Sherman orders every civilian out of Atlanta
Atlanta had surrendered on September 2, its mayor handing the city to Union troops after a four-month siege. On September 7, 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the entire civilian population removed from the city he now occupied. No family was permitted to remain; the army needed the city emptied and secured before winter operations. The order emptied a city that had numbered over nine thousand people in 1860; wartime figures for September 1864 are not documented.
Sherman's order previewed the total-war logic he would apply across Georgia that winter: civilians living inside a supply hub were treated as part of the target, not as people to be spared. News of Atlanta's fall and the emptying that followed reached Northern newspapers weeks before the 1864 election, giving Lincoln's campaign the battlefield win it badly needed.
