Jonesborough cut the last railroad into Atlanta and forced Hood (South) to abandon the city the night of September 1; Atlanta fell on September 2. It was the decisive, climactic battle of the Atlanta Campaign, and, by way of the election it helped decide, one of the most politically consequential battles of the entire war.

The strategic payoff was enormous. Atlanta was the Confederacy’s arsenal and rail heart in the Western theater, and its loss was a wound the South could not close. With the city taken, Sherman rested his armies, burned Atlanta’s war infrastructure, and in November set out from its ruins on the March to the Sea, the long destructive sweep across Georgia to Savannah that cut the Confederacy’s heart out and broke the will of the country behind the lines. Jonesborough was the hinge that opened that door.

The deepest meaning of the battle is not on the railroad and not even in the election returns. It is on the roads south of Atlanta, in the months Jonesborough set in motion, and it answers the question this story opened with: what these two armies were really fighting over.

From the moment Sherman’s columns moved through Georgia, enslaved people freed themselves by the thousands. They walked off the plantations that claimed to own them and into the Union columns, arriving day and night, as whole families and as lone escapees, a caravan of self-emancipated people moving with the army. And they did not merely follow; they helped. They guided the troops down hidden paths, pointed out hidden stores of food and forage, and gave Union scouts the military intelligence of people who knew the country better than any map. This was the war’s purpose walking on its own legs down the roads below Atlanta, what historians now call the largest emancipation event in United States history, the thing the fall of Atlanta set up. The railroad was the object. This was the reason: people turning the war into their own freedom, in real time, by the thousands.

And then there is the documented horror that ties the whole thing into a single human knot. The Union general whose corps broke Hardee’s line and won this battle was Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis (North) of the XIV Corps. Three months after Jonesborough, on December 9, 1864, during the March to the Sea, that same general did one of the cruelest things any Union officer did in the entire campaign. His column reached Ebenezer Creek, a deep stream he crossed on a pontoon bridge, a temporary floating bridge of boats. Hundreds of Black refugees, the self-freed people following his army toward safety, were close behind. To be rid of them, Davis ordered the pontoon bridge pulled up the moment his soldiers were across, before the refugees could cross. Trapped between the deep water in front and Confederate cavalry closing from behind, men, women, and children plunged into the creek, and many drowned.

The man who won the city that decided emancipation’s political fate also committed one of the march’s most monstrous acts against the very people the war was freeing. The same officer, the same campaign, the freedom and the cruelty bound together in one man on one stretch of Georgia ground. Jonesborough took the city, the city turned the election, the election guaranteed the end of slavery, and the general who broke the line at Jonesborough left hundreds of the freed to drown three months later. The cause of the war was slavery and its ending; the proof of the cause was the thousands walking themselves free on the roads Jonesborough opened; and the warning against any comfortable story about it is Ebenezer Creek.