At his headquarters seven miles from the center of Atlanta, Gen. Henry W. Slocum was startled by a series of violent explosions during the evening of September 1, 1864, and had no idea what had happened within the besieged railroad center. Before daylight on the following morning, he dispatched Capt. Henry M. Scott and a small body of cavalry into the suburbs to investigate. Scott reported to his immediate superior, Gen. W. T. Ward: "Soon after passing through the works formerly occupied by our army a body of men was observed coming out of the city. Advancing rapidly toward them, I discovered that they were citizens bearing a flag of truce. Going forward, I asked them what proposition they had to make. One of them then made himself known as the mayor, and said he had come to surrender the city."1
The explosions, Mayor James Calhoun explained, were caused by the destruction of a trainload of munitions—twenty-eight cars in all—that had been fired by Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood's engineers as the Rebels were abandoning Atlanta. Because he was then about twenty miles south of the city, Union Gen. William T. Sherman, the architect of this Federal incursion into Georgia, knew nothing of the pullout by the Southern army he had pushed southward from Chattanooga during weeks of hard fighting.
Calhoun hastily wrote a note to the Federal commander, saying, "The fortunes of war have placed the city of Atlanta in your hands, and as Mayor of the city, I ask protection to non-combatants and private property." Scott, Capt. A. W. Tibbetts, and Lt. J. P. Thompson signed the document to attest to the authenticity of the surrender that involved an estimated twenty-five thousand residents and refugees.