Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Wounded twice in the right arm at Fair Oaks, Virginia, in June 1862 (resulting in the loss of the limb), the Maine-born Oliver Otis Howard recovered sufficiently to take charge of a corps at the battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. It was Howard’s command that broke, exposing the vulnerable right flank of the Union army, and suffering a staggering 41 percent casualties. Two months later, at Gettysburg, Howard’s corps was again manhandled. Fate thrust him into overall command of Union forces on the field for much of the first day’s fight, and although he demonstrated generally ineffectual leadership, the U.S. victory that followed under Major General George Gordon Meade brought Howard an official congressional commendation.

  When Howard’s corps was transferred to the west in the fall of 1863, he went along to take part in operations around Chattanooga, where his performance was unexceptional. Assigned to command a different corps during Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, Howard managed to be in the right place at the right time when the job of taking over the multicorps Army of the Tennessee came open. Selected by Sherman as much to eliminate unwanted candidates as for his own leadership qualities, Howard got through the campaign without any significant gaffes. A lean, brown-haired, earnest man, Howard was smart, personally courageous, and dedicated to his work. He was also so outwardly religious in his demeanor that some of his troops took to calling him “Old Prayer Book.”

  Sherman’s other selection, Henry W. Slocum, was a New Yorker with a similar résumé (he led corps at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg), though without Howard’s stumblings. A cautious, conservative officer loath to take risks (his reluctance to order his troops to Gettysburg on the first day led one staff officer to derisively pronounce his last name in two drawn-out syllables), Slocum could also nurse a grudge. He sat out much of the Atlanta Campaign in a backwater post because he refused to serve with the officer to whom he was assigned. When that individual resigned Sherman’s service over Howard’s promotion to lead the Army of the Tennessee, Slocum was recalled to command a corps, which he did in a competent fashion.

  Sherman desired men in charge of his two wings who were capable, not easily panicked, and without any overriding ambition or imagination. As he made clear in a similar context, he “needed commanders who were purely and technically soldiers, men who would obey orders and execute them promptly and on time.” Howard and Slocum fit the bill and so were slotted into these key positions.

  II. The habitual order of march will be, wherever practicable, by four roads, as near parallel as possible and converging at points hereafter to be indicated in orders. The cavalry, Brigadier General Kilpatrick commanding, will receive special orders from the commander-in-chief.

  The wing formation, already road-tested during the Meridian Campaign, offered Sherman great flexibility in deployment and kept his force compact enough to be mutually supportive as it advanced, at least in theory. Also, spread out to this degree, the march order created a roughly sixty-mile-wide zone covered by the wings in their advance, providing units operating away from the main columns (principally foragers) with some degree of security.

  Sherman’s experience with cavalry, especially during the Atlanta Campaign, was not the kind to inspire much confidence. Time and again the mounted arm had failed to carry out its assignments, and on several occasions it suffered serious, even catastrophic defeats. So Sherman, on the verge of undertaking the greatest mobile operation of the Civil War, assigned the bulk of his most active arm to Thomas in the north, holding back just one division to provide security for the march.

  The man he picked to command his cavalry, H. Judson Kilpatrick, was the kind perhaps most imagined (and reviled) by the longsuffering infantry—a flamboyant, boisterous, and pugnacious Irish-American whose deeds rarely matched his words. The officer Sherman was leaving behind in Tennessee to refit and remount most of his cavalry (after forwarding the best horses to Kilpatrick) had enough spunk to question the choice. “I know [that] Kilpatrick is a hell of a damned fool,” Sherman answered, “but I want just that sort of a man to command my cavalry on this expedition.” Grading Kilpatrick’s performance during the Atlanta Campaign, Sherman gave him high marks for his drive and intensity. Given the disasters that had befallen the others Sherman had entrusted with the responsibility, perhaps he also believed that Kilpatrick possessed the one prerequisite for a successful cavalry officer: luck.

  III. There will be no general train of supplies, but each corps will have its ammunition train and provision train distributed habitually as follows: Behind each regiment should follow one wagon and one ambulance; behind each brigade should follow a due proportion of ammunition wagons, provision wagons, and ambulances. In case of danger each army corps command should change this order of march by having his advance and rear brigade unencumbered by wheels. The separate columns will start habitually at 7 a.m., and make about fifteen miles per day, unless otherwise fixed in orders.

  When it came to recollecting the grand march into Georgia, Sherman and his men invariably understated the relative size and vulnerability of the five wagon trains (one for each infantry column plus one for the cavalry) that trailed the marchers. Massachusetts captain Daniel Oakey was typical when he wrote that transportation was “reduced to a minimum, and fast marching was to be the order of the day.” The image that emerged from this campaign was that the Federal columns advanced into the Georgia heartland with few wagons.

  In fact, the aggregate number of wagons on hand was 2,520, or roughly 40 wagons per thousand men. In contrast, when the 120,000-man Army of the Potomac had set off to confront General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia earlier that year, the Federals marched with 4,300 wagons, or about 35 per thousand. The wagon allotment on the Georgia march was less than Sherman had allowed during the Atlanta Campaign (52 wagons per thousand men), but he was still taking along a lot of wheeled vehicles. The fact that each column had its own wagon train meant that there would be no efficiencies that might have been gained from consolidation into one or two trains. It should also be noted that these calculations do not take into account the pack mules used by the various units, nor does it allow for extra vehicles appropriated on the way.

  Providing security for these multiple trains loomed large in the planning of each day’s march. It was not unusual for an entire division to be tasked with protecting the wagons, assisting in their movement, or guarding the rear of the train near the tail of the column. Thus on any given day most if not all of four infantry divisions out of thirteen total would be assigned to wagon train security, movement, and maintenance. It was a significant allocation of resources for an undertaking that would become celebrated in popular memory for having hardly existed.

  (Not mentioned in Sherman’s orders was the substantial cattle herd—about 5,500 head—that would accompany the wings. These cattle had to be driven along the dirt roads and, more importantly, across all watercourses and swamps encountered. By way of comparison, most of the celebrated cattle drives that ambled across the wide open western plains after the war averaged 2,000 to 3,000 head. These were usually managed by a twelve-man crew who moved the animals strung out in a line perhaps five miles long. Using this measure, and remembering that the Georgia terrain was anything but wide open, Sherman’s cattle train likely stretched eight to ten miles.)

  IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten days’ provisions for the command and three days’ forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock in sight of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be intrusted the gathering of provisions
and forage at any distance from the road traveled.

  Sherman took great care to calculate how many rations he needed to bring along and what foodstuffs he could expect to find on the way. He utilized a map prepared by the Department of the Interior that displayed the Georgia counties he intended to traverse, over which he hand wrote livestock and crop production from information he found in the 1860 Census. “I had wagons enough loaded with essentials, and beef cattle enough to feed on for more than a month,” he wrote, “and had the Census statistics showing the produce of every county through which I designed to pass. No military expedition was ever based on sounder or surer data.”

  Sherman understood exactly what the nonmilitary implications were of these orders. He realized from experience that it would be impossible to strictly enforce the limitations he had set. He knew his boys, and surmised that hardly any approached the status of sainthood. He expected them to be what he would later describe as a “little loose in foraging,” and was prepared to accept that a few would do “‘some things they ought not to have done.’” After a recent addition to Sherman’s staff pondered these foraging guidelines, he came to a grim conclusion. “Evidently it is a material element in this campaign to produce among the people of Georgia a thorough conviction of the personal misery which attends war, and of the utter helplessness and inability of their ‘rulers,’ State or Confederate, to protect them.”

  V. To army corps commanders alone is intrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhood where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.

  Sherman’s means of imposing some restraint upon the foragers rested on his personal example and the influence exerted on his behalf by his officers. Through past practices and inferences, as well as occasional publication of his orders and communications on the subject, Sherman believed that the thin line between a stern military policy and uncontrolled looting could be managed.

  “Of course you cannot question my right to ‘forage on the country,’” he lectured an enemy commander late in the conflict. “It is a war right as old as history. The manner of exercising it varies with circumstances, and if the civil authorities will supply my Requisitions, I will forbid all foraging. But I find no civil authorities who can respond to calls for forage or provisions, and therefore must collect directly of the People.” Because the South was in conflict with the North, southern civilians had no basis for complaint. “There are well established principles of War & the People of the South having appealed to War are barred from appealing for protection to our Constitution which they have practically and publicly defied. They have appealed to War and must abide its Rules & Laws…. A People who will persevere in War beyond a certain limit ought to Know the consequences. Many, Many People with less pertinacity than the South has already shown have been wiped out of national Existence.”

  VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals or their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or brigades. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.

  In the war’s last year, Sherman codified his thinking on this matter: “Now it is clearly our war right to subsist our army on the enemy. Napoleon always did it, but could avail himself of the civil powers he found in existence to collect forage and provisions by regular impressments. We cannot do that here, and I contend if the enemy fails to defend his country we may rightfully appropriate what we want.”

  VII. Negroes who are able-bodied and can be of service to the several columns may be taken along, but each army commander will bear in mind that the question of supplies is a very important one and that his first duty is to see to them who bear arms.

  It is certain that Sherman had no comprehension or care to comprehend the powerful effect that the appearance of his armies had upon the slaves in his path. Twenty-plus years after the fighting ended, he could still avow that “domestic slavery at the South before the war was not cruel and inhuman.” To him the matter was one of cold equations, a bloodless calculus. “The U.S. has its hands full, and must first assert its authority and maintain it as against the Armies of the Confederacy, and then it will have time to give some attention to these negroes who have been turned loose by the Planters and former owners,” he reasoned in late 1863. More than a year later this outlook was unchanged by experience. “Now you Know that military success is what the nation wants, and it is risked by the crowds of helpless negroes that flock after our armies.”

  While most of the soldiers in Sherman’s columns shared their commander’s prejudices, what they encountered led some to a deeper appreciation of the matter. Long after the war, speaking to a gathering of veterans in Ohio, a Union officer who participated in the march told a likely apocryphal tale of coming upon a grinning blind black man sitting amid the ruins of his former owner’s plantation, his family scattered to the winds. Asked how he could be so merry with such desolation around him, the black man replied that “bress God, freedom’s come.” The officer telling the story then reflected: “That was his conception of freedom; it took the place of eyesight and home and friends and children; it was every thing to him; and so I say that the war gave to us a conception of freedom that we never had before.”

  VIII. The organization at once of a good pioneer battalion for each army corps, composed if possible of negroes, should be attended to. This battalion should follow the advance guard, should repair roads, and double them if possible, so that the columns will not be delayed after reaching bad places. Also, army commanders should study the habit of giving the artillery and wagons the road, and marching their troops on one side, and also instruct the troops to assist wagons at steep hills or bad crossings of streams.

  IX. Capt. O.M. Poe, chief engineer, will assign to each wing of the army a pontoon train, fully equipped and organized, and the commanders thereof will see to its being properly protected at all times.

  The pontoon trains were Sherman’s secret weapon, whose critical role in the coming campaign would be seldom recognized or acknowledged. The route that Sherman ultimately settled on pushed his columns over nine separate rivers or creeks that represented sixteen distinct crossing points (one river, the Ogeechee, would be bridged seven times before the end of the expedition). While men and horses may have splashed over a number of these, the all-important wagons could not. Without a means for prompt and efficient crossing of these obstacles, Sherman’s columns faced inordinate delays that in turn degraded foraging results, since the longer the files stood in place, the harder it became to supply them from the nearby countryside. Such delays also offered time for the enemy to concentrate against their opponent’s known course. Whether or not Sherman’s bold scheme would succeed depended very much on maintaining celerity of movement, which in turn depended on how well the pontoniers did their job.

  The man Sherman assigned to make this happen was another individual whose outstanding contributions to the war effort did not translate into postwar fame, except perhaps in the obscure lexicons of military engineers. Orlando M. Poe was a West Pointer with brains (graduating sixth in the class of 1856) whose wartime career path would have severely vexed a less patient man. Although busy in the engineering branch when the Civil Wa
r erupted, Poe (like many professionals of his caste) was soon put in charge of leading volunteers into combat.

  The skills needed to wrestle nature into compliance transferred well to getting citizen soldiers into fighting shape, so by early 1863 Poe was a brigadier general in charge of a division. Congress now let him fall into administrative limbo by neglecting to confirm his volunteer rank, leaving him the unhappy choices of either resigning from the service or reverting to his lower rank in the regular army. Poe, choosing his first career, returned to the engineers, where he was demoted to captain. It was in this capacity that he entered upon the campaign.

  The table of organization for Sherman’s forces included three engineer units reporting directly to Poe. The men of the 58th Indiana were responsible for managing the pontoon train for the army’s left wing, and to the 1st Missouri Engineers went similar duty for the right. The third engineering unit, the 1st Michigan Engineers and Mechanics, constituted Poe’s emergency reserve, to be assigned at his discretion as circumstances arose.

  Poe’s brief included a number of other activities of importance to Sherman’s operation. One was cartography. It was Poe’s task to provide Sherman and his key commanders with maps sufficient to enable the four columns to advance in rough parallel with each other. (“I have enough on hand to supply one to each corps and division commander,” Poe reported with pardonable pride on November 1.) Working from charts captured from Confederate sources and those compiled by the U.S. Coast Survey, Poe created and duplicated a broadly accurate master layout that showed the principal roads, water barriers, and towns, but was noticeably lacking other significant topographic features and smaller passageways. Once the march was under way, the master maps would be regularly updated by actual observation and from scouting reports, with major changes reproduced photographically for distribution.