From Western Deserts to Carolina Swamps: A Civil War Soldier's Journals and Letters Home

6: Rome, Georgia, and the Battle of Allatoona, May 23–November 9, 1864

90 CHAPTER SIX Rome, Georgia, and the Battle of Allatoona, May 23–November 9, 1864 L ewis Roe’s brigade did indeed relieve Brevet Major General Jefferson Davis’s 2nd Division, 14th Army CorpsatRome,Georgia,andfromthenuntilNovember served as the garrison at this post. The 1860 Census had recorded 4,010 residents at Rome, nearly half of them slaves. Although the numbers made Rome the second-largest city in northern Georgia (Atlanta was the largest), by comparison it had less than one-third the population of Quincy, the county seat of Roe’s home county in Illinois. Other communities in this part of Georgia were much smaller.1 In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Rome prospered from a combination of trade, commerce, and manufacturing. Numerous farms produced cotton, corn, wheat, tobacco, and other consumables, as Yankee foragers soon discovered. The city itself boasted a number of large dry-goods stores and other establishments, while gracious homes of brick and frame construction lined the streets. On February 14, 1860, the city’s streets and stores were lighted with gas for the first time. As early as 1849 the Rome Railroad spur had linked Rome with the main Western & Atlantic Railroad at Kingston, Georgia. Steam-powered machinery at the Nonpareil Mills ground out an abundance of flour and meal while the Noble Brothers Foundry, opened in 1855, manufactured machinery of every kind, using iron from the company’s furnaces near Cedar Bluff, Alabama. The local newspaper claimed 300,000 pounds of castings and almost thrice that amount of pig iron transported over the Rome Railroad in the year prior to July 1, 1860.2 The town at this period was confined to the peninsula between the Oostanaula and Etowah Rivers. Rome, Georgia, and the Battle of Allatoona 91 In the first year of the Civil War, Rome and Floyd County enlisted fifteen companies of soldiers and sent them off to join the fighting.3 Rome began to turn out war materials for the as-yet distant battlefields. Through 1862, the Noble Brothers Foundry cast both bronze and iron field guns and delivered fifty-eight field pieces to the Confederate government , not counting six eight-inch siege howitzers cast for the State of Georgia. The Noble firm produced an estimated eighty-five pieces, but difficulties with obtaining materials, complaints of faulty castings, and disputes with the government ended the casting of cannons by 1863. A fire had burned the Noble Brothers gun carriage department as Map 6. Rome, Ga., and vicinity, January 1864. U.S. National Archives, RG-77, CWMF N-38. 92 Chapter Six well. Other small firms in Rome contracted to make cartridge boxes, haversacks, sword belts, and even buckets.4 A Soldiers’ Aid Society enrolled hundreds of local women at the beginning of the war. Early in 1862, community leaders began to promote interest in the hospital situation, which initially led to citizens opening their homes to care for sick and wounded soldiers. The homehospital program expanded until December, when Confederate medical authorities established five hospitals at Rome. These operated for about one year, until a scarcity of supplies and the threat posed by the Union victory at Chattanooga in late November led to the last hospital vacating Rome on December 8, 1863.5 Just once in the first three years of the war did fighting threaten Rome itself. Union colonel Abel Streight led four regiments of mounted infantry, about 1,600 men including his own 51st Indiana Volunteers, on a poorly planned raid eastward from Tuscumbia, Alabama. As the brigade marched across northern Alabama, it attracted rebel Col. Philip Roddey and his brigade and then Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry. They caught up with Streight on April 28, 1863. From their first action at Town Creek, east of Tuscumbia, Streight and Forrest fought a running series of ambushes, skirmishes, rearguard actions, and small-scale battles as Streight’s brigade pushed east. After five days of near continuous fighting, Streight surrendered his Figure 15. The Noble Brothers Foundry & Machine Works, Rome, Ga. From George Magruder Battey Jr., A History of Rome and Floyd County (1969) [1922], p. 451. Rome, Georgia, and the Battle of Allatoona 93 1,466 worn-out troopers to Forrest at Lawrence’s Spring, about twentyfour miles west of Rome. Forrest paraded his captives through Rome, where the people reviled the Yankees and gave the southern cavalrymen a hero’s welcome...