“The most gigantic pleasure expedition”
Sherman’s official foragers were absurdly inept in their first attempts at living off the country. The bands were poorly organized, and though the army had looted houses in earlier campaigns, it had never done so on such a scale nor under the necessity of providing for all.
Charles E. Belknap, an eighteen-year-old captain, led one party into the back country on the first day out of Atlanta and discovered its shortcomings. These men halted at the cabin of a poverty-stricken “cracker” where they spotted a few lean razorback hogs—but were forced to fight for them with other foragers from competing regiments. Belknap led them to more plentiful spoils at a nearby farmhouse, but just as his party was loading all the loot they could carry, a few Confederate cavalrymen appeared, whooping and firing. The enemy numbered no more than half a dozen, but to Belknap’s disgust, “All the foragers of the corps took to the woods for safety; in their wild flight chickens were left orphans by the roadside. Hams, pickles, preserves and honey were cast aside.” Some of these men hid in the woods for a day or two before they made their way back to their commands.
The young captain was called into a conference at brigade headquarters when he returned to camp, and was relieved when the foragers were reorganized and he was given command of an enlarged band of ninety men, who thereafter roamed the countryside on their stolen horses, practicing their exciting trade.
The army—and Confederates—were soon calling such men bummers, an expression derived from “boomers,” Belknap theorized, since gunfire was endless wherever the infantry foragers went. In fact, the term seems to have come from the fecund German word bummler, for idler or wastrel; ten years before the war, “bummer” had come to mean tramp.
In any case, these men learned rapidly. Within the first week, when Sherman slowed the march to ten miles a day rather than the customary fifteen, the troops realized that their mission was to despoil the country, and they responded with enthusiasm. Foragers became bummers, and as such they were destined for infamy above all others in the army. Their striking appearance became legendary.
Major Sam Merrill of the 70th Indiana long remembered the first bummers who returned to his camp one night at sundown in a motley array of carts, wagons and carriages:
At the head of the procession … an ancient family carriage, drawn by a goat, a cow with a bell, and a jackass. Tied behind … a sheep and a calf, the vehicle loaded down with pumpkins, chickens, cabbages, guinea fowls, carrots, turkeys, onions, squashes, a shoat, sorghum, a looking-glass, an Italian harp, sweetmeats, a peacock, a rocking chair, a gourd, a bass viol, sweet potatoes, a cradle, dried peaches, honey, a baby carriage, peach brandy and every other imaginable thing a lot of fool soldiers could take in their heads to bring away.
Charles Booth of the 3rd Division’s 2nd Brigade had an equally vivid memory of the raiders who were, he said, “the life of the army”:
Imagine a fellow with … a plug hat, a captured militia plume in it, a citizen’s saddle, with a bed quilt or table cloth … poor fellow! He has rode upon that knock-kneed, shaved-tail, rail-fence mule over 30 miles, has … passed through untold dangers, and all for his load … a bundle of fodder … three hams, a sack of meal, a peck of potatoes, a fresh bed quilt, the old mother’s coffee pot, a jug of vinegar and a bed cord.
Once they had a taste of foraging, these men remained in the countryside, far from their units, day after day in order to avoid army discipline. Even when their wagons were fully loaded by noon they roamed plantations the rest of the day in quest of loot and excitement.
According to David Conyngham of the New York Herald, the army’s best forager was a lank Tennessean by the name of Joe, a half-breed Cherokee. As he led a party of bummers across an open-field one day, Joe abruptly jerked his bony horse to a halt.
“I’m damned if I don’t smell hog,” he said.
There was no sign of an animal in the field.
“Hell,” said one of his companions, “let’s ride on. We’re too far from the army.”
“Nary a step until I make sure,” Joe said. “A fat hog would be a mighty good change from chicken and turkey.”
“They’s no damned hog here, let’s git on.”
A hog grunted and Joe dismounted to search the ground. He kicked at a hollow spot, and the men soon dug out a fat pig, cleverly buried in a cave roofed with boards and covered with earth. The animal was butchered on the spot and borne away behind Joe’s saddle.
Most foragers raided farms in the spirit of carnival, heedless of the distress of victims. One band that found a few chickens under a house was assailed by a sobbing woman: “No! they’re all we’ve got left. They’ve been coming by all day, stealing everything—but they said we could have those to keep my little ones alive!”
A soldier bowed and smiled. “Madam, we’re going to suppress this rebellion if it takes every last chicken in the Confederacy.” The little flock was borne away.
After two days of looting, the army had more food than it could possibly use, and tons of fresh supplies were piled along the roadsides to go to waste. It was inconceivable, in this rich harvest country, that the troops would ever go hungry. The roads were littered with corn and fodder, and especially sweet potatoes, gigantic yams from a miraculous crop. Soldiers marveled at potatoes so large that they “started from the ground” as they were dug. Colonel Charles D. Kerr claimed he saw one three feet long, and his men reported yams “so large you can sit on one end while the other end roasts in the fire.”
No rations had been issued, and butchers had killed none of the cattle brought from Atlanta. Captain Charles Wills of the 103rd Illinois, in Howard’s wing, said, “Our men are clear discouraged with foraging, they can’t carry half the hogs and potatoes they find right along the road.”
Wills noted in his diary: “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure expedition ever planned. It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering, and promises to prove much richer yet.” The captain had one complaint: “I wish Sherman would burn the commissary trains, we have no use for what they carry, and the train only bothers us.”
Chaplain J. E. Brant of the 85th Indiana wrote: “All in fine humor at the expense of the Confederacy … killing nobody but an occasional cavalryman and eating out the very foundations of the Confederacy.” Chaplain George Bradley of Slocum’s corps found the men more cheerful than he had ever known them: “I wouldn’t have missed it for fifty dollars,” one soldier said.
One officer who made a valiant attempt to control wasteful looting was General Jefferson C. Davis, whose name was not an asset in this endeavor; his troops joked endlessly about the general and his namesake, the Confederate president. General Davis had a reputation for leniency, but occasionally lost his temper and sought to punish men at random. One day he saw two soldiers emerge from a house with armloads of women’s clothing, and was so outraged that he had them dressed in the finery and marched them behind wagons, bearing placards on their backs: STOLEN. Discipline was often to be enforced in this haphazard fashion, with soldiers singled out from thousands of fellow looters to serve as examples to the army. Such injustice served merely to further undermine discipline among troops whose basest instincts were aroused by constant temptations to loot and burn.
When General Davis threatened to shoot men who burned houses, a chaplain fumed: “Just think of shooting American soldiers for the benefit of rebels. No man who really loves our cause could issue such an order. If an officer desires to shoot our men, let him join the rebel army at once.”
The army regarded Davis as a dangerous man, though he was one of Sherman’s favorite officers. The Indianian was a veteran of the Mexican War who had spurned an appointment to West Point to remain on the frontier fighting Indians. The outbreak of the rebellion had found him at Fort Sumter, where he fired the first shot in response to the fateful Confederate cannonade that opened the war. More recently he had killed his superior, Major General William Nelson, during an argument over some trivial personal matter. He had escaped prosecution.
General Howard, like Davis, also threatened to shoot looters and burners, but when a court-martial sentenced one of his men to death, he commuted the sentence to a term in the prison at Dry Tortugas, in Florida waters controlled by the Federal navy. General Osterhaus fined pillagers a month’s pay; General Frank Blair imposed a fine of fifty cents for each cartridge fired unnecessarily, in hopes of preventing civilian deaths.
But nothing was to halt the depredation of the army’s foragers. From first to last, stragglers, deserters, camp followers—and occasionally whole regiments—joined official foraging parties in their pillage of the countryside.
Sherman was delighted with the “abundance” of plunder in the rich country yet untouched by passing armies. “The skill and success of the men in collecting forage was one of the features of this march,” he said. “Often I … was amused at their strange collections.” A decade later, when he defended his reputation in his memoirs, Sherman justified the stripping of Georgia homes on the basis of actual need: “No army could have carried along sufficient food and forage for a march of three hundred miles; so that foraging in some shape was necessary.”
The general believed—or later convinced himself—that his army was not unnecessarily harsh in its treatment of helpless women and children, though his raiders left countless miserable victims in their wake: “No doubt, many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence were committed by these … bummers; for I have since heard of jewelry taken from women, and the plunder of articles that never reached the commissary; but these acts were exceptional and incidental. I never heard of any cases of murder or rape …”*
However convenient Sherman’s memory, or however irresponsible his troops seemed to their victims and to later Americans, it remained that the army’s experience was unique in the nation’s history, and that the compulsion to pillage to excess was well-nigh universal in the ranks. Both North and South had been penetrated by other invading armies, but never in this fashion, sweeping through domestic areas without opposition, neither seeking nor expecting to meet enemy forces. This mission to despoil was a far cry from the classic campaigns that climaxed in Gettysburg or Bull Run or Antietam or Shiloh. Rather than bloodshed and pain and terror, each day brought fascinating new scenes to Sherman’s eager young troops, and most of them wished that the lark would have no end.
Now, as the columns moved deeper into the black belt, they were almost mobbed by thousands of wildly enthusiastic Negroes who thronged the roadsides. Virtually all of the slaves were illiterate, deeply religious and superstitious, and joyously aware that salvation had come.
Plantation hands flocked to see the columns pass. Theodore Upson, a twenty-year-old private of the 100th Indiana, said, “They are all looking for freedom but just don’t seem to know what freedom means.”
All along his route, “Massa Sherman” was followed by a roar of acclaim. One ecstatic black woman held a mulatto baby high so that it could see the general: “Dar’s the man that rules the world!”
Sherman rode past the 33rd Massachusetts as the regiment moved through a horde of Negroes. Blacks clung to the general’s stirrups, pressed their heads against the sides of his horse. “He’s the Angel of the Lord!” Men, women and children hugged the soldiers, laughing, crying and sighing: “The day of Jubilo!”
Federal pranksters sometimes victimized credulous Negroes who eagerly sought Sherman. As the XIV Corps neared a village where a great crowd of blacks waited at a crossroad, an orderly came from the rear of the column. “General Sherman will soon be along,” he said. “Look for a soldier in a red uniform, with a cocked hat and a feather in it. He’s driving a carriage with a pair of mules.”
The Negroes craned to look down the road, and when a forager came along in a captured Revolutionary uniform, they marched after him, singing hymns and hailing him as Sherman until someone told them the truth.
Twenty-year-old Corydon Foote, a Michigan drummer boy, was clasped by a Negro woman who shouted, “They tole us this here army was debbils from Hell, but praise the Lord, it’s the Lord’s own babes and sucklings!”
The advance of the 74th Ohio was particularly admired by Negroes. “Lordy!” one said in amazement, “they look just like our people, they ain’t got no horns!” Another caught sight of the regiment’s new American flag: “My God, did you ever see such a pretty thing!”
On another road the XVII Corps passed miles of Negroes who had perched on rail fences. A soldier shouted, “Boys, this is a review and there’s the reviewing officer!” An old black man stood on a rail, bowing and receiving salutes. When a black boy rode up behind him on a mule and reported that an equally large army was marching nearby, the old man raised his arms and screamed, “Dar’s millions of ’em—millions!” He turned to his neighbors in wonder: “Is dere anybody left up Noth?”
A few days later General John W. Fuller saw this old man hobbling along with the corps, hatless and barefoot, trying to keep pace with the troops.
“How far are you going, uncle?”
The old man stared in astonishment: “Why,” he said, “I’se jined!”
Despite all efforts of Sherman and his officers, thousands of Negroes fell in behind the line of march, many of them women. The 17th Indiana was followed by “vast numbers” of black women with babies in their arms or clinging to their skirts who plodded mile after mile, grimly determined to escape the plantations for the unknown that lay ahead. An officer of the regiment saw two little boys, four or five years old, hidden in a wagon by a weary woman apparently too exhausted to continue but determined that they should ride to freedom. Some babies perched upon the backs of mules by their mothers tumbled off and were abandoned at the roadside, or drowned in streams and swamps. David Conyngham saw hampers borne by mules, “a black head with large staring eyes peeping out of a sack” on one side, balanced by a ham or a turkey on the other.
An Illinois artilleryman watched with pity and admiration as the growing caravan of blacks came on in the rear of the army “like a sable cloud in the sky before a thunder storm. They thought it was freedom now or never, and would follow whether or no … Some in buggies, costly and glittering; some on horseback, the horses old and blind, and others on foot; all following up in right jolly mood, bound for ease and freedom. Let those who choose to curse the negro curse him; but one thing is true … they were the only friends on whom we could rely for the sacred truth in Dixie. What they said might be relied on, so far as they knew; and they knew more and could tell more than most of the poor white population.”
At night the camps roared with laughter and the songs of revivals and music halls. Negroes danced and sang, juggled, played banjos and fiddles and homemade drums, rattled bones and entertained troops in African tongues. Soldiers and black girls made love all about the camps, Conyngham noted. The most attractive young women rode by day in baggage wagons, where they led “luxurious lives” dressed in finery stolen from plantation homes and fed at the servants’ mess: “It would be vexatious to the Grand Turk or Brigham Young if they could only see how many of the dark houris were in the employment of officers’ servants and teamsters. I have seen officers themselves very attentive to the wants of pretty octoroon girls, and provide them with horses to ride.”
One night Sherman sent officers into the country to bring in a Negro from the neighborhood. “I don’t want a white man—I need some reliable information about roads and bridges.” An intelligent old black man came for a long talk with the general. He was scornful of the rebels: “When the Yanks are far off, our people are very brave. They say the women and children could whip ’em—but when you come close, then how they does git up and dust.”
The general gave the old man a message for the blacks of the neighborhood: “You’re free … you can go when you like. We want men to come with the army if they choose to come, but we don’t force any to be soldiers. We pay wages. But since you have a family you should stay here and all go together later.
“But don’t hurt your masters or their families—we don’t want that.”
Sherman repeated this message frequently as the basis of his personal policy of liberation. He ignored U. S. Grant’s suggestion that he “clean the country of Negroes and arm them.”
Unlike Sherman, who had known slaves and masters during his years in the South, most of his young Midwestern soldiers gazed upon the strange world of central Georgia’s plantation life in fascination. The more sensitive of them could realize how the intimacy of rural life and the repression of ignorant blacks had served to perpetuate the system and made possible the squelching of revolts for some two hundred years. The soldiers also noted indications of affection and kindness between whites and blacks, relationships which, even more than economic factors, preserved a sort of racial détente in this back country.
For all its horrors, the slave system had imposed a stability of sorts for whites and blacks of the region, a stability that was forever altered by the passage of Sherman’s columns. Both races were to be thrust into new and uncertain times. Soldiers had opportunities to see many blacks who were prepared to embrace the new day—and others who clung to the past. Major Nichols found an elderly black couple in a farmhouse who symbolized the division. After the major had talked with them for a few minutes, the old woman rose, glared and pointed to her husband. She hissed with a scorn that bespoke a lifetime of anger and frustration: “How come you sittin’ there? You s’pose I been waitin’ sixty years for nothin’? Don’t you see the door’s open now? I’m goin’, you hear? I’m gonna follow my child and go ’long with these people till I drop in my tracks.”
Nichols was astounded by the transformation in the old woman, who had been sitting with a dull expression on her worn face: “A more terrible sight I never beheld. I can think of nothing to compare with it except … Meg Merrilies.”
The northern wing of the army now approached the pleasant country market town of Madison, which, though it was to escape major damage, would nurse bitter memories of Sherman’s men in the holiday mood.
Reveille sounded at four in the morning on November 17, and troops of the left wing broke camp in a rainstorm. Several brigades of the XX Corps spent the morning tearing up the railroad on the way to Madison while the rear guard beat off a few rebels who attacked the rear. Gunfire sputtered throughout the day as foragers shot barnyard fowl, hogs and cattle; men entered the town carrying chickens, turkeys, headless sheep, and on their bayonets, chunks of fresh pork complete with hide and hair.
General Slocum was met outside the town by the mayor and three others, who begged him not to burn the place, but the interview was brief and the general made no promises. The troops found this the most beautiful town they had seen in Georgia, a quiet village of stately houses and large trees. The season was late and gardens were filled with roses and dahlias. A band played and Negroes crowded about, timorously at first, but soon becoming friendly with the blue-coats. “Our master told us you had horns,” one of them told William Grunert of the 129th Illinois. “He said you’d make holes in our shoulders to hitch us to your wagons.” The blacks pranced and sang with delight as the courthouse, depot and a slave pen, with its whips and paddles, were set on fire.
The wife of the local railroad agent came to plead with soldiers to spare the tiny office in her yard, but men threw open windows, tossed in flaming brands, and the small structure burned to the ground. The woman scolded her tormentors with unconcealed hatred. “I almost always have sympathy for the women,” Private Horatio Chapman wrote, “but I did not much pity her. She was a regular Secesh and spit out her spite and venom against the dirty yanks and mudsills of the north.”
A few houses and other buildings in the town were burned, or were, as Grunert noted, “demolished more or less.”
The town’s stores were pillaged by “vagabonds” from the rear of the army who flung bales of cloth and clothing, hardware and harness into the streets. Two soldiers bore off a large gilt mirror, tired of carrying it, and dashed it to the ground. Drunken soldiers lay on the streets of the town with wine bottles lying about them.
The New York Herald’s man described a scene in the parlor of a house of “a lot of bearded, rough soldiers capering about the room in a rude waltz, while some fellow was thumping away unmercifully at the piano, with another cutting grotesque capers on the top-board.” The soldiers tired of this “grotesque saturnalia” and burned the piano.
About 4,000 men of the corps camped near the home of the High family for two days and nights. The frightened Mrs. High greeted them by flapping her father’s old Masonic apron from the porch, shouting, “I’m a Mason’s daughter and a wife of a Mason, give me protection.” An officer posted a guard at the house. “Put out your light,” he said, “and go to sleep, and you will not be disturbed.”
The household was not molested until morning, when the aroma of fresh gingerbread attracted Federal soldiers, who entered the kitchen, took a few pieces and dropped coins into a tin pan. The black cook grew more excited as the troops came and went for hours, and the mound of coins grew until a last soldier snatched the remaining cakes, emptied the plate of coins and ran. The sobbing cook dashed after him, shouting, “Our boys wouldn’t have done that way, for they has had some raisin’ and has got manners, too.”
The army left Madison “in rather good spirits,” young Emma High said. The rear guard stacked arms on a lawn on the edge of town, stripped hundreds of roses from flower gardens, and marched away with flowers in their muskets and woven into garlands about their hats.
On November 20 Sherman halted at noon at the farm of a Mrs. Farrar a few miles east of Madison. The farm wife was a pretty but slatternly woman who said her husband was in the Confederate army “from choice.” She listened complacently to one of the general’s lectures on the war guilt of the South and made little comment. Her slaves told Henry Hitchcock that Farrar was in Milledgeville helping to build breastworks. “They’re gonna fight you over there,” a Negro said. “They done been building forts and all for two years.” The rumor was false. Despite the importance of the state capital and the presence of earthworks, the town was not to be defended.
The Negroes of this farm complained of Farrar’s cruelty: “He whups us with strops, hand saws and paddles with holes cut in ’em—and then rubs salt in the wounds.” They told the staff of a celebrated bloodhound on the next farm, an enormous red dog used to track down runaways. Nichols sent to have the dog killed, and when they heard a shot and a quavering howl the Negroes shouted in triumph.
For the rest of the march the army killed most dogs in its path, and sometimes carried the hunt to ludicrous extremes. One soldier snatched a poodle from a wailing mistress. “Leave my baby alone—she’s all I’ve got!”
“Madam, our orders are to kill every bloodhound.”
“She’s no bloodhound—she’s a house pet.”
“Well, Madam, we can’t tell what it’ll grow into if we leave it behind.” He disappeared with the dog under his arm.
Sherman’s columns had now marched almost one hundred miles without revealing their destination to the Confederates. Food was still plentiful and plunder of the countryside continued daily. Though the troops were already out of control, civilians had suffered few of the atrocities which were in store for many who lived along the route, especially in South Carolina. Officers made fewer, and less effective, attempts to restore discipline as the march proceeded.
The commander was anxious to concentrate the wings of the army at Milledgeville and drive toward Savannah, but he continued to threaten Macon to the south, hoping to conceal his true objective until the last moment.
From great distances, and without knowledge of the situation on Sherman’s rapidly changing front, Confederate leaders breathed defiance and implored Georgians to resist to the last man. From Mississippi the flamboyant Creole general, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, sent an appeal: “Arise for the defense of your native soil!… Rally around your patriotic Governor and gallant soldiers. Obstruct and destroy all the roads in Sherman’s front, flank, and rear, and his army will soon starve in your midst.”
The secretary of war, James Seddon, telegraphed from Richmond: “You have now the best opportunity ever presented to destroy the enemy … Georgians, be firm, act promptly, and fear not.”
Georgia’s congressmen urged: “Let every man fly to arms! Remove your negroes, horses, cattle and provisions and burn what you cannot carry. Burn all bridges, and block up the roads in his route. Assail the invader in front, flank and rear, by night and by day. Let him have no rest.”
Such bravado had long since been exposed. Sherman’s columns had swept forward rapidly, without meeting serious opposition in any quarter. Georgia was powerless to resist, it seemed. Joe Wheeler claimed that he had saved the small town of Griffin by making a stand there, but soon discovered that his enemy had merely veered off toward another objective. Wheeler’s next report revealed the hapless state of Confederate defenses: “Enemy turning column shortest route to Macon. I have no orders regarding the holding of any city should enemy besiege or assault. Please give me wishes and intentions of Government, or send someone who knows the course they desire pursued.”
Wheeler hurried into Macon to fight for the city, but though Kilpatrick’s horsemen were so close on his heels that some of them rode into the trenches, they soon turned away, their feint complete. Howard’s infantry was already crossing the Ocmulgee River, moving rapidly eastward. Wheeler was then impotent to do more than hang on Sherman’s flank, picking off stragglers.
*Sherman later conceded, in a speech in Washington, that at least two cases of rape had been brought to his attention. Southerners claimed rapes were common indeed along the army’s line of march, but such cases were seldom reported by victims.