Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  The ever-present Major Hitchcock penned his assessment of the campaign before Savannah was captured. Overall, he decided that Sherman’s columns had been “most fortunate in weather…. The health of the whole army…has been unusually good,—and mortality very small…. We have escaped more than was thought possible the obstacles which might have been interposed…. The great object of the march,—the destruction of R.R. on the vital chain of rebel communication from E. to W.—has been more than accomplished, and it is shown that a large army can march with impunity through the heart of the richest rebel state…. Our supplies are yet hardly drawn on at all, our…men are in the finest spirits, ready for anything ‘Uncle Billy’ orders…. I do not forget, and God knows I am sorry for the people of the regions we have traversed [but this]…Union and its Government must be sustained at any and every cost…. To do this implies…war now so terrible and successful that none can dream of rebellion hereafter.”

  Sherman’s final report on the Savannah Campaign was measured in its praise for his officers and men. Generals Howard and Slocum were described as “gentlemen of singular capacity and intelligence, thorough soldiers and patriots, working day and night…for their country and their men.” Those leading Sherman’s divisions and brigades received his “personal and official thanks,” while the rank and file were lauded for carrying out their duties (be it combat, road fixing, foraging, or track wrecking) “with alacrity and a degree of cheerfulness unsurpassed.” Sherman singled out Brigadier General Kilpatrick in both his final report and in a personal message sent on December 29.

  In the latter, the General said: “I beg to assure you that the operations of the cavalry have been skillful and eminently successful…. [At] Thomas’ Station, Waynesboro’, and Brier Creek, you whipped a superior cavalry force, and took from Wheeler all chance of boasting over you. But the fact that to you, in a great measure, we owe the march of four strong infantry columns, with heavy trains and wagons, over three hundred miles through an enemy’s country, without the loss of a single wagon, and without the annoyance of cavalry dashes on our flanks, is honor enough for any cavalry commander.”

  The first reactions to the campaign from the other side were often a mixture of concern and disbelief. Many a distant Georgian’s letters home during this period echoed the sentiments of one coming from Petersburg in early December: “I am nervous and exceedingly anxious to hear from you.” Some who wrote wondered why the state had apparently lain supine before the Yankee advance. “The people of Georgia should all unite and repel Sherman and destroy him at every post, destroy and carry off provisions and forage from his front,” wrote a bellicose member of the 3rd Georgia fighting under General Robert E. Lee. Another in the regiment was more acidic. “Even Georgian soldiers in Virginia don’t understand why Sherman marched through the State without resistance,” he wrote on Christmas Day. “Was it a lack of patriotism in the people that they did not fly to arms to stop the invader?” “I feel very little inclined to call myself a Georgian any more,” ruminated one more, “and if it were not that you all live in Macon I should disown the state in toto and transfer my allegiance.”

  When Governor Joseph Brown stood before the reconvened Georgia legislature in early 1865, he was compelled to officially rebut imprecations against his state’s will to resist “because her people did not drive back and destroy the army of the enemy.” The fault, Brown insisted, lay with the central government in Richmond, which held back fifty regiments of Georgia veteran soldiers in Virginia when they were urgently needed to defend their homes. Brown’s prideful bitterness found an echo in a young Georgia militiaman on picket duty after Savannah’s fall when he was confronted by a South Carolina squad who asked “what in the hell we meant by letting Sherman march through Georgia. I told them; allright, You will have a chance of it in a few days, for he is sure coming, and you will not be able to stop him either.”

  Only later would people become aware of the extent of destruction along portions of the march route. Where it was bad, it was often really bad. “All around the grove were carcasses of cows, sheep and hogs, some with only the hind quarters gone, and the rest left to spoil,” remembered a resident living near Louisville. A neighbor suffered much the same, recollecting that the hogs were “killed, mules taken, corn taken to feed the horses, anything, everything to eat.” Even the preponderance of homes that survived the passing storm were nonetheless badly treated. “Where there were no houses burned, they destroyed all the fencing and palings, so that when they left, the houses stood out in the bare yards and fields,” reminisced a Bulloch County civilian. “Many of us are utterly ruined,” contributed a Clinton homeowner. “What the people in this country are to do God only knows for starvation is certainly staring them in the face,” wrote a woman near Sandersville. A neighbor added that it “was now winter, too late for crops; what were we to do?”

  Once the shock had passed, however, a determination to survive emerged. Hardly had the last Yankee soldier disappeared down the road than most Georgians caught in their path began picking up the pieces. One resolute household existed on scraps scavenged from abandoned Union camps until “kind relatives in another part of Georgia, who had not been robbed, came to the relief.” For those who lived off the land, the prospect of a sudden catastrophe was never far from their thoughts, so recovering from Storm Sherman was no different. “Now I reckon you want to know what the Yankees did for us,” scribbled a McDonough mother to her daughter. “Well, bad enough but no worse than I expected…. You must not be uneasy. We will live but not so Plentiful as we used to.” “There was a great crop raised in 1864,” a Bulloch County farmer reminded his readers in 1914. “It was one of the most fruitful years in my memory…and even the Yankee army could not eat it up and carry it off in two days.”

  Sherman always believed that his march helped break Georgian support for the Confederate cause. State governor Brown might well have agreed, at least based on some of the petitions he received. One submitted in mid-January, from Wilcox County in the south-central portion of the state, declared that the “time has come when our authorities should go boldly to work to negotiate a peace before we are entirely ruined.” The great losses suffered outside the state by Georgians under arms lent an urgency to this appeal, which demanded that talks begin “before the whole white male population is butchered.” Other citizens were equally determined to keep resisting. “I hope that S.C. will accomplish what Ga. should have done, capture Sherman and his vile pack,” wrote a Rockbridge resident in February 1865.

  Just about everyone wanted the outsiders to go away. A Georgia soldier’s wife, living just outside the zone of Sherman’s destruction, reported a rumor making the rounds in mid-January that France and England were ready to guarantee Confederate independence if a policy of gradual emancipation was adopted. “I would rather do that than continue fighting or go back to Lincoln,” she declared. A northern man visiting conquered, conciliatory Savannah in late January 1865 observed that the “real Union sentiment in this city, I fear, is small. The people look upon the Confederate cause as lost, and therefore come forward and take the oath of allegiance to the United States; but they still retain their Southern sympathies and have no love for the Union.”

  Sherman’s March dramatically fractured the social fabric by shattering the binds of custom and coercion that held together white and black Georgia. The placid exterior of antebellum southern life masked a balance of terror coursing underneath—terror felt by blacks who were arbitrarily subject to cruel punishments unto death for any sign of resistance; terror felt by whites who viewed themselves as living atop a dormant but active volcano. Three years of war had already slackened the bonds by siphoning away many white males (the chief enforcers); the passage of Sherman’s columns severed most (but not all) of the remaining ones.

  “We fear the negroes now more than anything else,” declared a Sandersville resident in late November 1864. Yet amazingly, in the often complicated chronicle that was Sherman’s March,
minor incidents of black-on-white retribution were rare, major ones virtually nonexistent. “When Sherman’s army marched through the South, did we take advantage of this (as we might) to commit acts of lawlessness and violence?” asked a black Augusta newspaperman right after the war. “No, never!”

  Blacks who voted with their feet met a reception from Sherman’s men that ranged from a bemused paternalism to outright racism. “They thronged the line of march wide-eyed and wondering,” wrote a Pennsylvania soldier. “It was very amusing to see the darkies in the city [of Savannah] and villages,” wing commander Henry W. Slocum told a New York friend. “They came out in groups and welcomed us with delight, they danced and howled, laughed, cried and prayed all at the same time.”

  While some Yankees looked at the refugees with sympathetic eyes, many more were captives of the racial stereotypes of their age. Brigadier General William P. Carlin, commanding a division under Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis, thought of them as “useless creatures…encumbering the trains and devouring the subsistence along the line of march so much needed for the soldiers.” A soldier marching under Carlin described the escaped slaves as the most “unadulterated miserable wretches as I ever saw.” “The soldiers had no little fun at the expense of black people on that march,” said a Fifteenth Corps staff officer. A benign incident was recorded by a member of the 100th Indiana who watched as a uniformed orderly stopped before a throng of blacks waiting at a crossroads to tell them that General Sherman was coming, wearing a fancy uniform and riding a mule-drawn carriage. “The poor Darkies took it all in,” chuckled the soldier, “and when…one of our bummers came along dressed in a captured uniform that no doubt had been some cherished family keepsake…they marched along by the side of the road singing their songs till some one told them the truth.”

  The presence of a compliant and eager-to-please black population was a boon for Sherman’s March. “We find the colored population our friends at all times,” said an Ohioan. “When, as often happened during the march, information was given by the slaves, it could always be relied upon,” recollected an Illinois comrade. A Connecticut officer in charge of one foraging party recorded how his command relied on black guides to avoid Rebel cavalry patrols. They enjoyed a peaceful bivouac after cleaning out two plantations. Only in the morning did the local blacks reveal to the officer “that a large Rebel force had passed on a cross-road, less than a mile from me, during the night. These negroes had, on their own hook, gone out beyond my pickets and stood watch for our additional safety.”

  Back with the main column, blacks made themselves useful in a variety of ways. “Two Sergeants in Co. C picked up a colored man at Madison, who wished to cast his lot with Sherman’s army,” recorded a member of the 123rd New York. “The very next day he ‘confiscated’ a good horse, and the Sergeants transferred their heavy knapsacks, tents and blankets, pots, kettles, frying pan, coffee pot, etc. to the back of the horse. At night Jack, the name of the colored man, came in with plenty of sweet potatoes, fresh pork, etc., and fodder for his ‘mool’ as he called him…. He said he was going to get a cook next day, and sure enough, next night he brought in two colored girls, one of them a house servant, who was quite aristocratic, the other a field hand…. Those two Sergeants had an easy time of it all the way to Savannah.”

  When Sherman’s forces closed on the coastal citadel to plunge into its spongy barrier of swamps and flooded rice fields, the brawn of male blacks became a major asset. “New negro pioneer squads have been temporarily organized & [a] Serg[eant] is detailed from the regiment to take charge of them,” reported a man in the 105th Ohio. An artilleryman with the Seventeenth Corps took note of the “Pioneer Corps now numbering some 600 negroes picked up on the march.” This labor force enabled the Yankees to push through the zone of Confederate road obstructions with relative ease. “Rebels have blockaded roads along the swamps,” recorded a Minnesota soldier, “but they are soon cleared away by our negro pioneers, who carry axes & spades.” “The roads were nothing but quagmires,” added a Fifteenth Corps infantryman. “We had 400 negroes, who constructed of pine logs and poles a double corduroy [road] from our front to the rear.”

  The one laboring job that blacks were not allowed to perform was railroad wrecking. Sherman made this task one of the highest, if not the highest, of priorities for his troops. Whenever it was possible, the march route followed a railroad right-of-way so that units—from single regiments to whole divisions—could be assigned to wrecking duties. “I attached much importance to this destruction of the railroad,” Sherman said, “gave it my own personal attention, and made reiterated orders to others on the subject.”

  Major General Henry W. Slocum, commanding the Left Wing, reported that his men had destroyed 119 miles of rail, principally following the Georgia Railroad from outside Atlanta to where the line crossed the Oconee River, east of Madison. An additional six miles’ worth came out of the Eatonton branch of the Central of Georgia around Milledgeville. The infantry of the Right Wing, under Major General Oliver O. Howard, claimed 191 miles destroyed. Their path of destruction followed the Central of Georgia, starting east of Macon, continuing to the crossing of the Little Ogeechee, forty-six miles west of Savannah. Twenty-four miles were ripped out of the Augusta and Savannah line, with more than forty pried from the Savannah and Gulf Railroad beds.

  The traditional story of Sherman’s March reckons each of these stretches wrecked with exquisite care. Indeed, when Sherman personally supervised, or the work was carried out by the 1st Michigan Engineers, destruction was total. However, when the job was left to the infantry without Sherman’s presence, the results varied—from a thorough ripping of beds, burning of ties, and twisting of rails to a far more cursory vandalism, which often consisted only of flipping the track over and setting the sleepers on fire.

  This helps explain why, on January 3, 1865, Confederate engineer chief Major General J. F. Gilmer was able to report that “cars now run from Macon to Milledgeville.” By the end of the month, a determined traveler could complete a rail journey from Rutledge to Augusta. While it is true that whole sections between Gordon and Savannah would have to be abandoned, it was only because the Federal garrison in the latter place constituted a threat to working parties. This is not to say that the railroad wrecking was superficial. It wasn’t; but it was several degrees less than the absolute destruction usually portrayed. Much the same could be said for the Confederate telegraph system, dismantled along with the railroads. By dint of hard work, the Southern Telegraph Company had service restored between Richmond and Mobile on January 1.

  The notion that Sherman’s March to the Sea was the first to display characteristics of widespread destruction is a persistent generalization grafted onto the saga soon after its completion, projected to an even greater degree in the century following the Civil War. Sherman’s inclusion of civilian and commercial property on his list of legitimate military targets led some historians to proclaim that his campaign was one of “total war.” This is to misread Sherman’s intentions and to misunderstand the results of what happened.

  “Total war” implies a military operation meant to obliterate civilian infrastructure preparatory to imposing a new order on that society. Sherman had no such desires. His more limited goal was to make any continuance of rebellion so unpalatable to southern civilians that they would view a return to the Union as the lesser of two evils. The overwhelming force he applied made it clear to all that the so-called Confederacy lacked the wherewithal to guarantee personal security. Sherman’s decision to add civilian property to the mix stemmed from his belief in collective responsibility and his determination to punish the Southern leaders who should have been looking out for the welfare of their people by finding an accommodation with him.

  Ironically, from Sherman’s standard of values the March to the Sea was a failure. It was his hope to end the Civil War in such a way that the country would be able to turn back the clock to the idealized society that had (in his opinion)
existed prior to the outbreak of the conflict. Political and social changes that he neither understood nor could control doomed that aspiration.

  Sherman’s metaphor that war was like a fight between two adolescents that ended when one was fairly beaten and agreed to henceforth play by the other’s rules proved not to apply. Beaten Southerners may have rejoined the Union, but they had not renounced the essentials of the social system that had bound their society in 1860. New ways would be found to restore the old balance of white authority and black subservience, through manipulation of law and other forms of physical coercion that would restore the old order for nearly a century.

  Sherman’s way of war, however nontraditional in its means, was essentially conservative in its ultimate objectives. It is perhaps the supreme irony that the General departed Atlanta utterly convinced that his way would set things right again, when in fact he helped usher in changes whose implications must have appalled him.

  In 1875, when it was far too late to do anything about it, Sherman tried to discourage the public’s continuing fascination with the March to the Sea. “I only regarded the march from Atlanta to Savannah as a ‘shift of base,’ as the transfer of a strong army, which had no opponent, and had finished its then work, from the interior to a point on the sea-coast, from which it could achieve other important results. I considered this march as a means to an end, and not as an essential act of war.” Nobody paid much attention to his declaration because everybody knew better. The March to the Sea, at least in the popular imagination, was seen as a defining moment in American history. Its significance was promoted by Northerners and Southerners, though for decidedly different reasons.

  Those in the North were in the process of enshrining an enduring image of the common men who preserved the Union. From the halls of Congress (where veteran pensions were a hot topic) to the mainstream press (who found that printing soldier recollections often boosted circulation), the picture of “Billy Yank” was taking shape. One problem was that most such chronicles often ended in an untidy and bloody battle. The March to the Sea offered size and scope without the gore—at least, without much. As one veteran officer (though not a march participant) wrote in an article aimed at “Young Folks,” “The romantic character of the march is unsurpassed. That an army should disappear from sight for a month, marching unharmed through hostile regions, its whereabouts unknown to its friends, and emerge at last as if out of a wilderness, with undiminished numbers and increased renown, is a circumstance that equals in interest any in history; and so long as America’s boys and girls read the account of the nation’s achievements, they will find no chapter more fascinating than that which tells of Sherman’s March to the Sea.”