[580] across Flint River The attack failed with the loss of more than two thou sand men. On the evening of the 1st September, the enemy's columns converged upon Jonesboroa, and Hardee's corps, finding itself about to be flanked and overwhelmed, withdrew during the night, after having been cut up by two severe engagements, and with the loss of eight guns.
That night, finding his line of supply cut off, and the sum of his disasters complete, Hood determined to abandon Altanta. He blew up his magazines, destroyed all his supplies that he could not remove, consisting of seven locomotives and eighty-one cars loaded with ammunition, and left the place by the turnpike roads. He moved swiftly across the country towards Macon. The next morning Sherman moved south to catch the retreating army, but at Lovejoy's, two miles beyond Jonesboroa, he found Hood strongly entrenched, and, abandoning the pursuit, returned to Atlanta.
Sherman announced: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” His army entered the city on the morning of the 2d September, and the successful commander rode through the streets to his headquarters without parade or ostentation. Hie declared that his army, wearied by an arduous campaign, needed rest, and that he proposed to give it an interval of repose within the defences of Atlanta. But the period of military inaction was to be employed in launching measures of the most extraordinary cruelty against the non-combatant people of Atlanta. Gen. Sherman was the author of the sentiment, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” which was caught up in the Northern newspapers as a bit of very sententious and elegant philosophy, when, in fact, denying, as it did, that war had any law of order or amelioration, it was a mere plagiarism from the bloody and detestable code of the savage. This extraordinary doctrine Sherman at once proceeded to put in practice by depopulating Atlanta, and driving from their homes thousands of helpless women and children. It was the most cruel and savage act of the war. Butler, the tyrant of New Orleans, had only banished registered enemies. Sherman issued a sweeping edict, covering all the inhabitants of a city, and driving them from their homes to wander as strangers, outcasts and exiles, and to subsist on charity. Gen. Hood, while he received the exiles within his lines, took occasion to protest, writing to Gen. Sherman himself of the measure his sinister mind had devised: “It transcends in studied and ingenious cruelty all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.” But all protests were unavailing. In vain the Mayor of Atlanta had pointed out to Gen. Sherman that the country south of the city was crowded already with refugees, and without houses to accommodate the people, and that many had no other shelter but what they might find in churches, and out-buildings; that among the exiles were many poor women in an advanced state of pregnancy; that the consequences would be woe, horrour, and suffering,
