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That was perhaps the most stupefying change of all. Almost as soon as the occupation began, a spirit of emancipation swept through the city. Atlanta was free, and neither Sherman's soldiers nor the city's formerly enslaved people wasted any time in demonstrating what that meant. Richards, for one, couldn't believe the "impudent airs" Atlanta's freed people put on in the face of their former masters. They "were all free and the Yankee soldiers don't fail to assure them of that fact," he wrote, noting that one freedwoman was "as independent as can be" and that two of the men he had enslaved had both escaped into the city. It was like that all over town. Atlanta, which weeks earlier had had thousands of enslaved people working on its defenses, was now a haven for freed people from across the region, with men and women pouring in from the surrounding countryside. As the dumbstruck Richards wrote, it was as if slavery had suddenly "vanished into air."

Despite Richards's apparent disbelief, slavery's demise hadn't been quite as sudden as he thought. If anything, it had been a slow process that had begun once Union armies had begun invading the South in the earliest days of the war; yet that, too, understates the complexity of what the process actually looked like on the ground, particularly in places still experiencing the vortex of war. James M. Wells, a US cavalryman with a taste for adventure, had caught a glimpse of how complex the process could be some two months before Atlanta's fall while retreating back to the city following a failed cavalry raid on targets in middle Georgia. He and his men were facing a tall task. Georgia's scorching summer heat was in full blaze. The men were separated from the main body of mounted horsemen, and their only instructions had been to escape back to Atlanta by whatever means necessary. Though they had covered some of the terrain before, the good news ended there. Not only were the roads humming with Confederate cavalry, their horses were tired, they would soon need food, and the army's lines around Atlanta remained many miles away.

Much to the benefit of Wells and his band, a group of enslaved women soon discovered the desperate cavalrymen and began acting as their guides. The women had no horses of their own, so the men rode while the women walked. The women guided them down creek beds and along footpaths so deep and dark that Wells likened riding along them to descending the depths of "some vast subterranean cavern." Oftentimes the glare of torches led the way, shining upon fords or foot trails that made the dense Georgia brush more easily passable, which must have added to the feeling Wells had while riding in the dark of the night. He couldn't help but appreciate the steely courage of the women, who navigated the "impenetrable darkness" and faced grave repercussions if caught by Confederates. Pretty soon, larger groups of enslaved people began following along, increasing the size of the band. The enslaved people were all "determined to flee the country with us," Wells remembered, though he left no indication that anyone ever did.

He didn't get the chance to find out. Not long after meeting the enslaved women, Wells broke from the group during a surprise shoot-out with Confederate cavalry and was later captured, making him one of the many prisoners of war who never made it back to Atlanta following an operation sometimes remembered as Sherman's "big raid." The original plan of attack was for two cavalry forces to swing around Atlanta in opposite directions. General Edward M. McCook's force of Union horsemen was to ride west while General George Stoneman's squad of cavalrymen was to ride east. The two were then supposed to join forces south of Atlanta at Lovejoy Station in an attempt to cripple Hood's last remaining supply line into the city. If successful, the two cavalry forces would ride on to Macon, liberate the Union soldiers held there, and then head for Andersonville Prison, the great gulag of the Confederacy, which held as many as thirty-three thousand Union prisoners and sat in the state's southwestern corner near the town of Americus.

The problem was that the operation had been a fiasco from the start. Stoneman ignored orders. Rather than linking up with McCook at Lovejoy Station, he bolted straight for Macon. That left Confederate cavalry free to consolidate around McCook's forces, leading to a standoff southwest of Atlanta near Newnan. McCook, caught off guard and exposed, had no choice but to retreat in a wild ride back to Atlanta that saw hundreds of Union cavalrymen either killed or captured. Stoneman, meanwhile, ran into trouble of his own just outside Macon. He encountered a large force of Confederate cavalry at Sunshine Church, and like McCook, he soon realized he was in trouble and ordered his men to make their own wild, lifesaving ride back to Atlanta, which was the situation Wells found himself in before being captured. But unlike McCook, who managed to escape capture, Stoneman did not. He and more than four hundred of his men, many of whom had been holding the line so others could escape, were taken captive, which put a final end of one of the most calamitous cavalry movements in the history of the war.

Nevertheless, despite being a stunning failure, the "big raid" was one of the first instances in which Sherman's mounted wings dug deep into Georgia countryside, carrying the war to communities well beyond Atlanta. For the unsuspecting, it was a wake-up call. A war that had once been distant and abstract was now up close and personal and looming all around. Militias took to arms, and whole communities stood guard.

Monday we begin the book Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future by Neil Shubin.