July 29th we marched back to Atlanta. August 31st we marched to Jonesboro and on September 1st we moved to the right, threw up temporary works and Hardee’s corps fought the Battle of Jonesboro. Hood’s and Stewart’s corps were at Atlanta, twenty miles away, and we were entirely unsupported. We fought all day against seven corps of Yankees. We were surrounded and fought in front and in the rear. Fought as General Cleburne always fought. The Yankees charged our company seven lines deep, but our thin line held firm until some of the boys happened to discover a line of Infantry charging in the rear. Then they began to waver. Our Lieutenant Commander Clay jumped on top of the breastworks, waved his gun, (the sixteen-shooter which the officers of our company carried instead of sabres,) and called to his men to stand their ground. He was on the breastworks but a few minutes when he fell, pierced through by one of the thousand bullets fired at him. As he fell he saw for the first time why his men wavered. He ordered a hasty retreat to the right, and although dreadfully wounded successfully threw the line of battle to the rear. He fell in my arms and I got him to an ambulance and sent him to a hospital. In Macon we had only one commissioned officer left, John R. Loftin.
We would have been eaten up entirely, but for the coming of night, which gave Hardee a chance to unite his corps and throw up intrenchments. He displayed fine generalship throughout this engagement. Hardee had been offered the command of the army in Tennessee before Hood took it but had replied: “General Johnston is the only man able to command this army, and I will not have it.” Here was another terrible defeat for the new leader. Our loss at Jonesboro was about 2,500 men. The Yanks put our captured men on the train and sent them back over the old route. The fort at Dalton was garrisoned by negro troops. A great number of these negroes were at the station when the prisoners arrived. They insulted our men, and tried to take them from the train, yelling, “No quarter, if we get you on the field.” If white troops had not come to protect them there would have been serious trouble.
Our corps camped on the Macon road. It was a dark night and was raining heavily. By the flashes of lightning we saw the train of army ambulances coming out of Atlanta, and we heard female voices singing Dixie and other Southern songs. These were brave women, non-combatants, driven from their homes by the infamous order of Sherman. They had no shelter, no provision and only the clothes they wore. Some bore nursing babes and one woman gave birth to a Dixie boy in the wagon train. Yet these glorious women would not show anguish or cry out to please the demon general. They shouted for Dixie and sang on their dreary ride. They went further South out of range of the beast of a general. He burned Atlanta and made war on women and children for the rest of the way on his infamous “march to the sea.” As long as he had Johnston to fight he had no time for his diabolical deeds.