The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The North would reelect Lincoln despite Grant’s terrible losses—but only if the Union public could be convinced that such sacrifice would be capitalized on by generals like Sherman. As Sherman best put it to Grant in magnanimous fashion after taking Atlanta, “In the mean time, know that I admire your dogged perseverance and pluck more than ever. If you can whip Lee and I can march to the Atlantic, I think Uncle Abe will give us twenty days’ leave of absence to see the young folks.”56

  Atlanta and Beyond (November 1864–April 1865)

  History is replete with successful invaders—Xerxes at Athens, Napoleon in Moscow, the Germans inside the rubble of Stalingrad, the Chinese Communists at Seoul in 1951—who found their occupation of an enemy’s defeated capital or key city of either little value or real peril, given that a large undefeated enemy force was still nearby and most of the occupied city lay in ruins or was without supply. In contrast, Sherman saw Atlanta as the beginning, not the end, of his Georgia campaign. Sherman was sometimes unsteady—especially between Bull Run and Shiloh, when he suffered severe depression. He often overstated his own case in his memoirs and unfairly deprecated the efforts of others. There were plenty of better battlefield tacticians on both sides of the Civil War—Lee, Long-street, or Jackson, and Grant, Thomas, or Sheridan. He seemed surprised at Kennesaw Mountain—and both earlier at Shiloh and later at Bentonville. That said, no Civil War commander possessed a more astute appraisal of the nature of contemporary warfare, how to form and pursue grand strategy, and the critical nexus between war, civil society, popular support, and electoral politics. And few American generals have since.

  After the capture of Atlanta, to the shock of its remaining residents and to the outrage of John Bell Hood, Sherman forced most to flee the city and set about garrisoning it as a depot for further operations. He neither apologized nor expressed one iota of regret for shelling the city on his approach. As he put it to John Bell Hood, in an exchange of letters after taking the city, “I was not bound by the laws of war to give notice of the shelling of Atlanta, a ‘fortified town, with magazines, arsenals, foundries, and public stores’; you were bound to take notice. See the books. This is the conclusion of our correspondence, which I did not begin, and terminate with satisfaction.”57

  Sherman set out on November 17 from Atlanta on his famous five-week March to the Sea, reaching and capturing Savannah on December 21. From there, he undertook an even more arduous march through the Carolinas in an effort to enter Virginia at the rear of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. When the war ended in April 1865, Sherman had torn apart the South, humiliated the enemy, and caused massive defections from Lee’s army as Confederate soldiers in Virginia heard constant bad news of a huge Union force running amok among their friends and family to the rear.58

  Sherman, as an Ohioan with long residence in California, was at heart a westerner, familiar with navigation and supply over the new nation’s great distances by wagon, train, and ship. He felt comfortable with like kind, especially marching, camping out, and meeting the challenges of wide-open spaces and rough terrain. After Bull Run, the first great battle of the war, Sherman never again fought in Virginia or Maryland—the meat grinders that would devour the Army of the Potomac.

  Indeed, he would not return to the east until his final great march through the Carolinas. Pitched battles in the Richmond and Washington corridors were of an entirely different sort from the long marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, for which Sherman was far better suited. We do not know what Sherman might have done in Grant’s place during the awful spring and summer of 1864, but he might well not have had the same avenues to enact his evolving ideas about modern total war as he did out west.

  Misunderstanding Sherman

  Sherman is often characterized as a heartless prophet of modern, total, and merciless war, with the burning of Atlanta or Columbia serving as a sort of precursor to Dresden or Hamburg. That characterization—fanned by Sherman’s own vivid and occasionally hyperbolic use of nouns and verbs such as “cruelty,” “hell,” “ruin,” “howl,” “smashing,” and “breaking”—is not accurate, if such a charge refers to the level of damage he inflicted on either the Confederate army or its population. In comparison to horrific battles elsewhere, few of the enemy—soldiers or civilians—died, either inside Atlanta or on his subsequent marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. Where Sherman, in the moral sense, proved a revolutionary figure was not in the killing of civilians or waging “total war,” but through his radical notions of proper culpability in war.

  It made no sense to him that the slave-owning plantation class of the Old South, which had plunged the nation into war, should be relatively free from the costs of combat while mostly non-slave-owning and poorer Southerners were dying in droves in northern Virginia. Sherman saw that the destruction of the Southern mystique of superior gallantry was essential to Lincoln’s victory. Often in obnoxious fashion, he would instruct the South about the various dichotomies of the war. Industry and material advantage would nullify martial gallantry. The South’s pride in Southern civic superiority would, so Sherman further assumed, be questioned by the fact of a hundred thousand Union soldiers tramping wherever they pleased.59

  Sherman often tried to explain his evolving views in the context of the morality of the new age of warfare. In an August 14, 1864, letter to James Guthrie, a politician, railroad executive, and political ally, Sherman remarked as he neared Atlanta,

  We must, to live and prosper, be governed by law, and as near that which we inherited as possible. Our hitherto political and private differences were settled by debate, or vote, or decree of a court. We are still willing to return to that system, but our adversaries say no, and appeal to war . . . Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in till we are whipped or they are . . . The only principle in this war is, which party can whip.60

  More important still, for all the invective against Sherman, who was reviled as a terrorist in Southern papers, his ravaging was largely aimed at Confederate buildings, rails, telegraph systems, and the property of the slave-owning elite. For that he has never been forgiven, reminding us that Machiavelli warned in The Prince of the political repercussions of damaging property: “Men will sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.” Yet Sherman’s ultimate aims were to shorten the war and thereby save lives by marches that humiliated and demoralized the enemy population rather than butchering soldiers in head-to-head combat. He would be all the more hated the more he focused on property and the less he targeted Confederate soldiers. Or, as Noah Trudeau concluded:

  “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.61

  For Sherman, like Clausewitz earlier, armies were political tools. He reminded the nation that an army and its civilian supporters were inseparable from each other. Yet unlike Clausewitz, Sherman did not see the need to find the enemy’s main army and destroy it on the field of battle. The key was submission—whether materially or psychologically—of the entire civilian infrastructure that produced armies, a strategy not always predicated on set battle. Attack that civilian root, and its military fruit would die on the vine.

  For Sherman, inconclusive wars often resulted even when armies simply gave up or in i
solation were defeated—as if decisive battle was rarely decisive. In contrast, lasting peace was built through convincing an entire population that it had been both collectively defeated and humiliated, and that it bore the wages of its initial unwise aggression, and therefore that it should cease the production of war material and the contribution of men to the cause. Or, as Sherman put it once to General George Thomas, “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.” Much of later subsequent military history may well confirm Sherman’s thinking that “hostile armies” were inseparable from “hostile people,” especially when we reflect upon the ephemeral peace that followed the First World War, in comparison with the lasting peace after the Second.

  Sherman was far more adept at ruining Southern morale without killing thousands of civilians than were his twentieth-century disciples. When Confederate armies did not meet him in huge pitched battles during the Atlanta campaign and the later March to the Sea, Sherman grasped how he had struck at the very nerve of the supposed military gallantry and dash of Confederate cavaliers. Or, as he once put it to a Southern acquaintance, “Your biggest armies in Virginia and Georgia lie behind forts, and dare not come out and fight us cowards of the North, who have come five hundred miles into their country to accept the challenge.”62

  Sherman is also known as a revolutionary in his uncanny appreciation of the material resources of the new industrial age. Even before the war began, Sherman saw that industrial production and material resources would be more a determinant than claims of superior bravery. In a prescient antebellum conversation with his friend and colleague David F. Boyd at the Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (the precursor to Louisiana State University), Sherman—still residing in the South—let loose with a screed about the nature of war on the horizon:

  The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with . . . If your people would but stop and think, they must see that in the end you will surely fail.63

  Grant may have believed, though he never explicitly wrote, that the North’s far greater population (22 million versus the South’s 9 million, including slaves) meant that he could defeat the South even while losing three soldiers to Lee’s two. But such arithmetic assumed that a more affluent Northern public would accept such losses until Lee quit. In contrast, Sherman looked to different statistics: the North possessed a 23–1 edge in manufacturing, a 10–1 superiority in arms production, well over twice the rail and telegraph infrastructure of the South—and a better informed and more fickle public. That meant that Sherman would have the resources to equip large armies to go into the South and waste the far more limited material resources of the Confederacy, while losing fewer soldiers in battle and thus maintaining public support.64

  Grant, Hood, and Lee, like Sherman, finally grasped that rifled musketry, and soon the repeating cartridge rifle, along with far more lethal artillery, could destroy hundreds, even thousands of men in a few hours. But unlike Sherman, they were still not ready to abandon noble charges, head-on assaults—all the stuff of a once glorious Western way of war—that could prove suicidal. Since his horrific first day at Shiloh (April 6, 1862), Sherman had begun to craft a new manner of mobile warfare that could both bring victory and save his army from the oblivion of industrial warfare that would destroy tens of thousands of Americans at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor.

  Later, in his formal analysis of the lessons of the Civil War, Sherman repeatedly stressed both the physical and psychological benefits of keeping soldiers moving. A sense of linear progress was critical, freed from the stifling strictures of a bureaucratic and noncombatant military to the rear. In other words, once in the field, “overwhelming necessity overrides all law.” The more he could ensure that his men would have a good chance of surviving their victory, the more he could demand rigorous labor and physical sacrifice from them during his incessant marching. Only on the road, Sherman was the law, not his superiors Grant, Gen. Henry Halleck, or Lincoln.65

  Sherman also appreciated the importance of new electronic communications. When the telegraph and mass-produced and circulated newspapers were wedded to a free society, suddenly news from the front could reach the public within days, if not hours—often raw and hysterically editorialized. That meant, in a consensual society, that casualties suffered at Shiloh, Antietam, or Gettysburg could incite panic and hysteria and overshadow the eventual story of tactical victory itself. A general in the new age of warfare could win a battle, but lose the public will to continue. All hard-won victories in their immediate aftermath could be seen as Pyrrhic. Sherman accepted that new fact of media influence—even as he railed against reporters as purveyors of doom who could destroy public support for any army by inexact and incomplete reporting.66

  Lee and Grant may well have been better generals than Sherman, in the sense of deploying forces on the battlefield and keeping an iron nerve amid the bloodletting. But both nearly wrecked public support for their causes. It was Lee’s misfortune that he had a disciple like the heedless John Bell Hood rather than like William Tecumseh Sherman, who might have caused havoc by slashing his way to the North, destroying the Union economy and morale—as Lee held down Grant and the Army of the Potomac in the east. Grant had a distant subordinate who made him look good; in contrast, Lee had one who made him look quite bad.

  Yet in the end, as with most savior generals, the brilliance of Sherman’s revolutionary strategic vision was overshadowed by the controversies over his supposed embrace of “total war.” Military historians came to appreciate that Sherman had saved lives by bringing the war to a close; yet millions in the South, and nearly as many in the North, would forever deem him uncouth and barbarous. Sherman not only accepted that charge, but the additional one that his outspokenness had in some sense needlessly incurred it. In a letter to his wife, Ellen, he best summed up the paradox of wanting to explain to a nation what war was about while conceding the result would be unpalatable: “I know what I said will be gall and wormwood to some, but it will make others think.” But then again, Sherman seemed almost to wish to shock the public, or at least be disliked by it; as he wrote his brother in the midst of the Atlanta campaign, “I was in hopes I could remain unpopular.”67

  The Sherman Way

  What was the Sherman way? To lead troops from the front as unkempt-looking “Uncle Billy” or weather-beaten “Old Sherman,” but only after the most careful planning and organization had ensured that the Army of the West would be both more numerous and better supplied than its enemy—and would suffer fewer losses. In the Atlanta campaign, Sherman was almost killed twice, at Adairsville and Cassville, where artillery and small arms fire shredded trees around his staff. Earlier at Shiloh, he was wounded in the hand and lost three of his mounts. In general, Sherman was impatient with stasis and understood that armies that do not move, erode. Those that do, gain confidence and are more likely to fight well and endure hardship.68

  How did Sherman take Atlanta by September 2, without suffering costly casualties, and then prepare to march to Savannah—all deep in enemy territory with a variety of Confederate armies at his flanks and rear? Down to the mechanical level, Sherman was a master of practical details. Before Sherman set out, he calculated that 130 railcars were needed to travel southward from Tennessee each day he marched. To meet that need, Sherman commandeered railcars wherever he could find them, and finally shut down all civilian rail traffic. If his troops were well supplied with food and ammunition—and knew their general would ensure such supplies without interruption—they would march and fight well. More important still, Sherman could calculate how many railcars of stored matérie
l he might need when he left the logistical security of the tracks, and roughly how many supplies the local landscape might provide.

  Soldiers fired rifles, but that was impossible without food, ammunition, and proper care. The historian John Marszalek best summed up Sherman’s genius in planning the Atlanta campaign:

  He had come to see every Southerner, civilian and soldier, as the enemy; so too he considered every Unionist and every material good to be part of the war effort against the enemy. This ability to see war as total and to organize the vast resources to conduct that war made him the great military commander he showed himself to be that summer. Even before he began maneuvering his huge forces in battle, he had demonstrated military greatness.69

  Unlike Johnston and Hood, who were not exactly clear about their ultimate aims other than stopping the enemy, Sherman not only planned to take Atlanta, but was already envisioning where and how his larger strategic ideas about industrial warfare would play out on marches to the sea and northward through the Carolinas. Sherman’s famous exchanges with John Bell Hood right after taking Atlanta were soon quoted in newspapers and books as larger lessons about the nature of modern war itself. To Hood’s objection that Sherman had first fired on Atlanta, where civilians were intermingled among his batteries, and then, upon its capture, ordered its population to be evacuated, Sherman in his reply described in brilliant fashion the new, expanded parameters of modern war and its rationale: