DK - The American Civil War

in a vast sheet of flame and smoke.

Sherman, having declared it a Union

fortress and deported its citizens, was

burning the city in the process of

abandoning it. Atlanta would never be

useful to another Confederatel army.

Before them more destruction

awaited. Sherman’s rule of never

returning by the road he had come

meant his veterans were leaving behind

their old lifeline—the single-track

railroad around which they had

maneuvered their way to Atlanta.

Having dispatched adequate

forces to shadow General John

Bell Hood’s wounded Army of

Tennessee in Alabama, Sherman

was heading for the sea. He had

persuaded Lincoln and Grant that

a march to the Georgia coast was

Sherman’s “bummers”

A name that once designated stragglers, “bummers”

eventually included foragers as well. They roamed

at some distance away from the main army, often

plundering and ransacking at will.

Sherman’s March to the Sea

Leaving Atlanta in flames and a trail of destruction in their wake, General William T. Sherman and

his 62,000 veterans marched 300 miles (480km) in less than a month to the coastal city of Savannah.

Outraged at his devastation of Georgia, Southerners named Sherman the “Attila of the West.”

GRANT, SHERMAN, AND TOTAL WAR 1864

O

n November 15, 1864, General

Sherman’s 62,000 soldiers filed

out of their camps around

Atlanta, many marching over the

battlefields of the previous summer.

From their high vantage point, they

could look back over the debris of

empty cartridge boxes and shredded

breastworks, and observe a terrible

sight—Atlanta, in the distance, engulfed

BEFORE

After the fall of Atlanta ❮❮ 294–95,

Sherman weighed up his next move, even

as Confederate General John Bell Hood

intended to maneuver him into battle.

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

Having left Atlanta, John Bell Hood

and his Army of Tennessee still hoped

to bring Sherman to battle. But after

pushing Hood into northern Alabama,

Sherman left him there, assigning George

Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland to

protect the Union rear. He turned his back on

Hood, having persuaded a reluctant Lincoln and

Grant to approve instead a march through

Georgia to the sea.

SHERMAN’S PLAN

Sheridan, in devastating the Shenandoah Valley,

had demonstrated the effectiveness of a

scorched-earth policy ❮❮ 268–69. Sherman

planned a similar campaign on a larger scale,

torching everything that his army could not

consume and waging total war on the South.

120.” The order gave broad freedom in

the requisitioning of horses, mules,

forage, and provisions, but expressly

forbade entering civilians’ property or

using “abusive or threatening language”

to householders. If, passing through

any given district, the army was

unopposed, mills, cotton gins, and

homesteads were not to be destroyed. If

opposed, however, commanders should

impose “a devastation more or less

relentless.” But the rules were not

enforced. In fact, the two columns

gauged each other’s position by the

pillars of smoke on the horizon:

burnings marked their progress.

It might have been the war’s most

roguish march were it not for its

punitive intent. In Milledgeville,

Georgia’s capital, the invading army

held a mock session of the legislature in

the abandoned chambers, repealing the

ordinance of secession. Sherman slept

that night in the Governor’s pillared

mansion, but in his own camp bed

Campaign wagon

Wagons such as this one used on Sherman’s

march were essential pieces of equipment,

with bummers “aiming at all times to keep

in the wagons at least ten day’s provisions

for the command and three day’s forage.”

a good idea—putting his chosen 62,000

within easy reach of troop transports

that could ferry them to Petersburg. The

general had convinced himself that by

cutting a path of destruction through

the heart of the Confederacy, he might

“make Georgia howl.”

Sherman’s orders

Heading generally southeast toward

Savannah, the army advanced in

two columns, staying 20–40 miles

(32–64km) apart. They carried supplies

with them but intended to live off

the land. Each brigade was allotted

its share of the army’s 2,500 supply

wagons along with its own party of

foragers, or “bummers.” Sherman had

given his forces strict instructions in the

form of his “Special Field Orders, No.