class="body">When General Hood realized that the defense of the city was hopeless, he withdrew his troops and ordered the destruction of an arsenal and railcars loaded with munitions. The flames spread, causing the first wave of Atlanta’s destruction. Sherman entered the city on September 2, and stayed for six weeks. If his staff officers wondered what the commander had in mind for Atlanta, their doubts vanished when the general remarked, “Atlanta…I’ve been fighting Atlanta all this time.…All the guns and wagons we’ve captured along the way—all marked ‘Atlanta.’” Sherman was determined to leave nothing behind that would be of use to the Confederacy. However, it seems that he did not intend to level the city utterly. He ordered that the civilian population be evacuated from Atlanta, but he also gave orders that private homes and churches were not to be harmed. When the systematic destruction of the factories, railroads, warehouses, and other military targets began, though, fire spread to residential neighborhoods. Sherman personally directed the effort to douse the flames and save the houses, but to no avail. One of his staff officers described the scene: “bursts of smoke, dense black volumes, then tongues of flame, then huge waves of fire roll up into the sky.…sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames…lurid, angry, dreadful to look upon.” Some Yankees danced with glee amidst the destruction; others felt deep shame.

The departure of the Union column provided only a brief respite from the city’s misery. Looters from the countryside descended to scavenge through the things the Federals had overlooked. Somehow they managed to fill 250 wagons with their plunder. But the Atlantans straggled back in, got the post office and the bars running again, and wearily began work on the broken and blasted rail lines. They elected a new mayor and slate of officials, who opened the treasury and counted out the money they had to finance the reconstruction of the city. They came up with the grand total of $1.64.

Atlanta was born of the railroad, and the railroad saved it. Just a year after the war ended, Atlanta’s population was almost twice what it had been at the start of the war, as people flooded in from the countryside to get work. Having destroyed Atlanta, the Yankees played a small part in rebuilding it. They placed the regional headquarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau there, and the bureau built Atlanta University for the education of former slaves. (White Atlantans, who had no comparable institution, soon founded Georgia Tech.)

Much of the rebuilding was the work of a carpetbagger, a man named H. I. Kimball who descended on Atlanta from Chicago after the war, allied himself with the hated Republican state officeholders, and opened the spigots of government cash to rebuild the city and enrich himself along the way. One of his greatest

achievements came early: In 1868, he helped persuade the legislature to move the capital from Milledgeville to Atlanta. In 1870, he finished work on the city’s opera house, part of which he leased to the state for its capitol. In the same year he built the Kimball House, a lavish hotel. When it burned to the ground in 1883, he replaced it with an even grander edifice: a 440-room brick-and-stone palace that was the largest hotel in the South. In 1881, he got the World’s Fair and Great International Cotton Exposition for Atlanta. Later on a grand jury was unable to pin anything illegal on Kimball, and the city was left to contemplate all his good works. If some corners had been cut, then so be it. Atlantans were inclined to look ahead, not back.

Little survives of Atlanta’s 19th-century railroad past except an 1870s freight depot, which has been converted to a conference center. It can be found near Underground Atlanta, a subterranean complex of shops and restaurants south of the downtown business district (see “Underground Atlanta,” page 91). Aboveground there is a block of restored commercial buildings and Atlanta Heritage Row: The Museum at Underground, with a series of walk-through exhibits tracing the city’s history. One of the most effective is a dark, claustrophobic reproduction of a bomb shelter built to withstand Sherman’s siege. A short stroll brings you to the World of Coca-Cola, a museum paying homage to the beverage that is Atlanta’s gift to the world. In 1886 Dr. John Styth Pemberton set up a laboratory in his back yard to concoct a good-tasting cure for headaches. Mixing caffeine, cola nuts, and coca leaves, he came up with a brew that—who knows?—may have been the secret fuel of Atlanta’s resurgence.

One of the leaders of the city’s revival was a young newspaperman named Henry Grady, who was invited up to New York in 1886 to address a group of Yankee businessmen. His remarks made it plain that the South was ready for reconciliation, but not on its knees. Grady said he was glad that the Union was saved and that slavery was wiped from America, but he continued: “The South has nothing for which to apologize…. The South has nothing to take back.” Oddly enough, the next speaker of the evening was none other than William T. Sherman. Grady made sure the general knew that bygones were bygones and that Sherman was well regarded in Georgia, “though some people think he is kind of careless about fire.” He went on to inform the general that “from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city.” He called his section of the country the New South. What had happened in Atlanta was happening elsewhere in the region, but Atlanta led the way. It had the South’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Building, put up in 1892. The Equitable was demolished in 1971, but another early

skyscraper, the Flatiron Building, survives at 84 Peachtree Street.

The Flatiron and several other venerable commercial buildings are stops on the tours offered by the Atlanta Preservation Center. Indeed the center offers such a rich menu of architectural and historical tours that callers to its information line are advised to have a pencil and a large sheet of paper at hand. Its walking tours include the exotic Fox Theater, an Egyptian and Moorish fantasy erected in the 1920s; the Victorianera West End district, which includes a stop at Wren’s Nest, the home of Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote down the African-American Uncle Remus tales; the Druid Hills district, laid out in 1893 by Frederick Law Olmsted and the setting for the film Driving Miss Daisy ; the architecturally exuberant Ansley Park and Inman Park districts; and Atlanta University Center, where several 1860s school buildings survive. Near the university is the Herndon Home, the elegant 1910 Beaux Arts mansion of the founder of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Alonzo Herndon, who may have been the richest black man in the United States.

The center also offers tours of Piedmont Park, the site of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. Unfortunately, no buildings survive from the exposition, which put Atlanta on the map as the premier New South city. The purpose of the exposition was to open new markets for Southern manufactured goods and find new sources of investment capital. Atlanta also wanted to show that it had no racial problems and that blacks would provide their share of a stable work force. Accordingly there was a Negro Pavilion, and Booker T Washington was invited to make one of the speeches at the opening of the fair. He responded with the famous “Atlanta Compromise”—a speech accepting social and political segregation in exchange for allowing blacks to make economic progress within a well-defined sphere. Washington’s compromise was bitterly and zealously opposed by W. E. B. Du Bois, the great writer, scholar, editor, and anthropologist, who taught for a while at Atlanta University. It was Du Bois who wrote, prophetically, that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line.

For the white community, however, Washington’s words were exactly what they wanted to hear. Businessmen from around the world were coming to the fair to assess investment possibilities in the region. Crucial to Atlanta’s attractiveness was the appearance of racial harmony. But just a decade later that seeming harmony was brutally shattered by the race riot of 1906. Stirred up by highly exaggerated accounts of assaults on white women by black men and by the supposed discovery of white pornography in black brothels, white mobs surged through the city beating and shooting blacks. Public officials tried to stop

the riots, even turning fire hoses on the whites, but the violence continued for several days, leaving about 25 blacks and one white dead.

The riots were an immense shock to the black community, proof that the vilest racial hatred lay just under the surface. One black leader of the community later wrote that the black men who had been shining examples of selfimprovement and self-sufficiency had been the first targets of the mobs, and that the roughest elements had rushed to take up arms and had beaten back the rioters. So to whom should blacks look in the future for leadership?

The immediate result was a tightened, self-imposed segregation by the black community. They withdrew their businesses and homes from downtown and established themselves along Auburn Avenue—“Sweet Auburn,” as it came to be called. Here black people could spend their whole lives in a black environment, rarely glimpsing a white face. Black institutions—churches, schools, businesses —grew strong, even if they lacked the resources of their white counterparts. Auburn was home to an economic cross section of people, from railroad porters to doctors, lawyers, college professors, and executives. Children, whether rich or poor, went to the same segregated schools. Today, Sweet Auburn is preserved as a historic district, with a variety of commercial buildings and residences dating back to the nineteenth century, including the old headquarters of Alonzo Herndon’s Atlanta Life Insurance Company—a classically inspired building fronted by imposing pilasters—and rows of turn-of-the-century houses in the gracious Queen Anne style. One of the anchors of the Auburn community was and is the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where in the early 190Os the pastor was the Reverend A. D. Williams. In 1929, just down the street from the church, at 501 Auburn, his grandson Martin Luther King, Jr., was born. King now lies buried in a marble tomb between the church and his birthplace.

More than a million people a year visit the King Center, and even more are expected during the Olympics. Dr. King’s crypt stands in the midst of a long reflecting pool. The words etched on the side seem to shout, breaking the somber silence of the memorial: “Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty I’m Free at Last.”

In a small museum adjacent to the pool, photographs and signs form a chronology of Dr. King’s life in the civil rights movement. Four cases display a few things he left behind: some clothing, his Nobel Peace Prize, the tape recorder Coretta Scott King used to take down his speeches in Montgomery, Alabama, the key to the hotel room where he was assassinated. At museums we are accustomed to poring over a trove of artifacts, the accumulated glory of a lifetime of achievement: swords and armor, sideboards aglitter with silver, battle relics, pearls of great price. There is none of that here, and that is the power of the place—the sense of a great invisible legacy that can’t be

displayed or contained but that is all around us.

In 1935, an editor from the Macmillan publishing Company, Harold Latham, stopped briefly in Atlanta on a scouting tour for new Southern authors. At a luncheon, he pestered a woman named Margaret Mitchell, a former newspaper writer, about a historical novel rumored to be in the works. Mitchell vehemently denied that the book existed. But that evening, just as Latham was about to leave his hotel, he received a call from Mitchell, who was waiting for him in the lobby. Latham found the author sitting on a couch, flanked and nearly dwarfed by two stacks of about 70 envelopes, containing the manuscript she had denied existed just a few hours earlier. “Take the damn thing,” she said to the startled editor, “before I change my mind.”

Change her mind she did, frantically cabling Latham the next day: SEND IT BACK. But it was too late. On the train out of Atlanta, Latham had already skimmed through part of the manuscript and realized that what he had in his hands was a masterpiece of popular fiction. The historian Henry Steele Commager, while acknowledging the book’s melodrama, sentimentality, and potboiler mechanics, concluded in a review: “it rises triumphantly over [its] material and becomes, if not a work of art, a dramatic reaction of life itself.” Indeed, for millions Gone With the Wind became the story of the South.

The original title of the book was The Road to Tara, and a museum of that name will soon pay tribute to Mitchell and her work. The house on Peachtree Street where Mitchell wrote the novel was a decaying, burned-out wreck until the Mercedes-Benz company volunteered to finance its restoration. Scheduled to open in June, the site will feature a reconstruction of the basement apartment (which Mitchell called “The Dump”) where the book was born. Memorabilia gathered from around the world—posters and stills from the movie, reproductions of the movie costumes, and a hundred GWTW dolls—will show the international impact of GWTW. What should have been the prime exhibit—the actual manuscript of the book—is gone. After Mitchell’s death her husband destroyed nearly all of it at her specific request, saving only a few pages as evidence of authorship. Those precious sheets reside permanently in an Atlanta bank vault.

Although it may seem hard to believe, Margaret Mitchell was something of a revisionist. She went beyond the moonbeams and magnolias view of the South to portray a tough-minded heroine locked in a desperate struggle for survival. In her book the South was not a stage for posturing cavaliers but an arena for the clashes of hard-handed, greedy men, who sometimes just didn’t give a damn.