The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

Then, almost overnight, the whole atmosphere
changed. On September 2, General Sherman’s army
fought its way into Atlanta. When the Confederates
countered with an offensive northward toward
Tennessee, Sherman did not follow. Instead he aban-
doned his communications with Chattanooga and
marched unopposed through Georgia, “from Atlanta
to the sea.”
Sherman was in some ways like Grant. He was a
West Pointer who resigned his commission only to fare
poorly in civilian occupations. Back in the army in
1861, he suffered a brief nervous breakdown. After
recovering he fought well under Grant at Shiloh and
the two became close friends. “He stood by me when I
was crazy,” Sherman later recalled, “and I stood by him
when he was drunk.” Far more completely than most
military men of his generation, Sherman believed in
total war—in appropriating or destroying everything
that might help the enemy continue the fight.
The march through Georgia had many objec-
tives besides conquering territory. One obvious one
was economic, the destruction of southern
resources. “[We] must make old and young, rich
and poor feel the hard hand of war,” Sherman said.
Before taking Atlanta he wrote his wife: “We have
devoured the land.... All the people retire before
us and desolation is behind. To realize what war is
one should follow our tracks.”
Another object of Sherman’s march was psycho-
logical. “If the North can march an army right through
the South,” he told General Grant, Southerners will
take it “as proof positive that the North can prevail.”
This was certainly true of Georgia’s blacks, who

flocked to the invaders by the thousands, women and

children as well as men, all cheering mightily when the

soldiers put their former masters’ homes to the torch.

“They pray and shout and mix up my name with

Moses,” Sherman explained.

Sherman’s victories staggered the Confederacy and

the anti-Lincoln forces in the North. In November the

president was easily reelected, 212 electoral votes to 21.

The country was determined to carry on the struggle.

At last the South’s will to resist began to crack.

Sherman entered Savannah on December 22, having

denuded a strip of Georgia sixty miles wide. Early in

January 1865 he marched northward, leaving behind

“a broad black streak of ruin and desolation—the

fences all gone; lonesome smoke-stacks, surrounded

by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots

where human habitations had stood.” In February his

troops captured Columbia, South Carolina. Soon they

were in North Carolina, advancing relentlessly. In

Virginia, Grant’s vise grew tighter day by day while the

Confederate lines became thinner and more ragged.

Sherman,The March Through Georgiaat

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To Appomattox Court House

On March 4 Lincoln took the presidential oath and

delivered his second inaugural address. Photographs

taken at about this time show how four years of war had

marked him. Somehow he had become both gentle and

steel-tough, both haggard and inwardly calm. With vic-

tory sure, he spoke for tolerance, mercy, and reconstruc-

tion. “Let us judge not,” he said after stating again his

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To Appomattox Court House 395

These photos are of Lincoln, when he became president, and shortly before he was assassinated.