The Last Days of the Confederacy in Northeast Georgia

By Ray Chandler

In 1861, northeast Georgians were the driving force into secession and war. In 1865, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, his government collapsing and himself a wanted man, brought the reality of the war to the region's doorstep. Governor Joseph Brown, U.S. senator Robert Toombs and the politically influential Howell Cobb of Athens and his brother Thomas R.R. Cobb all fought passionately for Southern independence. The region epitomized the reasons for which the South waged and supported the war, yet it was spared the destruction seen in other places. Even Sherman's Union army touched only the region's fringes. Author Ray Chandler brings to light the final act of the Confederacy in the Peach State's northeast and the lasting impact it had on Georgians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625848369

Ray Chandler

Ray Chandler is a journalist and freelance writer from Elberton, Georgia. His work has appeared in the Athens Banner-Herald, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and various magazines, including Georgia Backroads. For the last ten years he has been a correspondent with Scripps News, covering politics, legal matters and crime. American and British history, and especially the history of Georgia, have been lifelong passions.

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Preface

The scene that begins the first chapter of this book has haunted me for years. The tableau of Colonel William McPherson McIntosh, commander of the Fifteenth Georgia Infantry, sitting in his tent, writing to his son his thoughts on soldiering and the war in which the colonel found himself is a dramatist’s dream, yet it actually happened, no doubt in the same way it happened in untold other instances from which no letters survived. The son was eager to get into the fray, no doubt inspired by dreams of glory and by the pageantry he had witnessed when his father and others had gone off to war. The father’s response to the son’s dreams are those nearly all fathers would make, once the father himself had drunk deep from the well the young man yearned for. What makes it especially poignant to me are two things. The first is knowing the colonel’s own fate, which will be related later. The second is that he was my great-great-uncle.

In my family, as in many families in the South up through at least my own generation (I was born in 1962), the Civil War was always more than something we read of in history books. We heard the stories told by older people who, in many cases, would have been told them by people who had lived through the war. Some were family stories of glory and such, as about William McIntosh and the other William in the family, William H. Mattox, my maternal great-great-grandfather, who had also served in the Fifteenth Georgia. Both were tragic figures. McIntosh was a hero. Mattox’s tragedy was that he wasn’t. Some stories were funny, such as that of David Chandler, my paternal great-great-grandfather. Too old to serve in the army, he had been sheriff of Jackson County, Georgia, for a time during the war, and the story of his encounter with a band of Union cavalry, probably some of Stoneman’s men, always brought a chuckle at every retelling. Other tales brought more somber reflection, such as of my maternal great-grandmother remembering, when a little girl, standing in a cotton field and hearing the explosions and seeing the rising smoke as the Confederate army evacuated Atlanta. Each story, in its own way, added our family’s brushstrokes, however small, to the panoramic portrait of the war.

There were also the stories about the famous local characters who had walked the same ground as we and had played their own parts in the war. For example, Alexander H. Stephens and Robert A. Toombs had both made names for themselves locally, practicing law in the northern judicial circuit before gaining their state and national political stature. Stephens was the reluctant Confederate, against secession yet embracing the cause of state’s rights. He served as vice-president of the Confederacy and had spent a good part of the war in Georgia, on the outs with the Confederate national government. Toombs, from Washington, in Wilkes County, just south of Elbert County, is to me the most interesting of all. Blustering, bombastic, hard-drinking—in fact, often drunk—Bob Toombs. A brilliant intellect trapped in a soul that could govern neither its temperament nor its passions, ultimately a tragic figure worthy of an ancient Grecian playwright. Perhaps no other man in Georgia so embodied the time and the place, and the passions and the ambitions that led Georgia out of the Union. Indeed, a lot of speeches were given in favor of secession at the November 1860 debate in the Milledgeville statehouse, but perhaps Toombs’s roaring best summed up the reasons why enough Georgian voters, even those who initially opposed secession, ultimately gave a slim overall winning margin in support of Southern independence.

And of course there were the enduring stories surrounding the Confederate treasury and its strange odyssey under the guard of adolescent Confederate naval midshipmen that ended, at least in part, in Washington when the fleeing Jefferson Davis had his last cabinet meeting in a building on the square and dissolved his government before continuing his flight from Federal forces. The Confederate treasury can be accounted for, but what can’t is part of the gold and silver belonging to the banks of Richmond that traveled with the treasury for much of the time. Tales of buried treasure stemming from a raid by some renegade Kentucky cavalrymen abound to this day. All of these—the historic figures who had tread the same ground as we, the events that had played out practically in our backyards—made the war far more than mere history. The sweeping histories of the war told of great campaigns, bloody battles, glorious victories and glorious defeats. A piece of these were ours, but our local history was ours alone.

One could argue on solid ground, I think, that Georgia’s secession was essential to the Confederacy’s very formation and life. Its railroads, its burgeoning industrial base and its keystone location linking the upper southern Atlantic coastal states to the heart of the cotton belt in the Gulf Coast states—all of these were essential to any chance for the new nation’s survival. Not without reason, after all, is Sherman’s campaign through Georgia considered by some the deciding struggle of the war.

One could also argue, I think, that without the Georgian leaders who hailed from the northeast corner of Georgia—Bob Toombs; the Cobb brothers of Athens, Howell and Thomas R.R.; and Georgia’s governor in 1860 and throughout the war, Joseph E. Brown—there would have been no secession. The fierce determination of these men to see Georgia leave the Union translated into political theater on a grand scale. Others played their parts, but these four, not always allies before the war, were the producers, directors and principal actors. They were able to overcome the initial deficit of popular support for secession and the skilled rhetoric of Alexander Stephens and other opponents. They won by dint of rhetoric that flew high and low, appealing to Georgians’ highest notions of self-determined liberty as well as to their most horrible fears: former slaves freed and running amok and, even worse, seeking retribution.

So war came, but it did not really come home to northeast Georgia in the way it did to other areas of the South until the very last months and days. Before that, when the residents saw a man in Union blue, he was a prisoner. And it is this story I set out to tell. It is a story I have wanted to tell as completely as possible for over thirty years. I have told it in bits and pieces and now want to put as much of it together as possible for the first time. It can’t be told in its entirety, not in one book, but I hope to tell enough to do justice to the people written about. (In the case of William Mattox, that involves telling the truth about a genuine scoundrel whose genes I do indeed carry.)

Wherever possible and as much as practicable, I have let the characters tell their own stories. Now nearly into my third decade as a working journalist, I’ve learned that one can add perspective, but for the most color and savor, let the people speak for themselves. As Mark Twain once put it, Don’t say that an old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

There are many to be thanked here. First, The History Press for allowing me the opportunity to produce this book. Second, to Olin Jackson, who gave me my start in published historical writing in the pages of what was first North Georgia Journal and later Georgia Backroads magazine. And third to Daniel Roper, who after taking over from Olin kept me writing. Most of all, my parents, who from my earliest age kept my appetite for history well fed. The first family vacation I recall, in fact, was to Charleston, South Carolina, including a visit to Fort Sumter. There were many more exciting places to come.

If I have one hope from this, it is that anyone reading it comes to know the joys of loving history.

Ray Chandler

June 2014

Elberton, Georgia

Chapter 1

…This Thing of Soldiering…

The night of May 30, 1862, in camp on the Confederate lines near the Chickahominy River. Colonel William McPherson McIntosh, commander of the Fifteenth Georgia Infantry, sat alone in his tent, bent over his field desk in the glow of a lantern. The rains of the past few days had stopped, and the word was that the next day and the days after would bring action. Already, McIntosh could hear the sound of artillery farther up the line.¹

The Army of Northern Virginia under General Joseph Johnston lay arrayed this night facing the larger Union Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan in what promised to be a death struggle for the Confederate capital of Richmond, just a few miles west. Mile by mile, the Confederates had fought a fighting retreat up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers before the slow Union advance until there wasn’t much farther they could back up. The glory of the heady days of the Confederates’ victory at First Manassas the previous July had frayed as steadily as men’s nerves over the winter’s skirmishing and now seemed a distant memory for the men who had been there.²

McIntosh had still been in Georgia as the smoke had lifted over Manassas. The Fifteenth Georgia was just taking form, and McIntosh, a major then, was learning something of soldiering. The drill field version of soldiering, that is, the marching in new uniforms, under fluttering flags, to spirited fifes and drums, assured you were marching to victory. In Virginia, the men had found the mud and disease of camp life over a cold, Virginia winter, in addition to the normal dangers of war. An outbreak of measles in the fall of 1861—a common consequence of so many men from so many different areas thrown together in one place—had decimated the ranks, at one point reducing the Fifteenth Georgia to about half strength. Indeed, the measles outbreak had been in part responsible for McIntosh rising to the regiment’s command. The commanding colonel, Thomas W. Thomas, a judge on the North Georgia circuit in civilian life, had resigned after measles had left him weakened. The lieutenant colonel, Linton Stephens, half brother of Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, had also resigned in the same condition. So, too, had McIntosh’s twenty-six-year-old brother-in-law, William Henry Mattox, a captain, not from measles but from a host of general camp ailments.³

The path of destruction left by Sherman’s army near Atlanta. The northeast corner of Georgia was spared this hard hand of the war.

The colonel left no record of his thoughts on soldiering in the heady days of 1860 and early 1861, but if they bubbled with dreams of glory and easy victory, those had fallen flat. It was his experience that McIntosh now set out to convey to his seventeen-year-old son, Singleton, a student at Georgia Military Institute in Marietta, near Atlanta. The young man was itching to leave school and join the army, the colonel had learned, but he could not see the boy a soldier:

This is natural, considering your age, and, I