150 years ago, Sherman left Atlanta burned
Five weeks later, he’d proven South was done
EDITOR’S NOTE _ Part of an occasional AP series on the sesquicentennial of the U. S. Civil War.
MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — On Nov. 16, 1864, 150 years ago, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman watched his army pull out of Atlanta, the Southern commercial hub he’d captured two months earlier, a tremendous morale boost for the North that helped ensure Abraham Lincoln’s re-election on Nov. 8.
“Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins,” Sherman wrote as his great march began: “the gun barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south.”
The troops sang as a band played. “Never before or since have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place.”
With 62,000 veteran troops, Sherman planned to drive to the Atlantic coast at Savannah, conquering territory but also making a point to the enemy, whom he now saw as both the Confederate army and the unyielding, enabling Southern populace. It was an audacious military plan which has come to be known as “Sherman’s march to the sea.”
“If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power that (Confederate President Jefferson) Davis cannot resist,” Sherman wrote to the Union commander, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who was locked in his own fight in Virginia against Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“I can make this march,” Sherman concluded, “and make Georgia howl.”
“Shock and awe. That’s really what Sherman was talking about,” historian John Marszalek, author of “Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order,” said in an interview.
Going back to “Cump” Sherman’s boyhood, when his father died virtually penniless and his mother sent him to be raised by another family, Marszalek said the warrior who’s remembered for chaos was really guided by a lifelong quest for order and stability.
Central to this notion was restoration of Union and the rule of law.
From Atlanta, Sherman sent his force, divided into parallel columns, southward through the center of Georgia, keeping on a fairly straight course — feinting east or west toward larger cities, pinning defenders there but not attacking. In fact, with the exception of fights his army quickly won against undermanned forces at Griswoldville and a few other places, Sherman’s march was a stroll, militarily. Despite its bloody reputation, “there was little death or injury to anyone, friend or foe,” Marszalek wrote.
The very ease of it made a statement: Southerners were undefended — helpless — now.
For the unprotected public, the resulting sense of terrifying vulnerability was just what Sherman intended.
“Forage liberally,” he famously ordered. He qualified that, writing that the poor should be spared, that private homes shouldn’t be entered, that stealing was forbidden.
Still, many troops took the orders as license to pillage. One letter home describes the spoils that a team of designated foragers returned to camp with one night: “Pumpkins, chickens, cabbages” for the evening meal, but also “a looking-glass, an Italian harp ..., a peacock, a rocking chair,” and more.
The psychic damage was incalculable. He made Southerners, as he put it, “feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.”
The March to the Sea took barely a month, ending with typical Sherman flourish.
He telegraphed Lincoln on Dec. 22: “I beg to present to you as a Christmasgift the City of Savannah.”
$
$
$
$