A Union lieutenant's escape from Andersonville to Atlanta, part two

A Union lieutenant escaped from the Andersonville prison camp, hid for weeks among Georgia farms while Sherman's army took Atlanta, was shot by two deserters, and was finally carried into the city. The National Park Service's Garfield National Historic Site tells the end of the escape of Lt. George Bailey in this second part of a two-part account, written by a park guide for the site's Garfield Observer. It draws on Bailey's own memoir, "A Private Chapter of the War."

General William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who captured Atlanta and made Georgia "howl" on his March to the Sea. Library of Congress.

August and September: waiting on the flanks

Bailey stayed at a plantation for most of August. A companion left after about two weeks, guided by an escaped enslaved man. When that guide returned, Bailey decided to try to reach the Union rear by going east, past the Union left, and then north to a railroad station eight miles away. Sherman, though, had moved north and west and then swung wide around the west side of Atlanta to cut the railroad south of the city, and local reports said the Federals were retreating to Chattanooga. Bailey fell back to the farm of a poor white family that worked land they did not own, arriving the night of August 31 to September 1, and returned to the plantation on September 9.

On September 10 stragglers reported that the Confederate army had fallen back to Jonesboro, twelve miles east, and that Sherman was in Atlanta. Bailey decided the plantation was no place for him. Along the way he and his guide met an enslaved couple, and the man had a carbine taken from a drowned Union soldier. Bailey persuaded him that holding it was dangerous and that, as Union property, it should go to Bailey. It was the first time since his capture on July 22 that Bailey was armed.

October: the last miles

On October 7 Bailey left the farm with his guide, aiming for the railroad at Lithonia, and was told that Federal forces were at Decatur but that Texas Rangers were roaming the area for deserters and escaped slaves. After midnight they reached the railroad just west of Lithonia, fifteen miles from Decatur. Daylight found them in Union fortifications a quarter mile east of Decatur, but the works were vacated, with campfires still smoking. In his memoir Bailey wrote that he was despondent, hungry and exhausted.

That day two armed deserters, one in butternut and one in blue, took Bailey captive and disarmed him, making clear they would not treat him as a prisoner of war. Late in the afternoon one told him it was as good a place to die as any. Bailey ran. Three shots were fired in quick succession, and a fourth later. The second hit his right shoulder, passed through the shoulder blade and entered a lung, but he got up and ran on, his guide close behind. Believing himself mortally wounded, Bailey asked to be taken to a lighted farmhouse he saw at sunset.

A widow and her sister there took him in and nursed him through the night. The guide went to find Federal forces, and by midday on October 9 about 150 Federal troops arrived with an ambulance and a surgeon, and the guide was with them. The column passed through Decatur and went six miles to Atlanta, now under the Union flag, past the battlefield of July 22 where Bailey had been captured. He wrote that the flag had never looked so bright.

The copy of Bailey's "A Private Chapter of the War" sent by the author to James A. Garfield, then the Republican presidential candidate and a Union veteran. NPS photo.

What Bailey concluded

A month later he was home in St. Louis, and fifteen years after that he wrote the account, adding a list of conclusions. In his view:

• the whole South was not in sympathy with the war, and many poor Southerners were victims of circumstance under the control of wealth rather than real enemies of the government;
• Black Southerners, as a group, were loyal to the Union and willing to help straggling Union soldiers, often at night and at some cost to themselves;
• a whole locality should not be condemned for the acts of a few, since the place that produces outlaws may also produce people who save the wounded;
• nobility of soul can rise above sectional prejudice;
• some real enemies of the government had stayed in the rear to avoid the dangers at the front, and added murder to treason.

He dedicated the memoir to the widow who nursed him, thanking her for rising above surrounding prejudice. The guide asks why Bailey sent a copy to Garfield: out of fellow-veteran feeling, or hoping the conclusions would matter in the presidential campaign. It is not known whether Garfield read it. The post says Bailey's chapter taught him things he thought worth sharing, and that they remain relevant.

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "A Private Chapter of the War, Part II," by Joan Kapsch, park guide, May 2016, for the Garfield Observer: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-private-chapter-of-the-war-part-ii.htm. Bailey's memoir is quoted only in paraphrase. Two pictures credited to Wikipedia and to a private group are left out, and the names of the guide, the widow and a fellow escapee are omitted.
• National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.