Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Many of the common soldiers who afterward recounted their experiences in this campaign both shaped and were shaped by its popular conception. “We had a gay trip through the State of Ga.,” wrote an Ohio boy to his “Coz” Sallie in December 1864. “Plenty of fat hogs, sweet taters, molasses, pea nuts, scared niggers and other eatables too numerous to mention on the whole route.” Twenty-four years later, a best-selling soldier memoir (Hardtack and Coffee, by John D. Billings) would remark that “this traveling picnic of the Western armies was unique.” Also enshrined was the image of the bummer as a carefree warrior, ingenious in his means of acquisition, dogged in his determination to fight when challenged.

  Usually forgotten in the retellings were the days of miserable weather that accompanied travel along rudimentary roads, the ever-present fear of murderous irregulars lurking just outside the picket lines, the back-breaking toil of shoving loaded wagons by hand through clay gumbo, the almost constant crack of muskets as enemy cavalry pressed the column’s rear, the miles of corduroy lanes, and the briefly violent roadblock actions. While contemporary accounts make it clear that no one was untainted by the foraging operations (if a soldier didn’t personally appropriate the food, he ate it without compunction when it was brought into camp), the passage of time led participants to assuage any lingering guilt by writing about such incidents in broad strokes or illustrating them by means of a humorous anecdote.

  In sharp contrast, the other side’s story of the march emphasized and amplified every encounter to an outrage. A sympathetic historian, writing in the 1950s, commented that a “bitter feeling toward the North, a belief that Yankees were barbarians, an utter detestation of Sherman, lived long in the minds of Southerners.” An 1875 Augusta newspaper review of Sherman’s Memoirs concluded that the General’s reputation would be forever sullied “by acts of cruelty and brutality which would have disgraced the chieftain of a tribe of Indians or the leader of a band of brigands.” When, in 1911, the U.S. Post Office issued a stamp bearing Sherman’s image, outrage throughout the South was palpable. “If W. T. Sherman’s face must be held up to view, send it to those who love his character and celebrate his victory in song, but not to those whose homes he robbed, whose daughters he insulted, whose sons he murdered, and whose cities and homes he burned,” thundered one editorial.

  Perhaps the lightning rod for rage at Sherman’s Savannah Campaign was the song “Marching through Georgia,” written in early 1865 by a Chicago-based composer named Henry Clay Work. Although he was a successful creator of melodic material for the commercial marketplace, Work was no hack. He was a meticulous, painstaking tunesmith, whose war songs were often animated by a humanitarian abolitionism. Unlike many peers who milked black stereotypes for all their minstrel-show guffaws, Work strove for more humane characterizations. Those strains of high craftsmanship coupled with an underdog sympathy came together in “Marching through Georgia.” To an original and compelling melody, the composer set his own verse, which in a remarkably short span managed to touch many of the campaign’s high points. He referenced the slaves who abandoned their owners (“How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound!”), the foraging (“How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found!/How the sweet potatos even started from the ground”), and the hapless opposition (“Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain”).

  In the North, much to Sherman’s displeasure, the song became a hit, as well as an obligatory accompaniment to his public appearances. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to listen to that blasted tune,” he was heard to mutter on one such occasion. Its reception farther south was quite different. A human face was put on the issue in 1902 when Miss Laura Talbot Galt, a thirteen-year-old student in the Louisville, Kentucky, school system, refused to sing the song in class. She even put her hands over her ears while her classmates performed the piece. “I did that because I would not listen to a song that declares such a tyrant and coward as Sherman and his disgraceful and horrible march through Georgia…to be glorious,” she declared in an open letter to the press. Fifteen years later, a Macon assembly representing “Children of the Confederacy” passed a resolution protesting “against the use of the so-called ‘hate song,’ Marching through Georgia, and [we] urge its suppression and elimination in all schools and on all public occasions.”

  Time has neutralized much of the acid in these sentiments, but the phrase Sherman’s March has morphed into a comfortable metaphor for a scorched-earth policy, and its architect has become an accepted synonym for a pariah. A series of damaging Georgia floods in the twentieth century were said to represent “probably its worst devastation since Sherman’s Civil War march to the sea,” and an Atlanta sportswriter, speaking of a disgraced Braves ballplayer, called him “the most disliked person hereabouts since William Tecumseh Sherman.” A T-shirt sold during the 1996 Summer Olympic games in Atlanta sported a fiery image of the General with the legend: “Atlanta’s Original Torch Bearer.” It seems that Sherman’s “shift of base” will forever be best remembered for everything that it wasn’t.

  Sherman’s March to the Sea was a highly organized, carefully planned operation that also allowed ample room for improvisation. The columns departing Atlanta on November 15–16 were not traveling lean and mean. Packed into more than 2,500 wagons were a twenty-day supply of bread; forty days of sugar, coffee, and salt; and three days’ worth of animal feed. Moving with the lengthy wagon trains were 5,000 cattle, representing a forty-day beef supply. Writing to his surrogate father from Savannah, Sherman rejected the notion that he had been “rash in cutting loose from a base and relying on the country for forage and provisions. I had wagons enough loaded with essentials, and beef cattle enough to feed on for more than a month, and had the census statistics showing the produce of every county through which I desired to pass. No military expedition was ever based on sounder or surer data.”

  Solving the problems in getting so many heavy, awkward vehicles over the watercourses large and small, along dirt tracks that were roads in name only, or through the sucking swamps outside Savannah represented a logistical achievement of unparalleled accomplishment. Sherman’s “secret weapon” (secret only from most of the popular postwar accounts) were the two pontoon detachments and the pioneer units, the latter of which began the march mostly white and ended up largely black in composition. Without the skillful hard work of the army’s bridge makers and road fixers, the march would have become a dispiriting slog through Georgia. The fact that Sherman could plan a route across fifteen significant creeks, streams, or rivers, requiring bridging at an average 230 feet per crossing (many more smaller water crossings were built), along with nearly 100 miles of corduroy paths, most of which was accomplished without serious delay to the columns, speaks to the effectiveness of this arm of the General’s operation. Not surprisingly, Sherman’s chief engineer, Captain Orlando Poe, was afterward jumped two ranks to colonel for his work.

  Foraging was a double-edged sword during the March to the Sea. On the one hand, Sherman’s supply situation required it. On the other, if it was allowed to take place without controls, the army’s combat effectiveness would be seriously degraded. By making use of his personal currency with his officers and men, aided by a few strongly worded orders on the subject, Sherman was able to keep something of a lid on the activity. He accepted the inevitability of some excesses, while he also distanced himself from any direct responsibility, which allowed him to focus on operational matters as his columns passed from the well-drained red clay region above the fall line into the sandy bogs and swamps of the coastal lowlands.

  In his official report of this campaign, Sherman put the damage done to the Georgian infrastructure at $100 million. It was a number without context, meant more to suggest the grand scale of his wrecking rather than a sober assessment of its costs to the Confederacy. The property consumed by Sherman’s men was, for the most part, the result of a focused targeting. Food-refining or product-manufacturing buildings were high-prior
ity objects, as well as just about any structure that could be associated with the railroads. Also topping the hit lists were government assets at all levels—town, county, state, and national. Almost everything else that suffered—in the built-up areas, at least—was what a later generation of military planners would term collateral damage. Houses unfortunate enough to be located adjacent to priority targets were often caught up in the flames and the general disinclination of Union officers to expend any effort to protect them. Exceptions, where dwellings safely distanced from the approved targets were torched, had a lot to do with circumstances or plain bad luck. The unexpectedly sharp Rebel rearguard action at Sandersville exposed much of the town to Yankee wrath, while blocked roads that held a Federal column in place for a while in Louisville also spelled trouble when bored soldiers turned to mob vandalism. When the columns kept moving and priority targets were sufficiently isolated, collateral damage was minimal.

  Not accounted for in any of the quantitative measurements was the psychological impact of what was, to all intents and purposes, a home invasion on a grand scale. One Illinois soldier never forgot how the white property owners viewed the looting of their holdings “with grim despair depicted on their countenances.” “We were the first live Yankees many of them had ever seen,” recorded Henry Slocum, “and our long columns filling through their quiet country towns inspired almost as much curiosity as terror.” “Some few look and act scornful and indignant to think that the Yankees should have dared to tread the sacred soil of Georgia,” added a Seventeenth Corps soldier, “others terrified and frightened stand mute as Egyptian mummies and stare…with disheveled faces upon the passing and conquering army.”

  Devastation of crops and animal stock was significant, but not on the scale of a great plague. For all the acumen they showed at winkling out hidden goods, Sherman’s foragers missed much. That some families suffered serious losses cannot be denied, but neither can the fact that most found ways to make it through the winter of 1864–1865, with no cases of starvation reported. Many a little boy or girl who viewed the outrages with wide-eyed horror lived to write about those experiences when they were old and gray. The Civil War devastated much of the South, and, sad to say, there were other regions which could match wrecked economies with the 60-by-300-mile swath marked out by Sherman’s columns. War, it must be said, is an equal-opportunity destroyer; a Pennsylvania farmer visited by Confederates on their way to Gettysburg would have much in common with a Georgia farmer caught in the path of the March to the Sea.

  Confederate resistance to Sherman’s campaign was fatally hampered at the very outset thanks to the defensive scheme imposed by Jefferson Davis. By parceling out authority among several regional commanders who enjoyed supreme oversight within their domains, while allowing his designated overall chief (Beauregard) to self-limit his authority, Davis virtually guaranteed that what scarce assets were available to oppose Sherman’s March would be used in the most inefficient manner. The question must be asked: Could Confederate forces have inflicted such damage on Sherman’s force that he would have contemplated turning back? The answer is a firm no. Sherman’s troops were simply too good and too experienced, their commander too fixed in his purpose. There is no questioning the fortitude and determination of the Georgia militiamen who attacked a numerically inferior Federal force at Griswoldville; still, the outcome was a terrible defeat.

  Yet Confederates could have inflicted some serious damage on Sherman’s operation. Wheeler was the key. If his mounted units (arguably the best fighters available on the Rebel side) could have been concentrated against the Federal logistical tail (the pontoon train especially), there is little doubt that the Union columns would have been considerably impeded. This might have resulted in Sherman reaching Savannah in a much less vigorous condition than he did, which would have forced him to take much more time to subdue the coastal fortress. All of which might well have pushed his departure from Savannah into the Carolinas into March, if not April. What the Confederacy might have done with such a delay is another question altogether.

  Such speculation is ultimately moot, because Wheeler was juggled from regional commander to regional commander, who required him to spread his units thin to carry out what they designated as his primary mission—intelligence gathering. The times he met Kilpatrick with anything approaching parity, there was a sharp combat. Given the volatile nature of cavalry engagements, the side that retained the battlefield at the end of the fight (a traditional measure of victory) meant very little. In virtually every mounted engagement of any consequence in this campaign, each side would legitimately claim its mission objectives had been achieved. When a unit making a retrograde movement is attacked, success for both sides is assured, since each completes its assignment. Given the practical impossibility of assessing losses absorbed and inflicted in such a continuous campaign, each cavalry commander let his imagination fill in the blank spaces, resulting in claimed totals that would have wiped out both sides. The fact that save for operational wear and tear, the opposing horsemen were ready to renew the combat right after Savannah says all that needs to be said about the casualty exchange.

  Even as the mounted forces picked up where they had left off after Savannah to continue the action in the Carolinas, Georgia’s Governor Brown was fuming over reports of excesses committed by Wheeler’s men while in his state. Given his naturally litigious personality, Brown launched an investigation, documented his case, then filed a lengthy brief with General Beauregard, who promptly forwarded the matter along to Major General Wheeler. Wheeler counterattacked by submitting affidavits from his subcommanders blaming other parties (including Georgia militiamen, roving bandit gangs, and even a special unit of Wheeler impostors organized by Sherman to spread discontent) that completely exonerated his command from any misbehavior. By the time this all came to a head, it was April 1865, so there was no prospect that the competing claims would ever be impartially examined. In a note included in the case file he had amassed, Governor Brown allowed himself the observation: “I cannot withhold the expression of my surprise, that General Wheeler should pronounce all the important charges of horse stealing, breaking open houses and stealing property of citizens, which are made against his command, to be basely false.”

  Adding up the numbers for the March to the Sea is more an exercise in conjecture than it is a computation of data. For all his careful details of damage inflicted and generous estimates of the destruction done, Sherman was remarkably lax when it came to counting the cost to his army. What tables and tabulations are to be found in the Official Records are all partials, and there is no consistent time frame applied to what reports are given. Missing entirely are any overall summaries for the entire Right Wing.

  A 1908 calculation by a Union veteran named Frederick H. Dyer, who was obsessed with what today we would call “number crunching,” provides a useful starting point. Dyer figured that the Savannah Campaign (November 15 to December 10) cost Sherman 136 killed, 673 wounded, and 280 missing, for a total of 1,089. Additionally, Dyer tacked on another 200 losses in combined killed and wounded for the siege itself. Dyer seems not to have accounted for death from disease and accidents; fortunately, here we have a report from the Right Wing’s medical director (there is no corresponding report for the Left Wing) that records 32 soldiers dying from disease and adds that 29 of those initially tagged as wounded succumbed to their injuries. Making appropriate allowances for the Left Wing, the best estimate becomes approximately 240 killed, 650 wounded, and 280 missing, totaling 1,170.

  Such a patchwork of incomplete hard data and extrapolations applies also to the extant Confederate information. A Southern version of Dyer by the name of Edwin L. Drake ran some Confederate numbers in 1878. Working only with general tabulations (killed/wounded/missing), he put Wheeler’s campaign losses at 596. Turning to the mix of infantry forces opposing the march, Drake estimated losses during the Savannah siege of 800. To these lists of losses we can add Griswoldville’s 550, Fort McAllister�
��s 200, and another 100 for various skirmishes, to reach an estimated total of 2,300. It’s a useful number to keep in mind when hearing Federal assessments term the Confederate efforts as “feeble.”

  How much Georgia vengeance was visited upon Union foragers is difficult to assess with any precision. Most Union accounts of men murdered while gathering supplies are secondhand; reliable primary testimony is rare. That some Yankee boys were killed while in the act of foraging is undoubtedly true. One modern historian puts the body count at 64 found in such a condition as to suggest execution. However, most of the significant incidents reported by Southern civilians or cavalrymen seem to exist more to counter deprecations against Georgia manhood than to accurately relay facts.

  One account relates how some property owners banded together to jump the foragers at their night camp. “They would kill whole small parties of foragers and bury them in the woods,” he declared, conveniently explaining why no bodies had been found. There is another recollection of the slaughter of a number of captured foragers in the town of Sandersville just before the Union occupation—an incident unreported by the Federal soldiers who flooded the area afterward, assiduously probing into every pile of freshly turned earth seeking buried treasures.