In the famous photograph taken by the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady in May 1865 at the height of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s fame, Sherman is wearing a high white collar and uniform, his arms crossed, his receding hair wild and unkempt on his domed forehead, his posture ramrod straight. He is looking slightly to his left with a fierce, implacable expression, the embodiment of “grim-visaged war,” as one of Grant’s staff officers described him in Atlanta in September 1864, whose severe demeanor is enhanced by the black armband commemorating Lincoln’s assassination, the sharp aquiline nose, hard-set mouth and hooded eyes, and the pronounced crease on his right cheek, which looks like a dueling scar. Brady’s iconic image does not convey the contradictions of Sherman’s complex personality—the thoughtful, literate, and highly intelligent man who was prone to fits of depression and self-doubt, the democrat who disliked and distrusted democracy, the racist who freed slaves, the ruthless soldier who often professed his loathing for war and preferred to avoid battle, the man who loved the South yet set out to bludgeon it into submission. The photograph was taken when Sherman had barely returned from the campaigns that had transformed him into the eccentric genius general of the North and the nemesis of the South, and he exudes confidence and willpower and the sense of a man who is conscious of his place in his country’s history. Before the war, there was little to suggest that such an outcome was likely; Sherman himself had come to believe that he was destined for obscurity and mediocrity, and even after the war began his career came close to unraveling before it had even begun.
“Grim-Visaged War,” Mathew Brady, May 1865. Courtesy of the National Archives (111-B-1769).
The general whom one of his officers called “the most American looking man I ever saw” was born on February 8, 1820, in the small town of Lancaster, Ohio, the son of a successful lawyer who gave him his unusual middle name in honor of the legendary Shawnee chieftain. At the age of nine, his father died of fever, leaving his widow with eleven children to support. To ease the burden on his mother, “Cump” Sherman was handed over to the care of the attorney Thomas Ewing, a family friend and Whig Party senator. Ewing secured his adopted son a place at the West Point military academy at the age of sixteen, where he received the standard military education of the period, with a heavily Europe-oriented curriculum that included courses on civil and military engineering, fortifications, siegecraft, artillery and infantry tactics, and a great deal of drill, in addition to more academic subjects such as mineralogy, geology, moral philosophy, and international and common law, which Sherman described to his younger brother John as essential requirements for “the scientific officer.”
One of Sherman’s professors at West Point was Dennis Hart Mahan, the father of the great admiral and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. He taught courses on military and civil engineering and the science of war at the academy from 1832 to 1871. Sherman does not say much in his memoirs about the impact of West Point on his future thinking and career, except to boast of the demerits he received as a result of the academy’s insistence on “neatness in dress and uniform, with a strict conformity to the rules.” Though he may not have paid much attention to his appearance, this most cerebral of American generals thrived academically, and he also imbibed a strong sense of the military as a special caste and the ultimate guarantor of the laws and Constitution of the republic that shaped his worldview both during and after the Civil War.
In 1840 Sherman left the academy as a second lieutenant and received his first posting, to Florida, where between 1835 and 1842 the U.S. Army was engaged in a vicious guerrilla war against the Seminoles known as the Second Seminole War, in which ten thousand regular troops and thirty thousand volunteers fought a frustrating campaign against one thousand Seminole warriors, for whom the swamps and hummocks of the Everglades provided a natural fortress and hiding place. In 1841 Colonel William J. Worth turned the war in the government’s favor by sending small units into the Everglades outside the normal hunting season, in the winter, to burn and destroy Seminole camps, canoes, crops, and food supplies rather than hunt their elusive combatants. These operations contain the outlines of Sherman’s future campaigns in the Civil War and also in the West. Though he made little contribution to the Seminole campaigns, he described them with some enthusiasm to Ellen Boyle Ewing, the daughter of Thomas Ewing and his soon-to-be fiancée, as “a kind of warfare which every young officer should be thoroughly acquainted with, as the Indian is most likely to be our chief enemy in times to come.”1
These less than glorious skirmishes in the Florida swamps were the closest Sherman came to actual combat before the Civil War. In 1842 he was stationed at Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan’s Island outside Charleston, where he first became personally acquainted with Southern society. In 1843, he spent three months in Georgia and Alabama investigating claims made by state militias for the loss of horses in the First Seminole War, and while there he went on long rides through Georgia’s former Cherokee country and drew topographical sketches of the same terrain “where in after-years I had to conduct vast armies and fight great battles.”
Sherman had a keen eye for topographical detail, and his letters are filled with precise and vivid descriptions of landscapes and wildlife during his prewar journeys in Florida, the Deep South, the Gulf of Mexico, California, and the West. He also liked to paint. During his less than demanding duties at Fort Moultrie, he developed such a passion for painting and drawing that he even contemplated giving up the military to become a painter—a career direction that many Southerners would later come to wish he had chosen. Sherman’s impressions of the South were generally positive. He enjoyed the social life at Charleston, the abundance of balls, and the attractive young women who attended them, and he was sympathetic toward the “peculiar institution” that sustained Southern society.
He was less enthusiastic about the military, which offered only limited prospects of promotion. Unlike Grant and many of his other West Point classmates, Sherman did not participate in the 1846–48 war with Mexico, and he was uncomfortably conscious afterward that “our country had passed through a foreign war, that my comrades had fought great battles, and yet I had not fired a single shot.” In 1850 he married Ellen Ewing, and three years later he left the army after having obtained the rank of captain, largely as a result of pressure from his adopted family to find more remunerative employment. That same year, he moved to San Francisco to take up a position as manager of the local branch of a Saint Louis bank, where he was appointed major general of the California militia.
This appointment drew him into a bitter dispute between the state government and a self-styled Vigilance Committee over the deteriorating law-and-order situation in the city. True to his West Point education, Sherman took the side of the government and was ignored and humiliated, an experience that reinforced his instinctive conservatism, in which an almost religious reverence for the law and the Constitution was coupled with a deep suspicion of “mob rule” and “anarchy,” and the politicians and newspapers who he believed often promoted these tendencies.
Sherman’s letters and memoirs contain a cross section of the turbulent and dynamic mid-nineteenth-century American society that he inhabited, from Indians, aristocratic Mexican women, and slave-owning planters to California gold miners, frontier scouts, and settlers, as well as the hardworking Yankee middle classes of the great Northern cities that he was never able to feel part of. In 1856, an economic slump in California led his employers to close down his bank in San Francisco. In July 1858, the Shermans moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was admitted to the Kansas bar, but this career path also turned out to be a dead end when the new lawyer was unable to generate sufficient work to feed his growing family.
These failures intensified Sherman’s tendency to melancholy and self-pity, and his pessimism regarding his career prospects was not helped by the success of his younger brother John, who made a smooth transition from the law to the House of Representatives. In one of his many despondent moments, Sherman told his wife that he was “doomed to be a vagabond,” and described himself as “a dead cock in the pit.” In 1859, his luck changed when he secured a job as superintendent of a new military academy in Louisiana, and the following year he wrote to Ellen in a tone of resignation rather than satisfaction from the newly created Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, “I must rest satisfied with the title of the ‘Old Man,’ the ‘cross old schoolmaster.’ ”
War
The “cross old schoolmaster” was then forty years old and appeared to have reached the zenith of his less than dazzling achievements. Without the Civil War, Sherman might have spent the rest of his life churning out Southern cadets for the U.S. Army, but this did not mean that he relished the opportunity that the outbreak of war provided. On Christmas Eve, 1860, he was in his college rooms when he read that South Carolina had seceded. According to a Virginian friend and colleague, Sherman began crying and pacing the room and decried what he called an act of “folly, madness, a crime against civilization” that would force him to fight “against your people, whom I love best.” Sherman insisted that the South could not prevail against “one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth” but he nevertheless foresaw, unlike many of his contemporaries, that the war would be long and bloody.2
On January 18, 1861, he resigned his post as superintendent in protest at the seizure by Louisiana troops of the federal arsenal at Baton Rouge. After an emotional good-bye to his cadets and colleagues, he made his way back to Lancaster and then to Washington, at the invitation of his brother. In March he met Abraham Lincoln and was distinctly underwhelmed by what he perceived to be the president’s complacent attitude toward the looming confrontation. Even after Fort Sumter, Sherman was not ready to offer his services to a government he believed was unwilling to fight the war the way it should be fought, and he turned down an offer from Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, to become chief clerk of the War Department. In May that year, he changed his mind at the behest of his family and became a colonel in the Thirteenth Regular Infantry, which played a minor role at the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas Junction. Sherman was disgusted by the chaotic retreat of Lincoln’s volunteer army, which he accused of having “degenerated into an armed mob.”
Against his better judgment, he agreed to become brigadier general of a volunteer regiment in Kentucky, and in October he was unexpectedly promoted to commander of the Army of the Cumberland in Kentucky, when his predecessor resigned on health grounds. Sherman did not believe he was ready for high command, and the promotion nearly wrecked his career when he scandalized Lincoln’s secretary of war Simon Cameron by declaring that at least two hundred thousand soldiers would eventually be needed to extend the war into the South. This prediction, as it turned out, was not inaccurate, but it was not what the North believed at the time. Sherman’s case was not helped by his paranoid overestimation of the numbers of Confederate troops in Kentucky, which led him to believe that his own army was about to be overwhelmed.
These views caught the attention of the Northern press, which was frequently as eager to destroy the reputations of Union generals as it was to boost them, and led to a series of stories questioning his sanity. Reports from Sherman’s headquarters of the manic behavior of the insomniac commander of the Army of the Cumberland did nothing to dispel such reports and eventually prompted his wife to travel to Louisville to rescue him from what was effectively a nervous breakdown. In November 1861, Sherman was relieved of his command and taken home to recuperate before being transferred to a remote post in Missouri, where he might easily have remained had it not been for the efforts of his wife, his brother, his stepfather, and his father-in-law, who lobbied intensively in Washington for him to be given another chance.
In February 1862, his old West Point classmate Henry Halleck sent him to Paducah, Kentucky, to organize the supply depot that Ulysses Grant had established for his campaign against forts Henry and Donelson. Here Sherman first demonstrated the logistical skills that would later shape his campaigns in the Deep South. Located twelve miles apart at the parallel Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respectively, in barely mapped terrain with few roads, these two forts were a vital component of the Confederate defense of Tennessee. Placed by Halleck in charge of the District of Cairo, Sherman demonstrated the punctilious attention to detail of a consummate quartermaster and restored much needed order and organization to the Western army’s chaotic supply chain. It was largely due to his efforts that Grant was provided with a constant flow of boats bearing food, supplies, and reinforcements when he needed them, in order to carry out his complex operations that provided the Union with its first major victories of the war, and this contribution restored Sherman’s own confidence. His redemption was confirmed at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, though only just. Initially taken by surprise by the Southern assault, he proved himself to be a courageous and inspirational general during twelve hours of ferocious combat, in which he was lightly wounded twice and had three horses shot from under him.
Sherman was praised by both Halleck and Grant for his contribution to the successful Union counterattack the next day, and Shiloh cemented his friendship with Grant that was to play such a decisive role in the campaigns that followed. Even more than Bull Run, Shiloh exposed the former lawyer and bank manager to the horrors of the conflict. “The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war,” he told his wife. “Mangled bodies, dead, dying, in every conceivable shape, without heads, legs; and horses!”3 Sherman witnessed many such scenes in the course of the war, during his mixed record as a field commander. On December 27, 1862, he led a failed assault on the Confederate forts and trenches overlooking Chickasaw Bayou, north of Vicksburg, in which his forces took 1,776 casualties, compared to the Confederates’ 187. At Chattanooga on November 25, 1863, he played only a supporting role in the successful Union assault on Confederate positions on Missionary Ridge, in which his forces became pinned down under heavy enemy fire as a result of a navigational error that left them in an exposed position.
If Sherman’s record on the battlefield was less than outstanding in comparison with that of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or even Grant, he nevertheless displayed talents that were extremely useful to the Union cause. He was a tenacious and meticulous quartermaster in a war in which logistics were more important than ever. He was also a sharp analyst of the South with a keen understanding of the political and military dimensions of the war. Last but not least, he proved himself highly proficient at organizing and directing the movement of large numbers of troops on the march. All these qualities transformed the temperamental and self-doubting officer who nearly exited the war in Kentucky into Grant’s right-hand man and the co-architect of the strategy that was to finally bring the war to an end.
This transformation was partly due to Grant’s influence. In April 1863, Grant finally succeeded in moving his army from the west to the east bank of the Mississippi River, thus enabling him to strike at Vicksburg. Rather than remain tied to his new operational base at Grand Gulf, Grant opted to march his army across the country between the two main defending Confederate armies, at Vicksburg and the state capital of Jackson. To increase his mobility and tactical flexibility, Grant ordered his soldiers to carry only essential supplies and make up the balance by living off the country.
These tactics were not entirely unprecedented. In 1847 Winfield Scott led his army on a seven-hundred-mile march from Veracruz to Mexico City, relying mostly on supplies that his army bought from the local population along the route. But Sherman was so appalled by Grant’s plan to move twenty thousand soldiers through hostile territory without supplies that he sent a courier in an attempt to get him to change his mind. Grant rejected Sherman’s arguments. Moving rapidly east toward Jackson, he dispatched two corps—one of which was commanded by Sherman—in a feint movement northward toward Vicksburg, before capturing Jackson. Throughout this campaign, the Union armies drew their food and forage from the surrounding population while simultaneously dividing the Confederate defenders, providing no supply line that could be attacked but cutting the line of communication between Jackson and Vicksburg.
Grant’s tactics were a revelation to Sherman. Not only had he demonstrated that a large army could subsist on the country without supplies, but his skillful manipulation of the Confederate armies offered a brilliantly executed example of how to make tactical gains over an opposing army by avoiding battle rather than pursuing it. Sherman’s corps also participated in the destruction of factories, storehouses, and railroad lines at Jackson, while Grant moved toward Vicksburg. Sherman learned these lessons well. In July that year, he returned to Jackson following the fall of Vicksburg and completed the destruction of the city with such thoroughness that Union soldiers dubbed it Chimneyville.
Sherman’s Torch
Unlike his superiors, Sherman never believed that the South could be brought back to the Union through a policy of conciliation. “The greatest difficulty in the problem now before the country is not to conquer but so conquer as to impress upon the real men of the South a respect for their conquerors,” he wrote to his brother from Saint Louis in 1861. “When one nation is at war with another, all the people of the one are the enemies of the other; then the rules are plain and easy of understanding,” he wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase from Memphis in August 1862. In a letter to Grant that same month, he promised to “make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy; indeed, I know, and you know, that the end would be reached quicker by such a course than by any seeming yielding on our part.”4 In October he told his brother, “It is about time the North understood the truth. That the entire South, man, woman and child are against us.”5
The “severity” that Sherman recommended was not dictated only by military considerations. He also regarded the war itself as a “salutary political schooling” that would eliminate “the modern anarchist doctrine . . . of secession” and force the South to accept the permanent authority of the federal government. “Obedience to the Law,” he wrote to Halleck on September 17, 1863, “. . . is the lesson that this war, under Providence, will teach and enlighten American citizens.” In these circumstances, “I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and we will do it . . . that it makes no difference whether it be in one year, or two, or ten, or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, every thing that seems to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are our enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts.”6
By that time, such ideas were no longer as anomalous in Washington as they had once been, but Sherman’s pronouncements sometimes went beyond the new parameters of hard war. In July 1862, he told one of his officers, “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. . . . For every bullet shot at a steamboat, I would shoot a thousand 30-pounder Parrotts into even helpless towns on Red, Ouachita, Yazoo or wherever a boat can float or soldier march.”7 In January 1864, an officer from the Army of the Tennessee in Huntsville, Alabama, asked him for clarification on the correct treatment of civilians under his jurisdiction with known “secesh” sentiments. In a detailed and learned reply, with references to precedents in European wars and civil wars, Sherman explained that noncombatants who “remain in their houses and keep to their accustomed peaceful business” should not be molested. Those who failed to observe such conditions, however, could be subjected to a range of punishments that included fines, imprisonment, banishment, or, in cases of espionage, death. Having “appealed to war,” Southerners had only themselves to blame for whatever consequences befell, Sherman explained: “A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many people, with less pertinacity than the South has already shown, have been wiped out of existence.”8
Sherman’s letters and statements contain frequent references to “extermination” as a remedy for this “choice.” But despite his propensity for extreme statements, Sherman was frequently appalled at the treatment of Southern civilians by his own troops. In the summer of 1861 he was so disgusted by the thieving and vandalism carried out by Union soldiers during the frantic retreat from Bull Run that he complained to his wife that “every woman within five miles who has a peach stolen or roasting ear carried off comes to me to have a guard stationed to protect her tree, and our soldiers are the most destructive men I have ever known.”9
In July the following year, during the march from Shiloh to Corinth, Sherman ordered his soldiers to cease “This demoralizing and disgraceful practice of pillage . . . else the country will rise on us and justly shoot us down like dogs and wild beasts.”10 These orders appear to have had little impact, according to another letter from his camp near Vicksburg in January 1863, in which he told his brother, “Our armies are devastating the land and it is sad to see the destruction that attends our progress—we cannot help it. Farms disappear, houses are burned and plundered, and every living animal killed and eaten. General officers make feeble attempts to stay the disorder, but it is idle.” Like many Union officers, he was concerned that such behavior would erode the discipline of his own army, but he also regarded pillage and looting as morally abhorrent activities in themselves. “War is at best barbarism, but to involve all—children, women, old and helpless—is more than can be justified,” he told one of his divisional commanders in the Yazoo River in April 1863.11
Sherman never entirely shifted from these views, but he nevertheless came to embrace a form of war that directly or indirectly targeted “children, women, old and helpless” in order to attack the Confederate Army and its government.
This evolution was to some extent a consequence of the war itself; the longer it continued, the more Sherman, like many Union officers, was disposed to win it through whatever means he believed necessary. His own experience of dealing with guerrilla warfare in the South reinforced his conviction that the Southern civilian population was collectively responsible for the war. Sherman’s letters and public statements are filled with bitter invective against the civilians who he believed had “chosen” a war while remaining largely immune or indifferent to its worst consequences. His hardening attitude toward the South was not just a consequence of the death and injury that he routinely encountered, but may also have been shaped by personal tragedy. In September 1863, Sherman broke his own rule that campaigning officers should not bring their families to visit them in the field. He invited his family to join him at his XV Corps camp near the Big Black and Yazoo Rivers. During the visit his beloved nine-year-old son, Willie, caught typhoid fever and died in Memphis. Sherman always blamed himself for the death, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he also blamed the war itself.
His personal motives notwithstanding, Sherman came to believe from a purely military perspective that the South could not be subjugated unless the civilian population also paid a price for its support of the Confederate government and army. In his letter to Halleck in September 1863, he declared in unequivocal terms that the war should be waged not just against those who actively resisted the Union, but also against Southerners who “stand by, mere lookers-on in this domestic tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection, or share in the final results.”
Despite such statements, Sherman still attempted for the most part to limit these efforts to public property rather than private homes, but his previous concern when his troops exceeded these boundaries was conspicuously absent by the summer of 1863. “Of necessity, in the war the commander on the spot is the judge, and may take your house, your field, your everything, and turn you all out, helpless to starve,” he told a citizens committee from Warren County. “It may be wrong, but that don’t alter the case.”12 In February 1864, Sherman led an even more destructive raid on the important railroad hub and arsenal of Meridian, 150 miles from Vicksburg, which became a prototype of his subsequent raid through Georgia. Following Grant’s cue, Sherman ordered his corps commanders and staff officers to strip their supply wagons to the minimum and march without tents, carrying only essential supplies of artillery and ammunition. On February 3, he led 23,000 soldiers out of Vicksburg, accompanied by a herd of cattle, and proceeded to carve a ten-mile-wide trail of burned and destroyed buildings all along what was left of the railroad line to Jackson, before proceeding to Meridian.
Marching in two columns and supported by simultaneous diversionary operations in northern Mississippi and along the river, Sherman was able to prevent Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk’s twenty-thousand-strong Army of Mississippi from massing against him. On February 14, his troops entered Meridian unopposed. Sherman spent the next five days displaying what Bruce Catton has called “a sinister zeal for destroying Southern property,” wrecking the city with such thoroughness that he was able to report to Grant that “Meridian, with its depots, storehouses, arsenals, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonments no longer exists.”13 The Confederate general Stephen D. Lee was aghast at this prodigious application of “Sherman’s torch,” and questioned whether such methods violated “the warfare of the civilization of the nineteenth century?”14 Sherman was generally indifferent to such criticisms. In his view, Southerners had “chosen” or “appealed to” war and therefore were obliged to accept its consequences—even if these consequences were decided by him. “To make war we must and will harden our hearts,” he wrote to Assistant Secretary of War Charles Anderson Dana in the spring of 1864. “Therefore when preachers clamor and sanitaries wail, don’t join in, but know that war, like the thunderbolt, follows its laws and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous and charitable stand in its path.”15
Sherman often described war as if it were a force of nature that could not be controlled, but he was also conscious that its impact could be intensified or diminished according to necessity. In August 1864, he reminded his friend James Guthrie of the early period of the war “when I would not let our men burn fence rails for fire or gather fruit or vegetables though hungry. . . . We at that time were restrained, tied by a deep-seated reverence for law and property.”16 Such restraint was no longer required, he insisted. “The rebels first introduced terror as part of their system. . . . No military mind could endure this long, and we were forced in self-defense to imitate their example.” Many armies in wartime have justified their own departure from military conventions on the grounds that their enemies had departed from them first. For Sherman, however, “terror” was not simply an instrument of military domination. “I believe in fighting in a double sense, first to gain physical results and next to inspire respect on which to build up our nation’s power,” he told a member of Grant’s staff after the battle of Chattanooga.17 And in the spring of 1864 he and Grant set out to impose this power decisively in a coordinated campaign in both theaters of war.
Atlanta
On March 20, 1864, Sherman and Grant met in the Burnet House hotel in Cincinnati to devise the coming spring campaign, at a time when the outcome of the war was by no means certain. Despite steady Union gains over the past year, Union casualties far outnumbered those of the Confederacy; its army was also plagued by desertion, and the Lincoln administration was entering an election year in which the president could not take the support of the public or even his own party for granted.
Both Grant and Sherman were acutely aware that a Democratic victory in the November election might lead to a negotiated peace and the definitive breakup of the Union, as they plotted a simultaneous campaign in both theaters that would bring the Confederacy to its knees. In the East, the Armies of the Potomac and the James would advance on Richmond and attempt to draw Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into a position where the Union armies would be able to destroy it. While Grant’s armies set out to “get Lee,” the Union Army and Navy would attack the Confederacy at multiple points throughout Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Carolina coast.
As commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi following Grant’s promotion, Sherman was entrusted with preventing Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, the second of the CSA’s armies, from coming to Lee’s assistance from Georgia. On April 4, Sherman was ordered “to pursue Johnston’s army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Over the next month, Sherman prepared for the coming campaign with characteristic thoroughness. On April 6, he commandeered all available rolling stock and food supplies south of Nashville exclusively for military use. For the next four weeks, an average of 130 locomotives hurtled down the heavily guarded railroad between the Union supply depot at Nashville and its forward supply base at Chattanooga, while horses, pack animals, and herds of cattle were shunted toward the front.
On May 4, some 120,000 Union soldiers crossed the Rapidan River in Virginia, and the following day they clashed with Lee’s forces in the dense woodland known as the Wilderness, in a hallucinatory two-day battle of stunning savagery. Over the next six weeks, the two armies were engaged in what Grant later called “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed,” a series of ferocious and bloody battles in which the Union armies lost 65,000 men and Lee 35,000.
While this terrible war of attrition was unfolding in Virginia, Sherman began a very different campaign in Georgia. On May 7, the combined armies of the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Ohio left Chattanooga, Tennessee, and followed the route of the Western & Atlantic Railroad, which was to be their principal supply conduit. Established in 1773 as a result of a royal charter from King George III, Georgia, the last of the fifteen British colonies, now had one million inhabitants. They had not yet experienced the war firsthand, but their state now became the scene of a dramatic war of maneuver, as a hundred thousand infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers advanced cautiously down the railroad toward Atlanta and forced the Army of Tennessee to conduct a series of tactical retreats to avoid being outflanked.
Today it takes just over an hour to drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta. In the summer of 1864, it took Sherman’s army more than two months to fight its way to the Chattahoochee River. Sherman generally tried to avoid direct frontal assaults on the well-defended Confederates and attempted to turn Johnston’s flanks, while his adversary was equally determined to conserve his forces by avoiding a decisive confrontation. The Union advance was marked by constant skirmishing and vicious small-scale engagements at New Hope Mill, Pickett’s Mill, Dallas, and Kennesaw Mountain, where Sherman ordered a rare and costly failed attack on strongly fortified Confederate positions on June 27. Though Confederate cavalry and guerrillas harried Sherman’s armies and attempted to cut their railroad supply link, this damage was quickly repaired—under the direction of Sherman’s brilliant chief of engineers, Captain Orlando Poe—with an improvisational ability that astonished the rebels, in one instance rebuilding a 780-foot-long trestle bridge across the Chattahoochee River in four days. Throughout this advance, Union soldiers foraged relentlessly to compensate for delays in the flow of supplies, and they burned buildings and houses in retaliation for acts of sabotage and guerrilla attacks. “We have devoured the land and our animals eat up the wheat and corn field close,” Sherman wrote to his wife. “All the people retire before us and desolation is behind. To realize what war is one should follow our tracks.”18
At the beginning of July, Union armies were only eight miles from Atlanta. By this time, Grant’s advance on Richmond had stalled. After nearly two months of relentless slaughter that had earned Grant the nickname the Butcher among Northern Democrats, the two armies now faced each other across fifty-mile-long entrenchments around Richmond and the city of Petersburg, and the fighting now took the form of sporadic skirmishes and sharpshooting from the trenches. Once again the Confederate defensive line in Virginia had held, and the appalling casualties horrified the Northern public and boosted the Democratic Party’s peace agenda.
As a result, the Lincoln administration’s hopes of reelection rested on Sherman’s campaign. On July 17, Jefferson Davis lost patience with Johnston’s cautious defensive strategy and replaced him with Lieutenant General John Bell Hood. A brave but reckless commander who had lost a leg and the use of an arm and took opiates to kill the pain, Hood immediately threw twenty thousand troops against Union forces at Peachtree Creek on July 20, losing 4,746 men in the first of three attempts to drive Sherman’s encircling armies back. The next day, Union batteries opened fire on Atlanta for the first time. On August 1, Sherman ordered his artillery commanders to “fire from ten to fifteen from every gun you have in position into Atlanta that will reach any of its houses. Fire slowly and with deliberation between 4 P.M. and dark.”
On August 9, an estimated five thousand exploding shells and cannon shots fell on the city, whose population may have been as large as ten thousand, including refugees who had fled the Union advance. To escape the bombardment, many of its inhabitants were obliged to dig “bombproofs” and “gopher holes” beneath their gardens or by extending their cellars, as Union commanders targeted prominent buildings and used heated shells as incendiaries. Though Sherman told one of his generals that most civilians had “got out” of the besieged city, civilians were inevitably killed in these bombardments. “This seems to me a very barbarous mode of carrying on war, throwing shells at women and children,” reflected a local bookseller named Samuel Richards.19 One Atlanta woman wrote to her husband to report that “a little child was killed in his mother’s arms,” while another shell killed a neighbor and “his little daughter Lizzie whom you would have seen at our house.”20
Sherman declared that he would make Atlanta “too hot to be endured” and transform it into a “used-up community by the time we are done with it.” On September 1, Union troops captured Jonesboro, twelve miles to the south of Atlanta, closing the city’s last connection to the interior. The following day, Hood’s army abandoned Atlanta, and on September 4 Sherman sent an exultant telegram to Lincoln announcing that “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” If Sherman had failed to “break up” the Army of Tennessee, he had nevertheless fixed it in place and captured a major railroad hub that was also a center for the homegrown Confederate armaments industry. The capture of the “Gate City” also effectively won the election for Lincoln. Then, having presented the president with this prize, Sherman took a decision that shocked and horrified many Southerners.
“See the Books”
Only five days after taking control of Atlanta, Sherman informed Hood that he had decided to reserve the city exclusively for military use and that it was “to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south, and the rest north.” This was not the first time civilians were forcibly evacuated during the Civil War. On August 25, 1863, Sherman’s father-in-law, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, ordered the depopulation of three counties in Missouri in retaliation for Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence. Some twenty thousand people were driven from the county and their homes burned, an expulsion that was justified by General John Schofield, then commander of the Department of the Missouri, on the grounds that “all the inhabitants [were] practically the friends of the guerrillas.” On July 7, during the advance on Atlanta, Sherman ordered General Kenner Garrard to arrest four hundred mostly female mill workers and their children from two factory towns near Roswell, outside Atlanta, whose factories produced a fabric used to make Confederate tents and uniforms. In Sherman’s opinion, their workers were “as much governed by the rules of war as if in the ranks.”21 Accordingly, he ordered Garrard to remove them “no matter what the clamor, and let them foot it, under guard, to Marietta, whence I will send them by cars to the North.” Though Sherman specified that the women and their families were to be transported to a “country where they can live in peace and security,” they were taken by rail to Louisville, where they eventually wound up in a female military prison.
The evacuation of Atlanta was justified on different grounds. From Sherman’s perspective, the continued presence of civilians was both a security threat to his own troops and an additional drain on the food supplies available to his army. Hood reluctantly agreed to comply in an angry letter the following day, in which he accused Sherman of deliberately shelling civilians and condemned the evacuation order as an affront to “the name of God and humanity” and an “unprecedented measure” that “transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.” This prompted an acrimonious exchange in which Sherman denied that his decision was unprecedented and accused the Confederacy of “hundreds” of similar actions.22
Sherman insisted that it was not cruelty but “kindness to these families of Atlanta to remove them now, at once, from scenes that women and children should not be exposed to,” because his army did not have the capacity to feed them. He also rejected the accusation that he had deliberately shelled civilians and accused Hood of having placed his defensive parapets at Atlanta so close to civilian houses that it was impossible for his artillery to distinguish between military and nonmilitary targets, then concluded with the following scornful riposte: “In the name of common-sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war—dark and cruel war—who dared and badgered us to battle. . . . If we must be enemies, let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in arch hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it more humane to fight with a town full of woman and the families of a brave people at our back or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people.”
In a long rejoinder, Hood insisted that “there are a hundred thousand witnesses that you fired into the habitations of women and children for weeks, firing far above and miles beyond my line of defense” and accused Sherman of “subjugating free white men, women and children” in order to “place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position”—reference to the presence of black soldiers in the Union army. Sherman denied that there were “negro allies” in his army and maintained that “I was not bound by the laws of war to give notice of the shelling of Atlanta, a fortified town, with magazines, arsenals, foundries, and public stores; you were bound to take notice. See the books.”
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this exchange is that it even took place at all. Victorious generals have never been obliged to explain or justify their decisions to their opponents, and this was just as true in the nineteenth century. Hood’s references to “the laws of God and man” and Sherman’s reference to the “books” both evoked a corpus of customs or usages of war inherited from the European military tradition, which attempted to limit the impact of war on noncombatants. The work of eighteenth-century legal scholars such as the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau received a new impetus in the second half of the nineteenth century as armies, governments, and jurists debated a wide spectrum of military activities that included the treatment of civilians by occupying armies, the appropriation and destruction of private and public property, the conditions under which cities could be bombarded, and the legitimacy of reprisals and other forms of collective punishment in response to guerrilla warfare.
These debates were reflected in the foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, as well as in the Civil War. On April 24, 1863, Lincoln promulgated General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, which laid down a code of conduct for Union commanders in Southern territory.23 Drawn up by Francis Lieber, a prominent legal scholar of Prussian origin, the “Lieber Code” was the first comprehensive attempt by any government in history to establish the mutual rights and responsibilities of soldiers and civilians in wartime, and many of its provisions were subsequently incorporated into the Hague Conventions regarding the Laws and Customs of War on Land, in 1899 and 1907. The Lieber Code’s insistence that “men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God” was balanced by its recognition of the principle of military necessity, which was invoked to list a number of conditions in which these moral principles could be disregarded. Thus Article 18 declared: “When a commander of a besieged place expels the noncombatants, in order to lessen the number of those who consume his stock of provisions, it is lawful, though an extreme measure, to drive them back, so as to hasten on the surrender.”
Sherman clearly regarded his decision to remove the population of Atlanta as justifiable according to this criterion, and this interpretation was supported in a letter from Halleck that same month: “Not only are you justified by the laws and usages of war in removing these people, but I think it was your duty to your own army to do so. . . . Let the disloyal families of the country, thus stripped, go to their husbands, fathers, and natural protectors, in the rebel ranks; we have tried three years of conciliation and kindness without any reciprocation; on the contrary, those thus treated have acted as spies and guerrillas in our rear and within our lines. Therefore the safety of our armies . . . requires that we apply to our inexorable foes the severe rules of war.”24
Sherman’s conception of militarily necessity evinced his belief that war imposes its own priorities, which do not correspond with those of peacetime. Hood’s condemnations were soon followed by an impassioned plea from James Calhoun, the mayor of Atlanta, and two councillors, who asked him to reconsider his evacuation order, which “would involve extraordinary hardship and loss” for a population whose members included pregnant women and women with husbands in the army and no one to look after them. In response Sherman wrote that his orders “were not designed to meet the humanities of the case” and included one his most famous pronouncements, when he declared “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”25
He also suggested that Calhoun’s appeal for mercy had an element of bad faith from a city whose population had previously supported the war and helped make it possible:
Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes and of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace in their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.
That, as far as Sherman was concerned, was the crux of the matter. Not only had the Confederacy brought such treatment on itself, but Atlanta’s role in war time production meant that its population was also a legitimate military target. Not only was war a form of cruelty that could not be “refined,” but the escalation of its “horrors” was an instrument of “perfect and early success” and was therefore more merciful and humane in the long run. The Lieber Code expressed a very similar idea when it declared, “The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief.” And Sherman’s reply to Calhoun closed with a rhetorical flourish that held out the prospect of reconciliation in exchange for the South’s obedience: “But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then I will share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter. Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the weather until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta.”
Despite his ruthlessness, Sherman still rejected the suggestion that his conduct of the war constituted what would later be called a “war crime” as a personal insult and an insult to his government. When Hood published extracts from this correspondence in a Macon newspaper, Sherman sent the complete exchange, together with his letter to Calhoun, for publication in Northern newspapers to make sure that his position was understood. In the North, the response was generally positive. “General Sherman says to the Mayor of Atlanta what every true heart in the land confirms and approves,” observed Harper’s Weekly. In the South, Sherman’s words were as iniquitous as his actions and transformed him into a hate figure in whom the Macon Telegraph saw “all the attributes of man . . . merged in the enormities of the demon, as if Heaven intended in him to manifest depths of depravity yet untouched by a fallen race.”
“Making Georgia Howl”
The South would soon have many more reasons to despise Atlanta’s conqueror. By the end of September, the city had been emptied of its inhabitants, but Sherman was beginning to have second thoughts about maintaining Atlanta as a military base and retaining a railroad supply line that ultimately extended some 470 miles to Louisville, Kentucky, via Chattanooga and Nashville, much of which passed through hostile territory and was vulnerable to attacks by marauding Confederate cavalry raiders in addition to Hood’s roving forty-thousand-strong army. To keep the railroad link open required the continued deployment of large numbers of troops that would undermine the offensive momentum that his armies had acquired, at a time when Grant’s armies were already bogged down in Virginia.
Grant suggested in a telegram that Sherman might link with General Edward Canby, the Union commander at New Orleans, and carry out a joint attack on the city of Columbus. Instead Sherman proposed to march his army through central Georgia “hauling some stores, and depending on the country for the balance” with a view to attacking Macon, Augusta, or Savannah, depending on the Confederate response, because “either horn of the dilemma will be worth the battle.”26 On September 26, Grant recommended that Sherman take his army back into Tennessee to counter a possible invasion of the state by Hood or Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry.
On September 29, Sherman dispatched a large force under command of the “Rock of Chickamauga,” General George H. Thomas, to defend Tennessee against Hood. Two days later, he informed Grant of his intention to “destroy Atlanta and march across Georgia to Savannah or Charleston, breaking roads and doing irreparable damage.” This plan became more defined as Hood attempted to lure his army out of Atlanta by cutting the railroad link to Chattanooga. These efforts were partly successful, and Sherman was obliged to venture out of the city to keep his supply line open. But he had no intention of chasing Hood’s army indefinitely. On October 10, he suggested to Grant that he “strike out with our wagons for Milledgeville, Millen, and Savannah.” This expedition was not designed to capture these cities, because “until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless for us to occupy it; but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people, will cripple their military resources. . . . I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!”
In another telegram two days later, Sherman dismissed the idea of pursuing Hood or defending the railroad: “We cannot remain on the defensive. With twenty-five thousand infantry and the bold cavalry he has, Hood can constantly break my road. I would infinitely prefer to make a wreck of the road and of the country from Chattanooga to Atlanta, including the latter city; send back all my wounded and unserviceable men, and with my effective army move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.” Grant was not averse to a campaign of devastation in principle. That same month, Philip Sheridan was ordered to transform the Shenandoah Valley into a “barren waste” in an attempt to cut off the flow of food to Confederate guerrillas and Lee’s army. On October 7, Sheridan reported the destruction of over two thousand barns and seventy mills, the seizure of four thousand head of livestock, and the killing or distribution of more than three thousand sheep to troops. He boasted that “the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have little in it for man or beast.”27
Sherman’s proposals were not dissimilar, but both Grant and Lincoln were anxious that a three-hundred-mile march through hostile territory might unravel in the face of concerted local resistance. Sherman was already acting as though his plan were a fait accompli. On October 19, he told his chief commissary in Atlanta, General Amos Beckwith, to begin preparations for “my big raid,” in which his army would “abandon Atlanta, and the railroad back to Chattanooga, to sally forth to ruin Georgia and bring up on the seashore.” In a letter to Halleck that same day, he outlined his intention to carry out a movement that was “not purely military or strategic but will illustrate the vulnerability of the South.” The following day, he clarified these “psychological” and symbolic intentions still further when he told General Thomas that his campaign would “demonstrate the vulnerability of the South and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.”
These observations are an indication of the extent to which Sherman’s strategic thinking had moved beyond the Napoleonic concept of the decisive battle. In his standard textbook, An Elementary Treatise on Advanced-Guard, Out-Post, and Detachment Service of Troops, Sherman’s former tutor at West Point Dennis Hart Mahan argued that “carrying the war into the heart of the assailant’s country, or that of his allies, is the surest plan of making him share its burdens and foiling his plans.”28 Sherman’s plans were in keeping with these recommendations. Though he shared Grant’s belief that the military victory was dependent on the destruction of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, he identified the inhabitants of the South as a military target in their own right, whose “ruin” would transmit a wider psychological message to the whole population.
The benefits of this course of action were by no means obvious to his superiors in Washington, who were accustomed to more conventional military objectives. Anticipating these objections, Sherman fired off two more telegrams to Grant on November 1, in which he insisted that it was “useless” to pursue Hood. “If I turn back, the whole effect of my campaign will be lost.” The following day, Grant conceded that pursuing Hood would mean “giving up all we have gained in territory” and told his friend to “go on as you propose.” On November 6, the triumphant Sherman promised “to act in such a manner against the material resources of the South as utterly to negate Davis’s boasted threat and promises of protection. If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist. This may not be war, but rather statesmanship.”
Sherman now accelerated his preparations, as trains shuttled back and forth between Atlanta and Chattanooga, carrying sick and wounded soldiers and surplus artillery and equipment, and bringing new supplies for the coming campaign. Amid the pandemonium and the purposeful movement of soldiers, wagons, and animals, civilians who had not yet left the city crowded onto the last trains with their household pets and what furniture they were able to carry or bribe the guards to let them take on board. On November 8, Sherman issued his Special Orders No. 120, which informed his troops that they had been organized “into an army for a special purpose, well known to the War Department and to General Grant . . . that . . . involves a departure from our present base, and a long and difficult march to a new one. All the chances of war have been considered and provided for, as far as human sagacity can.”
Sherman’s troops were instructed to take with them only the minimum of supplies and provisions. Servants, noncombatants, and refugees were to be sent back to Tennessee. Each corps was to carry provisions for ten days and forage for three days in its supply wagons, while soldiers were expected to “forage liberally on the country” to make up the rest. While quartermasters and commissary officers continued to accumulate supplies and equipment, teams of soldiers destroyed everything in Atlanta and its surrounding towns that could be of use to the enemy. Using an improvised battering ram and a grappling hook invented by the indefatigable chief of engineers, soldiers knocked down foundries, factories, and railroad installations and tore up a hundred miles of track. On November 12, the telegraph link was cut, leaving his army, as Sherman later put it, “detached from all friends, dependent on its own resources and supplies.”
Over the next few days, fires broke out in the business district of Atlanta and eventually destroyed some five thousand homes, creating a conflagration that was visible for miles around. Some fires were caused by pillaging soldiers; others were an accidental consequence of the ongoing destruction. On the morning of November 15, the first of Sherman’s columns marched eastward out of the deserted city along the Decatur road. The following day, at seven in the morning, Sherman himself left the smoking ruins of Atlanta with the Fourteenth Corps along the Decatur road, accompanied by the strains of military bands.
Sherman and his soldiers left the city in a buoyant mood. He later wrote, “The day was extremely beautiful, clear sunlight, with bracing air, and an unusual feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds—a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest.” The British Army & Navy Gazette observed that Sherman “has done either one of the most brilliant or one of the most foolish things ever performed by a military leader,” while the London Herald predicted that the coming campaign would determine whether Sherman was to become “the scoff of mankind, and the humiliation of the United States for all time” or whether his name would be “written on the tablet of fame.” Georgia newspapers predicted that Sherman had committed a tactical error that would result in the destruction of his army at the hands of Confederate guerrillas. In a visit to Macon shortly before his departure, Jefferson Davis exhorted the population of Georgia to ensure that Sherman’s armies would meet the same fate as Napoléon’s Grand Army during its retreat from Moscow—causing Grant to ask sarcastically whether the Confederate president would be providing the snow. Over the next month, the hollowness of these aspirations became painfully apparent, as Sherman’s armies showed the South what his “statesmanship” meant.