Savannah’s garrison trudged into South Carolina about forty-five miles, until the line of the Salkehatchie and Combahee rivers was reached. The movement was an ordeal for everyone. “Such a march as it was, through rain and mud,” grumbled a Georgia soldier. “Expressed my feelings in no complimentary terms. I certainly felt like cursing somebody and did not care who.” Following Beauregard’s plan, a new line of defenses was built behind the two rivers.
Many of the Georgia troops who had served in Savannah’s trenches were sent off to Augusta, while South Carolina militia units tramped along to Charleston. Those that were left, which included Wheeler’s cavalry, took defensive positions while everybody waited for Sherman’s next move. When confirmation of these events reached Richmond, a government official, thinking too about verified news of Hood’s Nashville defeat, remarked that together they made “up a tale of disaster which has filled the land with gloom.”
For Sherman the Savannah sojourn was a time to savor his accomplishments, revel in the majesty of a conqueror, and plot his next move. The newspapers for which he had little use during the campaign now sang his praises to a grateful nation.
Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1864
Well and nobly done, gallant Sherman.
Boston Post, December 27, 1864
It is an important event, crowning a successful march; and the more welcome it is a bloodless victory. It fills up the measure of the fame of the gallant Sherman, his corps of noble officers and…[his] invincible [army]…; and undoubtedly it is the herald of other and of still more important successes.
Quincy Daily Whig & Republican, December 27, 1864
The news of another magnificent victory will thrill through the nation, awakening again the echoes of enthusiastic applause from every hill-top and every valley. Sherman, at the head of his heroic legions, has marched into the city, with scarce a breathing spell after his great march.
Philadelphia Inquirer, December 26, 1864
Sherman has triumphed again, and this time with no loss to himself…. This is a great and glorious achievement for Sherman and his heroic army. No such campaigning has been undertaken during the war as that through which Sherman has led his army, and no campaign has had a more successful termination.*
The spouses and relatives of many of the officers who had recently fought him now presented themselves seeking favors. This greatly amused Sherman, especially in light of some of the proclamations signed by these officers branding his soldiers as vandals. “Therefore it struck me as strange that Generals [William J.] Hardee and [Gustavus W.] Smith should commit their families to our custody, and even bespeak our personal care and attention,” he chuckled. Sherman did what he could, though in no case did he intervene when the issue involved seized property. He did inquire about some of the people he knew when he was posted here as a young army officer, “but when I ask for old & familiar names, it marks the Sad havoc of war,” he told his wife.
The long campaign through Georgia had not dulled Sherman’s sharp distinctions of right and wrong. Efforts by British citizens resident in Savannah to protect their cotton holdings especially riled him. “I treat an English subject with [no] more favor than one of our own deluded citizens,” he informed Washington authorities, “and that for my part I was unwilling to fight for cotton for the benefit of Englishmen openly engaged in smuggling arms and instruments of war to kill us.” Speaking to a Savannah gathering that included several British subjects, Sherman avowed that there “was not a man in his army who would not eagerly join in invading England and punishing her for her insidious conduct.” “I would not be surprised if I would involve our government with England,” he informed his wife. Still, he had no inhibitions about staying in Charles Green’s mansion, which, he told Ellen, was “elegant & splendidly furnished with pictures & Statuary.”
Sherman’s isolation from the outside world was shattered on December 30 when he opened correspondence from his wife’s family and his brother, John, informing him that the ailing son he had never seen—Charles Celestine Sherman—had died on December 4. In writing to his wife, Sherman noted that Charles had “gone to join Willy, for he was but a mere ideal, whereas Willy was incorporated with us, and seemed to be designed to perpetuate our memories…. I should like to have seen the baby of which all spoke so well, but I seemed doomed to pass my life away so that even my children will be strangers.”
While Sherman was coping with this personal tragedy, a political storm was swirling about his attitude concerning African-American integration into U.S. society. At first it seemed that he could keep the matter at arm’s length. “It would amuse you to See the negroes, they flock to me old & young they pray & shout,” he told his wife on Christmas Day, “and mix up my name with that of Moses & Simon, and other scriptural ones as well as Abram Linkum the Great Messiah of ‘Dis Jubilee.’” Major Hitchcock noted, “Frequently they come in a dozen or twenty at a time, to his room up-stairs [in the Green mansion] where he usually sits. He has always had them shown in at once, stopping a dispatch or letter or a conversation to greet them in his off-hand—though not undignified way—’Well, boys,—come to see Mr. Sherman, have you? Well, I’m Mr. Sherman—glad to see you’—and shaking hands with them all in a manner highly disgusting, I dare say, to a ‘refined Southern gentleman.’”
The same mails that brought Sherman word of his dead son also conveyed warnings from supporters in Washington that his often professed opinions against blacks were not winning him friends. Major General Henry W. Halleck, the army’s chief of staff, reported that Radical Republicans were publicly stating that Sherman had “manifested an almost criminal dislike to the negro, and that you are not willing to carry out the wishes of the government in regard to him, but repulse him with contempt!” A political friend allied with the Radicals piled on as well. “You are understood,” he said, “to be opposed to their employment as soldiers and to regard them as a sort of pariahs, almost without rights.”
Replying to the politician, Sherman noted that on “approaching Savannah I had at least 20,000 negroes, clogging my roads, and eating up our subsistence…. The same number of white refugees would have been a military weakness. 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. My negro constituents of Georgia would resent the idea of my being inimical to them, they regard me as a second Moses or Aaron…. Of course I have nothing to do with the Status of the Negro after [the] war. That [is] for the law making power, but if my opinion were consulted I would Say that the negro should be a free race, but not put on an equality with the whites.” Sherman was less circumspect when answering Halleck, a fellow professional and member of the white military brotherhood. “But the nigger?” he asked. “Why, in God’s name, can’t sensible men let him alone?”
If Sherman had hoped to get going with the next phase of his grand scheme before any more of this controversy got in the way, he was to be sorely disappointed. On January 11, 1865, the day’s ship landings included a revenue cutter from Washington bearing the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. In addition to clarifying official policies regarding confiscated material (cotton, especially), Stanton wanted a face-to-face with Sherman about race relations. During that January 12 sit-down, Stanton listened intently as the General talked about blacks by relating “many interesting incidents [during the march], illustrating their simple character and faith in our arms and progress.” When the secretary brought up Brevet Major General Davis, Sherman quickly assured him that his subordinate “was an excellent soldier, and I did not believe he had any hostility to the negro.”
Stanton produced newspaper clippings critical of Davis’s actions at the Ebenezer and Lockner creeks. “I had heard such a rumor,” Sherman responded, and immediately sent for his Fourteenth Corps commander. The story Davis related to Stanton, strongly seconded by Sherman, said more about their biases than it illuminated the truth of what had happened. Davis explained that “old a
nd young” blacks were indeed following his column “in droves.” The route assigned his corps took the men along the swampy Savannah River Road, necessitating constant use of the pontoon trains. In order to keep on the schedule expected of him, the temporary bridging had to be pulled up the instant the last soldier passed over, then rapidly pushed forward to the next crossing so as not to delay the march. That was why the bridges had to be disassembled so quickly on the day in question. Davis allowed that some blacks were stranded on the far bank, but only because they were “asleep” when it was dismantled; further, that it was only “mere supposition” that any were drowned or picked up by Wheeler’s cavalry. What had happened to him, Davis said, could have happened to any of the senior officers in a similar situation, even to Major General Howard, who was one of the “most humane commanders who filled the army.” In Sherman’s recollection, Stanton ended the conversation by professing that the unfortunate affair had been explained “to his entire satisfaction.”
That wasn’t the end of it, however. Stanton insisted on meeting some black leaders, so Sherman arranged a gathering that very night, mostly attended by Methodist and Baptist preachers. With the General looking on, the group of twenty responded to a series of questions posed by Stanton regarding their understanding of the Emancipation Proclamation, their views on black military service, and their aspirations for the future. Then, to Sherman’s surprise and quiet fury, he was asked to leave the room. Once he had gone, Stanton asked those assembled for their opinion of the General. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their natural wariness of white men and recognizing that Sherman was not going away, the selected black leaders, after pronouncing the General “a friend and gentleman,” assured Stanton that they “could not be in better hands.”
Sherman never forgave Stanton for putting him on trial before a black jury. Just because he had conducted his recent campaign on purely military principles, untainted by political considerations, by refusing to burden his army with “hundreds or thousands of poor negroes, I was construed by others as hostile to the black race.”* Still, in a very public gesture, Sherman stood in the reviewing stand for a parade mounted by the city’s all-black fire companies. A reporter on hand recorded: “As they marched one or two of the most musical darkies sang various songs, of a didactic character, narrating the brave deeds of the companies in conflagrations of the past days, and the companies took up the chorus and filled the streets with their loud refrain.”
Also, as a sop to the war secretary (and to keep refugee blacks from following his army) Sherman signed his name to Special Field Orders No. 15, which established a framework for black refugee families to settle on abandoned plantations located on the South Carolina and Georgia coast, as well as along Florida’s St. Johns River.
Sherman later claimed that he viewed this policy as providing only “temporary provisions for the freedmen and their families during the rest of the war,” a distinction that, tragically, was withheld from most participants. Their efforts at a new life would come to an abrupt halt within a year when directives from the Andrew Johnson administration returned much of the land to its former (white) owners.
In the face of these vicissitudes, Sherman could still find solace in the warm support of President Abraham Lincoln as expressed in his reply to the General’s “Christmas gift” of “the city of Savannah”:
EXECUTIVE MANSION,
Washington, December 26, 1864.
MY DEAR GENERAL SHERMAN: Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift, the capture of Savannah. When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that “nothing risked, nothing gained,” I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce. And taking the work of General Thomas into the count, as it should be taken, it is indeed a great success. Not only does it afford the obvious and immediate military advantages, but, in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole—Hood’s army—it brings those who sat in darkness to see a great light. But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave General Grant and yourself to decide. Please make my grateful acknowledgments to your whole army, officers and men.
Yours, very truly,
A. LINCOLN
PART SIX
Finale
CHAPTER 23
“The Blow Was Struck at the Right Moment and in the Right Direction”
On January 21, 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman boarded the army steamer W. W. Coit, which carried him to Beaufort, South Carolina, where he would begin what he later called “the active campaign from Savannah northward.” Some hundred or so miles inland from where he came ashore, a Union prisoner of war in a stockade outside Columbia put pen to paper to praise the man he much admired and, by so doing, helped transform the March to the Sea from another military campaign to an American epic.
Samuel H. M. Byers was soldiering with the 5th Iowa when he was captured in fighting near Chattanooga in 1863. By his own account, he subsequently made several escape attempts, “only to be retaken” each time. Perhaps as a way of combating the psychological debilitation of confinement, Byers became obsessed with Sherman’s successes, as he gleaned them from camp rumors and occasionally smuggled newspapers. He had actually viewed Sherman just before his capture, and never forgot the General’s apparent fearlessness. Once it became known that Sherman’s Savannah campaign had accomplished its objective, Byers funneled his emotions into a five-stanza lyric poem with chorus that took considerable liberty with the facts, but which was unabashed in its adoration of this great American hero. The verse-poem concluded:
Oh, proud was our army that morning,
That stood where the pine darkly towers,
When Sherman said, “Boys, you are weary,
But today fair Savannah is ours!”
Then we sang a song of our chieftain
That echoes o’er river and lea,
And the stars of our banner shone brighter
When Sherman camped down by the sea!
A fellow POW set the verse to music to produce a song that the other prisoners enjoyed singing to mock their guards. According to Byers, the piece “soon reached the soldiers in the North, and before I knew it, it was being sung everywhere.” He would successfully escape captivity, and when Union forces reached Columbia, he actually met his hero, who added him to the headquarters staff. Sherman, who far preferred myth-making to objective reporting, informed Byers: “You hit it splendidly.”
The Union men who marched with Sherman to the sea expressed equal fervor when it came to evaluating what they had together accomplished. “The importance of the march through Georgia has never been overestimated,” wrote H. Judson Kilpatrick in 1876. “The very moment that Sherman reached the sea, demonstrating the fact that a well-organized army, ably led, could raid the South at pleasure; there was not a man in all the land but knew the war was virtually over, and the rebellion ended.” Much closer to the actual events, a triumphant Illinois soldier, writing from the streets of Savannah, had no hesitation in stating that the campaign “will go down in history, and be told over and over again as one of the greatest achievements on record.” Another Illinoisan was equally unequivocal that the “march has been the greatest blow to the Confederacy that has yet been struck.”
Few of the Yankee boys shed a tear over what they had done to the central and eastern portions of the state. “This part of Georgia never realized what war was until we came through on this expedition,” said a Minnesota man. “It is terrible to think of,” professed a Connecticut officer, “but only as an act of retributive justice to these people here.” “As you are aware,” a Wisconsin boy told his parents, “we have…made a big hole in the Confederacy. Will not the North rejoice when it realizes the effects of this great movement?…[N]o more [a] terr
ible blow has been dealt the South than that has just been given it in Ga.”
Recent memories of heavily laden foraging parties or the sights of pillaged homesteads were amplified in the imagination until many Federal participants became utterly convinced they had scoured Governor Brown’s state to the bedrock. “Georgia [is] in a helpless condition, not to recover from the terrible shock of war till reconstructed,” said a Wisconsin soldier, while a staff officer reflected that it “looks hard to see a large, prosperous, fruitful country thus laid in utter ruins, but it is the only way to conquer rebellion.” “On our march to the coast we have ploughed through [the] garden and granary of the Confederacy, laying waste the country and cutting things up root and branch,” reported a Pennsylvania officer to the folks back home. “We have effectively severed their railroad lines of communication; we have swept off thousands of their slaves; and not to put too fine a point upon it, Sherman’s scythe has cut a clean swath just fifty miles in width.” “On the entire route, the destruction was more devilish than you can imagine,” a Seventeenth Corps staff officer assured his family. “The Union army was a besom of destruction, sweeping across the country, leaving in its wake devastated farms and the smoke of burning buildings,” said another soldier.
Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea Page 59
