Reading 3 of 7 free1776 Club · all 7 storiesMonday, August 31
From the desk
Start with 1864: Sherman needed one more rail cut to force Atlanta's fall, and Jonesborough sat on it. Hardee's attack broke against Union lines, and that night Hood, still guarding Atlanta, pulled half the defenders away, leaving 20,000 Confederates to face nearly 20,000 Federals the next morning. Worth a longer look: 1814, when Peter Parker's night landing at Caulk's Field walked his men across a moonlit field into Maryland militia fire, and he bled out in minutes. The Charleston earthquake fills out the day, a city that had never felt a real tremor, shaking for months.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1864Featured · This day in history
South of Atlanta, Federal troops crack Hardee's line at Jonesborough
Sherman needed one more railroad cut to force Atlanta's evacuation, the Macon and Western, and Jonesborough sat astride it. On August 31, 1864, Confederate troops under William J. Hardee attacked converging Union forces south of the city and were thrown back with heavy losses; though the full weight of five Union corps did not converge on Jonesborough until the second day, September 1. That evening Hood, still convinced Atlanta needed defending, ordered half of Hardee's force back north, leaving roughly 20,000 Confederates to hold a line facing nearly 20,000 Federals with more in reserve. It was the last major fight of the campaign for Atlanta.
Atlanta's fall two days later gave Lincoln the battlefield win his 1864 reelection campaign badly needed, reversing Northern war weariness that had Democrats openly courting a negotiated peace. Jonesborough rarely appears alongside Gettysburg or Vicksburg in popular memory, even though it opened the door to Atlanta's fall.
Did you know
QWhy did a Confederate general's own soldiers go slack-faced when told to fix bayonets at Jonesborough?
Brigade commander Arthur Middleton Manigault noted that when his men were informed they would be attacking with bayonets fixed, as Hardee had specifically instructed his generals to remind them, the troops reacted with visible apathy rather than the fighting spirit officers expected. Weeks of marching, entrenching, and repeated bloody assaults during the Atlanta Campaign had worn the army down long before August 31 arrived. Manigault's observation stands out because it came from inside the ranks moments before the attack, not from a later report explaining failure. His men still went forward, but the exhaustion showing on their faces before a single shot was fired signaled the exhaustion that would cost Lee's corps dearly that day.
QHow did a premature order from General Lee turn part of the Confederate line into a one-sided slaughter?
Stephen D. Lee mistook the sound of Patrick Cleburne's skirmishers, who had gone into action roughly ten minutes after Hardee's artillery opened fire at 3 pm, for the actual signal to launch his corps' main assault. Acting on that mistaken cue, Lee sent his troops forward well ahead of schedule, and his first line crashed into Hazen's division after overrunning the Union picket lines, only to be stopped cold by concentrated rifle and artillery fire. The second line advanced right behind it and met the identical fate. Zachariah Deas' brigade broke and fled the field outright, a collapse rarely seen even in a campaign as grinding as this one.
QWhat did Confederate cavalry manage to seize from Kilpatrick's troopers before losing it right back?
During Mark Lowrey's division's running fight against Judson Kilpatrick's dismounted cavalry, the Confederates captured two Union guns and forced Kilpatrick's men to retreat across Anthony's Bridge, a rare tactical win in an otherwise disastrous day for Hardee's attackers. The advantage didn't last. Lowrey pressed the pursuit across the Flint River, but Giles A. Smith's division of the XVII Corps met the advance on the far bank, halted it, and recaptured both guns. The two artillery pieces changed hands twice within the span of a single running engagement along the riverbank.
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1814military
Under a full moon, Maryland militia kill the British captain leading a night raid
Less than a week after British troops burned Washington, Captain Sir Peter Parker led a Royal Navy landing party ashore on Maryland's Eastern Shore, hoping to draw American forces away from Baltimore. Near midnight on August 31, 1814, his men advanced across an open field at Caulk's Field under a full moon that lit them up for the waiting militia. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Reed's Maryland troops, holding the high ground, drove the British back with three of their own wounded against 41 British casualties. Parker was shot through the thigh and died within minutes. His men retreated to their ships.
Caulk's Field never touched Baltimore's defense directly, but it gave Maryland militia proof, days before Fort McHenry, that citizen soldiers could stand against British regulars and win. That confidence carried into the fight for Baltimore itself, where militia holding ground against a professional force produced the flag over Fort McHenry and the anthem that followed.
Did you know
QHow much higher were British losses at Caulk's Field compared to the Americans?
The mismatch was stark: three American militiamen wounded against 41 British casualties, a ratio of better than thirteen to one. No Americans were killed outright. The lopsided count is part of why Lieutenant Colonel Philip Reed's stand became a point of pride for Maryland militia so soon before the defense of Baltimore. For a force made up largely of citizen soldiers rather than regulars, holding a fixed position against a Royal Navy landing party and inflicting that kind of disparity was an unusual result this late in the war. By 1814 British veterans fresh from fighting Napoleon made up much of the invading force in the Chesapeake.
QWhat went wrong for the British after they briefly captured an American cannon on the high ground?
British soldiers pushed onto the militia's position and got their hands on one of the American guns, a moment that could have broken Reed's line entirely. Instead, American pressure forced them off the captured cannon before they could turn it or haul it away. That was as far as the British got that night. Losing the gun cost the attackers momentum at the exact moment their commander was still alive to press the advantage, and the reversal set up the collapse that followed once Parker went down minutes later.
QWhy was Robert Ross's army even available to raid Maryland's Eastern Shore in the first place?
Ross's troops were combat veterans freed up by Napoleon's abdication in April 1814, which ended the Peninsular War and let Britain redirect soldiers who had spent years fighting the French in Spain and Portugal. London sent them to Bermuda specifically to punish American raids along Lake Erie's north shore, and from there the force built into the wider Chesapeake campaign that produced Bladensburg, the burning of Washington, and the raid on Alexandria. Parker's diversion at Caulk's Field was a small offshoot of that much larger repositioning of British military power once the European war no longer demanded it.
1886tragedy
The ground rolls like an awful roar; Charleston is shaking apart
Charleston, South Carolina, had never recorded a significant earthquake before that August night in 1886. At 9:50 p.m. the ground shook for 45 seconds, then again ten minutes later, then seven more times before the following evening. The quake, later estimated at magnitude 6.9 to 7.3, killed 60 people and wrecked 2,000 buildings, with damage put at $5 to $6 million. Sand boiled up through liquefied soil. Rail lines snapped and dams broke, flooding the farms and roads around the city.
Charleston sits on a hidden fault system that produced one of the East Coast's most damaging earthquakes, and 1886 remains the benchmark disaster planners still use. A modern repeat in the same spot is projected to cost South Carolina roughly $20 billion and claim 900 lives, a projection that now shapes the state's disaster planning. The quake forced American cities on supposedly stable ground to plan for risk they could not see coming.
Did you know
QHow far did people actually feel the Charleston earthquake travel?
Far past the Southeast. The shaking registered as far north as Boston and as far northwest as Chicago and Milwaukee, where plaster fell from upper-floor ceilings. It reached west to New Orleans and crossed open water to be felt in Cuba and Bermuda. Structural damage, not just a felt tremor, showed up several hundred miles out, in central Alabama, central Ohio, eastern Kentucky, southern Virginia, and western West Virginia. The felt area stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes to the Caribbean.
QWhat physical proof did scientists find of the ground actually moving sideways?
A century after the quake, researchers Roger Bilham and Susan Hough went looking for hard evidence in old survey photographs and mapping projects from 1884 to 1919. Along the South Carolina Railroad southeast of Summerville, they measured a right-lateral offset in the track of about 14.76 feet, plus a yard of vertical uplift. Witnesses in 1886 had already described the rail bed as being forced to the right; the later measurement confirmed it and let researchers pin the rupture to the Summerville Fault and estimate its length at roughly 17 miles.
QWhy do wood-frame houses tell a different damage story than downtown Charleston's brick buildings?
The ground itself mattered as much as the building material. Wood-frame houses built on made, or filled, ground suffered damage 14 percent of the time, compared with just 0.5 percent for identical wood-frame houses on solid ground, a 28-fold difference tied entirely to soil. Yet the city's most visibly destroyed structures were its brick commercial buildings, which failed for a different reason: age, unreinforced masonry, and tops disproportionately heavy compared to their bases. Soil decided how houses fared. Age and top-heavy brick decided how downtown fared.
