5
Sherman
THE GENERAL WHO WON THE CIVIL WAR
AT THE BEGINNING OF 1864 the Union armies facing Robert E. Lee’s Confederates in Virginia were little farther along than they had been when the war started in 1861. Despite horrendous losses, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia still stood defiantly in the path of the Federal forces seeking to capture Richmond.
The situation was radically otherwise in the western theater, beyond the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains. By January 1864, Union forces—which had consistently faced Confederate commanders inferior to Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Virginia—had seized the entire valley of the Mississippi River, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and had driven Rebel forces beyond Chattanooga to Dalton in the mountains of northern Georgia.
With the states beyond the Mississippi isolated, the Confederacy in the west had been reduced to parts of Mississippi and to Alabama south of the Tennessee River. Nevertheless the Confederacy still retained a bastion of great strength: the four old eastern states where the Southern culture had originated, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia. The lower anchor of this heartland was Atlanta, pivot of the remaining rail links between east and west and site of vital foundries, machine shops, and munitions factories.
If the Confederate commander at Dalton, Joseph E. Johnston, could keep the Federals from Atlanta and Lee could protect Virginia, the South might hold out long enough for Northern voters, weary with the war and appalled at the losses, to elect a Democratic peace candidate in the November 1864 presidential elections, oust Abraham Lincoln and the radical Republicans, and bring about a negotiated peace between North and South.
Lincoln was well aware that a tide of pacifism was sweeping the North. He knew 1864 was the crucial year of his presidency. Unless he made dramatic advances before the election, he was certain to be defeated. Lincoln had learned from bitter experience that his primary lack in the east was a general who would advance, no matter the consequences. He had never had such a general. Time after time an eastern general had marched into the terrible jaws of the Confederate lion, had suffered devastating losses, and had withdrawn, anxious never to measure himself again against Lee or Jackson.
In the west, however, Lincoln had such a bulldog of a general, Ulysses S. Grant. Grant and his chief lieutenant, William Tecumseh Sherman, had fought brilliantly to seize Vicksburg and open the Mississippi in 1862–63 and in November 1863 had won the battle of Chattanooga and thrust the Rebels into the mountains of northern Georgia.
On March 4, 1864, Lincoln made a profound decision. He summoned Grant to Washington and conferred on him command of all the Federal armies. Like nearly all the Republican political leadership, Lincoln was still preoccupied with Lee’s army and capture of the Confederate capital of Richmond and told Grant he should supervise personally the Union Army of the Potomac in its attacks against Lee.
Grant agreed, named General Sherman to command in the west, and worked out a grand strategy to defeat the Confederacy. Grant’s main objectives were Lee’s army behind the Rapidan River in Virginia and Johnston’s army at Dalton. Grant would direct the campaign against Lee; Sherman would lead the campaign against Johnston. To distract the Confederates, he ordered separate moves against the strategic flanks of the two Rebel armies. Against Lee, a Union army under Benjamin F. (Beast) Butler was to advance westward along the south bank of the James River towards Richmond. Against Johnston, Union General Nathaniel P. Banks was to seize the port of Mobile, Alabama, and open an alternative gate into Georgia from the extreme south. In the event, neither flanking movement succeeded. Small Confederate forces bottled Butler up against the James east of Petersburg, and Banks was so slow that Sherman had to advance directly on Atlanta without the possibility of creating a threat to the Confederate rear.
Grant envisioned the campaigns to end the war as direct attacks with little subtlety. By 1864, frontal assaults had become extremely dangerous and costly. The long-range killing power of the rifle loaded with the Minié ball had been combined with trenches, earthen embankments, and log embrasures to make nearly any position taken by troops in the field virtually impregnable. Grant ignored this reality because he could think of no other course of action and because Lincoln assured him of his full support and unrestricted access to the manpower of the North. Consequently, Grant adopted a brutally simple strategy: to make repeated hammer blows against Confederate field fortifications, beating down the enemy by main strength. The prospects were for casualties on a scale even more enormous than had been suffered previously.
As was to be seen, however, General Sherman was acutely aware of the perils of frontal assaults and developed an entirely different approach, although he was forced to conduct a direct campaign along a single corridor leading from Dalton to Atlanta, since he was locked, for his supplies, to the single-track railway running from Chattanooga to Atlanta.
Sherman, an 1840 graduate of West Point, saw no active service in the Mexican War but earned a growing reputation for military excellence during the long operations in the west, especially in the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns. Even so, there had been little hint of the radically different approach to warfare that he was about to unleash in the drive for Atlanta and the marches through the heart of the South he made thereafter. These campaigns won the Civil War for the North when the strategy of Ulysses S. Grant came to the verge of losing it.
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
Bettmann Archive
Grant, in a letter to Sherman on April 14, 1864, said he would stay with the Army of the Potomac and order its commander, George G. Meade, to keep Lee’s army as his sole objective, “that wherever Lee went he would go also.” Grant thus renounced from the outset any plan to get around Lee’s army. To Sherman, in whom he had great confidence, his instructions were less specific. Sherman was to move against Johnston’s army, break it up, and get into the Confederate interior and do as much damage as possible “against their war resources.” He left Sherman free to execute the task in his own way.
Sherman had come to realize that destroying the Southern people’s will to pursue the war was more important than destroying Johnston’s army. Once the people wearied of war, their armies would melt away. So long as they remained adamant, they would continue to throw up armies or, failing that, guerrilla bands, which could lead to endless war. The only sure solution was to inflict so much damage on Southern property and way of life, and not merely “war resources,” that the people would prefer surrender to continued destruction. Stonewall Jackson had recognized this principle early in the war and had wanted to apply it against the Northern people. But the Confederate leadership had refused. Now Sherman, on the other side, was about to embark on it.
Nevertheless, Sherman had to deal first with Joe Johnston’s army standing at Dalton and blocking the way through the mountains to Atlanta, eighty air miles away. Johnston had about 60,000 men, with a corps under Leonidas Polk on the way from Mississippi. Sherman had assembled just shy of 100,000 men, with almost as many more guarding his railway supply line leading back from Chattanooga through Nashville to Louisville, Kentucky.
The 3:5 ratio of Confederate to Union strength was comfortable to hold such naturally defensible country as northern Georgia’s mountains, especially as Johnston had covered the low valley north of Dalton through which the railway ran with strong entrenchments on either flank.
Johnston had already renounced a proposal of President Jefferson Davis to take the offensive northeast of Chattanooga, turn west into middle Tennessee, and hope to compel Sherman to fall back to save Nashville. Johnston told Davis he did not have enough horses and mules to undertake the campaign. Johnston, convinced of the power of field fortifications, believed his best chance of defeating Sherman lay in remaining entirely on the defensive.
He was certain Sherman intended to attack him directly at Dalton, since the Federals were dependent on the railway and a move along the rail line would be the most obvious and simple course. For that reason he concentrated his two corps (under William J. Hardee and John Bell Hood) at Dalton with his 6,000 cavalry under Joseph Wheeler farther out, watching the approaches to Dalton.
This reliance on the defensive—and especially on defending a particular point along the railway—was Johnston’s fatal mistake. Sherman knew a frontal assault against the entrenchments at Dalton would be deadly and did not consider making it. Instead, on May 4, 1864, start of the offensive in Virginia and Georgia, he ordered his main force—the 61,000-man Army of the Cumberland under George H. Thomas and the 13,000-man Army of the Ohio under John M. Schofield—to demonstrate directly against Dalton, holding Johnston’s army in place. Meanwhile he sent the 24,000-man Army of the Tennessee under James B. McPherson through the mountains around Johnston’s left or western flank to seize Resaca on the railroad, fifteen miles south of Dalton.
This was a stunning version of Napoleon’s most deadly practice, the manœuvre sur les derrières, and was designed to interpose a strategic barrage or barrier directly on Johnston’s route of retreat. If McPherson marched firmly and seized Resaca, the Confederate army would be unable to retreat except along impracticable mountain roads east of the valley and was likely to be destroyed.
Thomas’s and Schofield’s armies pressed the Rebels at Dalton but, on Sherman’s orders, made no serious attack on the immensely strong Confederate entrenchments. However, the distraction of their advances cloaked McPherson’s flank move. On May 8 his leading division, against no opposition, occupied Snake Creek Gap, about five miles west of Resaca.
Meanwhile James Cantey’s brigade of Leonidas Polk’s corps arrived at Resaca. Johnston still had no hint of McPherson’s approach on his rear but, confused by Federal attacks edging around his position at Dalton, ordered Cantey, with his 2,000 men, to remain at Resaca until the situation clarified.
On the morning of May 9, McPherson’s army of 24,000 debouched into the valley about four miles west of Resaca, drove back a small Rebel cavalry patrol, and came within sight of a small line of entrenchments that Cantey’s men had hurriedly built. Although ordered by Sherman to attack boldly and seize the village, McPherson took up defensive positions with four divisions while sending his fifth division forward with orders to cut the railroad and then fall back to the mouth of Snake Creek gorge. The “attack” was so tepid that just eighteen men got to the railroad and succeeded only in breaking a small section of telegraph wire.
Johnston, alarmed, hurriedly sent three of his seven divisions at Dalton to Resaca. They arrived early on May 10. But this day McPherson rested his men and made no attack. Johnston, believing the maneuver was only a Union demonstration, recalled his troops, leaving two divisions at Tilton, eight miles north of Resaca, so they could move in either direction, and ordering Polk’s corps, now arriving, to concentrate at Resaca. Sherman was bitterly disappointed at McPherson’s failure but said only: “Well, Mac, you have missed the great opportunity of your life.”
Sherman ordered Thomas to leave one of his three corps to keep up a feint attack at Dalton, while the rest of his army and Schofield’s force moved around Johnston’s left flank to join McPherson and attack Resaca. Sherman hoped Johnston would stay at Dalton until he could get his main force to McPherson, but this was unrealistic, because surprise was gone. Johnston’s cavalry got enough signs of Sherman’s movement on May 12 to persuade him to retreat, thus giving up his impregnable positions at Dalton without a battle. By the morning of May 13, Johnston’s army was in force at Resaca.
McPherson advanced on the village, while Thomas and Schofield deployed to the north. In hours, the Rebels threw up field fortifications west and north of the village. On the 14th the Federals tested Rebel strength at various points but found no weak point.
Johnston was a solidly conventional soldier and had failed to grasp the radical nature of Sherman’s strategy. The ease with which Sherman had evicted the Rebels from Dalton indicated such a move was likely to be repeated. Building entrenchments was no antidote. Once Johnston had committed his army to fortifications, Sherman could simply go around them. For this reason, a Confederate policy solely of defense was a guarantee of ultimate defeat. Unless Johnston could make an offensive move that would force Sherman back, he would be driven from one entrenched position after another until he had fallen back to Atlanta.
Sherman’s vulnerable point was his line of communications. The Union forces relied on the railway from Chattanooga. In the rough mountains of northern Georgia, the troops would have starved without food delivered by this railroad. If Johnston had sent strong forces around Sherman’s flanks to block this railway, he might have brought the Federal offensive to a halt. He had enough troops to interpose strategic barriers requiring major efforts to break up. Such a policy would have distracted the Federals, and even if most Rebels had been forced to retreat, they might have escaped through the mountains and forests on either side of the railway. The wild nature of the country would have permitted large numbers of semiguerrilla Rebel bands to operate all along the railway, killing guards and repair crews, blowing up bridges, and interrupting rail traffic.
Johnston never attempted a major campaign against Sherman’s rail line. Rather, he reverted at Resaca to an obvious tactical pattern: sending Hood to strike Sherman’s left wing in flank, hoping to cut him off from his line of retreat. Such a narrow turning movement had little hope of success, given Union numerical strength, and the Federals parried the blow. Anyway, Sherman’s pontoon bridge had already been thrown across the Oostanaula River southwest of Resaca preparatory to another move around Johnston’s flank.
On May 16, hearing the Federals were across the Oostanaula and moving on his rear, Johnston abandoned Resaca and fell back twenty miles to Cassville. The last of Polk’s divisions had arrived, and Johnston, with 75,000 men, hoped to fall on an isolated Union column and destroy it. Sherman, however, marching in the way Napoleon had advanced, spread out a wide waving net of columns that could swiftly concentrate against any enemy force. Rather than ambushing a Union column, Johnston was in danger of being enfolded by Sherman’s even-wider-spreading columns. Reluctantly, he ordered withdrawal south of the Etowah River, causing deep gloom to his soldiers, sentenced to one more retreat.
Johnston entrenched positions covering the steep, narrow Allatoona Pass, through which the railroad ran fifteen miles northwest of Marietta. Sherman had no intention of following Johnston into such a trap and on May 23 outflanked Johnston’s line again, pushing his whole army due south across the Etowah, with the intention of swinging again on Johnston’s rear.
The Federals were now in a region of good farming country and foraged for their food—but also commenced Sherman’s design to force the Southern people to end the war. The foragers ruthlessly set fire to houses, barns, and other property, marking the beginning of a pattern of wanton destruction that Sherman intended to cut all the way through Georgia. Sherman wrote his wife: “We have devoured the land and our animals eat up the wheat and corn…. All the people retire before us and desolation is behind.”
Johnston detected Sherman’s move south and got his army into blocking position near Dallas, fifteen miles southwest of Allatoona. The two armies clashed violently for several days, but on May 28 Sherman began sidestepping eastward toward the railway, forcing Johnston on June 4 to retire fifteen miles southeastward to new entrenchments on Kennesaw Mountain covering Marietta, only twenty-five miles from Atlanta.
The Federals were held up for weeks by wet weather, and on June 27, Sherman ordered the only direct attack of the campaign: two separate but simultaneous assaults a mile apart against the entrenchments of Kennesaw Mountain. Since he had avoided such attacks, he hoped the Confederates would not be expecting them. Both assaults failed utterly, the Federals losing 3,000 men in a few minutes to the Rebels’ 630, the Confederate losses almost entirely due to artillery fire.
The attack on Kennesaw Mountain proved once more that there is never justification for a direct assault on an unshaken enemy in position. To his credit, Sherman tried it only once. When it failed, he immediately planned a new move to his flank.
Sherman acted far more wisely than Grant in Virginia. After the Army of the Potomac had clashed headlong with Lee in the Wilderness on May 5–7, 1864, Grant ordered a left-flank march to Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lee beat him there and Grant assaulted his entrenchments directly, suffering severe losses but failing to break the Confederate line. Grant then slipped off southeastward, ending at Cold Harbor, only a few miles northeast of Richmond, where again he attacked frontally, with horrendous casualties. In a month’s campaign Grant lost 55,000 men, nearly half his original strength, and nearly double Lee’s losses. Grant had ruined the offensive power of his army. He crossed the James River on June 12 and began a siege of Petersburg, but the Army of the Potomac lay largely paralyzed in front of the Confederate entrenchments. The war in Virginia settled into a long stalemate.
The outcome of Grant’s Virginia campaign—appalling losses and baffled hopes for victory—deeply depressed the Northern people and caused many, led by the Democratic Party, to doubt whether the war should be continued. Even within the Republican Party, leaders began to criticize Abraham Lincoln’s policy, and his strongest supporters feared his chance for reelection was hopeless.
In the gloom that settled over the North in July and August 1864, only Sherman’s continued advance offered any relief. If he captured Atlanta and demonstrated the weakness of the South, the North would take on new heart and see the war to a successful conclusion. If he failed and his campaign, like Grant’s, degenerated into a stalemate, Lincoln would be defeated and the Union dissolved.
The final approach to Atlanta commenced only four days after Sherman’s repulse at Kennesaw Mountain. McPherson slipped around Johnston’s left or western flank and reached only three miles short of the Chattahoochee River in the Confederate rear. Johnston detected the danger and withdrew his army on July 2. Sherman discovered the retreat early on July 3 and sent his forces in hot pursuit, hoping to prevent the Confederates from getting across the Chattahoochee and using it to build a formidable new line.
Johnston, however, had decided to meet the Federals in front of the Chattahoochee, taking a dangerous chance because the army, if defeated, would have difficulty retreating with the river at its back. Johnston took the risk to surprise Sherman, fortifying a six-mile bridgehead where the railroad crossed the stream.
Sherman had no intention of crashing into these new Rebel entrenchments. While some of his cavalry probed downstream as if searching for a crossing below Johnston’s bridgehead, other horsemen found two unguarded fords, Phillips Ferry, about ten miles upstream, and Roswell, about twenty. Sherman sent Schofield’s army over Phillips Ferry on July 8, forming a strong bridgehead on the southern bank, while Union cavalry crossed at Roswell and established another bridgehead, quickly reinforced by an infantry corps.
Taking the only course open to him, Johnston retired to Atlanta before the Federals cut him off. Once more he had been outwitted by Sherman, obliged not only to forfeit his fortified position but also to give up the Chattahoochee as his forward line of defense. Sherman took quick advantage of the situation, using his bridgeheads over the Chattahoochee to swing Thomas’s army onto the Confederates’ first entrenchments along the east-west line of Peach Tree Creek, five miles north of Atlanta, while Schofield occupied Decatur, seven miles east of the city, and McPherson moved seven miles farther east to break Hood’s main railroad connection with the Carolinas and Virginia, the Augusta Railroad.
Johnston’s last retreat was too much for President Davis. On July 17 he relieved Johnston and gave his command to John Bell Hood. This was wonderful news to Sherman. Hood was notorious as a “fighting soldier,” a man of little intellect who had never grasped the profound change in warfare brought on by the Minié ball and field fortifications.
Hood still believed the recipe for victory was an attack and, playing directly into Sherman’s hands, hoped to strike the Federals as they were crossing Peach Tree Creek. On July 20, Hood’s forces came out of their entrenchments behind the creek and attacked Joseph Hooker’s corps of Thomas’s army. A desperate frontal battle developed, lasting four hours and including much hand-to-hand fighting. Hood, even after initial assaults had failed and surprise was lost, repeatedly renewed the attacks, gaining nothing but adding to Confederate dead and wounded. Meanwhile, McPherson, moving west from Decatur, threatened the east side of Atlanta, and Hood had to call off the attack and divert troops to stop McPherson from entering the inner defenses of Atlanta. Hood fell back to the main lines protecting Atlanta after losing 4,800 men to the Federals’ 1,700.
Holding these lines with two corps, Hood made a wide circuit with Hardee’s corps on the night of July 22 to get on McPherson’s left rear. But McPherson had anticipated the move and posted Grenville M. Dodge’s corps to meet it. Dodge shielded McPherson’s rear, repulsed Hardee’s leading two divisions, and forced Hardee to strike the flank, not rear, of Frank P. Blair, Jr.’s, corps, protected by field entrenchments. Blair parried the first Rebel strikes, but Hood still ordered repeated hopeless assaults that gained nothing but cost horrible casualties. He lost 8,500 men to the Federals’ 3,700, including McPherson, who was killed. Hood was forced to fall back into the Atlanta entrenchments.
Sherman did not have enough men to besiege Atlanta. His plan was to cut off the railway lines and, threatening starvation, to force the Confederates to evacuate the city. The railroad to Augusta was already broken, and Sherman now moved McPherson’s army under its new commander, Oliver O. Howard, around Atlanta to cut Hood’s last remaining rail connections, the line running southwest to Montgomery and the one southeast to Macon.
On July 28, Howard’s army had just taken up positions near Ezra Church, a couple miles west of Atlanta, when Hood launched a frontal attack against it with a division. Howard’s men had erected a rough breastwork of logs and were able to halt the blow. Hood brought up two more divisions and renewed the vain direct assaults, finally losing 4,600 men to Howard’s 700. This third terrible defeat undermined the morale of the Rebel soldiers. Even in the first onslaught it was clear the men had lost their former élan. Hood, by his wrongheaded tactics, was well on the way to destroying his army.
Although Sherman attempted to seize East Point, seven miles south of Atlanta, junction of the Montgomery and Macon railways, delays gave Hood enough time to strengthen the East Point works and protect the railways. The situation began to look unpleasantly like a stalemate, since Hood had been upbraided by President Davis for his direct assaults and could no longer be induced into attacks.
Now almost the entire Rebel cavalry force, under Joseph Wheeler, began long-range raids to break Sherman’s railroad connection to Chattanooga, cutting several points between Marietta and Dalton. Sherman discovered, however, that Wheeler did not intend to keep the line broken, which would have forced Sherman to send back a major relief expedition to open it. Instead, he rode into Tennessee, hoping to cut rail lines there and induce Sherman to retreat. This had no hope of success. Men on horseback presented a large and easy target for rifle-firing infantry. To fight infantry, cavalry had to dismount, thereby losing their mobility. Cavalry consequently had to adopt a hit-and-run policy, because enemy infantry guarding rail lines could soon surround and destroy any static cavalry force.
With Wheeler gone, Sherman was able to repair the line back to Chattanooga, where he had a large stock of food and other goods already assembled, thereby relieving him of anxiety about supplies.
With the Rebel cavalry force unavailable to discover Federal movements, Sherman also was able to swing most of his army below Atlanta on August 28, destroy several miles of the Montgomery railroad, and on August 31 approach Jonesboro, on the Macon railroad, twenty miles south of Atlanta, with the intention of breaking this line as well. On this day Hardee, in command of two corps, obligingly launched another hopeless Confederate attack, suffering heavy losses against Federals behind hastily erected field fortifications.
Hood decided irrationally that a direct attack on Atlanta was imminent and drew all his forces back to the city except Hardee’s corps, which he ordered to protect Macon. Hardee retreated eight miles south to Lovejoy, while Sherman’s men broke the railway. Atlanta was now isolated. Hood realized he no longer could hold the city and on September 1 ordered the retreat, moving most of his forces southeast, then west to join Hardee. On September 2, Sherman telegraphed Washington: “So Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” The news electrified the Union, revived hope of victory, made Lincoln’s reelection a certainty, and sealed the fate of the South.
General Sherman had resolved to convince the Southern people that “war and individual ruin are synonymous terms” and set about at once to demonstrate his intentions. He ordered the entire population of Atlanta to evacuate, forcing men, women, and children out of the city by way of a station, Rough and Ready, just south of Atlanta. Homeless, destitute civilians spread across Georgia, seeking shelter, food, and comfort. Many suffered great privation. Although Sherman did not want to commit the troops necessary to garrison a populated Atlanta, his real purpose was to punish every Southerner he could reach for seeking to leave the Union. “If they want peace,” he wired Washington, “they and their relatives must stop war.”
In allowing plunder, arson, and destruction of the farms of northern Georgia and in his vindictive act against the entire population of Atlanta, Sherman demonstrated his intent to destroy the wealth and if possible ruin the lives of all Southerners in his path. He was to expand this program in the months ahead into a vendetta of organized ruination that had no parallel in modern history. He thus struck at the South’s most vulnerable element and ultimately broke the will of the people to pursue the war.
Sherman had already decided on his next move after capturing Atlanta: to march to the sea, living off the country and destroying everything in his path. His target would be either Savannah, 220 air miles away, or Charleston, 260 miles distant. At either point, Union ships could resupply his army. At Atlanta he was 450 miles from his real base of supplies, Louisville, and dependent on a single railroad that could be cut by Confederate raiders almost anywhere.
General Hood had no inkling of Sherman’s radical idea, and in late September, supported by President Davis, he turned his back on Sherman’s army and planned to march into Tennessee, seize Nashville, sever Federal rail connections with Louisville, and force Sherman to abandon Georgia by cutting off his supplies. First, however, Hood’s soldiers raided up the railway to Chattanooga, broke the line between Allatoona and Marietta, and moved north to Dalton. But Hood did not intend to invade Tennessee through the northern Georgia mountains, where there was little food, but turned west to Gadsden, Alabama, preparatory to moving more directly on Nashville. Meantime the Confederate raider Nathan Bedford Forrest frightened the Union garrison at Athens, Alabama, into surrendering and rode into middle Tennessee.
Sherman pursued Hood with most of his army but realized that to continue doing so into Alabama would play into the Confederate game to draw him away from Georgia. Accordingly, he called off his pursuit, sent General Thomas back to Nashville to protect Tennessee, and transferred to his command Thomas’s army, Schofield’s force, and all the cavalry except a 5,000-man division under Judson Kilpatrick. In all, Thomas had about 71,000 men, with another corps en route from St. Louis. Sherman was left with four corps and Kilpatrick’s horsemen, about 60,000 men in all.
On October 9, 1864, he wired Grant: “It will be a physical impossibility to protect the roads, now that Hood, Forrest, and Wheeler and the whole bunch of devils are turned loose without home or habitation…. I propose we break up the railroad from Chattanooga and strike out with wagons for Milledgeville, Millen, and Savannah. Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources. By attempting to hold the railroads we will lose 1,000 men monthly and will gain no result. I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”
Grant reluctantly agreed to Sherman’s plan but had misgivings, especially after President Lincoln, who had almost no understanding of military strategy, complained that “a misstep by General Sherman might be fatal to his army.”
Neither Grant nor Lincoln recognized, as did Sherman, that President Davis and Hood had committed an irretrievable error in expecting to pull the Federal army out of Georgia merely by marching on Sherman’s communications. Instead, Hood’s departure opened a virtually uncontested road to Savannah. Only a few state militia and cavalry stood between him and the sea. If Hood had relied on Forrest to break Sherman’s railway and had barred an advance into Georgia with his army, he might not have stopped all of Sherman’s columns but he very likely could have destroyed one or more, seriously threatening Sherman’s campaign.
Hood, whose army now numbered about 31,000 men, moved far to the west in order to get closer to Forrest’s cavalry force of about 7,500. On October 31 he gained a foothold across the Tennessee River at Florence, Alabama, 150 miles west of Chattanooga, but there his advance halted for three weeks because of lack of supplies. Hood’s move clinched Sherman’s resolve to march on Savannah, because the Confederate army now was so far west it had no possibility of countering him.
Grant wired Sherman on November 1, casting new doubt on Sherman’s plan. “Do you not think it advisable now that Hood has gone so far north to entirely settle with him before starting on your proposed campaign?” Grant asked. Sherman responded with patience that pursuit of Hood would be like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. He would withdraw southwestward, “drawing me as a decoy from Georgia, which is his chief object,” Sherman wired. Grant now dubiously endorsed Sherman’s project, consoling himself that Thomas, with over twice Hood’s strength, had enough troops to destroy his army.
Sherman now moved with alacrity, repairing the breaks in the railroad Hood’s men had made, sending back into Tennessee all his sick and wounded and bringing forward supplies for his march, then destroying the railroad as far back as Allatoona and the bridge over the Etowah River.
Sherman divided his army into two wings, each of two corps, the right under Oliver O. Howard, the left under Henry Warner Slocum, while Kilpatrick’s cavalry were directly under Sherman. Each corps, its transportation pared to the bone, was to move on a separate road. The army carried 200 rounds of ammunition per man and per cannon and twenty days of rations. But the rations were only for emergencies, for Sherman authorized his troops to live off the country. From the beginning the distinction between foraging and pillaging was lost, for Sherman intended to destroy everything of value as his army passed.
General Hardee was in command of the few troops the Confederates had to throw in front of the march. The only immediate force was 7,000 men, composed mainly of Wheeler’s cavalry, who had returned from Tennessee, and Georgia militia with little fighting potential. There were about 12,000 more men in various garrisons in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. The Georgia government, from the capital of Milledgeville, proclaimed a levée en masse of all able-bodied men to defend the soil, but this was a gesture of despair and little came of it. Hardee did not adopt his best policy, which would have been to disperse his slender forces into guerrilla bands to harass the Union forces. Sherman feared such a tactic, saying ambushes could kill nearly every Union officer.
Just prior to the start of the march, on November 15, 1864, the Federals burned the business part of Atlanta—machine shops, mills, warehouses, and stores—and then abandoned the city.
The march itself confused the Confederates greatly. With four columns moving on widely separated routes, sometimes fifty miles apart, they could not determine Sherman’s actual target. The right wing appeared to be aiming at Macon but actually passed north of it, while the left wing created the impression it was moving on Augusta. According to Sherman, this placed the enemy “on the horns of a dilemma.” As the eighteenth-century French strategist Pierre de Bourcet proposed in his “plan with branches,” by threatening alternative targets Sherman forced the enemy to keep troops protecting both Macon and Augusta, leaving a clear avenue for Sherman to march directly between them and seize Milledgeville on November 22.
Rebel forces at Macon swung around to Savannah, while Wheeler’s cavalry barely got ahead of the Union columns. Confederate General Braxton Bragg rushed to Augusta to take supreme charge of the campaign. He had about 10,000 men there.
On November 24, Sherman departed Milledgeville, sending Kilpatrick’s horsemen to the left flank to convey the impression the spearhead was aiming at Augusta. This kept Bragg in place and unable to intervene when Kilpatrick swerved southeast to cut the Savannah-Augusta railway. Wheeler nearly foiled this effort, but Kilpatrick, gaining support of some Union infantry, drove Wheeler back sharply, forcing the Rebel cavalry to follow in the wake of the Union forces, doing little damage, for the rest of the march.
Kilpatrick’s feint to the northeast gave almost free passage for the rest of the Union forces to Millen on December 9.
By now a path of desolation 200 miles long and as much as 60 miles wide had been cut through the center of Georgia. Houses, barns, and other buildings were burned, crops eaten or destroyed, cattle and horses seized, the people reduced to destitution. Behind the pillaging army ranged another army of freed slaves, excited and eager to follow the Federals wherever they went. The Federals were not happy with this clog of humanity and removed a pontoon bridge over a large stream to keep them from crossing. A great crowd of blacks, however, stampeded down the bank and into the stream, where many drowned.
At Savannah, General Hardee had gathered 15,000 Confederates, but his orders were to abandon the city rather than sacrifice the troops.
As Sherman’s army approached the city on December 10, he moved first on Fort McAllister, south of the city. Its formidable defenses on the ocean side barred contact with the Union fleet offshore, but Sherman calculated correctly that its landward defenses were weak, and the Federals captured the fort in a quick assault.
Sherman opened communications with the Union navy and found an order awaiting him from Grant to fortify a base on the coast, leave his artillery and cavalry, and transport the bulk of his infantry to Virginia to help in the campaign against Lee! This astonishing order demonstrates Grant’s lack of strategic insight. Sherman’s army would be far more devastating if it advanced on Lee’s rear through the Carolinas than if it were brought around to attack him frontally.
Sherman was disappointed at Grant’s command but replied he would come directly as sea transport arrived. But, anxious to seize Savannah beforehand, he tried to bluff Hardee into surrendering. Hardee refused but retreated northward into South Carolina on December 20, abandoning the city to the Federals.
Sherman’s march to the sea sent a deep wave of gloom over the South, demonstrating that the Confederacy could not protect its territory or its people. The people’s faith in their government and their cause suffered a near-mortal blow. Sherman had been right: the quickest way to end the war was to attack the people’s will to wage it.
While Sherman was closing in on Savannah, Confederate general Hood advanced on Union general Thomas at Nashville. Hood was propelled by desperation. He had made the wrong decision in marching his army away, opening the door to Savannah and to destruction of central Georgia. Now the only chance he had of pulling Sherman out of Georgia was to seize Nashville or defeat Thomas badly. Yet he had little hope of either with an army half the size of Thomas’s and morally shaken by its terrible losses.
Moreover, Hood—despite the disasters his army had suffered against Sherman—had still not learned that frontal attacks against entrenched positions were a recipe for destruction.
Accordingly, when he came up November 30 on Schofield’s isolated force at Franklin, twenty miles south of Nashville, he threw his men in repeated frontal assaults against the Federal entrenchments. The attacks failed utterly and cost him 4,500 men, triple the losses of the Northern defenders. This was the final blow to Confederate morale, for the men realized Hood’s tactics were destroying them.
Schofield withdrew to Nashville, where the entire Federal army had concentrated. It was folly for Hood to follow, but he did, lacking the understanding that his army had been crippled and that to bring it within the reach of the Federal army was almost certain to complete its ruin. He might have achieved real gains if, instead, he had slipped past Thomas and menaced Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.
Thomas struck on December 15, throwing the bulk of his army against the left flank of the entrenched Confederate line, forcing Hood to a shorter line two miles south. Despite the fact that Thomas, too, had launched a frontal attack, his losses were only 1,000 men, demonstrating that the Rebels no longer were fighting with their former resolve. Indeed, the roads to the south were filled with Southern stragglers.
The next day a sudden Federal infantry attack on a weakened part of the Confederate line was a signal for a general collapse of the entire army. About 4,500 Rebels fell prisoner, but the bulk got away to the south, finally halting at Tupelo, Mississippi, where the shattered forces were reorganized under new leadership.
Even before he had captured Savannah, Sherman set about to persuade Grant to rescind his order to move Sherman’s infantry to Virginia. On December 17 he asked permission to march north through the Carolinas and especially to punish South Carolina—the first state to secede from the Union and a particular object of Sherman’s enmity.
He had an ally in Henry W. Halleck, chief of staff of the Union Army, who wrote Sherman: “Should you capture Charleston, I hope that by some accident the place may be destroyed, and, if a little salt should be sown upon its site, it may prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.” Sherman responded to Halleck: “The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate.”
Grant at last agreed to Sherman’s plan, not because he understood the strategic advantage of cutting through the remaining heart of the Confederacy and onto the rear of Lee but because he had learned it would take transports two months to bring Sherman’s army to Virginia.
Sherman adopted another “plan with branches” to reduce the Carolinas. He had left Augusta untouched on purpose to confuse the Rebels as to his objective—Augusta or Charleston. When the march northward of his 60,000-man army commenced on February 1, 1865, Sherman aimed one wing at Charleston, the other at Augusta. As had happened in the march through Georgia, this placed the Confederates “on the horns of a dilemma” because it induced them to divide their 33,000 men to protect alternate targets. Instead, Sherman marched between the two cities on Columbia, the South Carolina capital, capturing it on February 16.
Confederate looters caused some damage during the evacuation, but drunken Union soldiers and a desire for vengeance on the part of the Federal leadership led to much burning and arson. A gale wind that came up during the night of February 17 turned these separate fires into an inferno that burned half the city, leaving thousands homeless.
Sherman’s march on Columbia separated the Confederate forces and prevented any chance of the two halves uniting. As a consequence, the Rebels were unable to assemble a strong enough force to challenge Sherman’s army. In addition, the march on Columbia severed the main railroads to Charleston and compelled the Confederates to abandon the port city on February 15. The senior Rebel commander, Pierre G. T. Beauregard, ordered his scattered forces to assemble at Chester, forty-five miles north of Columbia, to protect Charlotte, North Carolina, and the railroads leading to Richmond.
But Sherman sent his army northeast in numerous wide-spreading columns through Cheraw, South Carolina, to Fayetteville, North Carolina, with the intention of moving on northeastward to Goldsboro, where a corps of 21,000 men under Schofield had been sent by way of New Bern, a North Carolina port that the Federals had held since 1861. At Goldsboro, Sherman expected to resupply his army.
The Confederates, once more finding themselves out of position, were unable to interpose any effective forces to block Sherman’s progress, although the remains of Hood’s army at Tupelo, Mississippi, had been rushed through Georgia by way of Augusta to reinforce the Confederates.
In the crisis, President Davis reinstated Joseph E. Johnston as supreme commander. Johnston realized the only way to stop Sherman was to exploit the central position between the two Union armies that the Confederate forces possessed. To do so, Lee had to bring down a substantial portion of his army from Virginia and unite with Johnston’s 40,000 men. The now-superior Confederate army could defeat Sherman, then turn back on Grant. Sherman had feared this strategy from the start of the Carolinas campaign, questioning whether Lee “would permit us, almost unopposed, to pass through the states of South and North Carolina, cutting off and consuming the very supplies on which he depended to feed his army” and remarking that “if Lee is a soldier of genius, he will seek to transfer his army from Richmond to Raleigh or Columbia; if he is a man simply of detail, he will remain where he is, and his speedy defeat is sure.”1
Johnston proposed such a strategy to Lee on March 1, 1865, but Lee replied he was unwilling to turn against Sherman until the Federals had reached the Roanoke River, only fifty-five miles south of Petersburg. This demonstrated Lee’s lack of strategic vision and eliminated any possibility of defeating Sherman.
Yet Lee recognized that Sherman’s march was rapidly destroying his own army. He had written the governor of North Carolina on February 24: “The state of despondency that now prevails among our people is producing a bad effect upon the troops. Desertions are becoming very frequent and there is good reason to believe that they are occasioned to a considerable extent by letters written to soldiers by their friends at home…that our cause is hopeless and that they had better provide for themselves.”
Sherman crossed the Cape Fear River at Fayetteville on March 15, feinting temporarily north with his left wing in the direction of Raleigh to make Johnston and Hardee, the Rebel commander on the spot, believe that the North Carolina capital was his objective, while actually moving his entire army northeast on Goldsboro.
Lee, realizing his supply depots in eastern North Carolina were in danger of being overrun, wired Johnston on March 14 that unless Johnston could strike a blow against Sherman, Lee’s army would be forced to evacuate Petersburg. This spurred Johnston to seek battle. To prevent being overwhelmed by superior numbers, Johnston had to catch one part of Sherman’s army out of reach of the rest. Getting word from his cavalry on March 17 that Goldsboro was the Union objective and that Sherman’s left wing had turned in that direction, Johnston set his army in motion for Bentonville, ten miles west of Goldsboro, where he hoped to intercept its march. He believed Sherman’s right wing was moving along routes well away to the east. In choosing Bentonville, Johnston unwittingly invited disaster, for this crossroads was the very point Sherman had selected for his two wings to converge!
Johnston, however, beat the Federals to Bentonville, because his roads were better and heavy rains delayed the Federal advance. The two lead divisions of the Union left wing were still eight miles short of Bentonville on the night of March 18, while the other two divisions were eight miles farther back. Meanwhile the right wing, marching on roads to the east, was behind the left wing.
Sherman, believing the Rebels were concentrating to protect Raleigh, ordered the right wing to move directly on Goldsboro instead of turning north to Bentonville. Consequently, the two lead divisions of his left wing under General Jeff. C. Davis were alone when they reached Bentonville at midday on March 19 and bumped into a long line of Confederate entrenchments. The Union troops tried to carry the enemy lines but found they were ominously strong and hurriedly dug in. Johnston’s right arm under Hardee enfolded the Federal line, rolling back Davis’s left flank, but Johnston’s left had been stunned by Davis’s initial attack and the commander there, Braxton Bragg, called for reinforcements. Johnston sent over a division that otherwise might have swept behind Davis’s left and caused disaster. This gave time for part of the left wing’s other two divisions, under A. S. Williams, to come up and form a solid line.
By nightfall the Confederate attack had clearly failed, and Johnston, realizing the remainder of Sherman’s army would be arriving, drew his army into a convex semicircular defensive position, seeking only to remove his wounded before retreating northwest toward Smithfield.
Meanwhile Sherman had turned his right wing toward Bentonville, seeking to frighten Johnston back, not to attack, because his main objective was Goldsboro, junction with Schofield, and replenishment of supplies, which had run dangerously low. Although a division of the right wing made a deep penetration into the Confederate position, Sherman ordered it back, and Johnston was able to get his army away.
Sherman continued into Goldsboro and completed the greatest march in history through enemy territory, 425 miles. Sherman’s march had cut the heart out of the Confederacy, in both a physical and a moral sense. The denouement now came quickly, for Lee’s army in Virginia was ready to collapse at the first heavy blow. The disintegration of this army was partly because of the strain of trench life at Petersburg and partly increasing hunger as Sherman’s advance contracted Confederate supply sources. But the greatest reason was letters from home, which reflected the despair and helplessness of families and friends who had watched Sherman’s unchecked progress and witnessed the destruction of their property. Soldiers in this situation turned to their fundamental loyalty, their families, and deserted in great numbers to get home to protect those dearest to them as best they might.
On March 29, Union general Philip H. Sheridan’s cavalry threatened Lee’s right south of Petersburg, and the next day Grant turned this threat into an infantry stroke, overthrowing a Confederate detachment. On April 2 a general Federal assault broke into the outer defenses of Petersburg, forcing Lee’s withdrawal and his surrender at Appomattox on April 9. This led to Johnston’s surrender at Greensboro, North Carolina, on April 26.
The Civil War ended, and Sherman’s strategy of indirect attack had gained the victory. Unless he had seized Atlanta before the presidential election, Lincoln would not have been reelected. And the march through Georgia and the Carolinas destroyed the South’s will to continue the war.
But Sherman’s remorseless pattern of deliberate personal injury to the Southern people sowed seeds of hate that were to bear bitter fruit. If the purpose of war is to bring about a more perfect peace, Sherman failed dismally. The memory of the damage he and his men did was passed from parent to child throughout the South for a century after the Civil War. Sherman’s march evoked an enduring folk memory of wanton havoc that embittered the Southern people against the North, the Republican Party, and the national government for generations. This was why the South remained “solid” in voting Democratic for many years and why an element of distrust exists to this day against a federal government that could have perpetrated such violence against part of its own people.