flag during the jubilee campaign in Chattanooga his audience rose and, led by a choir, "sang 'Hold the Fort' with great spirit."[9]
The Battle of Allatoona was a brief but desperate struggle. With the retreat of the Confederates on the afternoon of 5 October it was accounted a Union victory, and Corse, summoning what humility he could, signaled Sherman: "I am short a cheek bone and one ear, but am able to whip all hell yet."[10] It is said, however, that in after years "no one dared twit" Corse "because his famous cheekbone and one ear were not missing, as his immortal signals had indicated in more strenuous times."[11] Major General Samuel G. French, Corse's opposite number at Allatoona, gave vent in his memoirs to an abiding frustration by denouncing both General Hood, who was his superior, and his Union opponent with fine impartiality. He was so bitter, in fact, that his publishers made him tone down his manuscript before publication because they were "ashamed of the language used" and fearful of seventeen possibly libelous passages.[12]
Sherman held Allatoona up to his armies as a model defense of a fortified place,[13] and the signaling between Kennesaw Mountain and Allatoona went into Signal Corps annals as perhaps the most famous of all Civil War signaling. Subsequently, Albert James Myer, the Army's first signal officer, was made a brigadier general by brevet "for distinguished service in organizing, instructing and commanding the Signal Corps . . . and for its especial service on October 5, 1864," that is, for its service at Allatoona, even though by the time of the battle Myer's appointment as colonel and chief signal officer had been revoked because of a dispute with the Secretary of War.[14] Frank A. West, a signalman at Allatoona, was so impressed with what happened there that he is said to have named a son Allatoona Pass West.
"Hold the Fort" was not the first artistic by-product of the Battle of Allatoona, but it was the only one that was to attain anything approximating folk status. It was preceded in 1866 by Caroline Stickney's long narrative poem, "The Flag that Talks," of which the following are representative verses:
O Talking Flag, thy worth if ever proving,
We hailed the distant glass;
Atlanta heard: "The foe at Acworth, moving
On Allatoona Pass."
Quick came the answer—"Signal for assistance
To General Corse at Rome;
Let the Pass garrison show firm resistance
Till reinforcements come—"[15]
