Atlanta, Georgia (Location Key)

The original name of Atlanta was 'Terminus,' because it was the end of the railway that was built in the 1830s to link coastal Georgia to the U.S. interior. By the time of the Civil War it was called Atlanta, and was one of the South's great railroad centers. As part of his March to the Sea, Union General Sherman led the campaign against Atlanta that took place during the summer of 1864, which ended when Confederate forces under General Johnston finally withdrew from the city on September 2nd; according to The Reivers, General Compson fought in this campaign "not too unsuccessfully as a brigadier" (20). Earlier, in a passage in "Raid" that Faulkner added when he included the story as a chapter in The Unvanquished, Drusilla tells Bayard and Ringo a Civil War story that begins with a group of Confederate soldiers "slipping into the roundhouse" at a railroad center in Atlanta in order to liberate a locomotive from the Yankees. The story is based on a historical event, though it takes great liberties with history - "Raid" takes place before the Union Army captures Atlanta, and in the original event Faulkner is borrowing it's the Confederates who chase the Yankees, not the other way round.