their needs. . . . The real historical importance of the movement is not one of segregation or integration. It's academically important."

It was left to a student in one of the private schools that Gladney visited to be explicit about the white supremacist message he heard from administrators, promoters, and perhaps family: "Niggers are dumb; can't learn. And when you have a majority of low standard in a school, they will pull all the rest down. It is not really a race issue, just a matter of lowering standards."¹¹⁰Gladney, 99–126.

Many private schools operated by churches also began to justify their existence through the imperative of religious education. "Religion is an integral part of the Independent School movement," said the director of the Louisiana Independent School Association. "We're developing a pseudo-parochial system where there's a fixed religion we feel we want."¹¹¹Gladney, 134–136. These often became Christian schools that turned "in every particular around Bible teachings and interpretations."¹¹²David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools that Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976), 61.

Whatever the non-racial rationale—economic freedom, better education, religious instruction—the vast majority of the South's private schools were established when it became clear locally that federal law would require some form of desegregation. By the start of the 1980s, the character of most of these private schools was set. "These are schools for whites," wrote the authors of The Schools that Fear Built in 1976. "The common thread that runs through them all, Christian, secular, or otherwise, is that they provide white ground to which Blacks are admitted only on the school's terms if at all."¹¹³Nevin and Bills, 11.

For God and Private Schools

Following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, private schools throughout the nation received federal support and endorsement as never before. The Reagan administration justified proposed federal assistance to private schools as a means for advancing high quality education along with diversity and pluralism. The administration waffled on whether to support Bob Jones University's claim that religion gave it the right to discriminate on the basis of race even while receiving tax exemption. "I was under the impression," Reagan said, "that the problem of segregated schools had been settled, that we have desegregation."¹¹⁴Catherine A. Lugg, "For God and Country: Conservative Ideology and Federal School Policy during the First Term of President Ronald Reagan" (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 105–111, 121.

In 1981, Reagan's secretary of education testified in support of tax credit vouchers for private schools as "an expansion of educational opportunities for all Americans." In 1983, Reagan became the first president to send Congress legislation for federal tax credits to finance private schools. The proposed "Educational Opportunity and Equity Act," the administration argued, would benefit a wide range of students, including low-income children of color, and more broadly would "promote diversity in education and the freedom of individuals to take advantage of it, and to nurture the pluralism in American society which this diversity fosters." School segregation was a thing of the past, said Reagan, and private schools were the engines of diversity.¹¹⁵Lugg, "For God and Country," 132; Julia Malone, "Drive Begins for Tuition Tax Credit: Reagan Education Secretary Argues for Private School Help," Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1981; Julia Malone, "Bid to Allow Tax Credits for Private-School Tuition Awaits Next Session of Congress," Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1983; David E. Rosenbaum, "Tuition Credit Seen in Reagan Plan," New York Times, May 27, 1985.

Reagan linked his tax credit bill with an imperative to return religion to schools. "I don't think God should ever have been expelled from the classroom," he declared at a news conference in which he defended his support of private schools, including religious schools. The president's remarks echoed a long line of southern segregationists who had justified the growth of private schools on religious grounds, especially after 1961 when the US Supreme Court outlawed a New York statute that required public school students to recite an official Christian prayer.¹¹⁶Lugg, 126–127; Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

White churches started private academies in the wake of court-ordered desegregation, with religion and segregation often intermingling in the schools' stated purpose. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, many white clergy supported closing the public schools, their churches provided white-only space, and their curricula were built around church teachings. "Our people—supporters of the Independent schools—are convinced God is behind us," asserted the head of the Louisiana segregated private schools in the early 1970s. "If you don't include that aspect, you're missing a good part of the motivation behind this movement. People believe wholeheartedly that God doesn't want us to mix."¹¹⁷Gladney, "I'll Take My Stand," 134.

Looking across the South in 1974, Rose Gladney, a young scholar whose family had been actively involved in setting up a segregation academy in Homer, Louisiana, saw how most adults involved in private schools had merged racial segregation, quality education, and religion into one rationale. "The teachings of the academies," Gladney sadly observed, "hope to ensure that there will be people who think there is a need because they will have been taught, for at least another generation, that love of God, love of their white skins, and love of quality education cannot be separated."¹¹⁸Goodman, Sanctuaries for Tradition, 9–12; Gladney, 137.

President Reagan transformed a "love of white skin" into a color-blind doctrinal belief that individual freedom of choice in schooling created diversity and opportunity for all in an era without segregation. Reagan became the nation's primary voice for why and how government should support private schools, and, as a former actor and California governor, his own past and national leadership obscured the original role and rationales of southern white supremacists from public memory.

In 1984, in re-nominating Reagan, the Republican Party's education platform included support for the right to pray in public schools, opposition to busing for desegregation, passage of tuition tax credits for private schools, and redirecting billions of federal funds dedicated to assist low-income students in public schools into vouchers for private schools. It was the first time a national political party endorsed school vouchers. In his State of the Union address fourteen months later, President Reagan declared: "We must continue the advance by supporting discipline in our schools, vouchers that give parents freedom of choice; and we must give back to our children their lost right to acknowledge God in their classrooms."¹¹⁹Lugg, "For God and Country," 212–213; "Republican Party Platform of 1984," The American Presidency Project, accessed March 8, 2019, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1984; Ronald Reagan, the annual State of the Union address (speech, Washington, DC, February 4, 1986), The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-congress-the-state-the-union. The first time a national political party's platform endorsed tax credits for private schools was in 1972 at the Republican National Convention. It was the first time a US president expressly advocated for school vouchers before a joint session of Congress. Without attribution, the views and tools of southern segregationists had become the official position of the national Republican Party and the Reagan presidency.

No to "Racial-Mixing," Yes to Vouchers

At the end of the Reagan administration, almost thirty-five years after Brown, enrollment in the South's private schools continued to grow in absence of any significant new government financial support.¹²⁰The next federal legislation providing new tax benefits to private schools was the Coverdell Education Account created in 1997 during the Clinton administration. It permits annual contributions up to $500 to earn tax-free funds to cover expenses in college or in elementary and secondary private schools. The accounts have restrictions on income and uses for K-12 private school tuition. Ironically, First Lady Hillary Clinton's first job out of law school involved investigating discriminatory practices of southern private schools. See Amy Chozick, "How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education," New York Times, December 27, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/us/politics/how-hillary-clinton-went-undercover-to-examine-race-in-education.html. Some schools created in defiance of desegregation struggled and failed, but most survived by embracing other stated purposes for their existence and by maintaining their tax-exempt status—a benefit that required most to enroll just enough children of color to avoid total segregation while preserving a culture of "schools for whites."¹²¹See, for example, John Egerton, "Hammond Academy: A Rebel Yell, Fading," in Shades of Gray: Dispatches from the Modern South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 237–248.

Since the 1960s, white flight from urban public systems such as Atlanta's had maintained and extended segregated patterns in private tax-exempt schools and in suburban public schools. On both sides of the Mason–Dixon line, many white middle-class parents had escaped the mandates of school desegregation by moving into suburban neighborhoods where residential patterns of racial isolation and economics provided virtually segregated public schools. This suburban constituency helped to sustain Nixon and Reagan policies in blocking inter-district desegregation plans.¹²²See Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 295–324.

Earlier segregationists had foreseen the importance of district lines. In 1955, Forney Johnston, one of the architects of the Alabama three-school "freedom of choice" plan, identified "ordinary and customary geographical districting" as a primary tool for defeating Brown. His strategies cast a very long shadow. Examining school data from 1988 to 1990, a national study concluded "that white families are fleeing public schools with large concentrations of poor minority schoolchildren. In addition, the clearest flight appears to be away from poor black schoolchildren."¹²³Robert W. Fairlie and Alexandra M. Resch, "Is There 'White Flight' into Private Schools? Evidence from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey," Review of Economics and Statistics 84 (2002): 21–33.

The patterns persisted. Based on data from 1998, scholars Sean Reardon and Jon Yun found that the "South ha[d] the greatest segregation between the public and private sector of any region—white and Asian private school enrollment rates are more than three times greater than Black rates in the South, and more than double Latino rates."¹²⁴Sean F. Reardon and John T. Yun, Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2002), 22, https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/private-school-racial-enrollments-and-segregation/Private_Schools.pdf. They also concluded that "the strongest predictor of white private enrollment is the proportion of Black students in the area."¹²⁵Reardon and Yun, Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation, 22.

Drawing upon the 2000 Census, Duke University scholar Charles Clotfelter found that private schools were continuing to foster racial separation and isolation in K–12 education in the South, especially in non-metropolitan areas: "Combined with the general stability or growth of private enrollments in the South since 1970, these findings suggest that private schools were playing much the same role in non-metropolitan counties of the South in 1999–2000 as they were shortly after desegregation."¹²⁶Charles T. Clotfelter, "Private Schools, Segregation, and the Southern States," Peabody Journal of Education 79, no. 2 (2004): 74–97.

During this time, Milwaukee and Cleveland became limited, urban experiments in voucher programs in northern states, as some white liberals suggested that vouchers might offer a way to break up what they came to believe were intractable problems faced by low-income public schoolchildren. It was also the era when state governments began establishing programs to finance attendance in private schools, especially through tax credit vouchers. This new initiative reached into every part of the nation, but mostly the South, including all of the states where segregationists had established vouchers.¹²⁷Harry Brighthouse, "Egalitarian Liberals and School Choice," Politics & Society 24, no. 4 (1996): 457–486; James S. Coleman, "Some Points on Choice in Education," Sociology of Education 65, no. 4 (1992): 260–262. For a clear, deep understanding of this recent emergence of tax credits to finance enrollment at private schools, see Kevin G. Welner, NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

The US Supreme Court began to bless these developments. As early as 1973, Justice William Rehnquist became the first member of the Court to issue a dissent from a school desegregation case relying on the precedent of Brown. In a case concerning school segregation in Denver, he condemned the Court's opinion for requiring a school district to advance desegregation—employing the old scare word, "racial mixing"—where there were "neutrally drawn boundary lines" that sustained segregation.¹²⁸Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, 413 US 189 (1973), 258; Justin Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2018), 278–283. As Driver notes, Justice Rehnquist as a Supreme Court law clerk had argued while Brown was being considered that the Court should not overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had sanctioned state-sponsored segregation. Barely a year after the Bob Jones decision held that religious private schools could not hold a tax exemption and discriminate on the basis of race, the Supreme Court slammed shut the courthouse door on those seeking to challenge the IRS's weak enforcement. Parents of twenty-five Black public school children sued the IRS, charging that its standards and procedures were inadequate to fulfill its obligation to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. In 1984, the US Supreme Court held that the parents had no standing to bring such a suit.¹²⁹Allen v. Wright, 468 US 737 (1984).

With the appointment of other justices across more than three decades, the Court increasingly refused to require school districts to use any method of desegregation that proved effective in dismantling the dynamics of separation. By 2007, the Court had turned Brown on its head as a precedent for backing public school districts' voluntary efforts to desegregate. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Brown commanded school districts to avoid using race as a consideration, even for the purpose of recognizing and diminishing public school segregation. "When it comes to using race to assign children to schools," Roberts wrote without doubt or irony, "history will be heard."¹³⁰Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 551 US 701 (2007), 2744; Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate, 293–308.

As the Court stymied effective strategies for desegregating public schools, Justice Anthony Kennedy led it in unleashing private schools from constitutional restraints for receiving taxpayer funds. Arizona's program of tax credit vouchers allowed individuals and corporations to give tax dollars to private schools instead of paying them to the state—a scheme similar to those the Court had outlawed in prior cases, including in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in the 1960s. Kennedy, in a majority opinion, held that tax credit vouchers did not involve public funds or any state action that the Bill of Rights would prohibit. "While the State, at the outset, affords the opportunity to create and contribute," Kennedy wrote, "the tax credit system is implemented by private action and with no state intervention."¹³¹Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, 131 U.S. 1436 (2011) at 1448. Justice Kennedy's opinion considered whether the First Amendment's clause requiring separation of church and state, by way of application to the states through the 14^th Amendment, prohibited providing state tax credit vouchers to religious schools.

With few federal restraints, legislatures have expanded these programs or established new forms of vouchers, such as educational savings accounts that deposit state and local per-pupil expenditures into a personal account for a child's parents to use toward private schooling or to supplement home-schooling.

Patterns of virtual segregation have stayed remarkably high in private schools. As recently as 2012, 43 percent of the nation's private school students attended virtually all-white schools—schools where white students comprise 90 percent or more of the enrollment. That year, half of the fifty states had a majority of private school students attending virtually segregated schools.¹³²Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 36–39.

Despite white flight, virtual segregation for white students was far more substantial in private schools than in public schools, especially in the South. In 2012, 63 percent of white students in South Carolina's private schools were virtually segregated compared with only 5 percent of white students in South Carolina's public schools. Private schools were almost twelve times more likely to enroll white students in virtually segregated schools in 2012 than were the state's public schools.

In Mississippi, white students attending private schools were almost four times more likely to be in virtually segregated schools than public school students. More than seven out of ten white students in Mississippi's private schools attended schools where 90 percent or more of the enrollment was white. In the state's public schools, the rate was 15 percent. In Louisiana, 52 percent of the white students in private schools were virtually segregated in 2012, but only 14 percent for white public school students.

This new era of vouchers emerged as public schools across the nation experienced a substantial increase in the numbers of low-income students and students of color. Completing a trend that began in the 1980s, low-income students (those eligible for free or reduced lunch) became a majority of the South's public schoolchildren in 2006; in 2009, the South's public schools also had a majority of students of color. By 2013, more than 50 percent of the nation's public schoolchildren were from low-income families and almost half were children of color.¹³³Steve Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South's Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2007), https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A-New-Majority-Report-Final.pdf; Steve Suitts, A New Diverse Majority: Students of Color in the South's Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2010), https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A-New-Diverse-Majority-2010.pdf; Steve Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the Nation's Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2015), https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/New-Majority-Update-Bulletin.pdf; Shaila Dewan, "Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities," New York Times, January 6, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07south.html; Lyndsey Layton, "Majority of US Public School Students Are in Poverty," Washington Post, January 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html.

Changing patterns, most evident in the nation's cities, spread to the suburbs. In 2011, 40 percent of public schoolchildren in the nation's suburban districts were low-income; the rates were 45 percent or higher in suburbs in the West and the South. During the 2000s, the number of suburban poor exceeded the number in the nation's cities for the first time. Similarly, with a huge increase in Hispanic children, suburban school districts began educating a student population in which students of color comprised more than 40 percent. At the same time, African Americans moved into suburban counties surrounding central cities (such as Atlanta) in record numbers.¹³⁴Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South and Nation (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2013), 5–6, 15, https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/New-Majority-2013.pdf; Elizabeth Kneebone, "The Changing Geography of US Poverty," The Brookings Institution, February 15, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-changing-geography-of-us-poverty/; Richard Fry, "Sharp Growth in Suburban Minority Enrollment Yields Modest Gains in School Diversity" (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, March 31, 2009), http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/03/31/sharp-growth-in-suburban-minority-enrollmentbryields-modest-gains-in-school-diversity/; Karen Pooley, "Segregation's New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility," Southern Spaces, April 15, 2015, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2015/segregations-new-geography-atlanta-metro-region-race-and-declining-prospects-upward-mobility.

This new diversity in suburban school-age populations did not result in major increases in integrated schools. Instead, old habits resurfaced that involved shifting residential segregation, white flight into exurbs, localities attempting to secede from majority-Black public school districts, and the states' rebirth of vouchers for private schools. Legislatures failed to increase public school funding to meet the huge challenges of educating a majority of schoolchildren who are low-income and non-white, especially in the South and West where most voucher programs have emerged.¹³⁵Don Boyd and Lucy Dadayan, "State and Local Governments Reshape Their Finances," The Book of the States 2016 (Lexington, KY: The Council of State Governments, 2016), http://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/system/files/Boyd%20Dadayan%202016.pdf; Nikole Hannah-Jones, "The Resegregation of Jefferson County," New York Times, September 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/magazine/the-resegregation-of-jefferson-county.html; Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South and Nation, 8–13.

New Token Students of Choice

Overall trends have obscured a small, inclusive change in the color line for admission to private schools amid a more pronounced, underlying pattern of racial exclusion. Frequently, white private schools have chosen Asian or Pacific Island children to break their completely segregated enrollment in order to reach a token level of diversity for an IRS tax exemption. These students have family ancestries from countries including China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India, the Philippines, and various islands of the Pacific. In 2012, Asian American students comprised 5.8 percent of the nation's private school enrollment—a number slightly above the percentage of the Asian school-age population. Only white students and students with Asian ancestries were in private schools in numbers that exceeded or generally matched their representation in the school-age population. In forty-two states, the percentage of Asian students in private schools exceeded the state's percentage of school-age Asian children.¹³⁶Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 17, 27–29. Reardon and Yun also found that Asian students were over-represented in private schools in 1998. One other group of school-age children nationally matched their representation in private schools in 2012: students who self-identified as "of two or more races."

This development stands in sharp contrast to the history of discrimination that Asians have experienced, especially in California and the South, and makes Asian students stand out among students of color attending private schools. The explanation for this shift seems grounded in at least three factors: since the late 1980s, Asian households have had the nation's highest median income (more than $11,500 above non-Hispanic white household income in 2012); since at least the 1990s, Asian students have had the nation's highest scores on standardized tests; and more than three generations after World War II, some whites may find the lighter skin color of Asian Americans more acceptable according to racist hierarchies.¹³⁷See Joyce Kuo, "Excluded, Segregated and Forgotten: A Historical View of the Discrimination of Chinese Americans in Public Schools," Asian American Law Journal 5 (1998): 181–212, https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=aalj; Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012, Current Population Reports (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2013), 5, https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf; Lauren Musu-Gillette, Cristobal de Brey, Joel McFarland, William Hussar, William Sonnenberg, and Sidney Wilkinson-Flicker, Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2017 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2017), 46–52, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017051.pdf; Herbert J. Gans, "'Whitening' and the Changing American Racial Hierarchy," Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 9, no. 2 (2012): 267–279.

Asian children usually comprise a small minority of a private school's enrollment. Their presence often serves to increase a school's performance on college entrance exams—enabling schools to promote evidence of quality education while avoiding an all-white enrollment that could jeopardize their tax exemption. Asian Americans' admission, however, does not change the reality of most private schools as "schools for whites."¹³⁸Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 28. The two states with the largest percentage of Asian and Pacific Islander school-age children, Hawaii and Alaska, have an under-representation of these children in private schools—in fact, the largest gaps among the 50 states in 2012.

Increased token admission of Asian children obscures the fact that the patterns of virtual segregation and exclusion in private schools are considerably larger for under-represented racial and ethnic groups: African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. In 2012, two-thirds of white students in US private schools attended virtually "exclusionary schools"—schools where African American, Hispanic, and Native American children comprised 10 percent or less of total enrollment. In thirty of the fifty states, 70 percent or more of all white students attending private schools were in such schools.¹³⁹Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 40–42, 64–65. Hispanics and Native Americans have their own linked histories of discrimination in education. See Victoria-María MacDonald, "Demanding their Rights: The Latino Struggle for Educational Access and Equity," in American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study, National Park Service, 2013, https://www.nps.gov/articles/latinothemeeducation.htm; Richard R. Valencia, "The Mexican American Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity in Mendez v. Westminster: Helping to Pave the Way for Brown v. Board of Education," Teachers College Record 107, no. 3 (March 2005): 389–423; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Theda Perdue, "The Legacy of Indian Removal," Journal of Southern History 78, no. 1 (February 2012): 3–36.

This "exclusionary" pattern is not unique to private schools. Some public schools also have extremely low rates of enrollment of African American, Hispanic, and Native American children. But, private schools in forty-seven of the fifty states have far higher rates of this kind of "exclusionary" enrollment than do public schools. In twenty-six of these states, the rates of "exclusionary" schooling in private schools were more than 25 percentage points higher than rates in public schools. The largest differences were in southern states. For example, 84 percent of white students in South Carolina private schools attended schools where African American, Hispanic, and Native American students together comprised only 10 percent or less of the private school enrollment. But only 11 percent of the white students attending public schools in South Carolina were in similarly "exclusionary" schools.

Each southern state that adopted voucher schemes in the era of massive resistance to Brown, except for Virginia, appears on the top ten list for exclusionary schooling, and Virginia was not far away. Like Virginia, Arkansas (where vouchers were tried temporarily in Little Rock) also had a gap of 34 percentage points. All southern states, except West Virginia, had a gap of 20 percentage points or larger. In West Virginia, the gap was 10 percentage points.

With the re-emergence of vouchers, the overwhelming majority of white students attending the nation's private schools continue to attend "schools for whites." The geographies where segregationists invented and implemented vouchers to resist Brown remain the places with greatest patterns of "exclusionary" private schools—assuring their white students that they do not attend school with any more than a token number of under-represented students of color. In 2012, the percentage of white students attending "exclusionary" private schools in the South exceeded the percentage in similar public schools in the South by 37 percentage points. This gap was double that of the rest of the nation.

Lingering Facets of Jim Crow Segregation

States that adopted the first voucher plans in the 1950s and 1960s were forced by federal courts to abandon the laws and practices of complete separation of the races in schools and other public places. Yet Jim Crow laws were far from the only manifestations of segregation. The "better citizens" (as upper-class white supremacists were often called) were willing to accept token desegregation because of their belief that white supremacy and racial superiority did not place each and every white person always above "a negro of intelligence and good character."¹⁴⁰Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 107; Thomas J. Woofter, Southern Race Progress (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1957), 133–137. In the Jim Crow era, many southern industrialists believed in white supremacy but did not always find absolute segregation an economic advantage for their companies. See Suitts, Hugo Black of Alabama, 246–250, for a précis of this condition in Birmingham.

The practice of permitting virtual segregation or token desegregation was widespread before and during Jim Crow. Often, the all-white Democratic primary was not all-white. "In county after county," V. O. Key Jr. wrote in Southern Politics in State and Nation, "a few Negroes have voted for many years in Democratic primaries conducted under white-primary rules." The practice of holding virtually segregated primaries was particularly common where African Americans comprised a small proportion of the population.¹⁴¹Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, 620. Of course, attempting to vote in a southern state's Democratic primary was dangerous or deadly for African Americans. Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 119–121; Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), 285–294; also, listen to Hank Klibanoff, Buried Truths, 2018, podcast, https://www.wabe.org/shows/buried-truths.

Similarly, southern justice was segregated, and "after 1900, essentially no Blacks sat on southern juries." But, as civil rights and civil liberties attorney Charles ("Chuck") Morgan noted in the 1960s, "[T]he names of a token number of Negroes are often included on jury rolls." These token Blacks—hand-picked by white jury commissioners from the few African Americans deemed acceptable—seldom served since they could be struck by prosecutors or defense lawyers.¹⁴²Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14; Charles Morgan Jr., "Segregated Justice," in Southern Justice, ed. Leon Friedman (New York: Random House, 1965), 159–161.

In their analysis of the South's segregationist leaders during massive resistance, historians Matthew Lassiter and James Hershman characterize segregationists as either caste-based or class-based. The caste-based defended complete segregation or exclusion on the belief that "all black people were inherently inferior to all white people." Understanding that absolute segregation was unnecessary to maintain a rule of white supremacy, the class-based segregationist (sometimes described as "moderate segregationists") conceded that "perhaps a few black people could be accepted into white institutions."¹⁴³Hershman, "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match," 105.

The ambitions of politicians such as George Wallace and Ernest Vandiver muddled the division between caste and class, but the contrasting definitions illustrate that segregation was not defined as only a total, absolute exclusion of all African Americans or other people of color from the spaces—including schools—occupied by whites. Southern laws were often written that way, but reality was different. Affluent leaders of the most successful strategies for defeating desegregation demonstrated a class-based acceptance of virtual segregation and worked to preserve it. They anticipated the long-term possibility of ending absolute segregation and empowering leaders of local schools to justify virtual segregation through non-racial language, traditional school attendance boundaries, and neutral-sounding educational admissions standards, although it is doubtful that many realized how powerful class-based terms would resonate in suburban desegregation politics decades later.¹⁴⁴Hershman, 104–106; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 13–14, 26­–29, 322–323.

The layered dimensions of segregation and exclusion are also illuminated by school segregation laws outside the South—in states that practiced de jure segregation well into the twentieth century—including the law invalidated by the Brown decision in Topeka, Kansas.¹⁴⁵Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 98 F. Supp. 797 (1951).

All the attention drawn to the South's massive resistance eclipsed notice of how the Kansas school segregation law differed by excluding Black children from all white schools only in cities with a population over 15,000. The Kansas statute allowed boards of education in larger municipalities to decide if they should establish absolute segregation in those places where the number of African American children might exceed virtual or token segregation in a public school. In all other areas of Kansas with small Black populations, demographic patterns assured an acceptable level of virtual segregation.

Kansas population data illustrates how the law preserved virtual segregation in most of the state and absolute segregation where there was more than a token number of Black children. From 1890 through 1950, Kansas's Black population never reached 4 percent of the state's total, with the vast majority of Black Kansans living in and around a few cities. In 1950, there were 73,158 African Americans among more than 1.9 million Kansans. Almost three-fourths of the state's Black population resided in five counties where the state's largest cities were empowered to enact total segregation. All but one did. Elsewhere in Kansas in 1950, twenty thousand African Americans were spread among 1.3 million whites across one hundred counties, ensuring the maintenance of virtual segregation without the force of law.¹⁴⁶Murray, State Laws on Race and Color, 161; Institute for Social and Environmental Studies, Kansas Statistical Abstract 1976 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1977), 5–9, 23, http://ipsr.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/KSA12.pdf. There was a failed legislative effort in 1921 to change the nineteenth-century Kansas law to allow towns as small as two thousand to establish absolute segregation in schools. Thom Rosenblum, "The Segregation of Topeka's Public School System, 1879–1951," National Park Service, last modified April 10, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/brvb/learn/historyculture/topekasegregation.htm.

In 1951, when Linda Brown's father sued to desegregate her school system, Topeka (pop. 80,000) required absolute segregation in neighborhood elementary schools, undoing the virtual segregation that demographic trends assured to most white parents elsewhere in Kansas. In other words, Kansas's law had the same intent as southern laws—to maintain some form of segregation in all cases—although it did not establish absolute segregation as the default. That was implemented only when virtual segregation could not be maintained in practice.

Arizona also had a school segregation law—in some public high schools—triggered whenever twenty-five or more "pupils of African race" registered. In these situations, 15 percent of the voters in the school district could initiate a referendum to require the local school board to "segregate the pupils of the African race from pupils of the Caucasian race." In other words, the presence of twenty-five Black students in a high school could set in motion a process for absolute segregation.

In adjoining New Mexico, the law permitted the separation of "pupils of African descent" into separate classrooms in the same buildings if the school boards decided "it was for the best advantage of the school." The state allowed a local school board to decide what number of students might endanger virtual segregation, although it did permit the local jurisdiction to avoid the cost of building a separate school to implement absolute segregation.

Wyoming law gave school boards and superintendents power to enforce absolute segregation whenever there were fifteen or more "colored children" within a district. Since the large majority of Wyoming's schools were small, the numerical calculation of what number might threaten virtual segregation was also quite small. Until 1949, local jurisdictions in Indiana could decide to institute absolute segregation under a law used almost exclusively in larger cities where the percentage of Black population jeopardized virtual segregation.¹⁴⁷Murray, 35–36; 290–291, 144; Mary Melcher, "'This Is Not Right': Rural Arizona Women Challenge Segregation and Ethnic Division, 1925–1950," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20, no. 2 (1999): 198–199. Arizona did require all elementary schools to segregate by race. Melcher suggests that Arizona required school segregation due to the large number of former southerners serving in the legislature. See Murray, 524; Reid E. Jackson, "The Development and Character of Permissive and Partly Segregated Schools," Journal of Negro Education 16, no. 3 (Summer 1947): 302–305.

These laws were different from those in the South because they assumed a different starting point. Before Brown, non-southern states started with virtual segregation and went to the absolute form when necessary, while southern states started with absolute segregation and went to virtual segregation when required by Brown. Wherever, school segregation was a multifarious exclusion without an exact shape or defining measure. As practiced, segregation always revolved around what a white-controlled legislature, white constituency, or white-controlled institution considered minimally acceptable. Contemporary private school patterns and practices—that state and federal governments have come to tolerate and often support with public funds—appear for what they are: legacies of class-based southern segregation used to evade Brown and multi-dimensional segregation of non-southern states before Brown.

Desegregation's Future

During the heyday of the first era of school vouchers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried that "token integration is little more than token democracy, which ends up with many new evasive schemes and it ends up with new discrimination, covered up with such niceties of complexity."¹⁴⁸Martin Luther King Jr., "Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience," New South, December 1961. King's words have proven prophetic, although he could not have foreseen how dramatically the icons and language of the movement he led would be used, even by his own lineage, to develop and advance the tools and strategies that segregationists of his day thought could defeat the promise of Brown.

Today's advocates of school vouchers are not the first to attempt to graft the words and imagery of King and the civil rights movement onto their reactionary cause. As early as 1988, Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority declared to a gathering of all-white, conservative male ministers in Atlanta that "Martin Luther King is everybody's American hero."¹⁴⁹Lorri Denise Booker, "250 Protest Anti-Abortion Conference—2 Arrested; 600 Pack Omni to Hear Falwell," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 9, 1988; "Homogenized Heroes," SRC Home Record, Southern Regional Council, First & Second Quarters, 1989, 5. Ralph Reed, director of the Christian Coalition, continued to try to align King as the role model for conservative evangelical activists, many of whom supported public funding for private religious schools. Carter, The Politics of Rage, 466. But the school choice and voucher movement is remarkable in replicating so closely the primary strategies and tactics of southern segregationists while claiming the righteous mantle of the people and movement who fought against those segregationists.

One reason school choice proponents have appropriated civil rights rhetoric may relate to the fact that there is little evidence that vouchers improve the education of low-income children or children of color.¹⁵⁰See Robert C. Pianta and Arya Ansan, "Does Attendance in Private Schools Predict Student Outcomes at Age 15? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study," Educational Researcher 47, no. 7 (2018), https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/XfYmtC25VddcCfbA3xiV/full; Mark Dynarski, On Negative Effects of Vouchers (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vouchers/; Mark Dynarski and Austin Nichols, More Findings about School Vouchers and Test Scores, and They Are Still Negative (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2017), https://www.brookings.edu/research/more-findings-about-school-vouchers-and-test-scores-and-they-are-still-negative/; Martin Carnoy, School Vouchers Are Not a Proven Strategy for Improving Student Achievement (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2017), https://www.epi.org/publication/school-vouchers-are-not-a-proven-strategy-for-improving-student-achievement/; Halley Potter, Do Private School Vouchers Pose a Threat to Integration? (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2017), https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/production.tcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/22102646/do-private-school-vouchers-pose-a-threat-to-integration.pdf; Kevin Carey, "Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins," New York Times, February 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/upshot/dismal-results-from-vouchers-surprise-researchers-as-devos-era-begins.html. Voucher advocates' strongest arguments invoke social justice as well as freedom in order to legitimate school choice as more than a consumerist mindset and to obscure the factual results.¹⁵¹Samuel E. Abrams, Education and the Commercial Mindset (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 303–307.

A larger part of the explanation surely lies in forgetting what little was known and understood about segregationists such as Alabama's Forney Johnston and Albert Boutwell, Georgia's John Sibley, North Carolina's Thomas Pearsall, and Virginia's Garland Gray. In current memory, George Wallace remains the image of the diehard segregationist—standing defiantly to assure not one Black child in any white school. The images, language, and cruel tactics of Wallace and Birmingham's "Bull" Connor remain vivid in the lingering American mind, but not the strategic, behind-the-scenes work of South Carolina's Marion Gressette.

Yet, the southern states' first plan for defeating court-ordered desegregation, the one that Johnston and Boutwell devised in 1954 in Alabama, is exactly what today's advocates and supporters of vouchers seek to implement: no compulsory "race-mixing" in schools and no mention of any intent to discriminate. What could be more American than the freedom of parents to choose their children's school—private or public—with public financial support?

The Boutwell plan also aimed to remove from the state constitution and statutes any right of education for a child and any obligation to fund education. Instead, a state was to "foster education of its citizens in a manner and extent consistent with its available resources, and the willingness and ability of the individual student [emphasis added]."¹⁵²Report of Alabama Interim Legislative Committee on Segregation in the Public Schools, 11. The plan authorized white school officials to decide "the eligibility, admission, and allocation of pupils, including the power to refuse admission to individuals or groups whose deficiencies in scholastic aptitude would compel undue lowering of school standards."¹⁵³Report of Alabama Interim Legislative Committee on Segregation in the Public Schools, 7–8. The state was to provide vouchers and tax funds to private schools to increase school choice options.

The primary components of segregationist plans developed in the 1950s and 1960s by southern states are today the main objectives of policymakers and advocates leading the movement for school choice and vouchers.¹⁵⁴For video overviews of the struggles against efforts to use vouchers to privatize public education, see videos at "Vouchers and Tax Credit Scholarships in the US," Southern Education Foundation, 2015, https://www.southerneducation.org/publications/vouchersandtaxcreditscholarships/; "Advancing Public Education in the South," Southern Education Foundation, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBo4HwZ_8v8. No less remarkable, the segregation that Forney Johnston envisioned in his tripartite school system was also foreseen by economist Milton Friedman, who considered it an acceptable consequence of his goal of managing the country's education systems through market forces.

The nation's lack of memory has done far more than encourage the acceptance as racially neutral the economic and social arguments of voucher advocates, who blithely use the language of civil rights to advance the tools of segregationists. The nation has lost an understanding of class-based segregation as a general but not absolute condition for preserving racial superiority. This country also has failed to remember that school segregation laws outside the South embodied the same bifurcated notion of absolute and virtual segregation, although applied to different locales and demographies. More disturbing is the current wide acceptance of segregation as a part of an American way of schooling that merits public funding.

At the same time, the legal meaning and force of racial discrimination in civil rights enforcement and tax policy has shrunk to such an extent that courts, the public, and policy makers often recognize discrimination in private schools only if a person or institution sounds like an old-style segregationist who says "No, not one." Even some of the nation's most prominent public scholars have failed to grasp how, despite past court rulings, the strategies of virtual segregation continue today as prevailing practice among religious and non-religious private schools with tax exemptions.¹⁵⁵For example, Jill Lepore writes that, because of the Supreme Court decision in Coit v. Green in 1971, "private religious schools no longer provided a refuge for whites opposed to integration." See Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 663. There is no basis in fact for such a conclusion.

The US Supreme Court has declared as law of the land that private schools cannot enjoy the benefits of exemptions from federal income tax, much less receive tax credits and direct government funding, while engaging in racial discrimination, even when motivated by claims of religious freedom. But, the federal government's current standards and practices of enforcement accept as valid and true on its face any private school's public pledge of non-discrimination in admission practices and operations, so long as the school has no formal or written policies to the contrary and does not maintain absolute, complete "No, not one" segregation. And parents of public school children cannot go to federal court to challenge the lack of robust, effective enforcement.

This faux policy of anti-discrimination has permitted a majority of private schools across the nation to maintain what strategic southern segregationists sought to achieve after Brown—virtual segregation and exclusion of children of color. Recall that two-thirds of white students attending the nation's private P–12 schools are in institutions where African American, Hispanic, and Native American children constitute 10 percent or less of the student body. These white schools are exercising "school choice" to decide which and how many children of color to admit—in token numbers and on terms, values, and motives inherited from strategic segregationists who, as Julian Bond noted, "dared not say out loud" their true goals.¹⁵⁶See Julian Bond, "Civil Rights in the Popular Culture," Southern Changes 14, no. 2 (1992): 4, http://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/sc14-2_1204/sc14-2_002/.

More than half of the nation's states have adopted some form of vouchers to support private schools, portending that virtual segregation and exclusion will be sustained over time. And the federal government is moving closer than ever to establishing a program of direct or tax credit vouchers to support private schools on whatever terms are acceptable to the states. Nor is there serious consideration of revising the standards and practices that have already permitted many states to erect the scaffolding of a private–public school system first put forward by Alabama segregationists in 1954.

By failing to grasp the history of the struggles and tactics against southern school desegregation, the nation has come to recognize segregation and racial superiority only in those private schools that are absolutely all-white. The looming danger lies in legitimizing and advancing a system of segregation and exclusion in education that is not called by its name. Even if most Americans find repugnant the absolute separation of the races that George Wallace defiantly championed as destiny in 1963, his words have transformed into a prophesy about schools across the nation that rings true by the most accurate, historical definition of the term: "segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow  . . . segregation forever."

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Southern Spaces staff members Stephanie Bryan, Madison Elkins, Amelia Golcheski, Camille Goldmon, Hannah Griggs, Rachel Kolb, Ra'Niqua Lee, and Sophia Leonard for their work on this piece.  Thanks as well to Jon N. Hale for his suggestions. A special appreciation to Megan Slemons, GIS specialist with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, for assistance with maps and tables; and to Allen Tullos, my dear friend and senior editor of Southern Spaces.

About the Author

An adjunct with Emory University's Institute for the Liberal Arts, Steve Suitts is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Earlier in his career, Suitts served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, and executive producer and writer of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the civil rights movement in five Deep South cities.

Introduction

The art flows through me, but does not belong to me alone. It speaks for those who have no voices, whose voices have been ignored, whose voices have been silenced. It relates history and circumstances that must not be forgotten.

—Gwendolyn Ann Magee, Artist

 

Rarely does an individual who has experienced oppression and prejudice find the means of expressing her experience with such masterful skill, in such an appropriate medium, and with such an embracing, uplifting tone.¹Bradley, Betsy. "Acknowledgments," in Journey of the Spirit: The Art of Gwendolyn A. Magee, ed. René P. Barilleaux (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2004), 3.

—Betsy Bradley, Director, Mississippi Museum of Art

Lift Every Voice and Sing, 1900. Poem by James Weldon Johnson. Music by John Rosamond Johnson. Courtesy of Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

An extraordinary artist working in fiber, Gwendolyn Ann Jones Magee (1943–2011) produced powerful abstract and narrative works in the medium of quilts. Magee's art, which she came to in midlife, was informed by her childhood in a creative home, her education in the social sciences, participation in the civil rights movement, careers in social work and business, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and grandmother.

A native of High Point, North Carolina, Magee lived most of her adult life in Mississippi. Educated in the public schools of High Point, she graduated from the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (WCUNC), now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). This essay, exhibition, and accompanying programming sponsored by the art department of UNCG brings Magee home and helps to raise awareness of her work. In the same spirit of homecoming, the High Point Museum will exhibit selections of Magee's work following the Greensboro exhibition, December 5, 2014–February 21, 2015.

Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee features twelve works based on James Weldon Johnson's transformative lyrics, set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson, and often referred to as "The Negro National Anthem." The quilt exhibition and this essay feature the twelve pieces as a cohesive body of work in narrative sequence. The exhibition also includes selected works that emphasize Magee's development through the expression of her social concerns and the evolution of her technical skills.

Fascinated with Color

Gwen Magee, 1947. Courtesy of Estate of Gwendolyn A. Magee.

Magee's childhood and early adult years in the Triad area of North Carolina contributed to the passionate voice she brought to her art. Edith Mayfield Wiggins, a childhood and college friend, remembers young Gwen Jones spinning endless stories and imaginative flights of fancy.²Edith Mayfield Wiggins, telephone conversation with author, July 10, 2014. Hers was a childhood surrounded by art publications and crafts in various media, and included museum trips to New York with her adoptive mother, schoolteacher Annie Lee Jones.³Roland Freeman, "Journey of the Spirit: The Art of Gwendolyn A. Magee," in Barilleaux, Journey of the Spirit. Fascinated with color, Magee recalled trying to dig into paper with crayons to achieve the depths and intensities that could match the pure hues in her mind's eye.⁴Gwendolyn A. Magee, oral history interview with Larry Morrisey, March 29, 2007. Courtesy of SouthArts. The power of color became a signature of her mature work.

Another influence throughout Magee's childhood and youth that affected her later work was the pervasive presence of "Lift Every Voice and Sing":

I well remember singing it at the beginning of almost every elementary and high school assembly program and at community activities. . . . It speaks to our heritage of slavery and oppression, as well as of our hope for equality, freedom, and justice.⁵Eleanor Dugan, "The Power of a Series: Gwen Magee Finds Inspiration in an Anthem," Quilting Quarterly, Journal of the National Quilting Association 30, no. 3 (Fall 2001).

I grew up with this song. It's been a major part of my life. All the way through school, we would sing it in assemblies, and sometimes daily in some of my classes. I can remember from about the age of four going with my mother to community programs or events and hearing it. For me, it's a powerfully emotional song, because it deals with pride, cultural heritage, and a clear recognition of all the difficulties African Americans have faced over the centuries.⁶Magee quoted in Freeman, "Journey of the Spirit."

In the fall of 1959, Gwen Jones, as a new graduate from William Penn High School in High Point, entered the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina in nearby Greensboro. Three years earlier JoAnne Smart and Betty Ann Davis had broken the color barrier at the all-white women's school. Although there were not violent protests or grandstanding in the schoolhouse door, the transition was not easy. Alice Joyner Irby, the newly appointed director of admissions, recalls touring the state, "searching for other black women who could succeed at WC. The women needed to be tough, smart, and ambitious to withstand the volatile culture they'd potentially face."⁷Sarah Perry, "A Place of Distinction: Woman's College in Greensboro," Our State: North Carolina, January 2014, http://www.ourstate.com/womans-college-greensboro/. By the time Jones and her four freshman cohorts arrived on campus they found themselves segregated in one section of one dormitory, and the target of discrimination, both subtle and not.⁸Magee, on her college years, quoted in Freeman, "Journey of the Spirit." The school was desegregated but not fully integrated.

Gwendolyn Ann Jones, 1963. Photo from Woman's College of the University of North Carolina yearbook, Pine Needles.

During Gwen Jones's college years, 1959–1963, Greensboro was a center of civil rights activities, best known as the site of the Woolworth's sit-ins initiated by four North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (A&T) students⁹Known as the Greensboro Four, the A&T freshmen were Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond. in February 1960. Advised by WCUNC administrators not to participate in the local demonstrations, between 1962–1964 Jones along with other students, black and white, targeted businesses adjacent to the campus and eventually prevailed in integrating the neighborhood movie theater and restaurants. Full integration did not occur until after she had graduated.

In a 1990 interview, Dr. M. Elaine Burgess, one of Magee's most influential professors in her major, sociology, recalled the action:

The kids were the ones that were doing it. They were brave. And they were so disciplined because they were frightened 'cause the Ku Klux Klan would come rolling up. They were never in danger, but they didn't know. You know, those early days—those young southern girls. That was a pretty big step. . . . I felt they did a nice job. And they organized it.¹⁰Oral history interview with M. Elaine Burgess, 1990, Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

After her 1963 graduation with a BA in sociology, Jones continued graduate study in social science at Kent State and Washington universities, working as an assistant with various research projects. She did not pursue a graduate degree, but took a fieldwork assignment. All of these experiences helped sharpen the consciousness that would inform her art.

In 1969 Gwen married Dr. D. E. Magee, an ophthalmologist she met during fieldwork in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. After Dr. Magee completed his residency in Philadelphia, the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they established careers and raised their two daughters, Kamili and Aliya. Although she had continued during the passing years to practice a variety of craft media while employed with Xerox, Merrill Lynch, and other corporate and minority placement programs, Magee decided in 1989 that she should learn to quilt in order to create reminders of home for her college-bound daughters. She discovered her artistic voice in the fiber arts, swiftly mastering quilting and surface design techniques through which she powerfully expressed herself and engaged an audience.

Gwen Magee at work on her abstract design Bolero. Photography by J.D. Schwalm and The Clarion-Ledger, 2001.		Gwen Magee at work with her daughter Kamili Magee Hemphill and Grandson Ellington Hemphill. Photo courtesy of Roland L. Freeman, 2014.

Gwen Magee's first works in traditional quilting soon moved into abstract designs, and then references to African culture through the use of textile and design traditions. She reveled in and fine-tuned her fascination with the intensity and interplay of color. As she developed her skills, techniques, composition, and color management, she was also laying the groundwork for a transition in subject matter. As she studied quilting periodicals she discovered the narrative work of other African American quilters, which inspired a growing dissatisfaction with her own work as lacking in cultural relevance and significance. The artist challenged herself to create work satisfying to an audience of one, herself, responding to her need to deal with her own history and heritage. Her vision expanded to include her concern with social justice and African American heritage in the creation of extraordinary textile narratives.¹¹Magee and Morrisey.

Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee

The exhibition, Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee, includes examples of the artist's work created concurrently with the title series (2001–2011) that illustrate the strengths of her approach. Although Magee's first ventures into quilting had expressed affirmative emotions toward domestic life, she understood the toughness of the subjects she chose to address as her narrative direction developed, and did not flinch from the use of powerful imagery. "I am fully aware," she blogged in 2009, "that the dissonance is palpable between this medium through which my art finds expression and the subject matter that it articulates. I know that the quilt form usually is associated with feelings of warmth, comfort, serenity and security and that my subject matter often is harsh, intense, somber and frequently brutal. However, viewers of the art frequently convey to me that they find the work to be compelling, evocative, meaningful and riveting."¹²Gwendolyn A. Magee, "Gwendolyn Magee in Her Own Words", Subversive Stitchers: Women Armed with Needles, February 6, 2009, http://subversivestitch.blogspot.com/2009/02/gwendolyn-magee-in-her-own-words.html.

"Shocking Quilts: We Show You the Controversial Patchwork" read the cover of a 2009 Quilter's Home magazine that included some of Magee's narrative works. The Washington Post commented on the resulting kerfuffle over censorship after a few traditional quilt shops, including the Jo-Ann Fabrics chain, refused to carry the issue:

"Some of the images are disturbing—and moving—like quilter Gwen Magee's Southern Heritage/Southern Shame, which depicts five lynching victims hanging in front of a Confederate flag. . . . Magee says that the contrast between her soft fabrics and her harsh social messages is exactly what makes her work effective. She did see a letter from one guy protesting her quilts, asking, 'Who would want to cuddle under such a thing?' 'He had no concept that this wasn't that kind of quilt,' Magee says."¹³Monica Hesse, "Quilting Magazine Exposes Craft's Risque Underside," Washington Post, March 5, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/04/AR2009030403994.html.

Southern Heritage/Southern Shame

This was my response to the failure of a referendum to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the Mississippi state flag.

—Gwen Magee

Southern Heritage/Southern Shame, 2001. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 22.5"x32.5". Collection of Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing, Michigan. Purchased with funding from the MSU Office of Research and Graduate Studies and the MSU Foundation. Photography © 2014 Roland L. Freeman.

This multilayered quilt, with its narrative elements and use of transparencies to create layers of meaning, is now in the collection of the Michigan State University Museum. The Confederate battle flag is overlaid with silhouettes of lynched bodies, but the left side of the work is deceiving—at first glance viewers may try to blink away a fog or a smudge. But suddenly, through Magee's skilled use of materials, a figure emerges and the shadowy, hooded figure leaps into view.

Five Years Hard Labor

In blisteringly hot sun, chain gang prisoners break rocks under the watchful eye of an armed guard and his dog.

—Gwen Magee

The Mississippi Museum of Art commissioned Five Years Hard Labor for The Mississippi Story, a selection of more than three hundred objects from its permanent collection of work by artists from around the state. Magee's narrative features one notorious element of Mississippi history, a chain gang, in a highly textured work.

This work combines techniques and design elements characteristic of Magee's style: diversely textured fabrics, intense color to enhance the mood, and heavy threadwork. The threadwork (often created with free motion machine embroidery) builds up textures in layers and helps unify the surfaces across a body of work, just as a painter's brushwork can become a style signature.

As in Five Years Hard Labor, human figures in Magee's work often appear as featureless profiles, reminiscent of Romare Bearden's pictorial narratives. The postures and apparel of the chain gang figures identify their status.

Magee's use of spiral elements lends universality to her compositions. The angry sun, an agitated disc in the chain gang quilt, combines shape, motion, and intense color to emphasize the scene's heat. A spiraling background texture echoes the sun.

Requiem

This is a lament for a vibrant city that will never again be the same with the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina compounded by the indifference and ineptitude of our government.

—Gwen Magee

Requiem represents another example of Magee's reactions to current events, and was the beginning of a planned series about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Magee completed only two pieces in this series. Family ties in New Orleans and keen attachments to the city, coupled with growing horror at government failures to deal with an overwhelming natural and manmade disaster drove the creation of this work. Requiem combines references to musical culture, a street corner significant to Magee's family, and the encroaching floodwaters where streams of music pouring from the trumpet meet and blend with streams of water flowing through broken levees.

Multiple details—the variety of specialty and hand-dyed fabrics mimicking decorative ironwork, window glass, the musician's alligator shoes, and the luminosity of a street lamp—enhance the strengths of the Katrina narrative told in one vignette. Heavy thread work suggests layers of architectural and cultural history on a typical street corner. The featureless figure of a musician propped against a street lamp stands in as a cultural icon. The spiral elements make their appearance, but in this work they are distorted and their perpetual motion diverted. On first glance, an arched doorway appears to frame rich shadows and coloring achieved with intense thread work that, when examined, emerge from the background as a montage of abstract images—a spiraling hurricane, rampaging water, a levee break—framed by an architectural feature.

Expendable Cargo

Slavers continued to operate even after importation of slaves became illegal. However, if the patrol ships were bearing down on them on the high seas, the illegal cargo was unceremoniously dumped overboard to drown - if no slaves were found on board there would be no imprisonment or fines.

—Gwen Magee

Expendable Cargo, 2010. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, and appliquéd cotton, with cording. 82"x18". Collection of Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson. Purchase, with funds from McCravey Fund, 2013.014. Photograph © 2014 Gil Ford Photography. Detail photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

On completion of Lift Every Voice, Magee began another African American history series. Expendable Cargo is representative of this body of work depicting harrowing facets of enslavement—here, the jettisoning of human cargo to rid a pursued ship of incriminating bodies. The shape of the quilt emphasizes the descending human figures, weighted and dragged downward by restraints, silhouettes shackled together, sinking through the depths of blue waves.

Expendable Cargo, part of Slavery Series, in the collection of the Mississippi Museum of Art is composed of quilts that are generally smaller in format and treated with less visual complexity than other Magee works. Again, Slavery Series' figures are featureless. Each represents a story of slavery told and retold. The surfaces are not as intensely worked, but the graphic qualities are inescapably direct. Some of the work moves toward sculptural adaptations that extend from the surface. Intensely experienced by the artist and viewers, images and narratives pour from Magee's Slavery Series, as if she seems compelled to create them as quickly as possible.

Deep Into the Woods

Deep into the Woods, 2011. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics. 16"x11.75"(closed), 16"x11.75"x23" (open). Collection of the Gwendolyn Ann Magee Estate, D. E. Magee, administrator.

Deep Into the Woods, one of Magee's later works, offers a purely sculptural means of telling a story, and represents an increasing transition from two-dimensional wall work into representations with more depth. This aptly named category of handmade objects is called a tunnel book. Using this multi-dimensional format, Magee layered in story elements, capturing a chilling moment in the deep woods. The stylized spiral foliage frames a hooded figure peering out from the depths, backed up by flames, an empty noose, and the Confederate battle flag. While Magee created many pieces that incorporated layers—using transluscent and sculpted fabrics, along with machine stitching—she found that the tunnel book format enabled her to express with actual (as opposed to illusive) depth the layers of meaning and imagery characteristic of her work.

Deep Into the Woods, alternate view. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

Verse One: Lift Every Voice

The title series of this exhibition draws its inspiration from the majestic words and music of "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The song's lyrics are a major legacy from James Weldon Johnson, and a crucial contribution to the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights. Johnson's achievements in many fields were acknowledged in the 2007 creation of Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute, but "his place in African American history and culture would be secure if he had composed only in 1900 with J. Rosamond Johnson 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,' a hymn officially adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and widely sung by African Americans as the Negro National Anthem."¹⁴"About James Weldon Johnson," The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, http://jamesweldonjohnson.emory.edu/home/about/index.html.

Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson articulated the power of "Lift Every Voice" in the introduction to their book of tributes on the 100th anniversary of the song's creation:¹⁵Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson, eds., Lift Every Voice And Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem: 100 Years, 100 Voices (New York: Random House, 2000). "It is wondrous and hardly explicable to many," wrote Bond and Wilson, "how James Weldon Johnson could have written such spiritually enriching lyrics in 1900 . . . 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' is fittingly provocative. Yet its message, ingeniously crafted, does not fuel the fires of racial hatred."¹⁶Ibid.

Magee's Lift Every Voice series translates the song's verbal images into powerful visuality. Images from words embedded in life experience were shared through well-developed skills that conveyed both the history and the passion of shared time and participation. " I had mental pictures inspired by the words," recalled Magee's longtime friend Edith Wiggins, "and when I saw Gwen's series my reaction was, 'Yes—that's exactly what I was thinking.' The series helps to validate and underscore what you've always felt and visualized."¹⁷Wiggins and Moye.

In a 2007 interview, Magee summed up her wishes that her legacy be "a body of work that not only is meaningful but is compelling, through its use of color, design, and/or subject matter—so that the viewer is not only engaged but is drawn into the work and, hopefully, back to it repeatedly."¹⁸Magee and Morrisey.

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

The full color spectrum not only of African-Americans, but of all peoples of the world is depicted. All should be able to find themselves represented.

—Gwen Magee

In her title piece to the series, Magee uses a spectrum of skin colors to introduce her wish to cross boundaries that separate humankind. The featureless profiles lift their voices, eyes, and heads.

The placement of the globe and text in a night sky, enhanced with sparkling stars and a texture of meander quilting suggesting swirling galaxies, connects this title piece to the "the blue marble"¹⁹A description of the term applied to the planet Earth, as described by the crew of Apollo 17: http://life.time.com/history/blue-marble-apollo-17-photo-of-earth-from-space/#1. Meander quilting is a technique in which non-overlapping quilting stitches meander across a quilt in a fluid, seemingly random fashion. perspective of earth, as viewed from space. The rainbow of faces lifted in hope, and the implied voices lifted in song convey Magee's hope for a universe that will "ring with the harmonies of liberty."

Full of the Faith

Three women kneel in the shadow of the cross to indicate their submission to the will of a higher power. This piece conveys the important role played by religion during slavery and reconstruction.

—Gwen Magee

Full of the Faith, 2004. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 42.5"x37". Collection of the Gwendolyn Ann Magee Estate, D. E. Magee, administrator. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

Full of the Faith, 2004. Detail. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

Multilayered in technique and meaning, this work depicts the centrality of faith in African American culture. Identified by their profiles and postures as a young woman, a mature woman, and an older woman, the three kneeling figures are iconic for their generational span and for their strength. These three figures, although flat fabrics, are visually contoured with the use of linear work that is an internal echo of the outlines shapes. The cross, with its African-patterned textiles, casts a protective shadow on the trio.

The cross rises from a richly embroidered billow of threadwork in deep and varied reds with gold overlays, a tour de force of surface work. The sheer beauty of this background belies reference to the smoldering and smoking remains of another form of burning cross all too familiar to African American history—another lesson of "the dark past."

Full of the Hope

Youth and education have long been very powerful symbols of hope for African-Americans with education viewed as our road map for making it into 'the promised land'.

—Gwen Magee

Full of the Hope, 2002. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 42"x40". Collection of the Gwendolyn Ann Magee Estate, D. E. Magee, administrator. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

Full of the Hope, 2002. Detail. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

Full of the Hope invokes the potential of education. With its open, serious faces and uplifted eyes, this is one of only three pieces in the exhibition that do not portray figures in featureless profile. The young man and woman in cap and gown and with diplomas in hand, stand in the light of golden rays. Magee believed fervently in the power of education, and spoke frequently to school groups as a part of her artistic mission.The graduation gowns are adorned with stoles emblematic of racial pride.

Our New Day Begun

A blazing sun symbolizes hope.

—Gwen Magee

The climax of the first stanza of Johnson's anthem is the title phrase for Magee's Our New Day Begun. A geometrically complex sun shines forth from a hand-dyed background, its luminosity enhanced with intricate lines of shading from meander lines of variegated thread work. The rising sun of this text is not the angry, spiraling sun of other works, but a glowing symbol of purpose and belief in the future.

Verse Two: Stony the Road We Trod

A slave coffle gives testimony to the miles and miles that men, women, and children were forced to trudge while shackled and chained.

—Gwen Magee

Moving into a second verse, Johnson's anthem turns toward history, as does Magee's imagery. She does not avoid the terrors of slavery as she translates words to visuals.

A variegated deep red background and profiled black feet suggest the bloody treks of shackled slaves traveling to unknown destinations, before and after the Middle Passage. The horizontal format of the quilt emphasizes the distance of these treks over perilous terrain. Interior contour lines emphasize the three-dimensiality of the trudging feet.

Bitter the Chastening Rod

The image of a chained woman being cruelly whipped even though her womb is heavy with child graphically illustrates the dehumanization of slaves.

—Gwen Magee

Bitter the Chastening Rod, 2000. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 43.75"x39". Collection of the Gwendolyn Ann Magee Estate, D. E. Magee, administrator. Photography © 2014 Dave Dawson Photography.

As she is whipped, a chained, pregnant, enslaved woman raises her voice in naked anguish. The stark black and white palette underscores the bitter verse as a featureless profiled figure represents numberless cruelties, violations, and abuses. Again, the interior linework on the silhouette emphasizes the contours of the writhing body.

Bitter the Chastening Rod, 2000. Detail. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

When Hope Unborn Had Died

A couple has bought a hog and a toddler at auction. Its mother, screaming in anguish, runs desperately out of the cotton field.

—Gwen Magee

The flat plane of two-dimensional artwork cannot contain the emotions of When Hope Unborn Had Died. An anguished mother, weighed down by a heavy cotton sack, screams across the unfolding scene. A parasol obscures the couple that has purchased her child, as a high stepping horse moves their carriage, cart, and cargo diagonally toward the edge of the frame, soon to disappear.

The action originates in the viewers' space as the three-dimensional sack of cotton drags out of the picture plane and anchors the mother in a powerless dimension. Viewers who approach this work are drawn into the narrative and to the figure whose futile scream floats above the carriage. Her featureless profile with its screaming mouth echoes the cries of countless mothers during generations of American slavery.

The use of fabrics as identifiers is particularly strong here. The slave mother wears rough cloth resembling the homespun of field work; the cotton sack is of burlap. The shielding parasol is of shiny, luxury cloth; the dappled horse is an irregularly dyed fabric; and the sun is a shiny, intense yellow. The stark, stylized tree with its unnatural spiral foliage echoes the angry sun.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered

We Have Come Over a Way That with Tears Has Been Watered

A slave ship plunges through ocean waters. Blazing in the sky the sun depicts the turmoil of the voyage. Slave trade routes are depicted by the quilting lines connecting Africa and the United States.

—Gwen Magee

A slave ship in full sail splitting the waters of the Atlantic evokes the Middle Passage in Over a Way that with Tears Has Been Watered. The atmosphere echoes the turmoil of the human cargo; a spinning sun of judgment emits jagged rays, filling the dark sky as turbulent waters crash the ship's hull.

The white sails billow and propel the ship through deep waters. The sails and the hold of the ship, with the telltale name of Amistad, are surrounded by a nest of tangled white threadwork, suggesting the rising miasma of misery.

Almost obscured in the chaos is the relentless path of map lines indicating slave voyages connecting Africa in the upper right corner to the Americas in the lower left.

Blood of the Slaughtered I and II

"Treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered . . ." The words haunted me for months—reverberating in my head over and over again; nine little words embodying a multiplicity of possible interpretations. But one meaning in particular resonated mercilessly. This single line . . . gripped me at the deepest core of my being and left me with no refuge.

—Gwen Magee

The Blood of the Slaughtered I, 2001. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 70"x85.5". Collection of the Gwendolyn Ann Magee Estate, D. E. Magee, administrator. Photography © 2014 Dave Dawson Photography.

By their title The Blood of the Slaughtered I and II warns viewers that this work is difficult to imagine and to comprehend. The listing of names of documented lynching victims is Magee's memorial—a textile roll call for viewers to read and ponder.

The names of the lynched, recorded by state, and localized within each state, brings the horrific history home. This is a memorial piece, a Vietnam Wall in cloth. With the spiraling tree in translucent overlay, fading body, and stark black and white palette, every element of this piece is stark and compelling.

	Blood of the Slaughtered I, 2001. Detail above, below. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.
	The Blood of the Slaughtered II, 2001. © Gwendolyn A. Magee, Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 70"x18". Collection of the Gwendolyn Ann Magee Estate, D. E. Magee.

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

Verse Three: God of Our Weary Years

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,

As African Americans, just as we have so much hope for our youth to 'lead the way' and to 'fulfill the dream,' we also have to daily face the reality that for countless reasons many of our youth, particularly if they are male and teenagers,somehow wind up being touched by the criminal justice system. This piece speaks to that issue.

—Gwen Magee

The face above the prison orange peering between bars—the same face as the eager graduate in Full of the Hope—stands in for a generation of black youth caught in persisting structural conditions of poverty and lack of education who may become a part of modern-day mass incarceration.

God of Our Silent Tears I

An execution scene addressing the disproportionate percentage of African Americans given the death penalty and executed. It does not address the question of guilt or innocence, but questions whether or not our system of justiceIs truly equal for all.

—Gwen Magee

God of Our Silent Tears I takes viewers into the execution chamber, where the life force of a condemned man fades, marked by the receding image of his body as an overhead hand throws the switch to the electric chair. Magee has chosen to give this figure an African American face and not portray him as a featureless profile. The tableau reminds viewers that capital punishment in America imposes unequal racial judgment in society's name.

God of Our Silent Tears II

This companion piece looks at execution from another perspective—that of the family being left behind, for they, too, will suffer. Each of the three newspapers shown takes a different position—one is against capital punishment and also questions the politics of the trail and whether or not this man was railroaded for political reasons. Another paper takes the position that the evidence clearly proved his guilt and that he therefore should be executed.The third takes a middle of the road point of view.

—Gwen Magee

As the family of a condemned man waits, and the clock nears the appointed hour of midnight, God of Our Silent Tears II portrays the other side of the execution scene, that of the "family being left behind."

Thou Who Has Brought Us

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Gwen Magee's series doesn't interpret the final lines of Lift Every Voice, but could be reprised by the hope expressed in Our New Day Begun. The spirit of Magee's work—informed by history but not overwhelmed by sorrow—complements the anthem that inspired her throughout her life.

Infinity

Infinity, 1995. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, and stitched, fabrics. 105.5"x90". Collection D. E. Magee. Photography © 2014 Dave Dawson Photography.

Infinity, the last quilt in the narrative sequence of Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee, voices the joy Gwen Magee knew in her life, the love she experienced for her family and friends, and the legacy of her work. Early in the chronology of her work in fiber, Magee created Infinity as a Christmas gift for her husband, D. E. Magee. Just beginning to flex her creative muscles, she worked from a traditional quilt pattern that she altered to celebrate Dr. Magee's serious hobby of astronomy and his profession as an ophthalmologist.

Infinity, 1995. Detail. Photograph by Dave Dawson Photography.

Infinity glows with intensity of color and precise geometry, successfully moving light across the surface while creating illusions of dimension through the manipulation of color and form. Dr. Magee's insistence that this was a work of art for the wall and not a bed covering marked a turning point from which Gwen Magee recognized and identified herself as an artist.

Curator René Barilleaux, who worked with Magee on her exhibition, Journey of the Spirit, at the Mississippi Museum of Art, sums up her life in the arts: "Gwen Magee was a rare combination of artist, advocate, and gentle spirit. In her life and in her art, she made monumental statements on those things about which she cared deeply."²⁰René Barilleaux, e-mail communication with author, April 5, 2013.

Gwendolyn Ann Magee, 1943–2011. Photograph by Barbara Gauntt. © Barbara Gauntt/Clarion-Ledger.

About the Artist

Gwendolyn Ann Magee has work in the permanent collections of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Museum of Mississippi History (Department of Archives and History), the Michigan State University Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Magee's work also has been exhibited in the Museum of Arts and Design, the Atlanta History Museum, the National Art Gallery of the Republic of Namibia, the Val d'Argent Expo in Alsace, France, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and at numerous other national and international galleries. Among other honors she was recognized by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters as Visual Artist of the Year in 2003 and she was a 2007 Ford Fellow through United States Artists.²¹Gwendolyn A. Magee, "Exhibitions/Resume," http://gwenmagee.com/resume.html.

About the Author

Dorothy Moye is a Decatur, Georgia, art consultant and a college classmate of Gwen Jones Magee (WCUNC '63). She is Visiting Curator for the Gatewood Gallery at UNC-Greensboro, for Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee, September 11–November 8, 2014. Other curatorial projects in 2014-15 include Flight Patterns: A Fiber Art Exhibition, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport through April 2015 and at the Welch Gallery, Georgia State University May 14–July 31, 2015; and semiannual exhibitions through the Decatur Arts Alliance.

Moye participates in multifaceted projects in the arts, and holds membership in numerous arts organizations, both local and national. She graduated from UNC–Greensboro and North Carolina State University in Raleigh with degrees in sociology.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank those who have worked tirelessly to bring the work of Gwendolyn Ann Jones Magee to a wider audience.

• The Magee Family: Dr. D. E. Magee, MD; Kamili Magee Hemphill; and Dr. Aliya Magee, DVM for sharing their legacy with the world.
• Dr. Lawrence Jenkens and the staff of the Art Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for belief in this project and the opportunity to curate an exhibition of the work of my friend Gwen Magee.
• Dr. Allen Tullos, Jesse P. Karlsberg, Meredith Doster, and the outstanding editors and staff of Southern Spaces for the opportunity to give ongoing digital life to the Gwen Magee Project. Thanks in particular to Emma Lirette and Clinton Fluker for their work laying out this piece.
• Carol Furey Matney and the other members of the Magee Project Committee for support and assistance and making this project possible: Bill Baites, Linda Arnold Carlisle, JoAnne Smart Drane, Day Heusner McLaughlin, Maggie Triplette, Charlotte Vestal Wainwright, and Edith Mayfield Wiggins.
• The director and staff of the Mississippi Museum of Art for assistance in the logistics of the project, as well as for the loan of three important works.
• The Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Michigan State University Museum for their generous loans.
• South Arts for access to an important oral history from their archives.
• Family and friends for valuable support and assistance in every aspect of this project.
• The African American graduates of the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (1960–1963) who pioneered the way to the most diverse campus in the state's university system, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Introduction to the Battle of Atlanta Project

Confederate and Union troops in close combat, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, Atlanta, Georgia, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

The fall of Atlanta was a major turning point in the Civil War, and this essay begins with a summary of the city's importance to both sides, their struggle for its control during the spring and summer of 1864, and the Federal military campaign across Georgia that began shortly thereafter. The essay then covers, tour stop by tour stop, the major battlefield sites and events of July 22, 1864. For the most part, the tour stops are sequenced in chronological order of the battlefield events, beginning with the prelude to the battle, followed by stops where the first fighting occurred, proceeding to the site where the clash was most intense, and concluding with the locations of the final and most famous combat action of the day. The mobile application includes condensed descriptions of each tour stop and provides recommendations for the tour route and parking. It is designed for use en route (passengers only) and at each destination (drivers and passengers). The essay includes more detailed explanations of military maneuvers and battlefield events, lengthier profiles of the opposing army commanders, and a more extensive account of the battle's aftermath. It explores in greater depth the commemorative monuments, veterans' reunions, and various other ways that a single, bloody contest continued to be remembered long after the fighting stopped."The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance" delves into the recorded past of a particularly fierce engagement between the United States and the Confederate States on July 22, 1864. The fighting that day was one of the biggest battles of the final ten months of the Civil War, and the Yankee victory east of the city was followed by daily bombardment of Atlanta and the Union's capture of the "Gate City of the South" on September 2, 1864. The famous Atlanta cyclorama painting depicts a Federal counter offensive launched at approximately 4:30 p.m. on the day of the battle against Confederate infantry that forced a long line of Yankees to retreat earlier in the afternoon. "The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance" combines a narrative of battlefield events, photographs, postcard views, images from the cyclorama, maps, and other visual and textual artifacts with a web-based mobile application designed to inform trips to battlefield sites by car or bus. The mobile guide combined with this essay can be used to learn about the Battle of Atlanta without a visit to what remains of the battlefield and without additional background reading. "The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance" presupposes no specialized knowledge of Atlanta or the Civil War, and it is intended for a variety of users and audiences.

News of Sherman's capture of Atlanta on September 2, 1864 electrified the North, New York Times, September 3, 1864.

Northern Civil War commanders made the capture of Confederate cities—specifically Atlanta and Richmond—and the crippling or destroying of the armies defending them, the major objectives in the Georgia and Virginia military campaigns that they launched in early May 1864. The Yankee military leaders had agreed on a coordinated, two-theater strategy for exhausting their foes by maneuver and attrition, and they achieved their goal—Confederate defeat—within twelve months.¹Edward Hagerman, "Union Generalship, Political Leadership, and Total War Strategy," in On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, eds. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 168. Atlanta became a target because of its unique political, economic, and psychological importance to the Confederacy. It was a principal railroad hub, a vital source of material support for the war effort, and a bastion of hope for the South as its military fortunes waned. The demolition and burning of the city in November 1864 and the battles and bombardment that preceded its ruin are indelible in Civil War history and lore. The events in and around Atlanta are part of a violent past that over time, and in a variety of ways, have triggered a cultural struggle over the war's meaning. Public and private forms of expression, each with their own history, offer different versions of remembrance that—because memory often exerts a greater impact—deserve as much attention as battle facts. Gone with the Wind, for instance, as a bestselling novel and blockbuster movie has shaped popular perception of the Civil War more than the combined works of all professional historians. The evocative power of Atlanta and the Civil War endures, evident in iconic images and texts, commemorative rituals, monuments, and other forms of remembrance.

The Battle of Atlanta pitted Confederate and Yankee forces against one another in a large combat zone that extended over areas now known as East Atlanta, Kirkwood, Edgewood, Reynoldstown, Little Five Points, Inman Park, and Poncey-Highland. Busy highways, streets, and urban neighborhoods have long since transformed the battlefield terrain, but today's visitors can tour many topographic features, historic monuments and landmarks, as well as remnants of a Civil War fort and rifle pit. A visit to the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama painting on display in Grant Park is an excellent accompaniment to the tour. The enormous artwork in the round, completed in 1885–86 using firsthand accounts of the fighting, illustrates the lay of land on July 22, 1864, and depicts the clash between Federal and Confederate troops in a particularly dramatic turning point, at about 4:30 in the afternoon. While some visitors prefer touring the Atlanta cyclorama before going to the battlefield sites, reversing that sequence and beginning with Civil War landmarks provides guidance to the sweeping troop movements, lines of attack, and contested terrain portrayed in the sprawling panorama.

The absence of a historically preserved battlefield means that visitors seeking firsthand knowledge about the places and events that figured prominently in the Battle of Atlanta must go beyond the almost effortless engagement with history available at well-preserved Civil War sites, such as Kennesaw Mountain, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. Visits to the Atlanta battlefield, even via virtual tour, require greater self-reliance and a more active process of combining historical accounts, maps, and images with present-day visual evidence to ferret out what happened, where, and why. The rewards are great. By juxtaposing information from then and now, visitors traveling through contemporary Atlanta gain a new and powerful perspective on the city, its neighborhoods, and their place in history. Exploring seemingly ordinary sites is a way to gain a new awareness of history, even if the sites are often encountered during our everyday routines. Landscape historian John R. Stilgoe encourages us to scrutinize those places, put them in spatial context, and arrange them in time. "Enjoy the best kept secret around," Stilgoe writes, "the ordinary everyday landscape that rewards any explorer, that touches any explorer with magic."²John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker and Company, 1998), 2.

Physical traces of the Battle of Atlanta evoke insights and exchanges that touch on broader questions about the Civil War, its causes and consequences, and the historical memory of major battles and the armies that fought them:

• The fact that African American slaves were bought and sold in Atlanta and were used to build earthen fortifications that encircled the city in an effort to fend off an invading Union force invites questions about slavery's role in causing, perpetuating, and ending the war.
• The implications of the fight for Atlanta occurring amid a US presidential election campaign highlights the connection between war and politics and the ways in which the outcome of a single, hard-fought battle can exert effects well beyond the immediate military contest to sectional and national history.
• The arduous, fifteen-mile night march by a Confederate army corps just prior to the Battle of Atlanta focuses attention on the motivation and morale of the rebel soldiers and, more broadly, the factors that propelled warriors on both sides to repeatedly head into combat despite the extraordinary dangers and hardships they faced.
• The Yankee armies' eventual capture of Atlanta, expulsion of its civilian population, and burning of the city prompts consideration of whether the Civil War ushered in the total wars of the twentieth century or was fought within the prevailing nineteenth-century constraints on military action against noncombatants.

Placing the battle in the context of a larger landscape and longer timeline makes the fighting between the Yankee and Confederate armies on July 22, 1864, more meaningful than focusing exclusively on the details of the single military contest. A three-hour Battle of Atlanta tour is an opportunity to gain new knowledge about tactics, topography, and combat action and to contemplate the broader context and significance of a specific clash. "The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance" is a guide for both explorations; it is designed for use before, during, or after a battlefield tour.

The Atlanta Campaign and the March to the Sea

The Battle of Atlanta was the bloodiest and single most important clash in the Atlanta Campaign of the Civil War. It was the campaign's climactic fight but not its conclusion.³Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 567. The four-month campaign was a series of maneuvers, battles, engagements, and skirmishes between advancing Federal and retreating Confederate forces that culminated in the Federal capture of Atlanta on September 2, 1864. The fall of the "Gate City of the South" was a turning point in the Civil War, virtually assuring Abraham Lincoln's bid for a second term as president at a time when his political prospects were dimming and the outcome of his 1864 election campaign against Democratic opponent George B. McClellan was uncertain. Other Union successes influenced the northern electorate, specifically Admiral David Farragut's closure of the Confederate port of Mobile, Alabama, in early August and General Philip Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in September and October. However, the Yankee capture of Atlanta electrified the North, and, more than any other event on or off the battlefield, it turned around Lincoln's political fortunes.⁴James M. McPherson, "Two Strategies of Victory: William T. Sherman in the Civil War," Atlanta History 33, no. 4 (Winter 1989–1990), 10.

McClellan, who had served as general-in-chief of the armies of the United States from November 1861 to November 1862, was gaining popularity among northern voters as a peacemaker who could restrain warring sectional leaders, Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, from irretrievably tearing apart the Union. The main plank of the Democratic platform called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, and McClellan personally singled out reunion, but not emancipation, as his one condition for peace. War weariness and McClellan's increasing popularity in the North gave hope to Confederate military and political leaders in the summer of 1864. Even though the Confederates had lost ground in their war effort, a favorable outcome in the northern presidential election could reverse their fortunes and lead to a peace settlement on favorable terms. Conversely, loss of either Richmond or Atlanta to the invading Yankee armies would spell disaster for the Confederates because either outcome would likely propel Lincoln to electoral victory, which in turn meant that the Union would continue to prosecute the war and emancipation would remain a principal war aim.

Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, commander of the Army of Tennessee during the first months of the Atlanta Campaign. Albumen print.

Much depended on how Confederate armies fared in Virginia and Georgia. Because the Confederate and Union forces in Virginia were bogged down in trench warfare near Petersburg beginning in mid-June, the stakes mounted in the more mobile Atlanta Campaign. In northwest Georgia, the three Federal armies under the overall command of Major General William T. Sherman fought and maneuvered their way southward toward Atlanta. Sherman was optimistic from the outset, writing to his wife Ellen on May 22, 1864: "I think I have the best army in the country, and if I cant [sic] take Atlanta and Stir up Georgia considerably I am mistaken."⁵Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 639. Despite several battlefield setbacks, most severely at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, the Union armies gained ground and forced the outnumbered Confederate Army of Tennessee, led by General Joseph E. Johnston, to fall back repeatedly to new defensive positions. When the Yankees circumvented Johnston's fortified position along the Chattahoochee River and began crossing the river on July 8, 1864, the Confederates retreated to an outer line of trenches defending Atlanta. By July 17, 1864, all three Union armies had reached the south bank of the Chattahoochee River, a half-day's march from the city. That same day, Confederate President Davis relieved Johnston of his army command and replaced him with General John Bell Hood. Davis was dissatisfied with Johnston's failure to halt Sherman's advance toward Atlanta. Hood offered the promise of more aggressive action against the Yankees, and as expected he soon went on the attack.

In each of the final four battles of the Atlanta Campaign, with Hood in command, the Confederate forces assaulted advancing or maneuvering Federal troops: at Peachtree Creek on July 20, east of Atlanta on July 22, at Ezra Church west of the city on July 28, and finally to the south at Jonesboro on August 31. In each instance, the Confederates were defeated with heavy losses. While the fighting raged at Jonesboro on August 31, a contingent of Federal infantry reached the Macon and Western Railroad several miles to the north and seized control of this last Confederate supply line into Atlanta. The next day, Union troops routed the remaining Confederate forces at Jonesboro, and that night Hood began a general withdrawal from Atlanta. Sherman allowed Hood's army to escape without pursuit, but Hood's aggressive fight for Atlanta had left him with fewer than forty thousand troops.

On September 2, long lines of Federal soldiers began marching into the city that they would occupy for nearly eleven weeks. Newspapers throughout the North reported their triumph on September 3, and President Lincoln offered national thanks to Major General Sherman and the officers and soldiers under his command. Harper's Weekly declared, "There is not man who did not feel that McClellan's chances were diminished by the glad tidings from Atlanta."⁶Anonymous, "The effect of the news from Sherman," Harper's Weekly, September 17, 1864, 594. Entering Atlanta, Sherman shifted his attention away from Hood's army to the work of transforming the city into a military base that could be held by a small garrison rather than a large force. On September 7, Sherman issued orders evicting the city's remaining residents, an action that he said was "not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles."⁷Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 707. When Hood's battered army regrouped and threatened the Union's railroad supply line between Chattanooga and Atlanta in early October, Sherman headed to north Georgia in pursuit. After several weeks of maneuvering and inconclusive fighting, both sides withdrew and moved in opposite directions. The Confederate army marched to north Alabama, and the Union troops returned to Atlanta. Sherman recognized that he could not continue to occupy an inland city deep in enemy territory without again risking the loss of his vital supply line. Instead he won approval from his superiors for a new campaign. He would abandon Atlanta and lead an army of sixty-five thousand in a march across the Georgia heartland toward the sea. Sherman would shift his base of operations to a coastal location that could be supplied by the navy and en route his soldiers would lay waste to anything in their path that could support the Confederate war effort.

The true issue, George P. McClellan, former Union major general and Democratic Party candidate for president in 1864, separates leaders of the Union and Confederacy. Lithograph print by Currier & Ives, ca. 1864.

On November 11, in preparation for the new campaign, Yankee engineers in Atlanta began demolishing the railroad depot and numerous other structures in the city that could have military value to the Confederates. On the final nights of the Federal occupation, November 15–16, Union soldiers set fire to unoccupied buildings, and the uncontrolled flames spread, threatening the entire city. By morning, much of the downtown was in ashes, and the city was still smoldering when the last of the Union troops departed on their March to the Sea. Sherman's soldiers trekked southeastward through virtually undefended, rich plantation country, fanning out across a sixty-mile-wide swath of territory from Atlanta to Savannah. Along the way, they foraged liberally, confiscated farm animals and crops, and wrecked railroads, farm buildings, cotton gins, and grist mills. When the campaign ended with the fall of Savannah on December 21, all that remained of the eastern Confederacy was Virginia, the Carolinas, and northeast Georgia.

Atlanta in 1864

When the Union occupation of Atlanta began in early September 1864, fewer than three thousand civilian inhabitants lived in the city, a sharp drop from the war-time high of nearly twenty-two thousand and less than half of the population in 1860.⁸Ralph B. Singer, "Confederate Atlanta" (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1973), 235, 253. The Civil War provided Atlanta with a windfall opportunity to enlarge its role as a railroad hub and manufacturing center. Located at the terminating point of four major railroads and far from the conflict's opening fronts, the city flourished during the first years of the war as the Confederate demand surged for rails, cannons, cartridges, shells, and clothing. As the war progressed, the city increasingly served as a hospital and convalescent center and attracted thousands of new residents to work in skilled trades, transportation and communications, wholesale and retail businesses, and the service sector. During the antebellum years, Atlanta had emerged as the center of a regional railroad network that by 1864 linked all that remained of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi. Atlanta was the distribution center for troops, munitions, food, and supplies of all kinds for the army. The city's vital importance to the Confederate war effort made it a primary target for the Federal forces invading Georgia in May 1864. As the war grew nearer during the spring and summer, Atlantans left on every available outbound train, and morale and productivity plummeted among the residents who remained. Well before the city fell on September 2 it had ceased to be of practical service to the Confederacy, but it remained a prize they could ill afford to lose because of its important bearing on the northern presidential contest and the morale of southern whites.

Whitehall Street, Atlanta's central business district, 1864. Wet plate negative by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.		Railroad depot, Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Wet plate negative by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Atlanta's slave population, enumerated at 2,523 by the city tax collector in November 1863, was relatively small compared to coastal cities, but enslaved labor contributed substantially to the city's economy and the Confederate war effort. Slaves in Atlanta carried out non-agricultural tasks, including iron forging, cabinet making, carpentry, brick masonry, blacksmithing, and—most frequently—unskilled labor such as domestic service. As the number of Confederate military hospitals increased, slaves replaced civilians and soldiers initially assigned to routine hospital labor. By the first half of 1864 most of the hospital attendants at several Atlanta hospitals were slaves. African American slaves also worked on Atlanta's inner ring of fortifications, the construction of which began after Federal forces advanced into central and eastern Tennessee in the summer of 1863 and Confederate armies were defeated at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863.⁹Robert J. Fryman, "Fortifying the landscape: An archeological study of military engineering and the Atlanta Campaign," in Archeological Perspectives on the American Civil War, eds. Clarence R. Geier and Stephen R. Potter (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 49. The War Department assigned Captain Lemuel P. Grant of the Confederate Corps of Engineers the task of designing and building the defensive fortifications. Grant, by offering owners $25 a month, employed enough slaves to bring the work force to the level needed to tear down homes and barns, clear woods, move earth, and build the fortifications at a brisk pace. By April 1864 an elaborate earthwork cordon encircled Atlanta, consisting of elevated artillery positions ("forts") connected to each other and fronted by infantry trenches, rifle pits, and closely-packed, sharpened obstacles designed to deter enemy assaults.¹⁰Ibid., 51.

Auction and negro sales, Whitehall Street, near present-day Peachtree Street, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1864. Wet plate negative by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Atlanta bordered a heavily forested, mineral-rich area to the north and the cotton belt to the south. Although some farmers cultivated land in Atlanta's immediate environs, the city stood a hundred miles north of the region in which large landholders (with three hundred or more acres) were relatively common. "Plantation" homes near Atlanta were much smaller and less impressive than Hollywood's Tara Hall of Gone with the Wind. The terrain surrounding Atlanta was predominantly rolling wooded hills, interspersed with clearings for small farms, homes, and mills, loosely connected by narrow wagon roads, trails, or streams. The invading and defending armies were vulnerable to this lay of the land, mainly wilderness and not well known by either side. Too sizeable to advance quickly on the available country roads or through densely wooded areas, both sides carried out large troop movements quickly and effectively on rails or alongside railroad lines. The predominant east-to-west flows of the Chattahoochee River and Peachtree Creek, the largest bodies of water north of Atlanta, offered natural—albeit unsuccessful—lines of defense for the Confederate forces in July 1864.

The Battle of Atlanta—Overview

The three Federal armies commanded by Sherman, the Army of the Cumberland, Army of the Tennessee, and Army of the Ohio, together numbered approximately one hundred thousand troops as they approached the city, but only about twenty-seven thousand of them fought in the Battle of Atlanta.¹¹Woodworth, Nothing But Victory, 568. Sherman held the remainder in reserve. Hood's Army of Tennessee was fifty thousand strong, a decided numerical disadvantage for the Confederacy, but Hood moved about thirty-five thousand troops into attack against the smaller number of Union soldiers on the battlefield.¹²Albert Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 412. The Battle of Atlanta resulted from Hood's attempt to catch Sherman off guard as the Federal left wing, the Army of the Tennessee, marched from the vicinity of Decatur, six miles east of Atlanta, toward the fortified city. Hood gambled that he could overwhelm the advancing Federals with a long flank movement and surprise rear attack coupled with a frontal assault intended to further disrupt the invaders' line. Both Confederate attacks failed to dislodge the Union troops, who prevailed against wave after wave of assaults.

General Joseph Wheeler, one of two former Confederate generals commissioned as major generals in the US Army prior to the 1898 war with Spain, 1906. Image by P. J. Plant.

Concurrent with the main fighting in the Battle of Atlanta, on the afternoon of July 22, 1864, Confederate General Joseph Wheeler's cavalry achieved short-lived success against a lightly guarded Federal outpost in Decatur. There, approaching the town's public square, Wheeler's horsemen dismounted and attacked a Federal infantry brigade that was protecting a lengthy wagon train of supplies and ordnance. Although Wheeler's troopers forced the Yankees to retreat, the Federals escaped with almost their entire wagon train intact. Before Wheeler could overtake the fleeing Union troops, he was called back to reinforce the Confederate infantry who were meeting stiff resistance in the main battle about four miles west of Decatur. Wheeler's cavalry provided only slight assistance. Years later, Wheeler achieved distinction as one of two former Confederate generals who President William McKinley commissioned as major generals in the US army as the country prepared for the 1898 war with Spain.¹³G. J. A. O'Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic 1898 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 196. Fitzhugh Lee was the other appointee. Union veteran McKinley recognized that appointments of former Confederates to high rank in a new and popular armed struggle against a foreign foe would help reduce sectional bitterness, still lingering in the North and South over thirty years after the Civil War. Wheeler, just twenty-seven-years old when the Battle of Atlanta was fought, declared his readiness to return to field command: "Although I am sixty-one years old I feel as strong and capable as when I was forty, or even much younger, and I desire very much to have another opportunity to serve my country."¹⁴John P. Dwyer, From Shiloh to San Juan: The Life of "Fighting Joe" Wheeler (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 220. The main combat in the Battle of Atlanta continued until darkness, and by then the Federals had won a major defensive victory. They held their ground and inflicted severe losses. Southern casualties numbered approximately 5,500.¹⁵Castel, 412. including the death of a division commander, Major General William H. T. Walker, and the loss of an unusually large number of field officers. Federal losses totaled 3,722 killed, captured, and wounded,¹⁶Woodworth, Nothing But Victory, 568. and the dead included Major General James B. McPherson, commander of the Army of the Tennessee and the only Union army commander killed in action during the Civil War. Few Union officers had risen through the ranks more quickly than McPherson and were as popular with their fellow officers and troops. His death was deeply mourned not only by Grant and Sherman but also by the Confederate commander in the Battle of Atlanta, John Bell Hood, who had been McPherson's classmate and close friend at West Point. Hood lamented that "No soldier fell in the enemy's ranks, whose loss caused me equal regret."¹⁷John B. Hood, Advance and Retreat (New York: De Capo Press, 1993), 182.

Following the battle, the Federal Army of the Tennessee worked overnight to strengthen its field position in anticipation of a renewed assault by Hood. However, when the fighting ended on July 22, the Confederates abandoned their efforts to crush the advancing Federal left wing. Their concerns turned to defending Atlanta's remaining railroad supply lines from the west and south. With their army severely depleted, the Confederates had limited means to contest the Federal maneuvers against those vital supply lines that began again four days after the Battle of Atlanta. The Federal victory on July 22, 1864, did not precipitate an immediate Confederate withdrawal from the city, but it went a long way toward forcing Atlanta's fall six weeks later.

Battle of Atlanta Tour Stops

General Sherman's Headquarters during the Battle

Union Major General William T. Sherman established his field headquarters just before the Battle of Atlanta on high ground east of the city, where the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library is now located.

Sherman surveying the battlefield, in front of the Augustus Hurt House, east of Atlanta, July 22, 1864, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, Atlanta, Georgia, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

Sherman's field headquarters and Federal line prior to the battle, July 22, 1864. Battle of Atlanta map by Michael Page, 2014.

On the morning of July 22, 1864, Federal General William T. Sherman, commander of the three Union armies closing on Atlanta, rode on horseback from his field headquarters, a pitched tent at what is now the intersection of Briarcliff and North Decatur Roads, near the present-day Emory University campus, to temporary headquarters, two and one-quarter miles to the southeast and in closer proximity to the city's center. Sherman established his new command post at Augustus Hurt's two-story, wood-frame home and hill top plantation, located on the present-day site of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. In 1864, Hurt's estate was on cleared land and commanded a sweeping view to the west and south. When Sherman arrived, he ventured beyond the unoccupied home and down a hillside for a closer look at Atlanta. From a vantage point near the western edge of the present-day presidential library campus, Sherman used field glasses to view the city that was a prime objective of his military campaign. He scanned the eastern section of Atlanta's inner fortifications located about one mile away, along present-day Boulevard and Glen Iris Drive, and observed Confederate batteries and soldiers. This provided direct confirmation that the Rebels remained in Atlanta in force, in contrast to Sherman's earlier supposition—already contradicted by Union reconnaissance—that the Confederate army had evacuated the city.

Augustus Hurt House, Sherman's temporary headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1864, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 4. Sketch by Theodore Davis.

Sherman also had a clear view of the rolling terrain just three-quarters of a mile to the southeast, where the late afternoon fighting would reach its peak around the home of Troup Hurt (Augustus Hurt's older brother). Sherman was in position to see Confederate troops break through the Union line and capture a four gun Federal battery, which posed a dire threat to the Army of the Tennessee. The proximity of Sherman to this fighting enabled him to direct cannon fire that hindered the Confederate advance. A counterattack by Federal infantry ended the Confederate threat. After the battle, Union troops demolished Augustus Hurt's plantation home and used the wreckage for fire wood. The hill top location of the house, near the eastern edge of the present-day presidential library campus, was effaced during construction of the campus grounds and parkway during the 1980s.

Sherman's panoramic view of Atlanta is close to what a present-day visitor can see from the western edge of the Carter Presidential Library campus, just above Freedom Parkway and looking at the city's downtown skyline. Although the tree line south of the presidential library now obscures the sweeping view of the battlefield from Sherman's observation point, his advantageous position can be visualized from the cyclorama painting's depiction of the Union commander on horseback, surveying the combat scene from high ground, and by locating the Augustus Hurt and Troup Hurt houses on a battlefield map.

Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of the Union armies. Carte de visite, albumen print.

Sherman emerged from the Civil War second only to Ulysses S. Grant in renown as a Union general, and the personal bond that the two generals established earlier in the war enabled them to collaborate effectively as each led campaigns that culminated in US victory. Sherman, after graduating sixth of forty-two in the West Point class of 1840, did not show promise of the strategic innovations, logistical genius, and military triumphs that were to follow. Unlike many of the conflict's other top generals, he did not serve in Mexico during the Mexican War, and his military record in the initial stages of the Civil War was lackluster. Because of his volatile temperament and erratic behavior, Sherman was relieved of his assignment as commander of Union forces in Kentucky in late 1861. Sherman's star started to rise in the winter and spring of 1862 when his military partnership with Grant began in earnest. He contributed to Federal victories in western Tennessee in February 1862, when Grant led combined land and naval assaults against the Confederate strongholds at Forts Henry and Donelson. That April, Grant gave Sherman credit for saving the day at Shiloh when, in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, Union forces came close to disaster but turned the tide on the second day of fighting. The following year, when under Grant's leadership the Federals prevailed at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Sherman's frank advice and skillful field command solidified their relationship. For the remainder of the war, each time Grant was promoted to a new rank and role, Grant moved Sherman into his previously held position: first as commander of the Army of the Tennessee, then as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, i.e., leader of all Union forces in the western theater.

Robert E. Lee, commander of the army of North Virginia. Carte de visite, albumen print.

Shortly after Lincoln named Grant general-in-chief of the Union armies in March 1864, Grant and Sherman conferred at length on plans for the spring campaigns. Beginning in early May 1864, Grant sought to pressure the Confederates on all fronts. In the east, Grant would attack Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which was defending Richmond; Sherman would invade Georgia and target the Army of Tennessee, initially under the command of Joseph E. Johnston and then John Bell Hood, which was protecting Atlanta. Grant and Sherman agreed on a strategy of simultaneous conquest of the two main Confederate armies and the urban centers they guarded. Keeping the Rebel forces separated would enable the northerners to take advantage of their numerical superiority in each theater. Movements against cities became a major focus of Union commanders who sought total defeat and unconditional surrender of the Confederacy.¹⁸Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 10. By mid-July, Sherman's tenacious pursuit of Johnston had covered ninety miles and reached the northern and eastern outskirts of Atlanta. On July 20, Confederate forces, now under the command of Hood, were thwarted in their sweeping attack on the advancing Federal right wing three miles north of the city at the Battle of Peachtree Creek. Sherman, five or six miles southeast of the Peachtree Creek battlefield, was in position to hear the fighting but did not learn the outcome until about midnight, when a dispatch arrived from the victorious Union general, George H. Thomas, commander of the Army of the Cumberland.

Union Major General William T. Sherman, officer of the Federal Army, advancing on Atlanta, ca. 1860. Wet plate negative. Courtesy of Brady National Photographic Art Gallery.

Sherman, traveling with Major General John M. Schofield's Army of the Ohio on the Federal left wing, had moved his headquarters early on July 20 to what is now the northwest corner of North Decatur and Briarcliff Roads. As the battle raged at Peachtree Creek, Union troops pressed toward the city: General James B. McPherson's Army of the Tennessee marching westward from Decatur towards Atlanta along the tracks of the Georgia Railroad and Schofield's Army of the Ohio moving from the northeast, to McPherson's right, reconnoitering the Confederate defenses, cutting roads, and opening communications. The only major action on July 21 occurred when McPherson ordered General Frank P. Blair, leading the Seventeenth Corps of the Army of the Tennessee, to capture Bald Hill, an elevation commanding the eastern approach to the city that the Confederate defenders used to hold McPherson's advancing troops at bay. On the morning of July 21, General Mortimer Leggett's division of Blair's Corps, after a bitter struggle, captured the hill—later re-named Leggett's Hill—from a Confederate division under the command of General Patrick R. Cleburne of Hardee's Corps. Leggett's troops immediately entrenched themselves and placed cannons in position to fire shells into Atlanta. By nightfall, the Federal left wing had advanced to a lengthy front some two-and-a-half miles from the center of Atlanta on what had been the eastern portion of the Confederates' outer defense line. The Confederates abandoned that entire line overnight, withdrawing to the city's inner fortifications, and allowing Sherman to move to his new headquarters at the Augustus Hurt House the following morning, July 22, 1864.

Augustus Hurt House, Sherman's headquarters on July 22, 1864, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, Atlanta, Georgia, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

When Sherman learned before dawn that Hood had abandoned the outer arc of Atlanta's defenses, the Yankee commander mistakenly concluded that the Confederates had evacuated the city. He immediately ordered a massive Union pursuit. However, by the time Sherman arrived at the Augustus Hurt House, Federal reconnaissance had discovered that Hood's infantry still occupied the inner fortifications surrounding Atlanta. Sherman countermanded his pursuit order, and he personally surveyed the fortified Confederate position after arriving at the hillside just west of the Augustus Hurt House. Sherman and his staff moved so far forward toward the city's fortifications that they drew Confederate artillery and rifle fire, forcing their retreat to the Hurt home. Sherman was joined there at about 11 a.m. by McPherson, who persuaded Sherman to reconsider another order, which would have sent the Federal Sixteenth Corps on a mission to tear up railroad track back to and beyond Decatur. Sherman was concerned that Confederate reinforcements would arrive by rail from Virginia and had already sent McPherson's cavalry to the rear to tear up track.¹⁹Steven E. Woodworth, Sherman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 128. McPherson was worried that sending the Sixteenth Corps infantry on a similar mission would leave the Union's Army of the Tennessee vulnerable to an attack against its thinly defended far left flank. Sherman agreed to postpone his order until 1 p.m. If the Confederates did not attack by then, the Sixteenth Corps infantry would proceed with its wrecking assignment. As events unfolded, Sherman's agreement to reinforce the Union's left flank proved to be a crucial move for the Yankees and a major misfortune for the Confederates as they launched their surprise attack at about noon.

General Hood's Observation Post and Oakland Cemetery

Confederate General John Bell Hood observed part of the Battle of Atlanta from a vantage point on high ground near the present-day Oakland Cemetery Visitors Center (Bell Tower).

Confederate Obelisk, dedicated to the memory of "Our Confederate Dead," Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia. Postcard made in Germany, ca. 1910.

Established in 1850, when its original six acres were purchased east of the city for use as a municipal burial ground, Oakland Cemetery was first known as Atlanta Cemetery. In 1856, several hundred yards north of the original cemetery, James E. Williams, who would serve as Atlanta's mayor after the Civil War (1866–1868), built a residence on high ground. On the afternoon of July 22, 1864, the second floor of the Williams House served as a vantage point from which General John Bell Hood, commander of the Confederate forces, and his staff observed troop movements and perhaps battlefield action. Hood witnessed two Confederate divisions, Brown's and Clayton's, move from within Atlanta's inner fortifications and march eastward astride the Georgia Railroad tracks (now the MARTA commuter rail line and CSX railroad tracks visible from the cemetery) to attack the Federal Fifteenth Corps, Army of the Tennessee, in the vicinity of what is now Dekalb and Degress Avenues, one and one-quarter miles from the Williams House. A Georgia Historical Commission marker located in the northern part of Oakland Cemetery, near the Bell Tower (visitors center), indicates the site of the Williams House. Hood, who was able to ride a horse despite his debilitating war wounds and leg amputation, also may have used the nearby home of Lucius J. Gartrell for an observation post during the battle.²⁰Robert E. Zaworski, The General and the House on the Hill (Alpharetta, GA: BookLogix, 2001), 39. Gartrell's house was located on high ground north of the railroad tracks, opposite Oakland Cemetery.

Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies, Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia, April 26, ca. 1881, Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. Sketch by James Henry Moser.

Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia. Battle of Atlanta map by Michael Page, 2014.

John Bell Hood graduated forty-fourth in a class of fifty-two from West Point in 1853 and was the youngest of the eight full generals of the Confederacy. At the military academy he had been in the same class as James B. McPherson, John M. Schofield, and Philip H. Sheridan of the Federal Army, the first two of whom fought against Hood in the Battle of Atlanta. Future Confederate generals also attended West Point at the same time as Hood. J. E. B. Stuart and William D. Pender, both of whom graduated in 1854, would emerge with Hood as outstanding young officers in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the pinnacle of its success in the summer of 1862. In combat that summer, under Lee's command at Gaines Mill, Second Manassas, and Antietam, Hood saw how bold assaults could turn the tide of battle. Hood performed impressively, if not decisively, in all three battles, reinforcing for him the importance of daring leadership and hard fighting—displayed at Atlanta two years later. Battlefield aggressiveness, not tactical brilliance, distinguished Hood as a brigade and division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia. When promoted to army commander, his skill at independent command was found wanting. Still, he emerged from some of the bloodiest, early battles in the Civil War physically unscathed and with a reputation for combat bravery. His luck ran out as the war went on. At Gettysburg in July 1863, Hood sustained a severe wound to his left arm, after which he recovered only limited use of that extremity. Two months later at Chickamauga, Georgia, a bullet shattered his right thigh bone, and Hood's right leg was amputated just below the hip. As a result of his wounds, Hood could not walk without crutches and required a body servant to get dressed, mount a horse, and complete many other activities of daily living.

Lieutenant General John Bell Hood, commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Photographic print.

Hood's leadership at Chickamauga won him a promotion to lieutenant general on February 11, 1864, and later that month he joined the Army of Tennessee in Dalton, Georgia as a corps commander. He served in that role until July 17, 1864, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis lost patience with General Joseph E. Johnston's command of the Army of Tennessee and replaced Johnston with Hood. When asked by Davis, Lee had advised against this change in command. "Hood is a bold fighter," Lee said. "I am doubtful as to other qualities necessary."²¹Clifford Dowdey, ed., The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), 202. When news of the change in Confederate command reached Federal General William T. Sherman, he asked Schofield, Hood's classmate at West Point, about Hood. Schofield replied that Hood was "bold even to rashness" and "courageous in the extreme."²²William T. Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman (New York: The Library of America, 1990), 544.

Oakland Cemetery provides a tangible link to Atlanta and the Civil War, both as a site where Hood established an observation post during the Battle of Atlanta and as the most prominent public space in the city used by residents and visitors to commemorate the war dead and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Oakland extended beyond its original boundaries through a series of expansions, and by 1867 it reached its current size of eighty-eight acres. During the Civil War a section immediately east of the original six acres was set aside for war dead. Now known as the Confederate section, this plot of land is the burial site of nearly seven thousand soldiers, including three thousand unknowns. Many of the Confederate dead were reinterred in Oakland Cemetery after members of the Atlanta Ladies' Memorial Association and their spouses raised funds in 1867 to remove bodies from the shallow graves on the battlefields near Atlanta. The last row of the Confederate section "C" contains the remains of Federal soldiers who were captured and died in Confederate hospitals. The Federal headstones have shields on them. The Confederate headstones have either "CSA" (Confederate States of America) or "Confederate" on them.

Advertisement for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, sculpted from Tate, Georgia, marble, National Geographic 53, no. 2 (February 1928): 4.

The Ladies Memorial Association also erected two large monuments that mark the space set aside for the war dead: a sixty-five-foot-tall obelisk of Stone Mountain granite and a six-foot-high statue of a grieving lion carved from a fifteen-ton piece of Tate, Georgia, marble and modeled after the renowned Lion of Lucerne in Switzerland. The base of the Confederate Obelisk was set in place on October 15, 1870, the day of Robert E. Lee's funeral. The shaft memorializing "Our Confederate Dead" was unveiled on Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1874. The obelisk is the focal point for the entire Confederate section and for decades provided the backdrop for annual Confederate Memorial Day celebrations. At the time of the obelisk's dedication it was the tallest structure in Atlanta, equivalent in height to a three-story building. The Lion of Atlanta, like the much larger Swiss statue, symbolizes the agonizing death struggle of an armed force in defeat, overwhelmed by its opponent but honored for bravery. In Atlanta, the monument commemorates the unknown Confederate dead, whose remains are buried in the surrounding plot; in Lucerne, the carving that Mark Twain called "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world"²³Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 259. is dedicated to the approximately 600 Swiss Guards who died while unsuccessfully defending the French royal family in August 1792, during the French Revolution.²⁴David P. Jordan, The King's Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 38. In each instance, a dying lion, mortally wounded by a lance driven through its back, clutches an emblem of the lost cause for which it fought: a Confederate battle flag in Atlanta and the French fleur-de-lis in Lucerne. The Lucerne statue was sculpted in 1820–1821 with the support of Swiss aristocrats seeking the backing of Bourbon monarchs who had been restored to the French throne.²⁵Arnold Lunn, The Cradle of Switzerland (London: Hollis & Carter, 1952), 147. Following the instructions of the Ladies Memorial Association, Thomas M. Brady of Canton, Georgia sculpted the Atlanta version, completing the statue in 1894.²⁶Anonymous, "Atlanta's Monuments to Confederate Dead," Atlanta Constitution, July 23, 1898, 15. It was dedicated on April 26 of that year. Twenty five years later, sculptor Daniel Chester French used white marble quarried in Tate, Georgia, for his colossal Abraham Lincoln Memorial statue in Washington, DC. Thus, marble from the same small town in Pickens County went to sculpt a memorial to thousands of unknown Confederate dead as well as a monument to the war's best known casualty.

Lion of Lucerne postcard, Lucerne, Switzerland, ca. 1910. Model for the Lion of Atlanta.		Lion of Atlanta, commemorating the unknown Confederate dead buried in the surrounding plot in Oakland Cemetery, 2009. Photograph by Matt Miller.

Commemorating the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston to Federal General William T. Sherman in 1865, near Durham, North Carolina, April 26 is Confederate Memorial Day in Georgia and in many former states of the Confederacy. Johnston's surrender, following Lee's on April 9 to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, removed the last large Confederate Army from the field. Until 1984 Confederate Memorial Day was a statutory Georgia holiday, marked in Atlanta by a procession of as many as ten thousand people from downtown to Oakland Cemetery for ceremonies and speeches.

Fort Walker and Rifle Pit

Confederate Colonel Lemuel P. Grant designed over ten and half miles of earthwork fortifications and connecting trenches that encircled Atlanta and included Fort Walker, the sole remnant of the city’s inner defensive works.

Fort Walker, Grant Park, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1910. Vintage postcard.

Fort Walker, located in present-day Grant Park, Atlanta, Georgia, with Union troops encamped north of the fort, October, 1864. Photograph by George H. Barnard. Courtesy of US Military Academy Special Collections.

Fittingly, the Fort Walker site in Grant Park is the sole remnant of the earthen works constructed under Lemuel Grant's supervision. Other remnants of Atlanta's defensive works were evident into the twentieth century, only to be obliterated in the post–World War II era by urban growth.²⁷Ibid., 52. Fort Walker remains a notable Atlanta Civil War site, protected by its location in a municipal park but vulnerable to natural erosion and effacement by human visitors. It was first restored in the 1880s,²⁸Gail Anne D'Avino, "Atlanta Municipal Parks, 1882–1917, Urban Boosterism, Urban Reform in a New South City" (PhD diss., Emory University, 1988), 42. after which it became a popular destination for visitors and a frequent subject of picture postcards. The fort was restored again in the 1930s, when the Works Progress Administration laid flagging stone—still present—to protect the broad area above the earthen wall, where the original Confederate gun battery had been placed.²⁹Marguerite Steedman, "Atlanta Fort Restored," Atlanta Constitution, May 2, 1937, 7. Until they were removed in the 1980s, several Civil War cannons were on display at the Fort Walker site. At the time of the Battle of Atlanta, the city was completely encircled by over ten miles of carefully planned and well-constructed fortifications that stood on average one-and-a-half miles from the city's center. These strong defensive works were completed for the most part by April 1864. Their construction was supervised by Lemuel P. Grant, after whom Atlanta's Grant Park is named. Subsequent extensions of the city's defensive perimeter in the spring and summer of 1864 increased its length. Among the add-ons was Fort Walker, a small bastion located in the southeast corner of Grant Park that was originally constructed as a separate four-gun parapet and subsequently incorporated into the main defensive line.³⁰Robert J. Fryman, "Fortifying the Landscape: An Archeological Study of Military Engineering and the Atlanta Campaign," in Archeological Perspectives on the American Civil War, eds. Clarence R. Geier and Stephen R. Potter (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 53. The fort was named for Confederate Major General William H. T. Walker, who was killed in the Battle of Atlanta.

Confederate fort near Atlanta, Georgia, part of the city's inner ring of fortification, 1864. Photographic print by George H. Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The actual look of Atlanta's earthwork fortifications in 1864 is preserved in the visual record created by George N. Barnard, a pioneering nineteenth-century photographer who documented Sherman's campaigns throughout the final year of the Civil War. Barnard also took photographs of the city itself, before, during, and after its wreckage and burning by the Yankees. His images of the city's forts after they fell to the Federals depict rugged earthen structures supported by timber frameworks, located on hilly prominences, and connected by lengthy entrenchments that could be occupied by infantry. The forts were fitted for artillery batteries, which were placed on level platforms behind gun embrasures. The grounds in front of each fort had been cleared of trees and brush for one thousand yards, leaving open lines of fire for the defenders' artillery and rifles. Some forts also were protected by abatis, felled trees with sharpened branches facing toward the enemy, and chevaux-de-frise, rows of criss-crossed, sharpened logs.

Lemuel P. Grant, Confederate engineer responsible for the construction of Atlanta's inner fortifications, 1889, Wallace P. Reed, History of Atlanta, Georgia: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of its Prominent Pioneers, vol. 2 (Syracuse, New York: D. Mason and Company, 1889), 168. Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

Lemuel Grant, a native of Maine who at age twenty-two had moved to Atlanta before the name of the place had been changed from Terminus and Marthasville, was originally trained as a civil engineer and had no military training or experience prior to his commission in 1862 as a captain of engineers in the Confederate army. Lemuel Grant's lack of familiarity with military fortifications and the range of field artillery had consequences. The distance between the fortified line and the city's center was less than the maximum range of the Federal field artillery, and beginning July 20, 1864, the advancing Federal forces were able to cannonade Atlanta without breaching or even testing the city's fortifications. Union commander William T. Sherman decided against a direct infantry assault after reconnoitering the fortifications following the Battle of Atlanta.

Confederate inner fortifications around Atlanta, 1864. Battle of Atlanta map by Michael Page, 2014.

A visit to the hilltop Fort Walker site and observation of the surrounding topography show why it was a key point in Atlanta's defenses. The location provides a commanding view of the valley below and an advantageous position for a gun battery. At the base of the site is a rifle pit, visible as a shallow, semi-circular trench in front of the fort wall. In 1864, troops would have had sufficient space within the trench to stand without exposing more than their eyes and rifle barrels in a narrow opening covered by a protective timber head-log.

Rifled cannons and side arms in the Civil War were nineteenth-century technological innovations that had the potential to add substantial firing range and destructive power to both armies. Yet, gunfire between the opposing battle lines in the Civil War was typically mass volleying of rifled muskets shot at close range from linear ranks. The rifled musket's rate of fire was not fast enough in the Civil War to enable departures from standard battle lines, which resembled tightly packed Napoleonic formations. Artillery served mainly as weapons of support for infantry and cavalry, either in defending positions or bolstering attacks. Long range fire was the specialty of rifled cannons, enabling accurate cannonading at a mile and maximum ranges in excess of two miles. Casualties inflicted by artillery typically accounted for a small proportion of Confederate and Federal losses. The majority of battlefield injuries and fatalities resulted from rifle fire, and protracted shooting at close range, often under a hundred yards, characterized many Civil War battles. Firefights often dragged on until exhaustion set in or nightfall ended the combat for the day, as was the case in the Battle of Atlanta. Casualties mounted because the fighting lasted so long—approximately eight hours on the Atlanta battlefield—and less because of technological advances in weaponry.

Remnant of Fort Walker and rifle pit, Grant Park, Atlanta, Georgia, May 10, 2014. Photograph by Daniel Pollock.

Prior to the third year of the Civil War, battlefield tactics remained largely unchanged from earlier nineteenth-century conflicts. By 1864, two major military innovations had gained acceptance. First, the principal armies began to engage in continuous campaigning for months rather than sporadic, pitched battles that lasted hours or days. Second, soldiers on both sides had learned to dig systems of trenches and light field fortifications, which strengthened their positions and protected against enemy rifle fire. Throughout the Atlanta Campaign, Confederate military engineers oversaw construction of defensive works, such as the Kennesaw Mountain Line and Chattahoochee River Defense Line, that they prepared before the arrival of the retreating Army of Tennessee. Just prior to the battles for Atlanta, the Confederate Army in retreat toward the city constructed a nine-mile line of entrenchments outside and to the north and east of the much heavier, inner fortifications. The southerners abandoned their outer defensive line on the night of July 21 and withdrew to the city's stronger, inner line. From there they marched into positions to attack the Federals the next day. The inner fortifications were not breached during the Battle of Atlanta, but the heavy earthen works could not thwart the Federal bombardment of the city that intensified after the Yankee victory or block the subsequent military maneuvers that forced the Confederates to surrender their stronghold on September 2.

Hardee's Night March

Lieutenant General William J. Hardee led a fifteen-mile overnight trek of between seventeen and eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers that culminated in their opening attack in the Battle of Atlanta.

Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, corp commander, Army of Tennessee. Carte de visite, albumen print.

During the July 21 fighting at Bald Hill, Hood learned from his cavalry scouts that McPherson's advancing Army of the Tennessee, despite its increasingly strong position, was vulnerable to an attack on its left flank or rear. As the Federal army moved closer to Atlanta, Sherman sent the cavalry division that had been guarding McPherson's left flank eastward toward Covington and the Alcovy River to burn bridges and destroy Georgia Railroad tracks heading to Augusta. Sherman wanted to disrupt enough track to prevent the southerners from using the railroad to move troops and supplies from Virginia. As a result, with the Union cavalry miles away, the left end of McPherson's line presented a weak spot protected by only two brigades. If the Confederates marched south of the city then swung east and north around McPherson's exposed flank they could rout the Yankees in a surprise attack and capture or destroy the large number of Federal supply wagons parked in the Decatur town square.

Hardee's Night March. Battle of Atlanta map by Michael Page, 2014.

To achieve these goals, and to prevent McPherson from moving south and cutting the railroad between Atlanta and Macon, Hood devised an ambitious plan of attack on July 21 that was reminiscent of a bold flanking maneuver that Stonewall Jackson successfully executed in May 1863 against the right wing of the Federal Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville, Virginia. Hood decided to divide his forces, keeping two corps, commanded by Alexander Stewart and Benjamin Cheatham, behind the city's inner fortifications while sending William Hardee's Corps, accompanied by Joseph Wheeler's cavalry, on a wide circling maneuver south and east of the city. Hardee and Wheeler would move out of Atlanta at nightfall, swing around McPherson's left flank, and then pounce on the Yankee's rear at daybreak, rolling up their line and destroying the supply wagons gathered in Decatur. In conjunction with this attack, Cheatham's Corps would move from behind the fortifications on Atlanta east's side in a direct frontal assault against the center of the Federal line held by McPherson and Schofield's troops. Meanwhile, Stewart's Corps would hold Thomas's Army of the Cumberland in check north of the city, preventing Federal reinforcements of McPherson and Schofield's armies and then engaging Thomas once the battle became general.

Hardee's division commanders, Confederate division commanders whose units completed Hardee's Night March, clockwise from upper left, William H. T. Walker, William B. Bate, Patrick R. Cleburne, and George E. Maney. Compilation by Christopher Sawula, 2014.

Hardee's Corps, with the exception of Cleburne's division, began its circuitous fifteen-mile march after dark on July 21. Walker's, Bate's, and Maney's divisions marched out the McDonough Road (Capitol Avenue and Hank Aaron Drive of today) to a point near the present-day state capitol, where they were joined by Cleburne's division. Cleburne's division, withdrawn into Atlanta after fighting all day at Bald Hill, joined the other three infantry divisions and Wheeler's cavalry around midnight. Once assembled, the entire column amounted to between seventeen and eighteen thousand foot and horse soldiers. Moving beyond the city limits, the trek continued in a southeasterly direction for five or six miles on the McDonough Road (along present-day McDonough Boulevard, except for the final mile and a half, which is now Moreland Avenue). After reaching its southernmost point, at or near the South River, Hardee's Corps and Wheeler's cavalry turned northeast on Fayetteville Road, then a winding, red dirt track that led to Decatur.

Hardee's Corps marched a mile and a quarter on the Fayetteville Road to Cobb's Mill on Intrenchment Creek, three miles below the southern end of McPherson's line. Hardee's troops reached Cobb's Mill at dawn, several hours behind schedule, and Hardee and his division commanders met William Cobb at his house north of the Creek. They recruited mill owner Cobb and a mill worker named Case Turner to serve as guides. To this point the route had been relatively clear, but Cobb and Turner said the way ahead included a tangled wilderness of forest and undergrowth and Terry's Mill Pond, a wide span of water resulting from the impoundment of Sugar Creek, northwest of where the Fayetteville Road crossed the creek. The wilderness march ahead would be particularly slow going for the Confederate foot soldiers, all of whom had marched all night and many of whom had fought at Peachtree Creek on July 20. The Confederate column continued its advance northward on the Fayetteville Road for a mile and a half beyond Cobb's Mill to a road fork where Hardee's Corps split into two columns. Cleburne's and Maney's divisions took the left fork and marched northwest. When they reached Flat Shoals Road (which existed in 1864), they deployed on either side of the road and moved toward the left flank of McPherson's army, which was aligned in an entrenched position in what is now East Atlanta. Walker's and Bate's column took the right fork and moved northeast on the Fayetteville Road, toward their eventual encounter with Union infantry positioned in what is now Atlanta's Kirkwood neighborhood. However, instead of keeping on the road, Walker turned northwest as it crossed Sugar Creek, followed by Bate's column, likely in an effort to keep contact with Cleburne's and Maney's divisions. Wheeler's cavalry continued on the Fayetteville Road towards Decatur and the Federal wagon park.

William Cobb's house, where Confederate corp commander William J. Hardee and staff stopped on their night march, July 21–22, 1864. Photo of unknown origin, May 1, 1905.

Walker's and Bate's divisions made slow progress along Sugar Creek's densely overgrown banks. The country road had been wide and clear, but maintaining alignment in the heavily wooded terrain bordering the stream contributed to mounting delays. The plodding march through wilderness slowed further when the Confederates encountered Terry's Mill Pond. The mill pond, which no longer exists, was at least a half-mile long, almost equally as wide, and reached depths of ten feet. Veering left around the western side of the mill pond took considerable time and further delayed the Confederate attack, already hours behind schedule. A Georgia historical marker titled "Terry's Mill Pond," locates the north end of the pond on Glenwood Avenue near its I-20 interchange.

Historical markers at Intrenchment Creek, April 28, 2014. Photograph by Daniel Pollock.

After marching all night and through the morning, Hardee's Corps arrived late but ready to advance against McPherson's Army of the Tennessee shortly before noon on July 22. Since Hardee did not know where McPherson's left flank terminated, he had sought to align his four divisions abreast, facing northward. Just prior to battle, Hardee's four divisions formed a crescent from left to right: Maney on the extreme left, west of Flat Shoals Road; Cleburne deployed to Maney's right, on and east of Flat Shoals Road; Walker in the Sugar Creek Valley, just north of Terry's Mill Pond and south of present-day Memorial Drive; and Bate on the far right, adjacent to present-day Memorial Drive. However, by the time Hardee's Corps was ready to strike McPherson's Army, the Federal left wing had changed its configuration so that the Confederates would assault a well-protected flank rather than the Yankees's rear. At Chancellorsville, Stonewall Jackson had placed his troops behind the Eleventh Federal Army Corps as he had planned to do, but east of Atlanta, Hardee's Corps completed its long march six hours behind schedule and was not in position to mount the devastating attack on the Union rear that Hood had envisioned.

Death of General Walker

A Federal soldier mortally wounded Confederate division commander Major General William H. T. Walker while he was scouting the Union infantry’s position just before the Battle of Atlanta.

Walker Monument, original placement in 1902, Confederate Veteran, July 1902.

After a lengthy, circuitous march, the Confederate corps under Lieutenant General William J. Hardee's command expected to catch the Yankee flank unprotected, as Stonewall Jackson did at Chancellorsville, but instead during the morning of July 22, Federal Major General James B. McPherson had moved his reserve forces into position to protect his army's left flank. The Yankee position resembled a capital "L," with the lower, horizontal portion well placed to intercept the impending Rebel attack, which otherwise would have struck a weak spot at the end of the Federal left wing. As Hardee's Corps prepared to break from its cover and begin its delayed assault, Federal skirmishers were positioned in the field ahead. Confederate Major General William H. T. Walker, while readying his division for attack, rode forward on horseback to reconnoiter the area and likely was killed at that moment, near Sugar Creek, by a Federal Sixteenth Corps infantryman. Case Turner, the civilian guide who accompanied Walker on the final stretch of the night march, and several Confederate veterans of the Battle of Atlanta provided differing accounts of when and where the general was mortally wounded. However, Walker clearly was one of the first casualties of the battle, and with or without him leading the way, his troops were among the first to make contact with Yankees. An upright cannon monument to mark the approximate location of Walker's death was placed on Glenwood Avenue, a short distance west of present-day I-20, and dedicated on July 22, 1902. In 1936, the monument was moved to its present location, a short distance east of I-20 at the intersection of Glenwood and Wilkinson Drive, after research by Colonel Howard Landers of the Army War College indicated that Walker was killed near the newer site.

Walker, an Augusta, Georgia, plantation owner and a distinguished veteran of the regular US Army, was physically brave and aggressive and temperamentally argumentative and volatile. His multiple wounds in the Seminole and Mexican wars earned him the nickname "Old Shot Pouch" and compromised his health to such an extent that he could sleep only while sitting up. An ardent defender of slavery and a staunch secessionist, Walker submitted his resignation from the regular US army on December 15, 1860, even before South Carolina left the Union. He was the first officer to give up his commission. Walker spurned the Montgomery government's initial offer to make him a Confederate colonel, holding out for a higher rank. He eventually was appointed a brigadier general, then major general in the Vicksburg Campaign.

Walker bitterly opposed Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne's proposal in January 1864 that the South arm slaves, train them as soldiers, and free those who fought for the Confederacy. At a meeting of Army of Tennessee corps and division commanders convened by Hardee on January 2, 1864—for the sole purpose of hearing Cleburne's arguments for arming and emancipating slaves—Walker exploded in anger and denounced Cleburne as an abolitionist and a traitor. Later that month, Walker assured that an intermediary hand-delivered a copy of Cleburne's memorandum to Jefferson Davis, a calculated maneuver in which Walker bypassed his corps and army commanders and violated military protocol. The Confederate president's response was what Walker sought. Davis ordered General Joseph E. Johnston, then commander of the Army of Tennessee, to suppress the proposal and forbid any further discussion of arming and emancipating slaves. Cleburne's death at the Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864, helped enforce the official gag order. No copy of Cleburne's proposal surfaced again until 1884.³¹Mark M. Hull, "Concerning the Emancipation of the Slaves," in A Meteor Shining Brightly: Essays on Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne, ed. Mauriel P. Joslyn (Milledgeville, GA: Terrell House Printing, 1998), 169.

Wilbur Kurtz at Terry's Mill Pond historical marker, Glenwood Drive and Wilkinson Drive, Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine, March 1957.

Walker's heated response to the Confederate emancipation proposal helped solidify his reputation as a firebrand. In life and death, he epitomized the antebellum ideology expressed most fervently by the slaveholding elite and its political leaders about the justness of a society in which masters and slaves purportedly both benefited from the bonds of mutual obligation. The upright cannon dedicated to Walker's memory on July 22, 1902, in East Atlanta became one of many landmarks constructed in the South at the turn of the century that commemorated the heroes and cause of the Confederacy. Because these public monuments typically valorized individual heroism above the causes for which the war was fought, they also served a larger purpose of white, sectional reconciliation. Southern war remembrance at the turn of the century emphasized a resurgent American nationalism that marginalized the problems of slavery, race, and emancipation. As historian David Blight notes:

"In the half century after the war, as the sections reconciled, by and large, the races divided. Race was so deeply at the root of the war's causes and consequences, and so powerful a source of division in American social psychology that it served as the antithesis of a culture of reconciliation. The memory of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism, and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong in the remembered Civil War."³²David W. Blight, "Healing and History: Battlefields and the Problem of Civil War Memory," in Rally on the High Ground: The National Park Service Symposium on the Civil War, ed. Robert K. Sutton (Fort Washington, PA: Eastern National Press, 2001), 25.

Major General Oliver Otis Howard, former commander of the Union Army of the Tennessee. Photographic print, ca. 1908.

The dedication of the Walker monument on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta was a gala celebration that the Atlanta Constitution featured the following day. Among the two thousand attendees were Union veterans, including retired Federal General Oliver Otis Howard, who had a minimal role in the battle but succeeded McPherson as commander of the Army of the Tennessee on July 27, 1864. Howard told the Atlanta Constitution that he had known Walker at West Point and that "Nothing gives me more pleasure than to take part in an affair of this kind."³³Anonymous, "General Howard Talks of Battle of Atlanta," Atlanta Constitution, July 22, 1902, 2. Howard's post-war career included a stint as Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, established by Congress in May 1865 to help former slaves make the transition to freedom. Howard also had a pivotal role in launching the university named in his honor in Washington, DC, and served as its president from 1869 to 1873. At the Walker monument's dedication, the event's main speaker was Julius L. Brown, the leading fund raiser for the monument, who lauded Howard's attendance in the rhetoric of North-South reconciliation: "What stronger evidence could be given that all sectional strife is ended, and that we are now united as one people, no matter what the demagogues may say?"³⁴Anonymous, "Honor to General W. H. T. Walker," Confederate Veteran 10, no. 9 (1902), 402–407.

Where the Battle Began

Federal infantry and artillery batteries positioned on high ground in the vicinity of the present-day Alonzo Crim High School fended off the opening Confederate attack in the Battle of Atlanta.

Noon, July 22, 1864. Battle of Atlanta map by Michael Page, 2014.

Shortly after noon on July 22, 1864, two Confederate divisions under the command of Brigadier General Hugh Mercer (who replaced the fallen William H. T. Walker) and Major General William B. Bate emerged from the heavily wooded, underbrush laden terrain east of Atlanta after an arduous fifteen-mile march and, moving north and northwest respectively, launched the first attack in the Battle of Atlanta. These two divisions, half of the Confederate infantry led by Lieutenant General William J. Hardee on the long march that had begun at nightfall on July 21, expected to move forward unopposed against the rear of Federal Major General James B. McPherson's Army of the Tennessee. Instead, Mercer's and Bate's divisions encountered Union infantry and artillery occupying an advantageous position along high ground in the vicinity of present-day Alonzo Crim High School, at the intersection of Clifton Street and Memorial Drive. Most of the Union troops, elements of the Federal Sixteenth Corps commanded by Major General Grenville M. Dodge, had arrived in their positions late in the morning, and Yankee reinforcements rapidly moved into action when the opening shots were fired. As a result, the Federals had the upper hand in the first clash of the Battle of Atlanta, and they used their advantage to repel the Confederate's surprise attack.

Post-war illustration of Union Brigadier General John Fuller planting the US flag on the Atlanta Battlefield, July 22, 1864. Print by James E. Taylor. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

When the fighting started, the three Union corps that comprised McPherson's Army of the Tennessee were deployed along a several mile front that resembled a capital "L", with the longer vertical portion extending north–south alongside or near the present-day Moreland Avenue (which did not exist in 1864), and the shorter horizontal segment extending east–west, parallel to the present-day Glenwood Avenue and Memorial Drive. The Fifteenth Corps, commanded by Major General John A. Logan, was located near the top of the long part of the "L," facing Atlanta to the west and spread across the Georgia Railroad (the tracks of which ran along the railroad bed now used by Metropolitan Area Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) and CSX Transportation).

Logan's line connected on its right with the left of Major General John M. Schofield's Army of the Ohio's Twenty-Third Corps, which was located in the vicinity of Sherman's temporary headquarters at the Augustus Hurt House (near the present-day Jimmy Carter Presidential Library). The Twenty-Third Corps infantry was only lightly engaged in the Battle of Atlanta, but its artillery had a role in the late afternoon fighting near the Troup Hurt House. Logan's left connected with the Seventeenth Corps under Major General Frank P. Blair. Brigadier General Mortimer D. Leggett's division of the Seventeenth Corps was positioned at Bald Hill, the high point of a lengthy ridge that ran in a north–south direction along the course of present-day Moreland Avenue. Bald Hill, which Union troops renamed Leggett's Hill after the battle, was located at the intersection of what is now Moreland Avenue and I-20. Highway construction during the early 1960s leveled the hill. To Leggett's left was Brigadier General Giles Smith's division of the Seventeenth Corps, which held a line that extended southeast from the hill along Flat Shoals Road (present-day Flat Shoals Avenue) to Glenwood Avenue. Together, the Federal Twenty-Third, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth Corps formed an approximately two-mile entrenched line (the vertical portion of the "L") that extended from the grounds of the present-day Carter Presidential Library southward to what is now the intersection of Flat Shoals Road and Glenwood Avenue in East Atlanta.

The shorter, horizontal segment of the Federal army's "L"-shaped line was filled by three brigades of Major General Grenville M. Dodge's Sixteenth Corps, two from the division commanded by Brigadier General Thomas W. Sweeny and one from the division of Brigadier General John W. Fuller. Sweeny's and Fuller's divisions had been in reserve before moving into their battlefield positions on the morning of July 22. Sweeny's brigades moved first, marching south from the present-day Candler Park to a position at the far end of the lower part of the "L," near today's Alonzo Crim High School, at Clifton Street and Memorial Drive. The head of Sweeny's column, a brigade commanded by Colonel August Mersy, was aligned along an east–west road (present-day Memorial Drive) perpendicular to the rest of Sweeny's line, a brigade commanded by Brigadier General Elliott W. Rice, which was behind Mersy's troops and positioned along Clay Road (present-day Clay Street). After Sweeny's column arrived, Morrill's brigade of Brigadier General John W. Fuller's division moved southward from where it had been in reserve, behind the Seventeenth Corps line at Leggett's Hill. Fuller's troops were deployed to Sweeny's right and occupied a position extending from present-day Memorial Drive southeastward toward the present site of the McPherson Monument. Together, Sweeny and Fuller's troops formed a line approximately three-fourths of a mile long, Artillery batteries from both divisions were placed on the hill where the high school is now located. These batteries faced south and east, the directions from which the Mercer's and Bate's Confederate divisions soon would sweep forward. The attacking Confederates did not expect to encounter three brigades with cannons aimed at them from high ground. Still, they charged again and again.

The advantageous elevation held by the Union troops can be appreciated today from the eastern edge of grounds of the Alonzo Crim High School. Looking eastward along Memorial Drive and across the adjacent terrain provides a view of the lay of the land from the Yankees' vantage point. Their commanding defensive position enabled them to strike a decisive blow against the Confederate column that attacked from the east. However, in a nearby sector of the battlefield the Federal defense was vulnerable. Between the two segments of the "L" formed by the Union Army was a half-mile gap that would cause serious problems for the Yankees.

Union Brigadier General Thomas W. Sweeny, ca. 1865. Wet plate negative.		Union Brigadier General John W. Fuller, ca. 1865.

The fighting between Fuller's and Sweeny's units of Dodge's Sixteenth Corps and Bate's and Mercer's divisions of Hardee's Corps was among the few engagements late in the Civil War in which the opposing forces met in the open field, with no earthen works to protect either side. The Federal infantry, supported with artillery fire, beat back the Confederates, but a Rebel column maneuvered into the half-mile gap in the Yankee's line and made threatening progress against Morrill's right flank. Georgia and South Carolina infantry, under the command of Brigadier General States Rights Gist of Mercer's division, caught Morrill's right exposed and opened intense fire. At this critical moment in the battle, Fuller realigned Morrill's brigade, which formed a line on either side of its division commander and charged eastward toward Gist's Brigade. Fuller's action is depicted by in a post-war illustration by James E. Taylor that shows the brigadier general planting the national colors and marking the new battle line for his brigade. Gist attempted to rally his troops, but they were driven back and forced to withdraw. Gist was injured and four months later was one of six Confederate generals killed at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. He is remembered for his battlefield bravery and his unusual first and middle names, inspired by the clash between South Carolina and the Federal government known as the Nullification Crisis of 1828 to 1833.

The successful Federal counterattack against Gist's Brigade, spearheaded by Fuller, brought to an end the first phase of the Battle of Atlanta. The Federal Sixteenth Corps had been well positioned to ward off the threat posed by Hardee's Corps to the rear of the Union Army. By repulsing Hardee's two right divisions, the Federal Sixteenth Corps took the sting out of the Confederates' surprise attack. The subsequent assault by Hardee's two left divisions, under Cleburne and Maney, would be a charge against the entrenched Federal flank, far from the Union rear. Still, the initial Confederate exploitation of a gap in the Yankee line, presaged greater gains, albeit temporary, from the ensuing attacks against the Federal Seventeenth and Fifteenth Corps.

Death of General McPherson

A Confederate infantryman killed Major General James B. McPherson, when the commander of the Federal Army of the Tennessee inadvertently rode behind enemy lines early in the Battle of Atlanta.

Union Major General James B. McPherson. Carte de visite, albumen print.

Federal Major General James B. McPherson, in command of the Army of the Tennessee, feared an impending attack by the Confederate Army of Tennessee on the morning of July 22, 1864. He met briefly with General William T. Sherman, overall commander of the Union armies advancing on Atlanta, at the Augustus Hurt House, Sherman's temporary headquarters. McPherson quickly convinced Sherman to reinforce the Federal left wing rather than send troops to the rear to tear up railroad tracks. When the conversation concluded, McPherson and his staff left on horseback to inspect the line of the Army of the Tennessee. Years later, Sherman recalled this final meeting: "McPherson was then in his prime (about thirty-four years old), over six feet high, and a very handsome man in every way, was universally liked, and had many noble qualities. He had on his boots outside his pantaloons, gauntlets on his hands, had on his major-general's uniform, and wore a sword belt, but no sword."³⁵Sherman, 550. After completing his inspection, McPherson stopped to confer with two of his corps commanders, Major General John A. Logan and Major General Frank P. Blair, near the Georgia Railroad (now the MARTA commuter line and CSX railroad tracks), at the present-day intersection of Dekalb and Whitefoord Avenues. A historic marker at that location, titled "Noon Under the Trees," describes the lunchtime meeting and its sudden conclusion: "This pleasant respite of discussion & cigars was broken by volley firing to the S.E. The Battle of Atlanta had begun." McPherson quickly mounted his horse and galloped south to the sound of the mounting gunfire, Within minutes he arrived at a hill near the intersection of present-day Memorial Drive and East Side Avenue, where he watched infantry and artillery units of Dodge's Sixteenth Corps fend off the initial Confederate assaults on their positions. The knoll from which McPherson viewed the opening phase of the battle remains visible as high ground on Memorial Drive, where a Georgia Historical Marker near East Side Avenue describes "McPherson's Last Ride." When he was satisfied that Dodge's troops were holding their ground, McPherson turned his attention to the one-half mile gap in the Federal line that separated the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Corps. By now, the two Confederate divisions on Hardee's left, commanded by Major General Patrick R. Cleburne and Brigadier General George Maney, were poised for attack. Cleburne's division struck first, hitting the seam between the two Union corps, and was later joined by Maney's division, to Cleburne's left, which began applying pressure to front of the Seventeenth Corps.

Death of General McPherson. Illustration by James E. Taylor, 1888. Courtesy of Notre Dame Archives.

McPherson rode toward this engagement, across the gap in the Federal line, and along a narrow forest road that ran in an east–west direction parallel to present-day McPherson Avenue. The road had been overtaken by Cleburne's advancing infantry, a contingent of which encountered McPherson on horseback, accompanied by a lone aide. Confederate skirmishers called upon McPherson to surrender, but his only response was to tip his hat, turn his horse, and try to escape. He was shot from his saddle by a single bullet and soon died where he had fallen to the ground. When Federal troops temporarily reoccupied the wooded area where McPherson had been killed, they retrieved his body, which was then transported by wagon to Sherman's temporary headquarters at the Augustus Hurt House. An upright cannon monument, erected in 1877 and located at the intersection of Monument and McPherson Avenues in East Atlanta, marks the spot where McPherson was killed.

McPherson was the highest ranking Union general killed in combat during the Civil War. His death, at age thirty-five, was deeply mourned by Sherman and Grant, both of whom considered McPherson to be a protégé whose accomplishments would surpass their own. The day after the Battle of Atlanta, Sherman wrote in a letter to the adjutant general of the US Army that "we have lost not only an able military Leader, but a man who had he survived was qualified to heal the National Strife."³⁶Brooks D. Simpson and Jean W. Berlin, eds., Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 671. McPherson graduated first in his West Point class of 1853, obtained his top choice of post-graduate duty in the Corps of Engineers, and was assigned during the pre-war years to projects in the New York and San Francisco harbors. In San Francisco, he met and became engaged to Emily Hoffman, a member of a socially prominent and staunchly pro-Confederate Baltimore family. The start of the war sealed the Hoffman family's opposition to her engagement, but she and McPherson remained committed to their marriage plans. Once the war began, those plans were put on hold, and McPherson was assigned to service under Grant. McPherson's battlefield achievements in Tennessee in 1862 and at Vicksburg, Mississippi, the following year, coupled with Grant's complete confidence in him, account for his meteoric rise through the ranks. At Grant's behest, McPherson was promoted to brigadier general and then major general. In March 1864, when Grant was promoted to general-in-chief of the Union armies, Sherman took Grant's place as overall commander in the Western theater, and McPherson assumed command of Sherman's old Army of the Tennessee. Before learning of his new role, McPherson planned a twenty-day furlough and embarked on a trip to Baltimore to marry Emily Hoffman. En route, he learned of his promotion and was ordered to travel immediately to Huntsville, Alabama, to help plan the Atlanta campaign. He reluctantly abided by his orders and returned from his furlough. He and Emily Hoffman never saw each other again. McPherson led the Army of the Tennessee throughout the Atlanta campaign, until he was killed on July 22, 1864. On August 5, General Sherman wrote to Emily Hoffman: "Why should deaths darts reach the young and brilliant instead of older men who could better have been spared. Nothing that I could record will Elevate him more in your minds Memory, but I could tell you many things that would form a bright halo about his image."³⁷Ibid., 682.

Blue-Gray reunion at the McPherson Monument, Albert Shaw, center-forward, with umbrella, July 1900. Illustration.

In 1877, a group of US Army officers stationed in Atlanta at the tail-end of the military occupation of the South committed themselves to erecting a monument to memorialize McPherson at the exact location in East Atlanta where he had been fatally shot. The officers used their personal funds to purchase the land where the monument still stands. The US War Department provided a large iron cannon, which was mounted in an upright position on a block of Stone Mountain granite bearing the simple inscription "McPherson." Custody of the monument, once erected, was transferred to the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, one of many veterans' groups, North and South, which sought to uphold the memory, reputation, and accomplishments of their specific groups in the post-war years. The Society of the Army of the Tennessee already had honored McPherson with a much grander monument in Washington, DC, an equestrian statue of their former commander, located less than three blocks from the White House in what is now known as McPherson Square. President Grant, members of his cabinet, and General Sherman, who had been promoted to general-in-chief of the US Army, attended the dedication ceremonies on October 19, 1876. The main speaker was John A. Logan, who succeeded McPherson as Commander of the Army of the Tennessee in the Battle of Atlanta and, after the war, served as a national leader of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest of all the Union veterans groups. Logan delivered a two-hour oration in which he traced McPherson's life and hailed him as a martyr and irreplaceable comrade.

Scene of General McPherson's death, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1864. Detail of wet collodion by George Barnard.

The McPherson monument in East Atlanta, the nearby Walker monument, and thousands of other outdoor memorials erected throughout the North and South in the postwar era served as focal points for public remembrance of particular heroes and events. Monuments figured prominently in rituals of remembrance, such as dedication ceremonies, Memorial Day celebrations, and veterans' reunions. Speakers at these events often offered testimonials to the valor and virtue of the commemorated individuals, their military units, or even the entire cohort that fought the Civil War. Their remarks typically ignored or glossed over the sectional differences over slavery that plunged the nation into Civil War and instead emphasized post-war reconciliation between the North and South. For example, when Confederate and Union veterans met in Atlanta for a national Blue-Gray reunion in July 1900, a highlight of the three-day event was a well-orchestrated gathering of veterans at the McPherson monument that included former generals and other high ranking officers from both sides. The Atlanta Constitution, paraphrasing the remarks of Albert Shaw, commander-in-chief of the largest Union veterans' group, the Grand Army of the Republic, editorialized that "there were neither rebels nor traitors in a cause where all answered the call of constituted authority." The Constitution encouraged its readers to leave the "argument as to causes to the historians" and added that "Atlanta, wrecked and burned by war, has arisen as an evangel of reconciliation, equal to the present and the future without surrendering a single iota of the past."³⁸Anonymous, "Blue and Gray Beautifully Intertwined," Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1900, 6.

Leggett's Hill

Entrenched Union infantry on Leggett's Hill held off intense attacks by Confederate troops, that attempted to capture the high ground at this location, the most important strategic position in the Battle of Atlanta.

Union Brigadier General Mortimer D. Leggett. Carte de visite, albumen print.		Union Brigadier General Manning F. Force. Carte de visite, albumen print.

Bald Hill—named Leggett's Hill by the Yankees after the struggle for its control on July 22, 1864—was the scene of ferocious fighting in the Battle of Atlanta. Opposing troops fired on each other at murderously close range and at times engaged in hand-to-hand combat, aided by bayonets and clubbed rifles. Some Federal units entrenched on the hill fended off Confederate attacks from the flank, rear, and front, jumping from one side of their earthworks to the other to repel charges from different directions. The southerners suffered severe casualties in their nearly continuous wave of attacks on July 22, but they came close to dislodging the Yankees from the strategic high ground before being checked. Brigadier General Mortimer D. Leggett, whose division of the Union's Seventeenth Corps captured the round-topped eminence on July 21 and successfully defended it the next day, praised the performance of Brigadier General Manning F. Force and his brigade. Leggett noted in a speech to a veteran's group after the war that the hill ought to have been named "Force's Hill," to fairly credit the Federal officer and his troops for their unsurpassed steadiness and gallantry in combat. Wounded in the face during the fighting for the hill on July 22, Force was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on March 31, 1892. The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama shows Force in a horse-drawn ambulance being carried to Sherman's temporary headquarters at the Augustus Hurt House.

Blue-Gray reunion, Leggett's Hill, 1906, Confederate Veteran.

Leggett's Hill was the highest elevation on the north–south ridge line along which present-day Moreland Avenue is located and also the high point between Atlanta and Decatur. As depicted in the cyclorama and described by Wilbur Kurtz, the hill's crest was an open field that stretched from north to south for over a quarter of a mile. The hill's north, south, and east sides rose gently and were largely cleared; the western face was relatively steep and wooded. By securing the summit on July 21, the northerners won a commanding view of the entire battlefield and were in position to train cannon fire on Confederate troops when they mounted counterattacks the next day. The hill also was in artillery range of Atlanta, approximately two miles away, and the Yankees fired cannon shot into the city shortly after seizing the high ground on July 21. When the Confederates' counterattacks failed on July 22, they ceded control of the single most important strategic position east of the city. Leggett's Hill remained a battlefield landmark until the early 1960s, when it was leveled during construction of I-20. A Georgia Historical Commission marker is located at the former hill site, on the west side of Moreland Avenue as it passes over the interstate highway.

Leggett's Hill, high ground east of Atlanta where Confederate infantry repeatedly attacked entrenched Federal troops, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, Atlanta, Georgia, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

Major General Patrick R. Cleburne's division of Hardee's Corps took advantage of a gap in the Federal line and launched the fierce Confederate struggle to retake Leggett's Hill on July 22. At the conclusion of Hardee's fifteen-mile night march, the two divisions on the left of Hardee's Corps, commanded by Cleburne and Brigadier General George Maney, had arrived just south of the hill shortly before noon. Cleburne's division was deployed on and east of Old Flat Shoals Road (now known as Flat Shoals Avenue) and Maney's division was positioned to Cleburne's left, west of the road. Cleburne and Maney's divisions faced the section of the entrenched Federal line held by Brigadier General Giles A. Smith's division that bent southeastward from Leggett's Hill along Old Flat Shoals Road, ending at present-day Glenwood Avenue. This section comprised the right angle in the "L" shaped Federal line that extended north along present-day Moreland Avenue (the vertical segment of the "L") and east along present-day Glenwood Avenue and Memorial Drive (the horizontal segment of the "L"). A half-mile gap between Smith's division of the Federal Seventeenth Corps and the Sixteenth Corps in Sugar Creek Valley to the east—a break in the line between the right angle and the horizontal part of the "L"—provided an opening that Cleburne's division could exploit. Cleburne's troops poured through the gap beginning about one in the afternoon, and, in the process, his skirmishers encountered and killed Federal Major General James B. McPherson. Cleburne's division, later joined by Maney's, pressed forward in a series of costly, brigade-level attacks on entrenched northern positions. During two hours of intense fighting, the southerners captured a short portion of the Union line and established themselves in the gap between the Federal Sixteenth and Seventeenth Corps. However, the Confederates failed to dislodge the vulnerable portion of the Seventeenth Corps line defending Leggett's Hill.

Southeast side of Leggett's Hill, June 24, 1929, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Photograph by Walter Sparks.

Only late in the afternoon when the southerners launched a more coordinated attack from multiple directions did they drive Giles A. Smith's division from its entrenchments along Flat Shoals Road to a new position that compressed the Federal forces on Leggett's Hill and threatened a more serious rupture in the Union line. From his observation post near Oakland Cemetery, sometime between 3 and 4 p.m., Confederate Army commander General John B. Hood committed Major General Benjamin Franklin Cheatham's Corps to the offensive, sending Cheatham's three divisions from behind Atlanta's fortifications to the battlefield east of the city. These attacks took aim at the long north–south section line of the Federal Army of the Tennessee, along present-day Moreland Avenue. Major General Carter L. Stevenson's Confederate division, on Cheatham's far right, advanced against Leggett's Federal division defending the hill. Stevenson's troops are depicted in the cyclorama charging eastward across the barren hill top toward Leggett's troops entrenched at the edge of woods on the hill's western slope. Shortly after 6 p.m. the Rebel assaults came together in a simultaneous attack in which Cleburne and Stevenson's division forced all of Smith's division and part of Leggett's to fall back until the two units were completely intermingled. Despite the confusion, the veteran US troops rallied and, aided by artillery, they repelled the southerners, forcing their final retreat from Leggett's Hill. In a post-war speech to a veteran's group, Leggett summed this up phase of the Battle: "The struggle to recover the hill from us was fierce and desperate beyond description. The carnage at this point was terrible and sickening. The ground from close to our works to one hundred yards or more away was literally covered with dead."³⁹Mortimer D. Leggett, The Battle of Atlanta: A Paper Read by General M. D. Leggett Before the Society of Army of the Tennessee, October 18th, 1883 at Cleveland (Cleveland, OH: J. A. Davies Printer, 1883), 22.

Confederate Line

Two Confederate divisions moved eastward through this sector and aligned themselves for a frontal assault against nearby Federal infantry, an attack that opened the climactic phase of the Battle of Atlanta.

Confederate Major General Benjamin F. Cheatham, ca. 1865. Wet collodion.

The Confederate effort to repel the advancing Federal Army of the Tennessee became a two-pronged attack during the afternoon of July 22, 1864, when the army commander General John Bell Hood ordered Major General Benjamin Franklin Cheatham's Corps forward into battle, joining Major General William J. Hardee's Corps, which had been engaged since shortly after noon. For the first three hours of the Battle of Atlanta, the Confederates mounted attacks against the far left of the Union line, which was positioned south of the Georgia Railroad, in the vicinity of Leggett's Hill and entrenched along its crest. For some of that time, Hood was in position near Oakland Cemetery, looking and listening for signs that Hardee's Corps was making progress against the Federals. Hoping to help Hardee's troops take Leggett's Hill, Hood—between 3 and 4 p.m.—instructed Cheatham's Corps to attack the Federal Seventeenth Corps, which remained in control of the treeless high ground, and move simultaneously against the Federal Fifteenth Corps, which straddled the Georgia Railroad in an extended, north–south line near present-day Moreland Avenue. Prior to attack, Cheatham's Corps occupied the eastern section of Atlanta's inner fortifications, which was located in the vicinity of present-day Boulevard, between Grant Park and Ponce de Leon Avenue. Cheatham mobilized his three divisions from behind the fortifications, deploying his troops in a battle line that extended for more than a mile.

Historical marker of Confederate line prior to Battle of Atlanta attack, Inman Park, Atlanta, Georgia, May 10, 2014. Photograph by Daniel Pollock.

The division on Cheatham's right, commanded by Major General Carter L. Stevenson, attacked first, moving from behind the fortifications located between present-day Grant Park and Oakland Cemetery and charging eastward against the Federal Seventeenth Corps defending Leggett's Hill. Cheatham's other two divisions, led by Brigadier General John C. Brown's in the middle and Major General Henry D. Clayton's on the left, followed Stevenson's division into combat. Brown's and Clayton's troops marched eastward, aligned themselves in battle formation in present-day Inman Park, and from there attacked Union forces entrenched on either side of the Georgia Railroad. A historical marker placed in a small triangular park at Delta Place and Edgewood Avenue describes the frontal assault that Brown and Clayton's divisions launched against the Federal Fifteenth Corps, which was commanded by Brigadier General Morgan L. Smith. This division had been led by Major General John A. Logan until early in the afternoon of July 22, when Logan replaced McPherson as commander of the Federal Army of the Tennessee.

Cover page, William Hardee's infantry tactics textbook, 1861. Confederate Imprints, 1861–1865, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

The tactic of attacking or defending in long lines of battle was inherited by Civil War field commanders on both sides from the Napoleonic era, reinforced by US army officer training in the same military schools and further instilled by shared combat successes with traditional linear formations in the Mexican War. When the Civil War began, the standard tactical manual used by the North and South was Hardee's Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics, written by former US Army officer and then Confederate corps commander William J. Hardee. Hardee emphasized the importance of placing the majority of combat forces in closely packed lines. The typical battle line for offensive and defensive purposes aligned troops shoulder to shoulder two or three ranks deep. These formations were difficult to maneuver in the field, and their effectiveness depended on prior drilling and battlefield discipline. However, once deployed, linear formations offered the advantage of a high density of firepower delivered with successive volleys as each rank of infantry alternately fired and reloaded or as one rank relieved another if necessary.

4 p.m., July 22, 1864. Battle of Atlanta map by Michael Page, 2014.

In a classic frontal attack, wave after wave of infantry would strike against a short sector of the enemy's line. A succession of attacks was intended to weaken and eventually break the opposition's line at a vulnerable spot, which immediately endangered the remaining segments. On defense, the battle line enabled concentrated volleys of fire against attackers, and, by 1864, both Union and Confederate infantry learned to strengthen their lines of defense with extensive use of protective earthworks. Even if attackers got inside an enemy's position, exploiting that advantage was difficult because of heavy losses during the attack, lack of reinforcements, or a counterattack by the defenders. The result was frequent failure of frontal assaults, particularly in the latter stages of the Civil War. Among these failures were the unsuccessful attacks launched by Cheatham's Corps against the Federal Army of the Tennessee in the climactic phase of the Battle of Atlanta. Still, the Confederate divisions led by Brown and Clayton achieved a notable breakthrough in the Union line before a ferocious counterattack led Major General John A. Logan turned them back.

Battlefield Terrain

Rolling terrain in present-day Springvale Park is a remnant of the Civil War-era countryside outside Atlanta and the spot from which Confederate troops launched an attack against the nearby, entrenched Federal line on July 22, 1864.

A cut in the Georgia Railroad, where Arthur Manigault's brigade spearheaded the Confederate's attack against an entrenched Union line, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

As the fighting for Leggett's Hill grew fiercer during the afternoon of July 22, 1864, the left of Confederate Corps Commander Benjamin Franklin Cheatham's line—Brown and Clayton's divisions—advanced eastward from behind the city's inner fortifications and moved into position for an assault against the Federal Fifteenth Corps, which was astride the Georgia Railroad in an entrenched north–south line west of present-day Moreland Avenue. The movement of a second corps onto the battlefield was part of Confederate Army Commander John Bell Hood's original plan of attack. However, that plan began to fail when Hardee's Corps arrived on the battlefield hours behind schedule and encountered an unexpectedly well defended Federal left flank. Further, when Hardee's Corps was intensely engaged with the Federal left wing during the first three hours of battle, Hood kept Cheatham's Corps out of action instead of supporting Hardee's attack. Still, even though the second prong of the Confederate attack was delayed, it achieved partial success when Brown's division found a weak spot in the Union line, broke through, and threatened to overwhelm the Federal Fifteenth Corps. Brigadier General Arthur M. Manigault's Brigade of Brown's division spearheaded this Confederate attack. They poured through the railroad cut located in the vicinity of the Inman Park MARTA Station, then broke the Union line at the Troup Hurt House and seized the four guns of Captain Francis De Gress's Battery H of the First Illinois Light Artillery. More Confederate units followed Manigault's Brigade in an attack that dislodged the center of the Yankee Fifteenth Corps across a half-mile front on either side of the Georgia Railroad.

A Georgia Historical Commission marker and a commemorative monument erected by the Sons of Confederate Veterans are located at the site where Manigault's attack advanced, a ravine in what is now Atlanta's Springvale Park, approximately four hundred yards from the Federal line, which was positioned along present-day Degress Avenue. A remnant of the ravine is still visible and provides a rare, surviving indication of what the battlefield terrain was like: a rolling, thickly wooded countryside riven with deep hollows, barren knolls, and widely separated tracts of cleared land on which were built houses, farms, mills, roads, and the single-track Georgia Railroad.

Springvale Park historic markers and surrounding park, Southern Confederate Veterans Monument and Georgia Historical Commission marker describing Manigault's brigade and its role in the Battle of Atlanta, Springvale Park, Atlanta, Georgia, 2009. Photograph by Matt Miller.

A narrow window of opportunity to preserve more of Atlanta's battlefields was missed when they were omitted from the initial set of national military parks that the US government established in the 1890s: Chickamauga-Chattanooga, Antietam, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. The 1890s were a critical time for preserving Civil War battlefields because many of them remained largely untouched and many veterans with personal knowledge of the battles could recall troop movements, positions, and combat encounters. Further, the post-war reconciliation between white Americans, North and South, was surging, and veterans from both sides joined unified efforts aimed at securing federal support for battlefield preservation. Their yearning to reconnect with the past, memorialize fallen comrades, and leave a tangible legacy of Civil War battles to future generations translated into money to preserve battlefields. However, the veteran generation soon ran into Congressional opposition to further funding for battleground conservation. In 1899, influential veterans and Congressional proponents voiced strong support for adding Atlanta to the list of national military parks, but their campaign fell short. Local journalist Wallace P. Reed bemoaned their failure in his Atlanta Constitution column published in 1900: "We have been criminally careless of our history. For generations to come artists and tourists from every part of the world will come here and they will ask a thousand questions about these famous places. Who will answer them? We have about 125,000 people here and only a few hundred are able now to point out the location of the old battlefields."⁴⁰Wallace P. Reed, "Our Many Friends; Both Blue and Gray," Atlanta Constitution, July 17, 1900, 6.

The next national wave of Civil War battlefield preservation peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, but by then it was too late to properly save Atlanta's battlefields. Atlanta historian and artist Wilbur G. Kurtz noted in 1931 that "Nothing obliterates the aspect of a battlefield so much as the modern steam-shovel and the encroachments of urban building enterprise."⁴¹Wilbur G. Kurtz, "Civil War Days in Georgia: At the Troup Hurt House: A Famous Battlefield Domicile; Its Environs, and Events Associated With It During the Forenoon of July 22, 1864," Atlanta Constitution Sunday Magazine, January 25, 1931, 4. A local campaign in 1937 seeking federal funds to preserve what remained of the city's battlegrounds was unsuccessful, despite renewed enthusiasm for Civil War preservation spurred by the popularity of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. In 1951, the legislature established the Georgia Historical Commission and charged it with preserving, restoring, and marking historic sites. The following year, the commission hired Kurtz to research, write, and place historic markers that pinpoint and explain the notable events of the Atlanta Campaign. Kurtz's historic markers were all erected prior to the Civil War centennial, 1961–1965. The inscriptions he wrote for each plaque continue to serve as the primary roadside guide to Atlanta's battlefields. They provide a means of connecting the historical narrative of the Battle of Atlanta to the ground on which the battle was fought, even though most of the terrain has been irrevocably altered.

Troup Hurt House and De Gress Battery

The Confederate capture of the Troup Hurt House and the De Gress Battery, followed by a successful Yankee counterattack, were the climactic events in the Battle of Atlanta.

The Troup Hurt House and the four-gun De Gress Battery (right of the house), which were temporarily captured by Confederate infantry on the afternoon of July 22, 1864, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

The most famous moments in the Battle of Atlanta occurred during a fierce mid-afternoon Confederate assault on the entrenched Federal Fifteenth Corps, followed shortly thereafter by a Union counterattack in the vicinity of the Troup Hurt House, in what is now the city's Inman Park neighborhood. The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama captures the decisive moment, at approximately 4:30 p.m., when Federal Major General John A. Logan rallied his troops to restore the broken Union line and repel the Confederate infantry of Brigadier General Arthur M. Manigault's brigade of Brown's division, who were firing from behind an improvised barricade of cotton bales in front of the Troup Hurt House. A historical marker on Degress Avenue in Inman Park is located at the site of Troup Hurt's two-story brick home, no longer standing, which was on high ground north of the single track Georgia Railroad (now the right of way for the MARTA commuter line and CSX railroad) and three-quarters of a mile south of the house of Augustus Hurt, younger brother of Troup Hurt. The Augustus Hurt House served as Federal Major General Willaim T. Sherman's temporary headquarters during the battle. The cyclorama painting depicts Sherman in front of the house, mounted on his horse, surveying the battlefield action.

Enlarged detail of the Troup Hurt House and the four-gun De Gress Battery (right of the house), which were temporarily captured by Confederate infantry on the afternoon of July 22, 1864, Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, 1886. Painting by the American Panorama Company.

Manigault's brigade, advancing eastward, spearheaded the mid-afternoon Confederate assault by penetrating the Federal Fifteenth Corps line at its weakest point, which was a thinly defended railroad cut and a nearby wagon road. Years earlier, when railroad construction engineers laid down track for the Georgia Railroad, they burrowed through a hillside to maintain a shallow gradient in the vicinity of the present-day Inman Park MARTA station. The railroad cut they created is no longer visible, but the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama provides a vivid image of the deep earthen channel, the rolling terrain on either side of it, and Atlanta to the west. On July 22, 1864, Manigault's brigade, after moving from Atlanta's inner fortifications and meeting stiff resistance, broke the Union line near the railroad cut, where the Federal Fifteenth Corps's second division, temporarily commanded by Brigadier General Joseph A. J. Lightburn, was particularly vulnerable to attack.

Capture of De Gress Battery by Confederate infantry, Joseph M. Brown, The Mountain Campaigns of Georgia: Or, War Scenes on the W. and A. (Buffalo, New York: Art-Printing Works of Matthews, Northrup, and Company, 1890), 69.

Manigault's South Carolinians and Alabamians, followed by Colonel Jacob H. Sharp's brigade of Brown's Confederate division, poured through the cut and forced the Union defenders to retreat. Manigault's troops fanned out to the north and captured the Troup Hurt House and Captain Francis De Gress's twenty-pound Parrott battery of four guns. A historic marker at the north end of Degress Avenue, before it turns sharply east, indicates the location of the De Gress battery, which the Yankees had placed on high ground facing Atlanta. Sharp's contingent, in close support of Manigault's Brigade, fanned out to the south, striking a Federal brigade positioned just south of the Georgia Railroad. Other elements of Brown's and Clayton's Confederate divisions joined the attack north and south of the railroad. Together, the combined action of these two divisions opened a half-mile gap in the Union line that if further exploited could have turned the tide of the battle against the Federal Army of the Tennessee. However, the Confederate successes were short-lived, and they were soon driven back by a ferocious Yankee counterattack.

General Sherman, observing the battlefield action from his position just over one-half mile north of the Troup Hurt House, personally directed cannon fire against the Rebel front and behind it, thwarting further gains and preventing reinforcements. Union Major General John A. Logan, who earlier that afternoon had replaced the fallen Major General James B. McPherson as commander of the Army of the Tennessee, was alerted to the dire threat posed by the breakthrough. Logan gathered reinforcements and galloped on his black stallion Slasher toward the collapsed front of the Federal Fifteenth Army Crops. When Logan arrived on the scene, three Federal division commanders were already preparing a counterattack. "Black Jack" Logan, whose dark complexion and jet-black hair and moustache made him a striking physical presence on the battlefield, was renowned for his combat leadership. He led the advancing Union infantry, supported by artillery fire, in a counterstrike that hurled back the Confederates, recaptured the De Gress Battery, and restored the Fifteenth Corps line across the half-mile front that had been lost less than a half hour earlier. The Federal troops did not pursue their retreating foes, and fighting in the vicinity of the Troup Hurt House came to a close. Combat continued until dark at Leggett's Hill.

A twenty-pound Parrott Gun and its crew at Fort Richardson, Arlington Heights, Virginia, 1861–1865. The De Gress Battery was comprised of four rifled cannons of this type. Albumen print, ca. 1865.

Logan's combat performance in the Battle of Atlanta added to his reputation, and he emerged from the Civil War a military hero. Historian Albert Castel credits Logan more than any other individual for the Union victory on July 22, 1864, citing "his skillful handling of his troops, his coolness and determination, and above all his inspiring presence."⁴²Albert Castel, "'Black Jack' Logan," Civil War Times Illustrated 15, no. 7 (1976), 44. Logan was among the most accomplished of the "political" generals, a group of officers who had pre-war careers that were dominated by political service, had little or no military training or experience prior to appointment to general rank, and typically had limited if any success in combat. Logan was an exception and was praised by Sherman for having "nobly sustained his reputation and that of his veteran army" after succeeding McPherson as commander of the Army of the Tennessee in the Battle of Atlanta.⁴³US War Department, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 38, Part I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 75. Still, Logan's lack of West Point credentials deterred Sherman from promoting him to permanent command of the Army of the Tennessee, a snub that infuriated Logan. Instead, Sherman appointed West Point graduate Oliver Otis Howard five days after the Battle of Atlanta.

Before the war, Logan had served as a highly partisan Democratic member of Congress from southern Illinois, and in 1866 he returned to politics as a Radical Republican, serving either in the House or Senate almost without interruption until his death in 1886. In 1884, he was the unsuccessful nominee for vice president on the Republican ticket headed by James G. Blaine. He also co-founded the largest Union veterans group, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and served three times as the GAR's commander-in-chief. On May 5, 1868, shortly after his first term began, Logan issued a general order to all GAR posts that established Decoration Day as the northern counterpart to the previously established Confederate Memorial Days. He designated May 30 for all Union veterans to decorate the graves of comrades "who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion."⁴⁴George F. Dawson, Life and Services of Gen. John A. Logan as Soldier and Statesman (Chicago and New York: Belford, Clarke & Company, 1887), 123. On May 30, 1868, commemorative ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in twenty-seven states.

Troup Hurt House site and location of present-day converted church, Degress Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia, May 10, 2014. Photograph by Daniel Pollock.

During the 1870s, northerners and southerners began to participate together in Memorial Day celebrations, which increasingly served the purpose of sectional reconciliation. The national ritual was known as Decoration Day, and the versions in the South—which were observed on different days in different states—were called Confederate Memorial Day. In the 1880s, the GAR actively campaigned to change the name of Decoration Day to Memorial Day, and gradually every northern state made Memorial Day a public holiday. The Memorial Day service in Chicago on May 30, 1895, was a high point in the national celebrations. On that day, a monument to Confederate dead was dedicated in the city's Oak Woods Cemetery, the burial site of over six thousand Confederate soldiers who had died as prisoners-of-war at nearby Camp Douglas. Some fifty thousand Chicagoans lined the parade route to the cemetery to catch a glimpse of such notables as Confederate general James Longstreet and Union general John Schofield. In the twentieth century, Memorial Day became an occasion to honor all Americans who died in service. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May.

Memorial Day, photomechanical print by Samuel D. Ehrhart. Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, Puck Building, May 28, 1913. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Popular images produced early in the twentieth century valorized fallen Civil War soldiers who fought on opposing sides and depicted Memorial Day as an occasion for surviving "Blue and Gray" veterans to enjoy leisure time together. Memorial Day observances, along with visits to battlefields, public monuments, and military cemeteries and participation in veterans' reunions, involved millions of Americans in Civil War remembrance. A main event in Memorial Day celebrations throughout the nation was the local parade in which Civil War veterans, some riding in carriages or automobiles and others still spry enough to walk, served as living links to the past. They brought memories of the war to life. However, these historical memories focused mainly on individual service and sacrifice, and they tended to obscure more divisive elements of the Civil War experience, most notably the causes of the nation's deadliest conflict and the war's wrenching aftermath. Historian David Blight writes that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sectional reunion was a victory for a reconciliationist vision of Civil War memory that could not have been achieved without overwhelming a competing emancipationist vision and resubjugating many of the people whom the war had freed from slavery. Blight adds:

"For Americans broadly, the Civil War has been a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies. The greatest enthusiasts for Civil War history and memory often displace complicated consequences by endlessly focusing on the contest itself."⁴⁵David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 3–4.

Grant Park and Cyclorama

The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, an enormous, nineteenth-century panorama painting, depicts combat action and battlefield landmarks in a vivid, true-to-life style.

Cyclorama brochures, 1887 to present. Compiled by Christopher Sawula, 2013.

Nineteenth-century cycloramas, enormous circular paintings exhibited in specially designed round or polygonal buildings, achieved great popularity by immersing their audiences in a visual experience designed to make viewers feel transported to another place and time. Like movies and computer-simulated environments later, cycloramas intentionally blurred the lines between image and reality by surrounding the spectators with a sweeping panoramic vista that filled their vision and excluded any sense of their real whereabouts. The panorama itself was painted in a meticulously true-to-life style that captured a spectacular event or scene, such as a famous battlefield incident, stunning natural landscape, or sweeping view of a great city. To heighten the impact of the indoor spectacle and distance visitors from the outside world, the only way to reach the painting was through a dimly lit corridor and up a staircase leading to a centrally located viewing platform. As spectators arrived in the viewing area, they were immediately surrounded by an enormous canvas, typically fifty feet high and four hundred feet in circumference. Viewers' movements were restricted to the elevated viewing platform placed at a distance from the painting. This focused their attention on the pictured story or scene, rather than painterly details, and created the impression that they were surveying a vast spectacle from an aerial vantage point. A canopy concealed the overhead lighting and the upper edge of the canvas, while a railing or three-dimensional landscape in the foreground hid the lower edge of the painting. In the words of panorama historian Bernard Comment, "Everything was arranged so that nothing extraneous could encroach on the display and disturb the spectator's field of vision."⁴⁶Bernard Current, The Painted Panorama (New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 2000), 8. In attempts to heighten the visual experience, cycloramas often added musical accompaniment, sound effects, and authoritative narration to the pictorial spectacle.

Original cyclorama building, Grant Park, Atlanta, Georgia, erected 1898. Color postcard, ca. 1910.

The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama in Grant Park enables contemporary audiences to simulate this nineteenth-century viewing experience. As viewers ascend to the central viewing platform they catch their first glimpse of the giant painting, one of two Civil War battle cycloramas still on display in the United States. The other is the Battle of Gettysburg at the Gettysburg National Military Park. After the spectators take their seats at the Atlanta cyclorama, the viewing platform begins a slow, circular rotation in front of the canvas and a recorded narration of the combat action, accompanied by background music, gunshots, and other sound effects, starts to play. In an experience that closely parallels a nineteenth-century visit to the cyclorama (displayed or housed in Atlanta since 1892), viewers are suddenly immersed in a climactic battlefield scene. Their vantage point is high above the fighting, as if viewing the action from a platform forty feet off the ground at the present-day intersection of Moreland and Dekalb Avenues. They witness the decisive moment, the Union counterattack led by Major General John A. Logan, launched at approximately 4:30 p.m. on July 22, 1864, and aimed at restoring the Federal line broken by a Confederate assault spearheaded by Brigadier General Arthur M. Manigault's Brigade. The cyclorama presents a panoramic view of the fighting as a complete circle, starting and ending with the intense confrontation at the Troup Hurt House and the nearby De Gress Battery. As segments of the painting are progressively illuminated, the audience sees Federal infantry moving forward to restore their broken line near the Troup Hurt House; Sherman surveying the battlefield from his headquarters at the Augustus Hurt House; Logan galloping to the front to lead the Union counterattack; a distant cloud of gun smoke arising from the fighting in Decatur; Federal infantry moving forward to restore their broken line near the Troup Hurt House; and Confederate Major General Carter L. Stevenson's division charging across the open ground atop Leggett's Hill. The narrator intones dramatically: "Only the old muzzle-loading guns, bayonets, and artillery made up the arsenal of weapons during the War Between the States, yet with few such weapons the casualties of these four years was staggering, as they were here at Leggett's Hill, where assault after assault [sic] being repelled and the slopes becoming mounds of the slain."

Union Major General John A. Logan, riding Slasher. Minneapolis Cyclorama promotional flyer, ca. 1886.

The artists who painted the Atlanta cyclorama in a Milwaukee studio in 1885–1886 were recruited from Germany and Austria by the studio's owner, William Wehner, a German-born, Chicago entrepreneur who sought to capitalize on the American public's renewed interest in the Civil War in the 1880s coupled with the popularity of battlefield panoramas. Several of the artists recruited by Wehner had worked in Munich on a panorama of the Battle of Sedan, a German victory that was decisive in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. He induced the artists to move to Milwaukee, where, he said, "You German artists will find congenial friends" among the many German-speaking residents.⁴⁷Francis Stover, The Panorama Painters' Days of Glory (Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1969), 4. Wehner also recognized that US audiences would insist on historical accuracy in paintings of Civil War battles, and to that end he hired Theodore R. Davis of Asbury Park, New Jersey, as technical advisor to the painters. Davis was on familiar ground in depicting the Battle of Atlanta. As a staff illustrator for Harper's Weekly during the war, Davis created an extensive visual record of combat action, battlefield topography, and local landmarks. Former Union Major General John A. Logan wrote of the artist's wartime experience, "Unquestionably Mr. Davis saw more of the war than any other single person."⁴⁸Theodore R. Davis, "Grant Under Fire," The Cosmopolitan 14, no. 111 (January 1893), 333. Davis accompanied Sherman on the Atlanta Campaign, and he witnessed much of the Battle of Atlanta from Sherman's headquarters at the Augustus Hurt House. In the summer of 1885, Davis and the panorama artists visited Atlanta, where they sketched aerial views of the battlefield terrain from a forty-foot tower that they erected near the present-day intersection of Moreland and Dekalb Avenues. Union and Confederate veterans and local Atlanta residents also provided information about the battle site and events. Wehner reported that "The Federal and Confederate officers who have contributed their aid, embrace nearly every principal commander now living who took part in the scene."⁴⁹William Wehner, "Battle of Atlanta: The Picture and the Painters," in "Atlanta," Battle of July 22, 1864 (Detroit, MI: Kerby Printing Company, 1887), 2.

Wehner's artists returned from their Atlanta site visit to Milwaukee to complete the painting, which was first publicly exhibited in Minneapolis in June 1886, remained on display there until March 1888, and was shown in Indianapolis and Chattanooga before its Atlanta opening in February 1892.⁵⁰Anonymous, "The City: The Panorama Was Viewed by Select Invited Audience," Minneapolis Tribune, June 29, 1886, 5; Anonymous, "The Battle of Atlanta Is Here," Atlanta Constitution, February 12, 1892, 7. In Atlanta, the painting was displayed in a specially constructed cyclorama rotunda near the city's downtown, on Edgewood Avenue, between Courtland Street and Piedmont Avenue. A second Battle of Atlanta panorama painting, also completed in Wehner's Milwaukee studio, made its debut in Detroit in February 1887.⁵¹Anonymous, "A Great Historical Painting: Formal Opening of the Detroit Cyclorama Company's Battle of Atlanta," Detroit Free Press, February 28, 1887, 5. Wehner instructed his corps of painters to produce both battle panoramas at the same time after he recognized that the artists could not all work on the same canvas simultaneously.⁵²Anonymous, "A Battle on Canvas," St. Paul Daily Globe, April 15, 1886, 4. What became of the version shown in Detroit and whether it survives are not known.

A story persists that the Battle of Atlanta panorama was commissioned by John A. Logan to boost his candidacy for the vice-presidency on the Republican ticket headed by James G. Blaine in 1884. This account seems dubious because work on the painting began in 1885, after the presidential election. A more likely explanation of the painting's origins is that William Wehner sought to profit from the revival of interest in the Civil War during the Gilded Age, which coincided in the United States with a vogue for cyclorama experiences. Cycloramas were produced to earn money, and they were bought and sold frequently as investors sought to cash in. The Battle of Atlanta painting changed ownership several times before George V. Gress, a civic-minded Atlanta merchant, purchased it in 1893. Gress moved the panorama to Grant Park in 1894 and donated it to the city in 1898. Gress already had made a major donation to the city in 1889, when he purchased a menagerie from a bankrupt circus and gave the animals to the city, along with housing and cages, to establish a zoo in Grant Park.

After Gress deeded the cyclorama painting to the city, Atlanta's park commissioners committed funds to restore the panorama and repair the circular wooden building in Grant Park where it was exhibited. The refurbished attraction was re-opened just in time for a Confederate reunion in Atlanta on July 22–23, 1898, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. The cyclorama painting remained on display in the fragile wooden structure, near the Auburn Avenue entrance to Grant Park, until 1921, when the panorama was moved to a new marble building—its present home—close to the center of the park and adjacent to the Atlanta Zoo.

The Texas Imperial, the Texas locomotive that overtook the Andrews Raiders in 1862, on display in Grant Park in the early twentieth century. Postcard, ca. 1910.

Grant Park is named for Lemuel P. Grant, who oversaw construction of Atlanta's fortifications in 1863–1864 and served the city in many official roles after the war. Grant made a fortune in railroad construction and real estate development, and in 1882 he donated a hundred acres on the southeast edge of the city for the public park that eventually would bear his name. As Grant Park took shape, Civil War attractions were added to park amenities that included shaded walkways, flower gardens, a lake for boat rides, and the city's zoo. In addition to the cyclorama, Grant Park's war-related points of interest were the reconstructed Fort Walker, complete with mounted cannons placed above the remnants of Confederate earthworks; a nearby walkway named in honor of James B. McPherson, the federal general killed in the Battle of Atlanta; and the locomotive Texas, which overtook the train that the Andrews Raiders had commandeered on April 12, 1862, in their failed effort to disrupt the Confederate's railroad supply line between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Grant Park became a common destination for Civil War veterans who gathered there for reunions and civilian visitors who combined trips to the cyclorama with stops at the park's other war-related sites.

In 1907, a local hotelier offered a prize for the best description of "How to Spend Four Days Sight-Seeing in Atlanta." The Atlanta Constitution published two essays submitted in the contest, and each one included Grant Park in the recommended itinerary. One essayist elaborated on the park's appeal: "A beautiful afternoon may be spent at Grant park, enjoying the wonderful beauties of the place, viewing the cyclorama, where one learns more of battles in ten minutes than in ten months of reading. A walk through the park to Fort Walker will be an inspiration, both for the magnificent view seen from the eminence, and the inspection of the old fortifications that make this a historic spot."⁵³Anonymous, "How to Spend Four Days Sight-Seeing in Atlanta," Atlanta Constitution, February 25, 1907, 3. The Atlanta Constitution did not report whether this contest entry won the $5 prize.

Some scholarly critics, writing in recent years, contend that the apparent mastery of battlefield details in late nineteenth-century cycloramas and the mass appeal of the paintings have reinforced a nationalistically inspired view of Civil War history that is entertaining but narrowly configured.⁵⁴Angela Miller, "The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular," Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (April 1996), 56. The panoramas depict fierce and close combat between Confederate and Union troops and convey the extraordinary courage of soldiers on both sides, emphasizing their common valor and sacrifice. However, critics argue, what these dramatic visual narratives largely omit are the deep divisions and bitterness that tore a nation apart and threw it into four years of bloody conflict. "America is defined in populist terms," notes one scholar in her analysis of the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama. "The cultural identity articulated by the painting is that Americans of the North and South are white, male, working class, and united by a rebellious spirit."⁵⁵Shelly Jarenski, "'Delighted and Instructed': African American Challenges to Panoramic Aesthetics in J. P. Ball, Kara Walker, and Frederick Douglas," American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2013), 128. Literally embodying sectional reconciliation among whites is the severely wounded Confederate soldier depicted in the arms of a Federal infantryman, aiding his foe in the heat of battle. They are brothers who enlisted on opposite sides and had not seen each other for three years. Also notable but not easily seen are the single African American and single female figures in the painting. They are included in the whirl of rear-line action, well behind the lines of rifled infantryman, galloping officers, exploding shells, and waving battle flags.

Aftermath

Confederate dead after the Battle of Atlanta, July 23, 1864. Sketch by Henry Dwight. Courtesy of Ohio Historical Society.

Losing the Battle of Atlanta was a major blow to the Confederacy. The flank attack attempted by Hardee's Corps and frontal assault launched by Cheatham's Corps amounted to a major opportunity, perhaps the final one, for the Confederate Army of Tennessee to crush at least one of the advancing Federal armies and turn the tide of the Atlanta Campaign. Instead, after eight hours of fighting on July 22, 1864, John Bell Hood's army had lost more than 10 percent of its fighting force to death, injury, or capture, and the carnage on the Atlanta battlefield was shocking to see, even for battle-hardened veterans. A Union surgeon, A. W. Reese, who visited the scene the day after the battle, recalled in vivid clinical detail:

Immediately in front of our lines the ground was, literally, piled with dead bodies of rebel soldiers—they laid, actually, in win[d]rows and piles. Their bodies were mangled, torn, and battered by balls in every conceivable manner and shape. Many of them were shot through the head and laid in a ghastly puddle of their own brains which had oozed from their shattered skulls.⁵⁶A. W. Reese, Personal Recollections of the Late Civil War in the United States. With Scenes, Incidents, and Memoirs of Earlier Times,1870, 532 (Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, MO).

Bombproof shelter, interior of a bombproof garden in Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1864. Print courtesy of the Atlanta History Center.

Although Sherman's armies had inflicted heavy losses, the Confederates defending Atlanta still held a well-fortified city and kept open two vital railroad supply lines that approached from the southwest and south. Four days after the Battle of Atlanta, Sherman turned his attention to severing those railway lifelines. As his artillery bombarded the city, he moved the Army of the Tennessee from its position east of the city to a new position to the west, where it would be in striking distance of the railroads as they entered on the same right-of-way. In Atlanta, Hood watched the Federal movement, and, in an effort to thwart it, he sent four divisions from behind the fortifications to attack the Union troops. The resulting Battle of Ezra Church on July 28, was another stinging defeat for Hood's army, the third loss in eight days. By one estimate, the Army of Tennessee sustained more than twelve thousand casualties in its failed attempts to win a decisive victory against the invading Yankees.⁵⁷Thomas L. Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 455. However, the Confederates maintained possession of the two railways and overwhelmed two Union cavalry divisions Sherman had sent on raids south of the city.

Aftermath of September 2, 1864, Confederate destruction of ammunition-laden railcars, near present-day Fulton Cotton Mill lofts, Atlanta, Georgia. Gelatin silver print by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Sherman increased the volume and pace of the shelling of Atlanta that his gunners had started on July 20. On August 9, the bombardment intensified to its highest level, and the artillery pounding continued for two weeks as the remaining civilians in the city huddled in "bombproof" shelters. The cannon fire damaged or destroyed numerous buildings and occasionally injured or killed civilians, perhaps causing twenty deaths.⁵⁸Stephen Davis, "How Many Civilians Died in Sherman's Bombardment of Atlanta?" Atlanta History 45, no. 4 (2003), 19. Incessant shelling did not force Hood's army to evacuate, and it continued to receive supplies.

Sherman called an abrupt halt to the bombardment on August 25, and the following night he moved the bulk of his three armies from their trenches north and west of Atlanta on a sweeping march to the south and then east. On August 28, the Federal infantry reached the Atlanta & West Point Railroad, the western-most of the two open rail lines, and they destroyed miles of track. Union troops continued eastward toward their main objective, the Macon and Western Railroad, the more important of the two Confederate supply lines.

"Old Tecumseh," Union Major General William T. Sherman at Confederate Fort, Atlanta, Georgia, October 1864. Stereograph by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

As the Federals approached the last open rail line at Jonesboro, a railroad town eighteen miles south of Atlanta, Hood sent two of his army corps to meet them. In an effort to counter the Union threat, Hood's troops launched a poorly executed assault on August 31. At approximately the same time that the Confederates first attacked the Yankee infantry outside Jonesoboro, other Union forces reached the railway north of the town and severed it. The next day, September 1, the Yankees attacked and broke the Confederate line at Jonesboro, forcing the Rebels to retreat southward toward Lovejoy's Station. When a courier brought Hood news that Jonesboro had fallen and the railroad was cut, he issued orders for the evacuation of Atlanta. Beginning late in the afternoon of September 1, Hood and the remainder of his army still in the city began marching out, southeastward along McDonough Road. In the early hours of September 2, a rear guard of Confederate cavalry set fire to five locomotives and eighty-one boxcars (twenty-eight of which were filled with ammunition), that lay idle along the Georgia Railroad tracks in an evacuated area near Oakland Cemetery and the Atlanta Rolling Mill (present-day Fulton Cotton Mill lofts on Boulevard). The exploding boxcars left a path of devastation a half-mile wide, leveled the Rolling Mill, and ignited a blaze that burned until dawn.

Ruins of Atlanta railroad depot, demolished before Sherman's departure, 1864. Wet collodion by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Early on September 2, shortly after the last Confederate cavalry unit vacated Atlanta, a civilian contingent led by Mayor James M. Calhoun surrendered the city to an advance party of Sherman's army. By noon, Union soldiers were marching into Atlanta, and the two-and-a-half month Federal occupation of the city began. Sherman, who was near Lovejoy's Station when Atlanta was captured, received dispatches on the morning of September 3 notifying him of Hood's evacuation and the city's surrender. Later that day Sherman telegraphed US Army Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck: "So Atlanta is ours and fairly won."⁵⁹Simpson and Berlin, eds., 696. Four days later, on September 7, Sherman rode into the city.

The Atlanta Campaign was over, and Sherman soon would make plans for a fall push, his March to the Sea. To secure Atlanta as a base of Union military operations, Sherman decided that Atlanta's remaining residents would have to leave. He issued an expulsion order in the first week of September, which was met with popular outcry and vehement protests from Confederate General John Bell Hood. Atlantans had endured the battles around the city, the bombardment of their homes and businesses, and now faced forced evacuation. Sherman justified the expulsion order on military and public safety grounds. 

Trout House, Masonic Hall and Federal encampment on Decatur Street during Union occupation of Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Wet collodion by George Barnard. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

In early October, Hood led his army northward in an effort to cut Sherman's supply line, the railroad from Chattanooga, and force the Federals out of Atlanta. Sherman chased after Hood, and the opposing armies engaged in sporadic and inconclusive fighting for a month. Hood's elusive army eventually moved to northern Alabama, at which time Sherman gave up his pursuit and returned to Atlanta. Sherman made plans and secured approval from his superiors Grant and Halleck for a sweeping march across the central Georgia countryside in the direction of Savannah on the Atlantic coast. Sherman then ordered the destruction of all remaining structures in Atlanta's business and industrial areas that had military value. The wrecking of Atlanta began on November 11 and continued for four days and nights. Union engineers were instructed to preferentially knock down structures rather than burn them, but Yankee soldiers who were not part of the demolition squads began to set fire to private buildings, especially homes. On the final night of the Union occupation, November 15–16, troops set much of the downtown ablaze. When Sherman and his rear guard moved eastward the following morning, the last fires were smoldering and much of the city was in ruins. Pausing on the outskirts, Sherman later recalled: "We stood upon the very ground whereon was fought the bloody battle of July 22, and could see the copse of wood where McPherson fell."⁶⁰Sherman, 655.

The Federal Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps moving out of Atlanta, Georgia, November 15, 1864, Harper's Illustrated Weekly, January 1, 1865.

Union photographer George N. Barnard photographed Atlanta before, during, and after the damage wrought by Sherman's armies. Arriving in mid-September, Barnard produced well-known views of Atlanta's battlefields, fortifications, and businesses. One of the first scenes he photographed was the site of McPherson's death, a spot marked by an inscribed wooden placard nailed to a thin tree. Barnard revisited the site in November 1864 or May 1865, when he took a second set of photographs. In late September 1864, Barnard also devoted attention to General Sherman, who posed for portraits with his staff at a former Confederate fort west of the city. Barnard was particularly busy in October and early November 1864 when he created many of his best known images of the Atlanta and the fortifications surrounding it. He photographed homes that served as headquarters for Union officers, storefront businesses including a slave market on Whitehall Street (now Peachtree Street),⁶¹Michael Rose, Remembering Atlanta (Nashville: Turner Publishing Company, 2010), 17. the centrally located rail car shed, both before and after it was demolished, and teams of Yankee soldiers tearing up and twisting railroad track. Barnard's images provide an enduring impression of Civil War Atlanta and a stark record of the wreckage.

About the Author

Daniel A. Pollock, MD, is a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, where he leads a unit responsible for national surveillance of healthcare-associated infections. Since arriving in Atlanta in 1984, he has pursued an independent scholarly interest in the city's Civil War history, and he has conducted over 150 tours of Battle of Atlanta sites.

Acknowledgements

"The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance" is a collaborative project of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Project co-directors: Daniel A. Pollock and Allen Tullos
Principal researcher and author: Daniel A. Pollock
Project coordinator and digital strategist: Brian Croxall
Principal web app software developer: Jay Varner
Photograph and historical collections researcher: Christopher Sawula
Project librarian: Erica Bruchko
Cartographer: Michael C. Page
Web app interface designer: Kevin Glover

Principal videographer and video editor: Steve Bransford

Assistant videographer and video editor: Dina Warnock

Assistant videographer: Raymond McCrea Jones

Southern Spaces managing editor: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Southern Spaces assistant managing editor: Sarah V. Melton

Southern Spaces staff: Meredith Doster (layout), Alan Pike (videography and development), Clinton Fluker (images), Emma Lirette (text linking), Katie Rawson (early development), and Eric Solomon (text linking)

Copyediting and proofreading: Marlo Starr

Production assistance: Franky Abbott, Matt Miller

Initial software developer: Kyle W. Bock

ECDS co-director: Wayne Morse

Emory Library and Information Technology Services (LITS) Software Engineering Team

Software team manager: Mike Mitchell

Project manager: Tonia Edwards

LITS Library Tech Services: Jonathan Bodnar, Bethany Nash

LITS Scholarly Communications: Lisa Macklin, Melanie Kowalski

Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum: Monica Prothro, Yakingma Robinson

Content review: Steve Davis, Charlie Crawford, and Dave Buckhout

Thanks to: Carol Anderson, Julie Braun, Holly Crenshaw, Ginger Cain, Kathryn Dixson, and John Klingler
Proposal consultant: Deb Watts

The responsibility for the final essay text ultimately resides with the author.