“Let us give these southern fellows all the fighting they want and when they are tired we can tell them we are just warming to the work.” — Sherman to Grant, August 7, 1864

All the Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign from Peachtree Creek to the City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864

Savas Beatie, 2017
192 pp.; 212 images, 7 maps
ISBN: 978-1-61121-319-5
Click here to order

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About the Book: John Bell Hood brought a hang-dog look and a hard-fighting spirit to the Army of Tennessee. Once one of the ablest division commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia, circumstances placed him, by the spring of 1864, in the war’s Western Theater. Recently recovered from a grievous wounds sustained at Chickamauga, he suddenly found himself thrust into command of the Confederacy’s ill-starred army even as Federals pounded on the door of the Deep South’s greatest untouched city, Atlanta.

His predecessor, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, had failed to stop the advance of armies under Federal commander William T. Sherman, who had pushed and maneuvered his way from Chattanooga, Tennessee, right to Atlanta’s doorstep. Johnston had been able to do little to stop him.

The crisis could not have been more acute.

Hood, an aggressive risk-taker, threw his men into the fray with unprecedented vigor. Sherman welcomed it.

“We’ll give them all the fighting they want,” Sherman said.

He proved a man of his word.

In All the Fighting They Want, Georgia native Steve Davis, the world’s foremost authority on the Atlanta campaign, tells the tale of the last great struggle for the city. His Southern sensibility and his knowledge of the battle, accumulated over a lifetime of living on the ground, make this an indispensable addition to the acclaimed Emerging Civil War series.

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All the Fighting They Want includes:

  • Appendix A: Confederate Monuments in and around Atlanta by Gould Hagler
  • Appendix B: Civil War Collections at the Atlanta History Center by Gordon Jones
  • Appendix C: The Battle of Atlanta on Canvas: A Brief History of the Atlanta Cyclorama by Gordon Jones
  • Driving Tour
  • Order of Battle
  • Suggested Reading

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About the Author: Stephen Davis, longtime Atlantan, has been a Civil Warrior since the fourth grade. He served as Book Review Editor for Blue & Gray magazine for more than twenty years, and is the author of more than a hundred articles on the Civil War in both scholarly and popular journals. His book Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston and the Yankee Heavy Battalions, was published in 2001. He is also the author of What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta (2012), as well as a companion volume to this book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton Through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahooche River, May 5-July 18, 1864 (2016)