Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  The fact that the future status of African-Americans had been brought to the fore by the war annoyed Sherman to no end. “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed,” he told his wife in 1863, not long after the Lincoln administration issued the Emancipation Proclamation. “With my opinion of negroes and my experience, yea prejudice, I cannot trust them yet.” Sherman’s bias placed him squarely at odds with his president and his superior officer on this issue, and he did everything within his power to impede efforts by Lincoln and Grant to recruit black soldiers within his command area. “I have had the question put to me often: ‘Is not a negro as good as a white man to stop a bullet?’ Yes; and a sand-bag is better; but can a negro…improvise roads, bridges, sorties, flank movements, etc., like the white man? I say no.” Summing it up, he told a southerner and former acquaintance, “I care not a straw for niggers.”

  Sherman believed that the hard war he advocated and practiced would have no lasting repercussions. Its essence, he explained, was “which party can whip. It’s as simple as the schoolboy’s fight, and when one or the other party gives in, we will be the better friend.” To others protesting his stern policies, Sherman promised, “When peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.”

  Sherman was a man of destiny who was very aware of the fact. “My children and children’s children will now associate my name with their Country’s History,” he bragged in 1863. A year later he remarked: “I do think that in the Several Great Epochs of this war my name will bear a prominent part.” “If I have attained any fame it is pure and unalloyed by the taint of parasitic flattery and the result is to you and the children more agreeable,” he assured his wife, “for it will go to your and their benefit more than all the surface flattery of all the newspaper men of the country.” To his surviving son, Sherman said, “People write to me that I am now a Great General, and if I were to come home they would gather round me in crowds & play music and all such things. That is what people call fame & Glory.”

  It was Sherman’s anointed task to join the great material and human resources of the North with a winning plan driven by his determination to succeed. A recurring metaphor in Sherman’s writings likens war to a great storm, and while he may have had the skill and knowledge to generate the tempest, his mastery of it was far from complete. “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war,” he said to the mayor of Atlanta. “We have accepted the issue [of war] and it must be fought out,” he told another Southern official. “You might as well reason with a thunderstorm.” Lecturing a former friend who had sided with the South and who had protested Sherman’s policies, he said, “Talk it over with your neighbors, and ask yourselves if, in your trials and tribulations, you have suffered more from the Union soldiery than you would had you built your barn where the lightning was sure to burn or tear it down.” “To make war,” he cautioned in early 1864, “we must and will harden our hearts. Therefore when preachers clamor and sanitaries* wail don’t join in, but know that war, like the thunderbolt, follows its laws and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous and charitable stand in its path.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Plan

  When William Tecumseh Sherman published his Memoirs in 1875, his recollections immediately became a focal point for the General’s personal enemies and others seeking to protect the reputations of those he had disparaged. (So much so that the New York Herald bannered it as the “most spicy book of the day.”) Controversy erupted over ownership of the idea for the March to the Sea, which even then had become a fixture of American legend and lore. Leading the pack of those who challenged Sherman’s paternity was Henry Van Ness Boynton, a sometime reporter for a Cincinnati newspaper and a breveted brigadier general with an honorable wound received at Missionary Ridge. Helped with access to official records by some in the Grant administration who felt Sherman’s memories had slighted their chief, Boynton cranked out a refuting book that hit the market the same year as Sherman’s, earning its author the General’s undying enmity.

  What emerged from Boynton’s tome was a prodigious assembly of quotations from Sherman’s work contrasted with official records, all of which seemed to aggregate a great deal but which actually added up to very little. The paper trail of the Civil War was littered with schemes and stratagems, and more than one officer ran his finger through the center of the Confederacy and on to the coast. Even Sherman acknowledged that the idea of “‘cutting their way to the sea’” was “common talk around the campfires of the West.” Nearly twenty years after the war he was still answering questions on the subject. “I have no doubt that hundreds and thousands of men thought of such a scheme,” wrote Sherman in 1883, “but the truth is nobody did it till we did in 1864.”

  The plan came together in bits and pieces, in fits and starts, with some elements taken from past operations and some improvised by necessity. It was unfinished even at the outset of the movement, a work in progress that benefited from contributions by many of Sherman’s subordinates, who added their parts—small and large—to his overall conception. The result was one of the most famous episodes of the Civil War and American history.

  At the beginning of U. S. Grant’s nationally coordinated Federal military offensive of 1864, Sherman, commanding nearly 100,000 men based around Chattanooga, Tennessee, confronted a Confederate force of 64,000 led by General Joseph E. Johnston, whose task was to block any Federal penetration into central Georgia. Sherman’s mission, personally given him by Grant, was to “knock Jos. Johnston, and to do as much damage to the resources of the enemy as possible.” (In an irony that probably wasn’t lost on Sherman, he performed a great service toward Lincoln’s reelection by failing in his primary objective of wrecking the Confederate army and instead turning his efforts to a more obtainable goal, the capture of the Gate City. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman announced on September 3. Crowed the Republican-friendly New York Times, “The political skies begin to brighten. The clouds that lowered over [our]…cause a month ago are breaking away.”)

  Grant was thinking about the next phase even before Sherman carried out his share of the spring operations. At this stage in his forecasting, Grant projected Sherman continuing through Atlanta to Mobile, Alabama, then an important and still active Rebel seaport. By the time Sherman had fought and maneuvered his way into the Gate City in early September, the picture had undergone a dramatic change. A month earlier, Union naval forces, which had overwhelmed the Confederate forts guarding Mobile Bay, took possession of its entrance. With this blow, the military value of Mobile dropped to almost nothing—at least as a port of entry for supplies. “Now that we have all of Mobile Bay that is valuable,” Grant wrote Sherman on September 10, “I do not know…[what] will be the best move [for you to next make].”

  Sherman was already taking steps to keep himself mobile. His first idea was to turn Atlanta into an armed camp held by relatively few troops to allow the bulk of his force freedom to operate in the open. In the clean clinical corridors of Sherman’s thinking process, that meant that Atlanta’s disloyal civilians would have to be evicted. On September 8 he issued orders expelling all citizens not working for his armies, a decision he justified on the basis of military necessity. This ignited a paper storm from the town representatives and General John B. Hood, who had succeeded Johnston. To city officials who pleaded for mercy, Sherman explained that his order was “not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles.” In his reply, Sherman ticked off the facts as he understood them and concluded with the statement that war is “cruelty and you cannot refine it.”

  When Sherman offered to transport the evicted residents into General Hood’s camp, the Confederate officer saw red, accusing the Yankee officer of “studious and ingenious cruelty.” Thi
s provided Sherman with the kind of public forum that he found irresistible. In an exchange of messages that he would eventually release to the press, Sherman countered Hood with instances where Confederate leaders had removed civilians from harm’s way, and, noting the property damage that had already been done to the city, insisted that “it is kindness to these families of Atlanta to remove them now.” When Hood appealed in God’s name, Sherman promptly waggled his finger at the Confederate general (and those leaders like him) “who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war.” Sherman terminated the dialogue after one more exchange, deciding that to continue it was pointless.

  The equations Sherman applied to human beings played no favorites. Even as he and Hood were sparring over the forced civilian evacuation, they were also discussing a prisoner exchange. Hood opened the bidding on September 8 with a generic request containing no reference to numbers involved. Sherman checked to see how many Rebel POWs he held, and in his reply set the target number at 1,810. He also added an important stipulation. He was only interested in men taken from his armies who were healthy enough to immediately resume their places in the ranks. Sherman pointedly was not interested in sickly prisoners, or those belonging to eastern Union armies, or those whose term of service had expired. After sputtering about this matter, Hood proceeded with the exchange; however, not anticipating Sherman’s fine print, he had already brought some up from Andersonville who did not qualify. These were turned around almost in sight of their liberation. Said one of the embittered POWs, “this act of Sherman’s will kill hundreds, as all hope of ever getting out of this is gone.”

  Options

  Despite his initial decision to fortify and hold Atlanta, Sherman soon realized that he had spent its propaganda value in its capture, and to continue defending it would only bring diminishing returns. Union forces in Atlanta were dependent upon a single rail line running north to Federal supply depots in Tennessee. Rebel actions to cut or interdict the railroad forced Sherman to disperse men and materiel to defend and repair it; this reduced his strength and allowed the enemy to claim the all-important initiative. As he phrased it, he had his “wedge pretty deep, and must look out that I don’t get my fingers pinched.” He and Grant now began some long-distance jawing about what to do.

  Sherman’s rapid-fire mind chewed through the possibilities. On September 4 he was thinking of a joint operation with Union forces operating out of New Orleans to capture Columbus, Georgia, a hundred miles south of Atlanta on the Chattahoochee River, site of one of the Confederacy’s most productive arsenals. With Columbus, and a connection south to a supply source secured, Sherman then imagined a thrust farther into central Georgia. Six days later Grant wondered if Sherman might better move to capture Augusta, 150 miles east of Atlanta, site of the Confederate Powder Works, the South’s largest propellant manufacturer. Sherman was willing but worried about logistics. He remained fixed on the need for a secure base of supply along the eastern side of Georgia before he would commit to cutting loose from Atlanta.

  By September 12 Grant and Sherman were back to square one. Sherman learned that he could expect no help from New Orleans, while Grant admitted that he lacked the strength to take and hold a supply depot in eastern Georgia. The lieutenant general did feel that a small force might be detached from Virginia to close the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Well, Sherman replied, if you had enough surplus assets to close Wilmington, you could use them instead to capture Savannah. “If once in our possession…,” he argued, “I would not hesitate to cross the State of Georgia with sixty thousand men, hauling some stores, and depending on the country for the balance.” Sherman saw how he could threaten Macon with its busy ordnance factories so that once the enemy reinforced there, he could swing up to capture Augusta against weak opposition. “Either horn of the dilemma will be worth a battle,” Sherman concluded.

  (Even as he was progressively refining his strategic ideas for the military operation, Sherman was seeking political accommodations that might ease the way. His grand objective all along had been to knock Georgia out of the war. The defeat of Hood in battle and Atlanta’s capture had been important steps in that direction. Hardly had Sherman settled in the Gate City than he was trying to talk the state’s leaders into leaving the Confederacy. Working through a trio of prominent Georgians who were against continuing the war, Sherman sent a message to Governor Brown offering to “spare the state” from further destruction and paying for supplies requisitioned by his men. The quid pro quo was that Brown “would issue his proclamation withdrawing his State troops from the armies of the Confederacy.” Brown replied with a public statement, noting that he and Sherman “would have power to bind no one by any compact we might make,” and besides, the proud people of Georgia would “never treat with a conqueror upon her soil.” Thus ended Sherman’s first foray into high-stakes politics.)

  The Plan—–Hood, Beauregard, and Thomas

  In every scenario he had imagined so far, Sherman had moved his army from one established supply base to another. He just could not conceive any operation of consequence unless Grant gained control of Savannah and its waterways. In typical Sherman fashion, his recognition of its importance to his evolving scheme elevated its significance on the national level. The Confederacy’s leaders, he told Grant, “may stand the fall of Richmond, but not of all Georgia.”

  Suddenly, the intellectual stimulation of debate and discussion was interrupted by movements of the enemy. On September 24, a major Confederate cavalry force, led by the fearsome Nathan Bedford Forrest, challenged Union control of the Tennessee River by capturing the garrison at Athens, Alabama, in the northeast corner of the state. Forrest’s move posed a direct threat to middle Tennessee. Then, on September 29, Hood (now with Jefferson Davis’s blessing) began to march his army counterclockwise around Atlanta. By October 3 his infantry were wrecking the Federal depots at Acworth and Big Shanty, smack on Sherman’s supply line. Two days later a division of Hood’s army tried to capture the critically important Union strong point at Allatoona Pass. The effort failed, but it was a near thing.

  Hood’s movement forced Sherman to dance to the Confederate tune. He began transferring some of his troops into defensive positions along the rail line while directing any newly arriving units to concentrate at Chattanooga and Nashville. Sherman also sent one of his most capable officers, Major General George H. Thomas, to take charge in Tennessee. Then, leaving one corps to garrison Atlanta, Sherman set off after Hood. Even as his men began their wearisome tramp back along roads they had already traversed triumphantly in the opposite direction, Sherman was pondering what he’d rather be doing.

  In a message sent to Grant on October 1, Sherman wondered aloud that if Hood quit his railroad wrecking and marched his army northward, “why will it not do to leave Tennessee to the forces which Thomas has,…and for me to destroy Atlanta and march across Georgia to Savannah and Charleston, breaking [rail]roads and doing irreparable damage? We cannot remain on the defensive.” His thinking now made an important leap forward—he no longer required a secure supply base waiting at the end of the campaign.

  Hood and Sherman: September–November 1864

  As Sherman pushed his forces northward along the railroad, repairing it as he went, Hood remained nimbly out of reach. Up to this time the Confederate officer had operated solely with a cavalry force under Major General Joseph Wheeler, but Sherman could foresee the day when the formidable Forrest would be added to the current campaign. As each day of pursuit proved fruitless, Sherman became increasingly convinced that playing Hood’s game accomplished nothing. “It will be a physical impossibility to protect the [rail]roads, now that Hood, Forrest and Wheeler,…are turned loose…. I propose we break up the railroad [we currently control] from Chattanooga [to Atlanta] and strike out with wagons for Milledgeville, Millen and Savannah,” Sherman wired Grant on October 9. “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its [rail]roads,
houses, and people will cripple their military resources. By attempting to hold the [rail]roads we lose 1,000 men monthly, and will gain no result. I can make the march, and make Georgia howl.”

  Sherman was counting on the special relationship he enjoyed with Grant to enable him to promote his plan. As he later put it, “We were as brothers—I the older man in years, but he higher in rank. We both believed in our heart of hearts that the success of the Union cause was not only necessary to the then generation of Americans, but to all future generations.” On a more informal occasion, Sherman added of Grant, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

  Grant’s grand strategy had been predicated on destroying the enemy’s armies. Sherman knew this and understood that it required careful and patient argument for his friend to accept the concept of turning his most powerful western armies against infrastructure rather than armed forces. (“This may not be war but rather statesmanship,” he suggested to Grant.) Hearing no response from Grant to his October 9 message, Sherman made additional points with a follow-up sent two days later. “Hood may turn into Tennessee and Kentucky, but I believe he will be forced to follow me,” Sherman argued, hoping to assuage Grant’s principal concern. “Instead of being on the defensive, I would be on the offensive, instead of guessing at what he means to do, he would have to guess at my plans. The difference in war is full 25 percent.”

  Crossing Sherman’s note in telegraphic transit was one from Grant that spoke both to his professional concerns and his personal regard for Sherman’s particular brilliance. “If there is any way of getting at Hood’s army, I would prefer that, but I must trust to your own judgment. I find I shall not be able to send a force from here to act with you at Savannah. Your movements therefore, will be independent of mine.” The more Grant thought about matters, the more willing he was to be convinced by Sherman’s plan. But Grant answered to a boss in Washington who was not as quick to embrace such a shift in strategy. On October 12 Grant was advised that President Lincoln “feels much solicitude in respect to General Sherman’s proposed movement and hopes that it will be maturely considered…. [A] misstep by General Sherman might be fatal to his army.” Lincoln’s implication was clear; a mistake by Sherman might be fatal to the administration’s reelection hopes.