Rethinking Sherman’s March
The March to the Sea
has come down to us as an act of savage brutality perpetrated by one of
the great villains of American history. Just the mention of William
Tecumseh Sherman’s name conjures images of burning cities, ransacked
plantations and terror stricken women and children, à la “Gone with the
Wind.” Even after the passage of 150 years and dozens of scholarly books
on the general and his march, most conversations about Sherman continue
to generate more heat than light.
After three years of
fighting and over half a million dead, by the fall of 1864 the United
States still had not suppressed what Union leaders considered a
slaveholders’ rebellion and arguably the most potent threat ever posed
to the nation’s existence. Faced with continued resistance and climbing
casualty figures, Sherman decided that the time had come to widen the
burden and pain of the war beyond just rebel soldiers to include the
civilian supporters of the Confederacy, especially the common folk who
filled the ranks of the rebel armies.
Sherman believed that
forcing noncombatants to feel what he called the “hard hand of war” was a
military necessity. Making the war as harsh as possible would bring
victory more quickly and with a minimum loss of life on both sides,
undermine Confederate morale on the home front, trigger a wave of
desertions from the insurgent armies, destroy the Confederacy’s ability
to wage war and prove to the rebels that their cause was hopeless and
their government impotent to protect them and their property.
This new “hard war”
doctrine was fully sanctioned by the United States government. The
previous year, President Abraham Lincoln had approved the creation of
the Lieber Code, a set of rules based on accepted practices that
authorized the Army to destroy civilian property, starve noncombatants,
shell towns, keep enemy civilians in besieged cities, free slaves and
summarily execute guerrillas if such measures were deemed necessary to
winning the war and defending the country. “To save the country,” the
code’s author, the Columbia law professor Francis Lieber, stated, “is
paramount to all other considerations.” Like other wartime chief
executives right down to the present day, Lincoln was willing to take
drastic measures to ensure the survival of the United States.
So on Nov. 15, 1864,
Sherman’s army set out from Atlanta on its infamous March to the Sea,
cutting a swath of destruction toward Savannah on the coast. Sherman
swore to “make Georgia howl,” and in his Special Field Order No. 120 he
laid out the rules of destruction and conduct for the march. The army
was to “forage liberally on the country” with details of men and
officers sent out each day to gather food. Soldiers were instructed not
to enter private homes and to discriminate between the rich, “who are
usually hostile,” Sherman observed, and the poor and industrious, who
were usually “neutral or friendly.”
To be sure, there was
more destruction than allowed by these orders. Sherman’s soldiers, as
the historian Joseph Glatthaar has written, saw this “as a golden
opportunity to teach the people of Georgia … the hardships and terrors
of [a] war” which they blamed Confederates for starting and continuing,
despite repeated defeats on the battlefield. Some homes, especially
those of wealthy slaveholders considered guilty of bringing on the war,
were burned; private dwellings were entered and personal property was
taken or ruined; and civilians were stripped of more food than the army
needed or could possibly consume. Beyond food and livestock, high-value
targets included anything that could be used by the Confederates to
continue the struggle: factories, mills, cotton gins, warehouses, train
depots, bridges and railroads.
Still, in Georgia
relatively few private homes, like that of Howell Cobb (a former federal
official deemed a traitor by Sherman) or those adjacent to factories
and mills, were burned. One study conducted during the 1930s comparing
wartime maps with existing antebellum structures found that most along
the route of the march were still standing and those that were gone had
been lost largely due to postwar accidents. And despite the commonly
held belief, reinforced by the movie “Gone with the Wind,” that Sherman
reduced the entire city of Atlanta to a smoldering ruin, approximately
half of it was completely destroyed, roughly the same proportion of
Chambersburg, Penn. that had been burned by Confederates the previous
July.
As its author
intended, the March to the Sea was harsh on civilians. Losing crops,
food stores and livestock left non-combatants with little to eat as
winter approached. But the fear Sherman created was as powerful as his
acts of destruction. The sight of federal troops, marching across the
state destroying property and pillaging virtually unopposed, had a
demoralizing effect on white Georgians who supported the Confederacy.
By waging war against
the minds of his opponents, Sherman’s march achieved its creator’s goal
of hastening an end to the conflict: the wives of Confederate soldiers
along the route of the march or who feared they lay in the path of
Sherman’s advancing legions begged their husbands to come home, and
desertions increased significantly during the fall and winter of
1864-65. This hemorrhaging from Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia
further depleted his already thin ranks and allowed Gen. Ulysses S.
Grant to deliver the knockout blow in the spring of 1865.
From the vantage point
of the 21st century, Sherman’s way of war seems a dramatic departure
from earlier methods and has prompted some historians to characterize
his March to the Sea as the birth of modern total war. But “hard war”
was not total war. While the march destroyed property and infrastructure
and visited suffering and fear on the civilian population, it lacked
the wholesale destruction of human life that characterized World War II.
Sherman’s primary
targets — foodstuffs and industrial, government and military property —
were carefully chosen to create the desired effect, and never included
mass killing of civilians, especially those law-abiding noncombatants
who did not resist what Sherman described as the national authority.
Indeed, Sherman always claimed that his war on property was more humane
than traditional methods of conflict between armies. He even told one
South Carolina woman that he was ransacking her plantation so that her
soldier husband would come home and Grant would not have to kill him in
the trenches at Petersburg. He was fighting to bring rebels back into
the Union, not to annihilate them.
At the end of his
march, when the people of Savannah surrendered virtually without a fight
— they were “completely subjugated,” he wrote — he saw no need to wreck
the city’s military and industrial facilities or destroy private homes.
Five months earlier, Sherman had told the mayor of Atlanta, “If you and
your citizens will give up, I and this army will become your greatest
protectors,” and it was a lesson not lost on Savannahians. The fate of
the city where the March to the Sea ended was different from the one
where it began.
Sherman demonstrated
for the first time in the modern era the power of terror and
psychological warfare in breaking an enemy’s will to resist. This
concept would come into full bloom during World War II when both Axis
and Allied powers deliberately and indiscriminately bombed civilians in
order to create terror and win the war by any means at their disposal —
including dropping two atomic bombs. It would be seen again during the
Vietnam War when America bombed Hanoi, dropping on a single city more
ordnance than the United States dropped in all of World War II.
Indeed, America in the
20th century waged total war to such a frightening extent that one
wonders: If Sherman had commanded in World War II or Vietnam, would his
detractors be so repelled by him, especially those white Southerners
taught to hate him as a war criminal? If he had served in the same army a
century later and had worn khaki or green rather than blue, and if his
targets had been Germans, Japanese, Vietnamese or Islamic terrorists
rather than Confederates, would we still loathe him to the same degree?
Francis Lieber’s words
written in 1862 — “To save the country is paramount to all other
considerations” — could have been spoken by the generals Omar Bradley or
George Patton as they smashed their way through another German town, or
Curtis LeMay as he ordered the firebombing of Japanese cities. History
has deemed them heroes because their actions were against their
country’s foreign foes, while Sherman has been vilified as a terrorist
because his actions, although less severe, were against his country’s
domestic enemies.
Rightly or wrongly,
Sherman did what he deemed militarily necessary within the rules laid
down by his government to win the conflict and save his country. Rather
than an aberration, his “hard hand of war” fits well within the American
military tradition. Like the total war tactics of his 20th century
successors and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed more
recently, the March to the Sea reveals the moral ambiguity of war and
the extent to which Americans are willing to go when our national
existence is at stake.
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Sources: Lee
Kennett, “Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians
During Sherman’s Campaign”; Anne J. Bailey, “War and Ruin: William T.
Sherman and the Savannah Campaign”; Stephen Davis, “What the Yankees Did
to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta”; Joseph T.
Glatthaar, “The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the
Savannah and Carolinas Campaign”; Mark Grimsley, “The Hard Hand of War:
Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865″; John F.
Marszalek, “Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order”; Noah Andre Trudeau,
“Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea”; William T. Sherman,
“Memoirs of General William T. Sherman”; John Fabian Witt, “Lincoln’s
Code: The Laws of War in American History.”
W. Todd Groce is
president and chief executive of the Georgia Historical Society and the
author of several books on the Civil War and American military history,
including “Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil
War, 1860-1870.”
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