James Calhoun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article describes an Atlanta, GA, mayor. A different James Calhoun (1743–1816) was a mayor of Baltimore, MD

James Calhoun

James M. Calhoun (February 12, 1811 – October 1, 1875) was mayor of Atlanta, Georgia during the Civil War.

Calhoun was born in South Carolina (his father was a cousin of John C. Calhoun) and his parents died when he was 18. He moved to Decatur, Georgia, to live with his older brother Ezkiel N. Calhoun who was a lawyer. He began studying law in 1831 and passed the bar February 22, 1832. Politically, Calhoun was a Whig in a largely Democratic district but was elected to the Georgia General Assembly in 1837 from DeKalb County, the State Senate in 1851 and the next year moved to Atlanta, where ten years later he served four one-year terms as its mayor.

In 1863, he commissioned a volunteer militia to defend Atlanta. When Union troops under the command of William T. Sherman drew near during the Atlanta campaign, much of the population of Atlanta, including Calhoun's wife and children, fled the city, reducing the population of Atlanta from around 22,000 to less than 3,000 when the Confederate Army of Tennessee retreated from the city on September 1, 1864.

Calhoun surrendered the city on September 2, 1864, writing, ""Sir: The fortune of war has placed Atlanta in your hands. As mayor of the city I ask protection of non-combatants and private property." A marker now stands at the corner of Peachtree Street and Alabama Street indicating where the surrender took place. Sherman ordered the evacuation of the remaining civilian population of Atlanta on September 7, 1864. Calhoun and the city council protested this order, claiming that most of those who had not fled could not leave on account of their age, sickness, pregnancy, or destitude. In response, Sherman wrote "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. . . We don't want your Negroes, or your horses, or your lands, or any thing you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and if it involved the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it." Sherman's troops occupied the city for two months and burned much of it on November 15, 1864, in preparation for the March to the Sea.

Calhoun is buried in Oakland Cemetery. His son, William Lowndes Calhoun, served as Atlanta's mayor in the 1870s.