Sherman's March to the Sea

Sherman’s March to the Sea was the campaign of the summer of 1863 in which William T. Sherman took Atlanta, the rebel state’s great interior junction, burned it, and marched about sixty-two thousand men two hundred and eighty-five miles across Georgia to Savannah, the Province’s capital, without a supply line, living off the country and destroying what they did not use. It began with the surrender of Atlanta on 24 May 1863 and ended with the surrender of Savannah on 16 July. It cut the rebel state in two, captured Georgia’s rebel government at its desks, and showed the people of the Deep South that the state they had made could not protect them, which was its purpose. The rebellion lasted less than three months after it.

It is also the part of the Civil War that the Realm has never settled. Two charges are made against it. The first is that Sherman burned Atlanta on the night of 30 May on his own decision, without the authority of any minister, and reported it afterwards, and that no minister ever called him to account. The second is that the army which freed the enslaved people of central Georgia as it passed did not protect the people who followed it, and that at Ebenezer Creek it took up its bridge in front of them. The Realm’s military historians regard the march as the decisive operation of the war, and a large number of the same historians regard it as the Union’s worst act. Sherman was made Earl of Atlanta in 1870, and the title is still held.

Sherman

Sherman was an Ohioan and a regular officer of the Royal American Army who had lived in the South and liked it, which is the first thing people learn about him and the last thing they understand.

He was born at Lancaster, in the Commonwealth of Ohio, in 1820, was raised partly in the family of a senator, and went through the Royal American Army’s academy and into the regular service. He resigned in the 1850s, failed in banking, and in 1859 became the superintendent of a new military academy in Louisiane, where he was liked and liked the place. When the five polities rebelled in 1861 he resigned and went north, and his friends at the academy remembered that he wept when he left it.

He came back into the army in 1861 and rose under Grant, whose chief subordinate he became, and whose judgement he trusted above his own on everything but the conduct of his own campaigns. He was nervous, talkative, contemptuous of politicians and of the press, and fond of the people he made war on. He was also convinced that the war would end only when the people of the South felt it as their armies did, and he said so in letters to anyone who would read them. In 1863 he was given the means to do it.

Atlanta

The city

Atlanta was the rebel state’s principal interior junction, where the railways from the coast, the west and Virginia met, and its foundries and depots supplied the Loyal Army in the field.

It had grown fast on the railways and was a new city, with no great houses and few old families, and most of its people worked for the railways or the war. Sherman’s army came down on it from the north in the spring of 1863 through the hill country of north Georgia, flanking the rebel positions one after another rather than assaulting them, and the city’s defenders, too few to hold its lines, withdrew south in the third week of May.

The surrender

On 24 May 1863 the mayor, James Calhoun, rode out with a white flag and surrendered the city to the first Union colonel he met. The army marched in the same afternoon.

The order to leave

On 26 May Sherman ordered the whole civilian population of Atlanta to leave the city.

He meant to turn it into a military depot and then destroy what the rebel state could use, and he did not intend to feed its people while he did either. Calhoun and the city’s council wrote to him in protest, describing the old, the sick and the women with young children who were being sent out onto roads with nowhere to go. Sherman’s reply is the most famous letter of the war:

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

About 1,600 people left by the roads south with what they could carry. The army made no provision for them, as the Realm’s own histories say. Nobody counted the people who died on those roads in the weeks that followed, chiefly the very old and the very young, and their number is the first of the figures that the argument about Atlanta has never been able to settle.

The order to burn

Sherman ordered his chief engineer, Orlando Poe, to destroy every building in Atlanta of military use and every mile of railway in and around it, and the order was executed loosely.

The order was written, as a special field order, and it named depots, foundries, machine shops, warehouses and the railway yards. Poe’s engineers began on the night of 30 May. The fires in the depots spread to the stores beside them and the stores to the business district, the wind carried them, and soldiers who had not been ordered to burn anything set fires of their own. By morning about two-thirds of the city’s buildings had gone, including the whole of its commercial centre. The churches mostly survived, which Atlanta remembers. Because the city had been emptied, the fire itself killed perhaps a dozen people. Poe’s report to Sherman said, in the sentence the Realm’s historians always quote, that the order had been executed with less discrimination than it was given.

The authority

The burning of Atlanta was Sherman’s decision alone.

Grant had approved the plan for a march to the sea in principle, and the ministry knew of it. Neither Grant nor any minister was told that Atlanta would be burned until it had been. Sherman sought no authority for it and received none, reported it after the fact, and was never disciplined. The Realm’s official histories are direct about the sequence, because the alternative account, in which a general acts within his instructions, was tried in the 1870s and does not survive the despatches.

The ministry

The Lincoln ministry learned that Atlanta had been burned from Sherman’s report, and was divided by it.

Edwin Stanton, the war minister, defended the burning in the Commons as an act that would shorten the war, and said so plainly. William Seward, the Foreign Secretary, thought it a disgrace and said so only in private. Lincoln said nothing in public for a week, and then nothing about Atlanta at all. When Savannah fell the ministry sent Sherman its formal thanks, for a campaign that had cut the rebellion in two, and the thanks did not mention Atlanta. That omission is the whole of the Realm’s official judgement on the fire, then and since.

The march

Setting out

On 3 June 1863 the army left the ruins of Atlanta for the coast, with twenty days’ rations and no supply line.

Sherman had cut himself off deliberately. The railway behind him was destroyed, the telegraph was cut, and for six weeks the ministry and the public knew where he was only from the rebel newspapers. Before he left he had written to Grant that he would make Georgia howl, and he meant it literally.

The army

The army was about 62,000 men, veterans almost all of them, in two wings marching on separate roads across a front that was sometimes sixty miles wide. Oliver Howard commanded the right wing and Henry Slocum the left, and Judson Kilpatrick’s cavalry screened them both. Several Black regiments marched with the army, and Black men served as its pioneers and teamsters throughout. The army’s route ran through Covington, Madison, Sandersville and Louisville, to Millen, and down the Ogeechee to Savannah.

Foraging and the bummers

The army fed itself from the farms of central Georgia, under orders that were careful and a conduct that often was not.

Each brigade sent out organised foraging parties every morning, under an officer, with orders to take food and fodder and to stay out of houses. The orders were real, and many parties kept them. Behind and around the columns went the bummers, stragglers, deserters and freelance foragers from both armies, who stripped houses, took what they wanted and burned what they did not, and whose conduct is the source of most of the march’s reputation in the places it passed. Sherman’s own estimate of the damage, in his report, was about A£100 million, of which he said that four-fifths had been simple waste and destruction.

Sherman’s neckties

The army destroyed about 300 miles of railway. The rails were torn up, heated in the middle over bonfires made of the sleepers, and twisted round trees so that they could not be straightened, and the soldiers called them Sherman’s neckties.

What opposed it

Almost nothing opposed it.

The Loyal Army’s main force was in Virginia, under Johnston since Jackson’s death, and could not be spared. Georgia had its militia, mostly old men and boys, and Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry, which harassed the columns and killed stragglers but could not stop them. The only real fight was at Griswoldville, in June, where a brigade of Georgia militia attacked a Union rearguard entrenched behind fence rails and was cut down. The Union soldiers who buried them wrote home that they had found old men and boys among the dead and had taken no pleasure in it.

Millen

At Millen the army found Camp Lawton, a prison camp for Union soldiers, evacuated a few days before, with hundreds of fresh graves. The discovery hardened the army for the last weeks of the march, and the country around Millen suffered more than most for it.

The freed people

The column

Enslaved people left the plantations of central Georgia and followed the army in numbers that overwhelmed it, perhaps twenty-five thousand of them over the six weeks.

They came on foot, with what they owned, with children and old people, and they followed the column because it was the first time in their lives that leaving had been possible. The army freed them by passing; it did not know what to do with them after. They were fed when there was food and not always fed, they slowed the columns, and Sherman, who wanted a fast army, ordered that they be discouraged from following, an order which did not work. Several thousand reached Savannah with the army.

Ebenezer Creek

At Ebenezer Creek, near the coast, the corps commander Jefferson C. Davis had the army’s pontoon bridge taken up after his troops had crossed and before the freed people following them could, and hundreds drowned or were taken by Wheeler’s cavalry.

The creek was deep and cold and Wheeler’s men were close behind. People tried to swim it, and many drowned. Some men of the rearguard felled trees and made rafts to pull people across, against orders. Those left on the far bank were taken by the rebel cavalry, and many of them were shot or returned to slavery. The Black regiments of the army were with the other wing, ahead, and learned of it afterwards. The general who gave the order shared his name with the rebel state’s Lord Protector, and was no relation, which the Realm has never stopped noticing.

The inquiry

In 1864 a select committee of the House of Commons took evidence on Ebenezer Creek from freed people, soldiers and officers, found the facts, and named nobody.

Its evidence is the basis of what the Realm knows, and the Realm does not dispute it. Sherman gave evidence to the committee. He was asked about Atlanta, which was outside the committee’s terms, and answered anyway: that he had burned it, and that he would burn it again. It is the most quoted thing he ever said to Parliament.

Forty acres

At Savannah Sherman set aside the coastal islands and the abandoned rice lands south of the city for the freed people, forty acres to a family, by a field order of his own.

Tens of thousands were settled on the land in the year that followed, and they began to farm it. When the pardoned owners came back, the land was given back to them and the freed families were removed, and the grants were among the first of the promises of the war to be reversed. The army’s honest work for the freed after the march was done by Oliver Howard, who went from commanding its right wing to running the bureau the Realm set up for the freed people, and founded the college at New Westminster that bears his name, Howard University.

Savannah

The sea

On the Ogeechee, below Savannah, the army met the blockading squadron, ships of the Royal Navy and the Royal American Navy that had waited off the coast for weeks with supplies and the army’s mail.

It was the first word the ministry had of the army since Atlanta.

The surrender

Savannah surrendered without a fight on 16 July 1863, when its mayor, Richard Arnold, rode out to ask protection for its people, and got it.

Savannah was the capital of the Province of Georgia, and its rebel government had not left it. Joseph Brown, the rebel First Minister, was found at his desk in the assembly building, still signing warrants, and asked to be allowed to finish the page; he was allowed, and then arrested, with the members of the assembly who had stayed. Sherman put the city under strict orders, and it was neither burned nor looted, which the people of Atlanta have been pointing out ever since. He telegraphed Lincoln that he begged to present him with the city of Savannah, with its heavy guns and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

What it settled

Savannah fell, the rebel state was cut in two, and the rebellion ended within three months.

The Loyal Army in Virginia had lost the country that fed it, the rebel state had lost the railway that joined its halves, and the people of Georgia and the Carolinas had seen that their government could not stop an army walking across them. Charles Town was occupied in September, and the last field army surrendered at Bennett Place on 9 October.

Afterwards

The Earl of Atlanta

In 1870, in the same honours in which Lincoln was made Duke of Springfield, Sherman was created Earl of Atlanta.

The title was the ministry’s choice and not his, and he disliked it. Georgia had no members in the Commons to protest, being under direct rule, and the protest came from loyal southern members and from the Lords, where it was said that the Realm had named a peerage for a fire. The ministry answered that the title commemorated a victory. Nobody believed it. The earldom is held today by the fifth Earl of Atlanta, a descendant who is not among the forty elected hereditary peers, does not sit, and is known to have visited Atlanta once, unannounced.

General-in-Chief

Sherman commanded the army as General-in-Chief from 1869, when Grant became Prime Minister, until he retired.

In 1877, when Grant left office and the party looked for a successor with a war record, it offered Sherman the leadership, and he refused it in the words that have been used by every reluctant candidate since: if nominated I will not run. The premiership went to Blaine. Late in life, speaking to a class of cadets, he said that there were boys who thought war was all glory, and that war was hell.

Death

Sherman died in New York on 14 February 1891.

None of the men he had fought against stood at his graveside. His old opponent Joseph Johnston, the rebel general-in-chief, had been hanged at New Westminster in 1866, and the absence is the one the Realm’s historians notice. The only statue of Sherman in the Realm is an equestrian figure near the Treasury in New Westminster. A proposal for one at Savannah in 1913 was withdrawn.

Memory

Atlanta

Atlanta rebuilt itself faster than any other city of the South and took the phoenix as its emblem in the 1880s, with the motto Resurgens.

It is now the engine of the Province and the largest city in it, and the burning is part of its story of itself in the way that a fire becomes part of the story of a city that grew bigger afterwards. It marks 30 May each year, quietly. The earldom is a standing grievance there, and the visit of the fifth Earl is remembered chiefly because nobody knew about it until he had gone.

Georgia’s two memories

Georgia remembers the march twice.

White Georgia remembers the burning, the bummers, the burned houses and the twisted rails, and its memory of the march became the foundation of everything the Lost Cause later said about Sherman. Black Georgia remembers the column as the road out of slavery, the army that came down the road and could be followed, and Ebenezer Creek as its betrayal. Both memories are true, and the Province marks neither of them officially.

The verdict

The Realm has not decided what it thinks of the march, and the Register does not decide for it.

One case holds that the march shortened a war that was killing ten thousand people a month; that the rebellion’s capacity to fight lay in exactly what it destroyed; that a general who spares his enemy’s arsenal spends his own men instead; and that the freed people of central Georgia owed their freedom to an army that the case against it would have kept at home. The other holds that a decision of the magnitude of burning a city, taken by a soldier without civil authority, is precisely what the Realm’s whole constitutional practice exists to prevent; that the destruction went beyond any military case afterwards made for it; that an army which took up its bridge in front of the people it had freed forfeited some of its claim to have freed them; and that a Realm which made the general an earl for it had decided the question without saying so. Both cases are put in the Commons whenever the subject arises, which is about once a decade.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The American Civil War, of which the march was the decisive campaign
• Kingdom of the American States, the rebel state it cut in two
• Province of Georgia, whose capital it took
• Ulysses S. Grant, who approved the march and not the fire
• Abraham Lincoln, whose ministry thanked Sherman without mentioning Atlanta
• Columbia District, and Howard University

Categories

History · American Civil War · Campaigns · Province of Georgia · Constitutional History · Slavery