Sherman's March to the Sea

Sherman's March to the Sea (1864–65).After capturing Atlanta in September 1864, a victory that guaranteed the reelection of Abraham Lincoln and the continuation of the Civil War, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Union commander in the west, turned his thoughts to the most direct assault he could imagine on the heart of the Confederacy, one that targeted Southern morale. Despite some misgivings on the part of Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the overall Union commander and Sherman's closest friend, Sherman decided to send a blocking force under George H. Thomas to stop Confederate moves northward. Breaking his lines of communication, he would fan out his army and set off for Savannah, Georgia, on a giant raid that became known as the march to the sea, carving a wide swath through the Georgia countryside on his way.

Uniquely among Union generals, Sherman had the intellectual and emotional capacity to understand psychological warfare, a war of mass civilian terror. He was quite explicit about the deeper meanings of his march even before he started. “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms,” he wrote to one associate, while adding to another, “I am going into the very bowels of the Confederacy, and will leave a trail that will be recognized fifty years hence.” In a cooler and more analytic vein, Sherman also recognized that as the South lacked a military force to oppose his destruction of its infrastructure and agricultural supplies, his victory would be “proof positive” to all Southerners and to the world that the North had an overwhelming power that the South could not resist. “This may not be war, but rather statesmanship,” Sherman concluded, thus making his own political analysis of war. If civilian morale crumbled, so would the Southern army and state.

In their march of 285 miles, which lasted 5 weeks, Sherman's army of 60,000 men cut a swath of between 20 and 60 miles through Georgia, destroying fences and crops, killing livestock, burning barns and factories as well as some houses, particularly those deserted by the planter class. It must be emphasized that Sherman's forces refrained from raping white women and from killing civilians. Although many historians have rather carelessly called Sherman's campaign total war, it never became genocidal, nor had Sherman intended it to become so. Such limits were, of course, of scant comfort to the impoverished and malnourished civilians Sherman's army left in its wake.

On 22 December 1864, the day after the Confederate garrison of 10,000 had escaped the city, Sherman's army marched into Savannah on the sea, which Sherman announced to Lincoln and to the Union with his usual rhetorical vivacity: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” A week earlier, George H. Thomas's force had destroyed John Bell Hood's Confederate army at Nashville, triumphantly completing the other half of Sherman's post‐Atlanta strategy. As Grant's Army of the Potomac was bogged down in trench warfare before Petersburg, Virginia, it was the Christmas victories of Thomas and Sherman that lifted Union spirits.

On 1 February 1865, Sherman's army set off on its even longer sequel to the march to the sea, a campaign of over 400 miles up through the Carolinas, to come up behind Lee's army for one last, climactic battle if it was needed. As much of South Carolina was a swamp during winter, this part of Sherman's march was more an engineering than a fighting marvel: his troops cut down trees to make roads, bridges, and causeways at a pace of ten miles per day. Incapable of opposing Sherman militarily, Confederates could only watch in horror as Sherman's troops laid waste to the countryside at an even greater level of intensity than they had evinced in Georgia. Now almost all civilian homes were destroyed, and several cities were burned, including Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, although Confederates began the blaze by burning cotton bales in the street before departing. Many of Sherman's men broke ranks and joined in a night of burning and looting before they were disciplined; other Union troops extinguished the flames the next day. At Columbia, Sherman's men reached an apotheosis of destructiveness.

Sherman had realized the potential for terror his army would bring to bear on the state that was the cradle of the Confederacy. “The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance on South Carolina,” he had written on Christmas Eve, 1864. “I almost tremble at her fate but feel she deserves all that seems in store for her.” Sherman's men—his “bummers,” as they styled themselves—shared in this contempt for Confederates, especially those of the South Carolina gentry. “Nearly every man in Sherman's army say they are ready for destroying everything in South Carolina,” one private wrote home from Savannah before the campaign resumed, while another confirmed after they had finished that “in South Carolina, there was no restraint whatever in pillaging and foraging. Men were allowed to do as they liked, burn and destroy” (Fellman, Citizen Sherman, 222–24). Sherman and his men were attuned to one another and acted accordingly. They wanted to create a legend of invincible destructiveness, and they succeeded, landing a devastating blow on Southern morale as they marched and destroyed.

When his army reached North Carolina in March 1865, Sherman reined in the behavior of his troops to a certain extent, because he would soon link up with the Union and feared potential condemnation of his extremism in the press; because he conceived of North Carolinians as poor whites more attuned to Unionism than South Carolina planters; and because he was aware that as the war was nearing an end, violence could decrease. When Lee's lines collapsed at the end of March 1865, Sherman's men were not needed for a final push into Virginia.

But their march would live on in history and in legend. Seven years after the war, Sherman testified that he had not ordered the burning of Columbia, but that “If I [had] made my mind to burn Columbia I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village.” Southerners were not mistaken in their hatred of Sherman, who really had intended them as much destruction as he felt might be needed to end the war. Defeated Confederates also testified, despite themselves, to Sherman's effectiveness, for they realized he was the general who had broken their hearts. His march probably shortened the war and made the Southern defeat more comprehensive; therefore the moral meanings of Sherman's march are complex and moot. The march was terrible, but it worked, and it might even have saved lives.

Sherman himself never doubted the efficacy of the destructiveness he had brought to bear. In his 1875 Memoirs, he wrote, “My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” For cold calculation, rage, and ruthlessness, no Union general had a better understanding of the kind of war against civilians that could defeat a democracy such as the Confederacy.
[See also Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Civil War: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

William T. Sherman , Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. 2 vols., 1875.
Lloyd Lewis , Sherman, Fighting Prophet, 1932.
John T. Barrett , Sherman's March Through the Carolinas, 1956.
Marion B. Lucas , Sherman and the Burning of Columbia, 1976.
Joseph T. Glatthaar , The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolina Campaigns, 1986.
John F. Marszalek , Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order, 1993.
Lee Kennett , Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman's Campaign, 1995.
Michael Fellman , Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, 1995.

Michael Fellman