Free Fizz by Tristan Donovan Page B

Chattahoochee River and entering the city. So they burned down one of the city’s two bridges and gathered at the remaining crossing to face the Northern forces. Just after nightfall the Battle of Columbus began with Pemberton’s cavalry among the Southern forces gathered for the last stand of the Confederacy. During the two-hour battle for the bridge, Pemberton was wounded: shot and slashed by a saber that sliced him open from abdomen to chest. Against the odds Pemberton survived the battle. The Confederacy did not. Ten days later the war was over.
    The South had been crushed. Many of its cities were in ruins and its people were defeated and malnourished. A sense of moroseness infected the defeated states and patent medicine sales boomed as citizens searched for nostrums capable of ridding them of the disease and deep depression that blighted daily life. This was especially true in Atlanta, which was particularly hard hit in the war. The city had formed in 1837 as Terminus, a collection of shanty homes, whorehouses, and saloons stuck at the southern end of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which stretched north to Chattanooga and was intended to be extended east to Augusta. By 1860 this dead-end hamlet had changed its name to Atlanta and become a railroad hub where nearly ten thousand people lived. But when General William Sherman of the Union army reached the city in November 1864 on his way to capture the port of Savannah, he ordered Atlanta to be leveled. As the general recalled in his memoirs when his forces finally left for Savannah, “Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.” Atlanta, however, would rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
    Instead of brooding on its destruction, Atlanta rebuilt itself with a new vigor, rallying around the vision of a New South as championed by Henry Grady, the editor of the
Atlanta Daily Herald
and, later, the
Atlanta Constitution.
Through his newspapers Grady pitched his vision of Atlanta as the place where the New South would be forged. “There was a South of slavery and secession; that South is dead,” he remarked in an 1866 speech. “There is a South of union and freedom; that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour…. From the ashes [General Sherman] left we have raised a brave and beautiful city; somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the brick and mortar of our homes and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory.”
    To illustrate the need for a new, industrial South he told the story of a poor Georgia farmer who, when he died, was buried in a coffin made in Cincinnati. The nails that sealed his coffin and the clothes he was buried in also originated from the factories of the North. So too his marble headstone, which came from Vermont, and the Pittsburgh-made shovel that dug his grave. All Georgia did, he noted, was provide a body and some cotton. Atlanta took Grady’s impassioned vision to heart and in the final decades of the 1800s turned itself into a boomtown. In 1870 there were just 2,200 residents. Ten years later it was a thriving city of 37,000 people. By 1900 there were 90,000 citizens living there. In just thirty years Atlanta went from smoking ashes to a modern city with paved streets, electric lights, streetcars and tall office blocks that cast long shadows over the churches that once dominated its skyline.
    At the center of this fast-growing metropolis were the patent medicine men. Postbellum Atlanta was the national capital of patent medicine, packing in more quacks per head than any other US city. And it was the city’s insatiable appetite for nostrums that drew Pemberton to its bright lights, dazzling energy, and potential for profit in 1869. Pemberton opened a drugstore in Kimball House, an upscale hotel with more than three hundred rooms and a steam-powered elevator. He hoped to find