“Retreating Confederate troops burned as much as General Billy’s boys did.”
Please state source of this statement
Read any major work on the Battle of Atlanta.
Confederate forces set fire to stores that they didn’t have transport to move in order to deny it to the Union forces (Standard Operating Procedure!). What’s unclear is if it spread into the city proper. Some historians say it did some say it didn’t, but clearly Sherman’s troops set their own fires also. The likely explanation is both contributed, one deliberately & one accidently.
You think it would be wise to leave all that cotton for the Yanks? Fire suppression being what it was in the day, there was certainly a lot of collateral damage from those fires. Read “Sherman’s March. “