SHERMAN’S MARCH TO THE SEASherman’s March to the Sea had inflicted
a devastating blow on Southern morale
while making Sherman a hero in the North.INTO THE CAROLINAS
Sherman did not burn Savannah like he did
Atlanta and Columbia, South Carolina. Instead,
he spent the winter there, putting his veterans
on the road again a few weeks later—this time
headed north. And rather than dispatching
his men to Petersburg to reinforce Grant, he
plundered his way through the Carolinas in
the same way he had done through Georgia.
General Joseph E. Johnston, brought back from
retirement, would try to stop him with an
army of barely 30,000 men 310–11 ❯❯.DESTROYING HOOD’S ARMY
Before Sherman departed Atlanta, he had
quipped that if Hood would go “to the Ohio
River, I’ll give him rations ... my business is
down south.” Hood had tried doing just that,
but he and his Army of Tennessee were virtually
destroyed by George Thomas at the Battle
of Nashville 300–301 ❯❯.because all the furniture had been
hidden. The soldiers destroyed railroads,
ripping up tracks and twisting them into
“Sherman neckties.” They devoured all
livestock in their path. They stripped
farms of all their forage and root crops.
They burned barns, corncribs, cotton
gins, houses, and once an entire town.
Coming across Camp Lawton, a
prisoner-of-war stockade, the veterans
were so enraged by the brutalities they
found that Sherman ordered nearby
Millen to be destroyed with “ten-fold”
times the usual measure. As the Union
army advanced over a front nearly 60
miles (97km) wide, all the South could
do was narrow the zone of destruction.Rebel resistance
The only formal
resistance was met
near Griswoldville,
where Georgia
militia tried to
stem Sherman’s
advance. The militia were
slaughtered—650 killed or injured, with
only 62 Union casualties. Most of the
fighting took the form of skirmishing
against scattered militia and the few
thousand Confederate cavalrymen led
by General Joseph Wheeler, whose men
took horses and valuables well before
the army arrived. They even applied the
torch themselves, using scorched-earth
tactics to foil the bummers.
The devastation inevitably got out of
control, and was further aggravated by
marauding groups of deserters and
renegades. Even the Confederate
cavalry—now branded “Wheeler’s
robbers”—let discipline slip. And, to
complicate matters, thousands of
jubilant ex-slaves were swept up in
the wake of the march.Savannah in sight
By early December, as the army skirted
the low country swamps and marched
beneath trees festooned with Spanish
moss, Sherman’s increasingly scruffy
soldiers were being called the “Lost
Army” by the North. The men emergedinto view by December 11, “within
sight of the spires of Savannah,” one of
them wrote, “if there were not so many
trees in the way.”
Savannah was garrisoned by 10,000
soldiers and was protected by a ring of
defenses mounting over 100 siege guns.
But the packed-earth Fort McAllister,
12 miles (19km) below the city, was
Sherman’s main concern. It had long
defied Union warships; but on December
13, in an all-out assault, his infantrymen
stormed through the circle of sharpened
stakes and mounted the parapets. Its 230
defenders resisted bravely but futilely.
Four days later, Sherman formally
demanded the city’s surrender. The
garrison commander, General Hardee,
chose to evacuate instead. After dark
on December 20, lit
only by distant fires
as the navy yard
was set alight, a line
of men and wagons
moved across the
Savannah River to
South Carolina on
a vast pontoon bridge. The next night
the ironclad CSS Savannah exploded,
lighting up the sky for miles. “The
concussion was fearful,” one witness
reported, “rocking the city.”Sherman’s gift to Lincoln
When nervous city fathers gathered to
surrender the city to the Union, they
had to scramble to find carriages, most
having been stolen by Wheeler’s vacating
cavalry. Many citizens were frantic thatAFTER
“Oh, just burn a barn or
something. Make a smoke like
the Indians do.”
GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN, ON HIS METHOD FOR LOCATING HIS CAVALRYtheir city would go the same way as
Atlanta. But when Sherman rode in on
December 22, he found the same town
of handsome squares and shade trees
that he remembered so fondly. As his
tattered legions marched down the
grand avenues, he sent a telegram to
President Lincoln: “Dear Sir,” he began,
“I beg to present you as a Christmas
Gift, the City of Savannah ...”View from the press
“General Sherman’s Grand March through Central
Georgia,” complete with plantation houses and distant
pillars of smoke, was depicted in the December 10,
1864 issue of Harper’s Weekly.Haul of ammunition
The capture of Fort McCallister outside Savannah, which
had long been a menace to Union warships, brought
with it a sizable haul of guns, shells, and cannonballs.Sherman’s estimate of damages inflicted
during the march. A fifth of this was
militarily justified, the “remainder ...
simple waste and destruction.”$100 MILLION