Gary Ecelbarger. The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010. 299 pgs.

Gary Ecelbarger’s 2010 volume The Day Dixie Died provides a detailed narrative of the July 22 Battle of Atlanta during Sherman’s summer 1864 Atlanta campaign. As a fine example of a microstudy, Ecelbarger’s narrative of the events of that sweltering and gory day reads like a drama at points, and is fascinating in its penchant for detail. Yet Ecelbarger argues that the Battle of Atlanta on the day of July 22 in particular was not simply fascinating in its tides and turns, but that the outcome of the battle as the dusts settled that day would alter the course of the Civil War as much as Antietam, Gettysburg, or Vicksburg. Ecelbarger bases this interpretation of the events of July 22, 1864, or “the day Dixie died” as he claims, on three critical arguments.

The least profound of these arguments is simply that the events of that day were bloodier than the other days of the later war in the west. The bloodiest battle of the last ten months of the war, as Ecelbarger claims, occurred outside of the Atlanta on July 22 as John Bell Hood’s Confederate Army of Tennessee viciously assaulted the Union Army of the Tennessee. One in six members of the each army was unable to report for duty the next morning, to the dismay of Confederate commanders, whose army was spent against a Union victory.

Ecelbarger’s more thoughtful argument rests on two derivative points. He claims that the day of July 22, which was but one of many days of a four-month campaign, was the turning point of the struggle for Atlanta. Though none realized the significance of that day, save John Bell Hood, as the author claims, it represented the cementing of the momentum of Sherman’s numerically superior army against Hood’s tired Confederate forces. After the sun rose the next morning, Hood’s men had been expended by the bloody Confederate attack the day before, during which upwards of ten-thousand men were killed (p.214). His men and resources now spent, Hood’s army was manhandled by Sherman’s until his victorious campaign was cemented at the Battle of Jonesboro in late August and early September of 1864, and the famous telegraph “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won” was sent by the Union general to Lincoln. That telegraph points to Ecelbarger’s most profound point – that the events of July 22, the turning point in the Atlantia Campaign, saved Lincoln’s 1864 presidential campaign, thus ensuring his reelection and the end of both slavery and the Confederacy. Ecelbarger argues that “The capture of Atlanta two months before the [1864 Presidential] election was tailor-made to boost Lincoln’s prospects (p.223)” for re-election and ensured the defeat of the Copperheads. Ecelbarger argues that had Atlanta not fallen when it did in 1864, than the good news that allowed Lincoln to win in his reelection campaign would have never arrived in the North. Without the fall of Atlanta due to the bloody combat of July 22, the 1864 Presidential Campaign and Lincoln’s war effort, and the entirety of American history might have been drastically different than reality.

Ecelbarger’s narrative is certainly exhaustive. He often expounds on the activities of individual regiments in his minute-by-minute analysis of the July 22 battle. His preference for details borders on the bewildering at several points in the narrative, but on the whole, Ecelbarger presents the story of the battle as just that – a story, and a thrilling and captivating one. The noblest characteristic of his account is his excellent description of the geography of a battlefield that no longer exists, as he mentions in his introduction. Ecelbarger provides intimate details about a landscape profoundly altered by history since 1864, and provides several excellent maps detailing military maneuvering and placement. Ecelbarger’s history is an intensely-detailed microstudy that metaphorically drops the reader in the thick of one particularly grueling eight-hour day of Civil War combat that is accessibly to Civil War hobbyists, with broader implications that scholars will value.

-Jonathan Jones