On the Road to Atlanta: Eating well on the Chattahoochee.

While writing about a minor action on the downstream end of the Chattahoochee River outside Atlanta in July 1864, I was struck by the diary of Thomas Hamilton Williams, a private in Company E of the 1st (6th) Tennessee Cavalry, CSA, who was engaged at Moore’s Bridge on July 13th, 1864.

Prior to that fight, he spent a pretty comfortable week along the Chattahoochee, though he did encounter some livestock:

Moore’s Bridge was “a covered structure, very well built, 480 feet long on two main spans.” It was constructed by a Free African American man, Horace King, described as a “noted bridge builder.” It was a toll bridge, built in partnership with two white men, James D. Moore and Charles Mabry. King lived on the west (north) bank of the river by the bridge, and served as the toll collector. The site was currently defended by the 1st Tennessee Cavalry, Ashby’s Brigade, of Humes’s Division. Thomas Williams, a private in Company E, noted that after crossing the Chattahoochee on July 4th, the regiment had seen relatively easy duty. They were initially assigned to defend “Aderholt Ferry” at the mouth of Sweetwater Creek a mile below Sandtown but moved to Campbelltown on the 6th. There, wrote Williams, he had “one of my big eating days . . . a hearty dinner—5 kinds of vegetables, ham, bacon, bread and batter cakes (first plate); 2nd plate—green apple pie with honey and buttermilk to wash it down.” After returning to camp he was delighted to “find a couple of fine blackberry pies awaiting my coming to be devoured. . . . A few friends pitch into them.” The next several days saw the 1st continue to shift downstream, moving at a leisurely pace, with plenty to eat and regular bathing in the river. The worst trouble Williams saw came on the 12th, when, “last night, hogs troubled me greatly. Tore down my ‘Shantee,’ ate my bacon and did all the mischief they could, and I determined to revenge myself,” killing “a shoat.”[1]

[1]“Moore’s Bridge Skirmish,” Georgia Civil War Commission Sign; Alleen Williams Carter, The Papers of John Bell Hamilton and Thomas Hamilton Williams, Master’s Thesis (Jacksonville, AL: Jacksonville State University, 1971), 135-36.