The Union got to Jonesborough first. Major General Oliver O. Howard (North), commanding the Army of the Tennessee, one of Sherman’s three armies, reached the town ahead of the Confederates and put his men to work doing the single most important thing infantry could do in this war: digging. Entrenchment meant throwing up dirt into a defensive line, a rampart with a trench behind it, so that the men inside fight from cover while anyone who comes at them has to cross open ground. The lay of the land matters for everything that follows: Atlanta sits to the north; Jonesborough and its railroad run north to south below it; and the Flint River runs just to the west of the town. The Union army had crossed the Flint from the west to reach Jonesborough, so the Federals faced east and the Confederate attacks would come at them from that side. Howard dug in on the approaches near the river. By the time the Confederates arrived, the Federals were behind dirt and waiting.

The Confederates came up through the morning of August 31, Hardee’s (South) corps by dawn, Lee’s (South) by afternoon, and around three in the afternoon their attack opened: artillery first, then the infantry rolling forward. Lee’s corps struck the entrenched Union line and, for a moment, got somewhere, overrunning the Union picket line (the thin screen of soldiers thrown out ahead of the main line). And then it ran into the dirt. The Federals behind their entrenchments poured rifle and artillery fire into the charging ranks, and the attack came apart against the works the way attacks against works came apart all through this war.

Then the human heart of the first day, and it is documented. The Confederate infantry, having seen what one charge across that open ground cost, would not make a second one. Officers urged them forward; the men refused to renew the charge. This was an army that had been bled white over four months of retreat and slaughter, and the rank and file had learned, in their bones, the price of running at entrenched men with rifles. They had paid it once. They would not pay it again, whatever the order.

Off on the Confederate left the attack unraveled even faster. Brigadier General Mark Lowrey’s (South) division, swinging wide, ran into a wall of fire from the dismounted cavalry of Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick (North), troopers fighting on foot with Spencer repeating rifles, lever-action weapons that fired several rounds before reloading where an ordinary rifle-musket fired one, so that a thin line of them threw out a volume of fire far beyond their numbers. Staggered by it, Lowrey’s men veered off west, crossed the Flint River, and were halted on the far bank by a Union division of the XVII Corps, the whole left wing of the attack wasted, chasing the wrong direction across a river.

By evening it was finished. Hardee (South) called off further assaults. The Confederate attack of August 31 had been, in the sources’ word, easily repulsed. The Union lost somewhere around 175 men killed and wounded for the whole day. The Confederates lost on the order of 1,700 to 2,200. Lee (South) alone estimated roughly 1,300 casualties in his corps, with Hardee’s corps losing several hundred more on top of that. That is something close to a ten-to-one exchange, the economics of the Civil War in a single afternoon, the cost of throwing flesh at fortifications, paid out at Jonesborough the same way it was paid at a hundred other earthwork lines.

That night Hood (South), still inside Atlanta and now afraid that Sherman might be massing to assault the city itself, made a phantom-haunted decision: around two in the morning he recalled Lee’s corps (South) from Jonesborough back to Atlanta. The threat to Atlanta was never a frontal assault. It was the railroad, and the order stripped Hardee of half his force just as the real crisis arrived. The real crisis had already happened, a few miles to the south, that very afternoon, and no one in Atlanta knew it yet.

While the attack out front was being shredded against the entrenchments, the corps of Major General John M. Schofield (North) and Major General David S. Stanley (North) reached the Macon & Western south of the fighting and tore up the track, ripping out the rails so no train could run. The last open artery into Atlanta was severed, the city could no longer be fed or held, and Atlanta was already lost, hours before its defenders had any idea. Hardee was now to hold the field alone the next day with barely half an army.