Throughout history, warring armies have burned and destroyed crops and property in order to reduce besieged cities to starvation, to punish rebellion and defiance, to deny food to their opponents, or to prevent invading armies from living off the land. In 1069–70, the Normans adopted a policy of “harrying the North” in response to a baronial rebellion in Yorkshire that was supported by a Danish invasion. The twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury describes how William the Conqueror “ordered both the towns and fields of the whole district to be laid waste; the fruits and grain to be destroyed by fire or by water” in a campaign of “fire, slaughter and devastation” that left “the ground, for more than sixty miles around, totally uncultivated and barren, remaining bare even to this present day.”1
“Ravaging” expeditions in which foraging was indistinguishable from plunder were a well-established tactic of medieval European warfare, one that was often radically at odds with the prevailing mythology of knightly chivalrous war. The late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Chanson des Lorrains describes a typical spectacle of military depredation that would not have been unfamiliar to Sherman’s armies:
The incendiaries set the villages on fire, and the foragers visit and sack them; the terrified inhabitants are burnt or led apart with their hands tied to be held for ransom. Everywhere alarm bells ring, fear spreads from side to side and becomes widespread. On all sides one sees helmets shining, pennons floating, and horsemen covering the plain. Here hands are laid on money; there cattle, donkeys and flocks are seized. The smoke spreads, the flames rise, and the peasants and shepherds flee in panic in all directions.2
During the Hundred Years War, the armies of King Edward III carried out raiding expeditions known as chevauchées in northern France, in which villages, churches, and monasteries were burned and their inhabitants killed. In 1355 Edward’s son Edward, better known as the Black Prince, led an army of six thousand to eight thousand English and Gascon soldiers on a seven-hundred-mile circular raid into the Languedoc from Bordeaux to Narbonne. Marching three columns abreast, young Edward’s forces attacked more than five hundred villages, towns, and fortified places, amassing more than a thousand wagons laden with booty and bringing back prisoners for ransom, while French knights helplessly observed their progress.
Campaigns of devastation aimed at civilian life and property were also a feature of the more stately conventions of warfare in early modern Europe. In Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester described operations in 1593 along Lough Neagh in which “We have killed, burnt and spoiled all along the lough within four miles of Dungannon. . . . We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it has bred much terror in the people, who heard not a drum nor saw not a fire there for a long time.”3 In 1686 Louis XIV attacked the Piedmontese Protestant community called the Vaudois, or Barbets, where many French Huguenots had taken refuge from Catholic persecution. When the Vaudois turned to guerrilla war, the French army carried out mass arrests in the countryside and destroyed or confiscated food and animals till the French commander Marshall Catinet reported, “This country is completely desolated, there are no longer any people or livestock at all.”4
The most notorious act of devastation in ancien régime Europe took place during the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97), when Louis XIV set out to establish a defensive cordon of “dead zones” adjoining the French frontiers to protect his kingdoms from invasion. In December 1688, the French minister of war François-Michel Le Tellier, the marquis of Louvois, ordered the French military commander in the Rhenish Palatinate “to completely ruin all the places that you leave along the lower and upper Neckar so that the enemy, finding no forage or food whatever, will not try to approach there.”5 More than a thousand towns and villages were destroyed in these campaigns, with such thoroughness that the “devastation of the Palatinate” was still remembered in the region more than a century later.
Such campaigns were not an aberration in the nineteenth century. During the Peninsular War, General Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, ordered his army to burn crops, villages, and fruit trees in a wide swathe of territory in front of the defensive lines of Torres Vedras that his troops erected around Lisbon—to deny food to the advancing French. These measures eventually forced the half-starved French army to fall back, and they may also have resulted in the deaths of some fifty thousand Portuguese civilians. They nevertheless earned the praise of Napoléon, who complimented Wellesley on his ability to “destroy his enemy without fighting.”
Napoléon’s armies frequently relied on le système de maraude or le système devastateur in the countries they conquered—stripped their populations of food and other provisions to maintain their armies. Devastation was used as a punitive measure between 1830 and 1847 during the conquest of Algeria, where French troops under the command of General Thomas Bugeaud carried out destructive raids, or razzias, in which crops, orchards, granaries, and villages were burned to suppress indigenous resistance. These measures were described by Alexis de Tocqueville, the great liberal political thinker, as “unfortunate necessities that any people wishing to make war on the Arabs must accept.”6
At first sight, these precedents make it tempting to regard Sherman’s campaigns as a mere continuation of a tradition that is as old as war itself. For Southerners, indeed, Sherman’s march was a retrograde throwback to an earlier form of “uncivilized” war that was legitimate only against “savages.” But if some of the actions of Sherman’s army would not have surprised William the Conqueror or Sir Humphrey Gilbert, his campaign was also recognizably modern in its targets and its strategic intentions. And what makes Sherman’s march through Georgia so resonant in the wars that followed is the fact that a democratic state regarded a campaign of strategic devastation against its own citizens as a legitimate instrument of psychological subjugation and politico-military domination.
The Flying Column
The transformation of Sherman’s march into a paradigm of military destruction has often been enhanced by evocative metaphors that have variously compared his army to a storm or a typhoon, an expression of divine wrath and retribution, or a “wild Halloween brawl,” as Bruce Catton once described it. The novelist E.L. Doctorow described Sherman’s army as “a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain.”7
Sherman himself wrote of his intention to transform his army into “a mobile machine, willing and able to start at a minute’s notice, and to subsist on the scantiest food.” By the time he left Atlanta, this “machine” had been carefully streamlined in order to achieve the very specific objectives that he had designed for it. The army that Sherman took with him into central Georgia was less than half the size of the one that he had originally brought with him from Nashville, consisting of four corps reduced to a combined total of roughly 54,000 men, in addition to 5,015 cavalry under command of the rambunctious and egocentric General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick. In order to ensure the maximum “celerity,” its supply train was limited to a total of 2,500 wagons, including 600 ambulances, which carried ammunition, and enough food and forage for twenty days, in addition to 14,500 horses, 19,500 mules, and 5, 500 head of cattle to be slaughtered as required. Artillery was also reduced to a minimum, and individual pieces were drawn by teams of four horses rather than the usual three.
To reduce the loads still further, heavier wall tents were limited to officers only; enlisted men were reduced to the light fly sheets they carried with them, each of which formed one half of a pair to make a tent. Apart from their rubber blankets, soldiers carried three days’ rations and forty rounds of ammunition in their pockets and knapsacks. A rigorous medical selection process in Atlanta ensured that only the healthiest and strongest soldiers were allowed on the march. To give himself maximum tactical flexibility, Sherman divided his army into two parallel wings, marching roughly twenty miles away from each other. The Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps of the Army of the Cumberland occupied the left, under the command of the New Yorker Major General Henry W. Slocum. On the right marched the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps of the Army of the Tennessee, commanded by the devoutly Christian Major General Oliver O. Howard.
With Hood’s army absent in Tennessee, Georgia was defended by an ad hoc conglomeration of Confederate forces that included four brigades of the ill-trained and inexperienced Georgia State Militia, various hastily scooped up and under-strength regiments dispersed throughout the state, in addition to fewer than 2,000 cavalry under the command of General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, making a total of some 13,000 fighting men. These forces could not hold back an army of nearly 60,000 veteran soldiers, but Sherman was no less aware than Grant that any extended delay would quickly exhaust his army’s supplies of food and provisions and leave it vulnerable to hit-and-run attacks. In a state crisscrossed with rivers, creeks, and swamps, determined resistance from even small concentrations of troops might bring his army to a halt.
Sherman’s organization and deployment of his army were carefully designed to avoid such bottlenecks. Both wings were preceded by ax-wielding “pioneers,” whose task was to rebuild destroyed bridges, clear blocked roads, and cut down trees to “corduroy” the swamps and muddy roads with rows of timber to allow wagons to pass. Each corps included a contingent from Orlando Poe’s corps of engineers, equipped with wagons carrying the canvas canoes and light planks that were used to replace destroyed bridges with pontoon bridges up to nine hundred feet long. These preparations transformed his army into two astonishingly mobile “flying columns” that were capable of marching at an average speed of ten to fifteen miles a day with very few stragglers.
From the early hours of the morning until often late in the evening, Sherman’s soldiers marched almost continuously in fifty-minute stretches broken by ten-minute rests, with a forty-minute break for lunch at midday, in a line that sometimes stretched for twenty miles, including the cattle and supply trains. In May 1862, it took the overcautious Henry Halleck three weeks to march a hundred-thousand-strong army five miles to capture the city of Corinth. It took Sherman’s army less than a month to reach the outskirts of Savannah on December 10. In that time, his army crossed fifteen creeks, streams, and rivers; constructed pontoon bridges at an average of 230 feet per crossing; and chopped down trees to corduroy more than a hundred miles of mud and swamp while fighting constant skirmishes with Confederate cavalry.
This irresistible progress was a testament to Sherman’s meticulous planning and organization and also to the skill and motivation of what was then one of the finest and most experienced armies in the world. With Judson “Kill Cavalry” Kilpatrick’s horsemen acting as messengers, the two wings invariably arrived when and where they were supposed to, while stripping food from the countryside through a remorselessly effective foraging system. Under Sherman’s chief quartermaster, General George L.C. Easton, foraging was carried out with such speed and efficiency that supply wagons barely paused during the march as new quantities of food and other goods were absorbed and distributed among them. Each morning, brigade commanders dispatched foraging parties of approximately fifty men, who were sent out before daylight with details of where the army would be camping at the end of the day. Fanning out five to six miles or more from the main body of the army, these organized teams, as well as more autonomous foragers known as bummers, returned in the early evening or late at night to the next camp, mounted on mules, cows, or horses or in requisitioned buggies and wagons loaded with corn, molasses, sweet potatoes, turkeys, ducks, chickens, and meat, all of which were handed over to the brigade commissary officers.
The success of this system was partly due to Sherman’s prewar travels in the South. His exceptional memory for landscape and topographic detail meant that he knew exactly what to expect before leaving Atlanta, and he brought with him a copy of the 1860 census containing precise details of the population and economic resources of every county in the state. As he later boasted to his wife, “No military expedition was ever based on sounder or surer data.”8 The rapid progress of his armies was also due to his own skillful generalship. Whether poring over maps with his staff officers or pacing the campfire in his dressing gown and drawers into the early hours of the morning, Sherman was constantly thinking about the campaign and planning ahead, able to switch tactics and direction in accordance with shifting developments on the ground, with the assistance of his experienced and capable corps commanders, who knew exactly what was expected of them.
As in the Meridian campaign, Sherman divided his army in order to confuse his enemies about his intentions. On leaving Atlanta, the left wing followed the Decatur road through Covington and Madison toward the state capital of Milledgeville—a line of march that seemed to suggest the city of Augusta as its ultimate objective. The right wing, meanwhile, headed farther south through Jonesboro and McDonough, leaving open the possibility of an attack on Columbus or Macon. From a conventional military perspective, any of these cities constituted a potential target. Augusta was the site of the largest gunpowder factory in the CSA; Columbus was the site of the Columbus Arsenal and Armory, the Confederate Quartermaster Depot, and the Naval Iron Works; while Macon contained a number of factories and workshops dedicated to military production.
Rather than commit his troops to a prolonged siege of fortified cities, Sherman chose to bypass them, forcing his opponents to disperse their forces and constantly guess his ultimate direction, using Kilpatrick’s infantry as an instrument of deception. On approaching Macon, Kilpatrick’s men carried out a feint attack to the very outskirts of the city, while the right wing wheeled north to converge with the left at the state capital of Milledgeville. From there the two armies diverged once again, and Kilpatrick was transferred to the left wing, where he carried out a similar feint toward Augusta, skirmishing with Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry at Waynesboro before resuming the march toward Savannah.
By the time it became clear to the Confederacy that both wings were headed toward Savannah, it was too late to do anything about it. With the main Confederate army pinned down in Virginia, only John Bell Hood’s forty-thousand-strong Army of Tennessee posed a significant threat to Sherman’s forces, a threat that was removed when Hood decided to take his army out of Georgia and invade Tennessee. Successive defeats at Franklin on November 30 and Nashville on December 15–16 decimated Hood’s army and eliminated any last possibility that Sherman might have to diverge from his route to defend the state.
As a consequence, Sherman was able to move through Georgia almost at will, using Kilpatrick’s cavalry to shield his army from Wheeler’s probing attacks. Apart from cavalry skirmishes and occasional sharpshooting attacks, his army faced no significant resistance. The only significant battle of the march took place near the small town of Griswoldville on November 22, when a 1,500-man brigade of the Fifteenth Corps under Brigadier General Charles C. Walcutt easily repulsed a pointless assault by 4,500 ill-trained militia and Georgia state troopers, many of whom consisted of adolescent boys and old men, in which 51 rebels were killed and 471 wounded. On December 10, Sherman’s armies reached the swampy outskirts of Savannah and found that the city’s defenders had broken open the dikes and flooded the rice fields. Three days later, the Second Division of the Fifteenth Corps stormed the Confederate outpost of Fort McAllister, overlooking the Ogeechee River, thus enabling the Union Navy to resupply Sherman’s armies and reopen the “cracker line”—as Union soldiers called their supply line, after the hardtack crackers that were an essential part of their rations.
The dikes were quickly repaired by Poe’s unstoppable engineers, and as the waters receded Sherman’s army prepared to besiege a city that was defended by ten thousand Confederate troops under the command of Lieutenant General William J. Hardee. Sherman warned Hardee to surrender and threatened to inflict the “the harshest measures” on the city’s population if he was obliged to mount a siege. On the night of December 20, Hardee’s forces quietly slipped out of the city across a makeshift causeway, and the following day the Union army entered Savannah. On Christmas Eve, its triumphant commander sent a telegram to Lincoln offering him the city and its cotton as a “Christmas present.” Sherman’s previous failures were forgotten as the North celebrated a campaign that appeared to confirm the imminent collapse of the Confederacy. Behind him, the March to the Sea had left a trail of misery and destruction that confirmed his reputation as the nemesis of the South and which, to many Southerners, did not seem like war at all.
Smashing Things
In his memoirs Sherman later described the March to the Sea somewhat dismissively as a “mere change of base” that was intended to put his army in a position to assist Grant in Virginia. While this objective certainly figured in his calculations, this explanation does not accord with the motives in his letters and telegrams that preceded the march. Unlike Scott’s march on Mexico City in 1847, Sherman’s march was not simply intended to get from one place to another, but to eliminate Georgia’s war resources and break its communication links to the rest of the South. These objectives were pursued with the same mechanical and workmanlike precision that characterized other aspects of the campaign.
Between Atlanta and Savannah, Sherman’s soldiers tore up 317 miles of the Central Georgia Railroad, including the vital junction at Millen where the lines from Savannah, Augusta, Atlanta, and Macon converged, in addition to demolishing and burning railroad depots, warehouses, station buildings, and bridges. In what was already a well-established procedure, sections of track were hoisted up simultaneously by hundreds of soldiers, and the wooden ties burned to make a bonfire on which rails were softened and twisted around trees or bent into bow shapes—“Sherman’s neckties”—so they couldn’t be used again.
After severing the railway and telegraph connections within the state and between Georgia and the rest of the South, Sherman did not need to actually capture the cities that the Confederacy was so anxious to defend. The effectiveness of this strategy was demonstrated by the complete collapse of gunpowder production at the Augusta powder factory during the march. Factories, cotton storehouses and cotton gins, flour and salt mills, workshops, tanneries, and sawmills with any direct or potential military purpose were also destroyed. Sherman’s soldiers also targeted Georgia’s agricultural production, burning barns and storehouses containing food supplies that they didn’t need for themselves, and shooting or bayoneting livestock that they couldn’t take with them. Thousands of exhausted mules and horses were put down with the blow of an ax or a bullet so that they couldn’t be used by the enemy, and bloodhounds used to pursue slaves were also shot, often at the request of the slaves themselves.
This ongoing slaughter of animals added to the general desolation that accompanied Sherman’s army. One Confederate officer described how “the whole region stunk with putrefying carcasses, and earth and air were filled with innumerable turkey buzzards battening upon their thickly strewn death feasts.” Sherman’s marching orders in Atlanta had specified that destruction should be limited to public property and subject to approval from commanding officers. In the early stages of the march, however, soldiers burned property as they saw fit; Georgians were able to measure the progress of the Union armies by the spreading fires.
“As far as the eye could reach, the lurid flames of burning buildings lit up the heavens. I could stand out on the veranda and for two or three miles watch them as they came on,” remembered one Georgia woman.9 During a sixty-five-mile journey to her home in the village of Gordon in Washington County in late December through the “Burnt Country” left by Sherman’s troops, Eliza Frances Andrews, the daughter of a local judge, passed through a bleak world of trampled fields, damaged or destroyed property, and slaughtered animal carcasses in which “the dwellings that were still standing all showed signs of pillage, and on every plantation we saw the charred remains of the gin-house and packing screw, while here and there lone chimney-stacks, ‘Sherman’s Sentinels,’ told of homes laid in ashes.”10
Such testaments tend to give a somewhat misleading picture of universal destruction, which was subsequently embellished further in popular memory. “No one, without being there, can form a proper idea of the devastation that will be found in our track,” wrote Chaplain Bradley of the Twenty-Second Wisconsin. “Thousands of families will have their homes laid in ashes, and they themselves will be turned beggars in the street. We have literally carried fire and sword into this once proud and defiant land.” Yet Sherman’s army did not burn every house they came upon, and the majority of Georgian homes, both rich and poor, were not affected by “voluntary incendiarism,” which was more likely to be limited to barns, storehouses, and outbuildings.
Destruction: Sherman’s March to the Sea, F.O.C. Darley, lithograph, c. 1883. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
House burning became less frequent as the march went on, and Sherman’s officers were mostly able to keep the destruction within officially designated parameters, which restricted arson to certain public buildings or as a response to acts of resistance or sabotage. At the former state capital, Louisville, Federal troops vandalized and burned much of the town to the ground after a bridge was set on fire by retreating Confederates. On November 29, Andrew J. Boies of the Thirty-Third Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry found what was “once a flourishing town, but today it is a heap of ruins.”11
A Michigan surgeon described how cotton sheds on the road out of Parks Mill along the Oconee River were “purified by fire. The smoke ascends to the skies bearing aloft the prayers of the Yanks for success & the curses of the rebs for our defeat.” Plantation mansions and other symbols of the Southern social order, such as slave auction blocks, prisons, and courthouses, were often singled out for vandalism and destruction, and not always with the orderly precision that Sherman expected from his army. At the genteel state capital of Milledgeville, soldiers trashed the statehouse and trampled its book collection before holding a riotous and drunken mock-legislative meeting in which they revoked Georgia’s order of secession. In the town of Madison, in Morgan County, Captain David Conyngham, an officer in Sherman’s army and a correspondent with the New York Herald, witnessed soldiers dancing on pianos before breaking them up with axes and burning them.12
From the point of view of local farmers and householders, foraging was also a form of destruction, and its impact was often exacerbated by pillage and theft, as soldiers robbed silver plate, cutlery, jewelry, silk dresses, pistols, family heirlooms, and watches. In some cases, soldiers beat up and tortured male home owners and slaves to find out where they had hidden valuables, tying ropes around their necks and nearly strangling them to make them talk. Such actions were officially prohibited, but they were not easy to prevent. Though Georgians often went to great lengths to hide their animals, provisions, and valuables in swamps or slave quarters, foragers became adept at locating concealed hiding places in gardens or even cemeteries, prodding at lawns and flower beds with bayonets or ramrods. The most remorseless and skilled foragers were the bummers, who achieved folkloric status in the North. These were ordinary Union soldiers who were assigned to foraging expeditions but often operated on their own in civilian clothes or composite military and civilian outfits. Captain George Whitfield Pepper, a chaplain in Sherman’s army, described a typical bummer as “a ragged man, blackened by the smoke of many a pine knot fire, mounted on a scrawny mule, with a gun, a knapsack, a butcher knife and a plug hat, stealing his way through the pine forests far out on the flanks of a column.”13
According to Pepper, such men subjected the population of Georgia to a “class of devastations” of which “the North has little conception,” which included “deliberate and systematic robbery for the sake of gain” and the “wanton destruction of property which they could not use or carry away.” Conyngham describes a typical “scene of ruin and pillage” that was often repeated: “Boxes were burst open; clothes dragged about; the finest silks, belonging to the planters’ ladies, carried off to adorn some negro wenches around camp; pictures, books, furniture, all tossed about and torn in pieces.”14
Such behavior was subject to harsh punishments, at least in theory, but Sherman’s own officers sometimes complained that he did not discipline his troops with the necessary rigor, and many of his soldiers assumed that they had their commander’s tacit approval or interpreted private pillage as the destruction of war matériel. As Conyngham observed with only a modicum of irony, “To draw a line between stealing and taking or appropriating everything for the subsistence of an army would puzzle the nicest casuist,” for even plates, jewelry, or watches “were things that rebels had no use for. They might possibly convert them into gold, and thus enrich the Confederate treasury.”15
All these events formed part of what George Pepper described as “one vast sheet of misery. The fugitives from ruined villages or desolated fields, seek shelter in caves and dens. Cities sacked, towns burned, populations decimated are so many evidences of the desolations of war.”16 These “desolations” also included the destruction of forests and woodland for firewood and timber to make corduroy roads, in addition to the depredations of Wheeler’s cavalrymen and assorted Confederate deserters, who seized food and animals with such voracity that Georgians often loathed them as much as Sherman’s soldiers. Nevertheless, this devastation was not as apocalyptic as has sometimes been depicted. Evocations of the “sixty-mile swath of destruction” left by Sherman’s armies in books and films such as Gone with the Wind often conjure up images of a blackened land containing nothing but charred ruins. But compared with the behavior of some twentieth-century armies, Sherman’s soldiers were relatively restrained and subject to sufficient discipline to keep their worst instincts in check—most of the time.
From Savannah Sherman sent an audit of destruction to his superiors, which claimed that his armies had seized 6,871 mules and horses, 13,294 head of cattle, 10.4 million pounds of grain, and 10.7 million pounds of fodder and had inflicted $100 million in damages on the Georgian economy, only $80,000 of which he attributed to “simple waste.”17 It is difficult to know how Sherman arrived at these financial calculations or how they were recorded, and the casual reference to “simple waste” suggests they were not as accurate as he claimed. But the destruction of war material was only one component of a campaign that he later stated was intended “to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their innermost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”18 The “demonstration” of the power of the Federal army and government was partly intended to intimidate and overawe the civilian population, but it also contained some of the ingredients of what the Pentagon now calls information warfare.
In a letter to Halleck from Savannah, Sherman wrote that “this war differs from European wars in this particular: we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time now realize the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.”19
The belief that Southern morale or willpower played a decisive role in the Confederate war effort was not limited to Sherman; Southern newspapers frequently issued strident patriotic appeals calling for a collective act of will that would compensate for their defeats and overcome the North’s superior material resources. Such appeals were often accompanied by false and inaccurate claims to encourage the population to believe that victory was possible. Sherman’s campaigns were specifically designed to crush such expectations, by bringing the “hard hand of war” to the neighborhoods and homes of Southerners. This purpose was clearly understood by many of his soldiers. “Evidently it is a material element in this campaign to produce among the people of Georgia a thorough conviction of the personal misery which attends war, and of the utter helplessness and inability of their ‘rulers,’ State or Confederate, to protect them,” wrote Major Henry Hitchcock, a New York lawyer attached to Sherman’s staff as a military secretary. Echoing his commander, Hitchcock described the devastation of Georgia as a “lesson” that “has been well taught and by many has been thoroughly learned” and insisted that “no other teaching can enlighten those who have been drugged & stupefied with the lies & brag of Jeff. Davis and his organs.”20
There is no doubt that this “lesson” was understood. Many Georgians were stunned by the size of Sherman’s army; this was the first time many of them had ever seen Union troops. “They say you are retreating, but it is the strangest retreat I ever saw,” one old man told George Pepper at the town of Millen. “Why, dog bite ’em, the newspapers have been lying in this way, all along. They are always whipping the Federal armies, and they always fall back when the battle is over.”21 Sherman regarded destruction as a form of “teaching” and a demonstration of the power of his government, but there were also limits to the amount of pain he was willing to inflict on the population. Though he declared on more than one occasion that it would be necessary to kill three hundred thousand men in order to stabilize the South, neither he nor his government attempted to put such proposals into practice.22 During the Spanish Civil War, advancing Nationalist troops carried out many massacres and executions of their real or suspected political enemies as they marched northward in a systematic campaign of terror intended to impose what one of Franco’s generals described as “mastery” over the population. Sherman also set out to terrorize and overawe Southern civilians, but his campaigns were also intended in the long run to reincorporate the Southern population into the Union as equal citizens, even in the state that he and many of his soldiers held primarily responsible for the war.
The Smoky March
Even before capturing Savannah, Sherman had always intended to join Grant’s armies in Virginia via the Carolinas. As the first state to secede from the Union, South Carolina and its planter aristocracy were particularly despised by Sherman and many of his soldiers. “With Savannah in our possession, at some future time if not now, we can punish South Carolina as she deserves,” he told Grant on December 17. “I do sincerely believe that the whole United States, North and South, would rejoice to have this army turned loose on South Carolina, to devastate that State in the manner we have done in Georgia.”23 After briefly considering the possibility of bringing Sherman’s armies from Savannah to Virginia by sea, Grant once again agreed to give Sherman his head, and the latter began preparing for a campaign that was more challenging than Georgia.
With its swamps and waterlogged lowlands, nine major rivers and innumerable streams and creeks, South Carolina presented formidable obstacles to an invading army and the state was also better defended. A total of 33,450 Confederate infantry, cavalry, and militia were deployed in South and North Carolina, which included the Army of Tennessee, made up of the remnants of Hood’s battered army and Hardee’s garrison from Savannah, under the command of Sherman’s reinstated adversary Joseph Johnston in addition to cavalry and militia.
Sherman undertook his preparations for what Grant called his “January project” with characteristic thoroughness. His chief quartermaster and commissary officers were ordered to the Union-controlled city of New Bern in North Carolina to oversee a buildup of supplies, and his engineers repaired the stretch of the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad that was under Union control to ensure that provisions were waiting for his army when it arrived. As in Georgia, Sherman’s men were instructed to carry only minimal supplies and live off the land, but this time his officers were deprived of their wall tents and obliged to use the same bivouacs as enlisted men in a campaign that promised to be more explicitly punitive than its predecessor. “The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance on South Carolina,” he wrote to Halleck on Christmas Eve. “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel she deserves all that seems in store for her.”24
Heavy rains delayed his army’s departure, so that it was not until February 1 that Sherman set out once again, with 60,000 infantry and cavalry, 40,000 animals, and 3,000 wagons equipped with twenty days’ rations. Following his modus operandi in Georgia, Sherman continued with his “horns of a dilemma” strategy and again divided his army into two wings, marching within supporting distance of each other. For the first two days, all four corps marched toward Augusta between the Savannah and the Salkehatchie Rivers. On February 3, the Seventeenth Corps veered right and crossed the flooded Salkehatchie. Wading waist- and sometimes shoulder-deep in icy water and holding their rifles and cartridge belts above their heads, Federal troops drew Confederate fire while their companions outflanked the Confederate positions in floats and rafts, enabling the rest of the army to erect pontoon bridges and cross behind them.
The two wings continued to make their way through the swamps and water channels at an astonishing pace, dragging wagons that sometimes sank in the mud and water and had to be unloaded and reloaded by up to seventy-five men. Once again, Sherman’s pioneers and engineers played a vital role in making this rapid progress possible, hacking their way through swamps, laying corduroy roads, and erecting pontoon bridges, as the left wing feinted toward Augusta while the right moved east toward Charleston, which was already blockaded by the Union Navy. This rapid progress astounded Sherman’s adversary Joe Johnston, who later wrote that “there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar,” but it was facilitated by poor judgment by General Beauregard, the overall commander of Confederate forces in the Carolinas. As Major George Nichols, one of Sherman’s staff officers, observed, “Beauregard committed the gross error of attempting to defend cities of no strategic importance” instead of using the terrain to his advantage and concentrating his forces along the Salkehatchie River.25
Having crossed the river, Sherman’s forces now proceeded to inflict on South Carolina the punishment they believed it deserved. In December Halleck had urged Sherman to raze Charleston to the ground, as Rome did to Carthage, and leave “a little salt . . . sown upon its site,” in order to “prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.”26 In the event, Sherman did not enter Charleston. Instead Union forces tore up some fifty miles of the South Carolina Railroad track west of Branchville on February 11, thereby cutting off Charleston from the interior and leaving it to surrender to the navy while both wings continued toward the state capital, Columbia. No sooner had Sherman’s soldiers entered South Carolina than they began burning towns, farms, and plantations. On February 13, David Conyngham entered Orangeburg to find “the smoking ruins of the town, the tall, black chimneys looking down upon it like funeral mutes, and . . . old women and children, hopeless, helpless, almost frenzied, wandering amongst the desolation.”27 At Barnwell all public buildings were burned, including the courthouse and the Masonic Hall, as well as various private homes, leaving “only the chimneys standing like grim sentinels,” as one local resident described it, and causing Sherman’s cavalry commander Kilpatrick to rename the town “Burnwell.”
As in Georgia, Sherman’s orders specified that only houses that had been abandoned were to be burned, but these orders were not always obeyed. “I never saw so much destruction of property before,” wrote Charles Wills. “Orders are as strict as ever, but our men understand they are in South Carolina and are making good their old threats. Very few houses escape burning, as almost everybody has run away from before us, you may imagine there is not much left in our track. Where a family remains at home they save their house, but lose their stock, and eatables.”28
Another Union veteran described how “the army burned everything it came near in the state of South Carolina, not under orders but in spite of orders. . . . Our track through the state is a desert waste.” Crops, railroads, plantations, courthouses, public records offices, libraries, and plantations were burned, vandalized, or destroyed in the course of the “smoky march,” and the homes of the despised slave-owning South Carolina “chivalry” were singled out for special punishment. On the west bank of the Ashley River, a favorite summer retreat for wealthy Charlestonians, numerous mansions were burned and looted. At one plantation near Hartsville, in Darlington County, soldiers ransacked drawers, trunks, and closets, stealing money, jewelry, and clothes from owners and servants, before making a bonfire of Bibles and hymnals.
Similar scenes were enacted all along the forty-mile-wide strip that the two wings of Sherman’s army passed through. “Where our footsteps pass, fire, ashes, and desolation follow in their path,” observed Nichols in his diary. “The sufferings which the people will have to undergo will be most intense. We have left on the wide strip of country we have passed over no provisions which will go any distance in supporting the people,” wrote Major Thomas Osborn, Sherman’s chief of artillery.29 George Pepper recalled, “Wherever a view could be had from high ground, black columns of smoke were seen rising here and there within a circuit of twenty or thirty miles. Solid built chimneys were the only relics of plantation houses after the fearful blast had swept by. The destruction of houses, barns, mills, &c., was almost universal.”30
As in Georgia, Sherman’s soldiers foraged relentlessly and destroyed or spoiled what they did not need, emptying granaries and spilling their contents into the street and slaughtering livestock till farms and public roads were littered with butchered cattle, hogs, and mules. Even more than in Georgia, foraging became a justification for vandalism and theft, as soldiers broke into houses, destroying furniture, paintings, and photographs and the contents of libraries with malicious relish, sometimes torturing slaves and white householders to make them reveal the whereabouts of valuables and goods. In some cases, valuables were shipped to the North from Charleston—including a melodeon looted from a church by one of Sherman’s generals. The Confederate general Richard Taylor disgustedly described a visit to Washington shortly after the war, filled with demobilized soldiers and “hundreds of volunteer generals . . . gorged with loot” accompanied by women “resplendent in jewels, spoil of Southern matrons.”31
Some of this loot undoubtedly came from Georgia and the Carolinas. The Carolinian novelist William Gilmore Simms described the looting and vandalism of wealthy South Carolina homes, in which “choice pictures and works of art, from Europe, select and numerous libraries, objects of peace wholly, were all destroyed. The inhabitants, black no less than white, were left to starve, compelled to feed only upon the garbage to be found in the abandoned camps of the soldiers.”32 At one plantation near Barnwell, a Mrs. Alfred Proctor Aldrich described how her house was visited by successive waves of Union soldiers who “ate like hungry wolves,” then broke bureaus and wardrobes with their bayonets, hunting for gold, silver, and jewelry, tearing open feather beds, and smashing furniture and musical instruments. “We have marched through the heart of South Carolina, living off the country as we went, destroyed everything before us, including houses, cotton-gins, leaving many a woman and child in a state of starvation,” wrote Andrew Boies on March 25. “It will beat all the raids that we have made yet. It will take years to put it back into shape, as it was when we first marched into it.”33
As in Georgia, Sherman’s soldiers also ruined newspaper offices and printing presses. Though the destruction was generally confined to property, there were incidents in which slaves and white householders were murdered by soldiers in the course of robberies and foraging expeditions. Such actions were not official policy, and Union officers tried to prevent pillaging, carrying out impromptu inspections of soldiers’ knapsacks, camps, and wagons and in some cases returning stolen goods to their owners. But many of Sherman’s soldiers believed that South Carolina deserved everything it got and rationalized their actions in terms identical to those used by their commanding officer. As one Ohio sergeant wrote, “Every house, barn, fence and cotton gin gets an application of the torch. That prospect is revolting, but war is an uncivil game and can’t be civilized.”34
The Burning of Columbia
The targeting of cities was always an important component of the Union’s hard-war policy, whether because of their significance as industrial centers and transportation hubs or as symbols of Confederate political power. For many Southerners, the most shocking and visible evidence of the war’s destructive power was the transformation of towns and cities, which had previously been regarded as symbols of civilized progress and material prosperity, into the ruined “chimneyvilles” that dotted the South. With the advent of photography, Americans were presented with images of urban devastation that would later become so familiar to the twentieth century—hollowed-out roofless buildings, piles of rubble, and protruding chimneys at Charleston, Vicksburg, Richmond, Atlanta, and other cities. When Sherman’s army entered Atlanta, the spectacle of destruction shocked even his own soldiers. “I had often heard of the terror of bombardment of a crowded city, but I never realized it before,” wrote the Union surgeon J.C. Patton, who observed buildings “torn in every shape that can be imagined,” trees cut down and fences destroyed, “in short every kind of mischief done by these iron missiles.”35
By the time the Union army abandoned the city in November, some 35 percent of it had been burned down or destroyed, either by Hood’s retreating army or by Sherman’s soldiers. When the first refugees returned at the end of November, they found what one eyewitness called “an ocean of ruins” inhabited by roving packs of feral dogs, where “the putrid carcasses of dead horses and mules met the eye, while the stench that exhaled from them filled the air, producing a loathing on the part of all who ventured into the city, unutterably disgusting.”36 Similar scenes accompanied the progress of Sherman’s vengeful army through the Palmetto State. Though the destruction of Charleston did not fit Sherman’s war plans, Union naval bombardments were sufficient to destroy 1,500 out of 5,000 homes, leaving what the Northern reporter Sidney Andrews described as “a city of desolation, of vacant homes, of widowed women, of deserted warehouses, of weed wild gardens . . . of miles of grass grown streets.”37 The most “Carthaginian” act of urban destruction during Sherman’s march through the Carolinas took place on February 17, 1865, when his army occupied Columbia.
Before the war, Columbia was a prosperous city of some 8,000 residents, half of whom were slaves. With gas lighting and three railroads, it was a city that the celebrated Carolinian diarist Mary Chestnut described as “the place for good living, pleasant people, pleasant dinners, pleasant drives.” By the time the city surrendered to Sherman’s troops, its population had grown to 24,000, including many evacuees and young women sent from the countryside to what was considered to be a safer environment. Though it contained some factories that had been reconfigured for military purposes, Columbia was essentially an administrative center whose significance to Sherman’s army was largely due to its political symbolism as the capital of the “cradle of secession.”
The day before entering the city, Sherman told General Oliver Howard to “occupy Columbia, destroy the public buildings, railroad property, manufacturing and machine shops; but [we] will spare libraries, asylums, and private dwellings.” He was nevertheless aware that many of his soldiers wanted to go further than this—a sentiment summed up in their reworking of the song “Hail, Columbia,” with its refrain “Hail, Columbia, happy land! / If I don’t burn you, I’ll be damned.” The city was already beginning to burn on the morning of February 17, when the local plantation owner General Wade Hampton III ordered his retreating cavalry to set fire to bales of cotton in the street. For the rest of the day, fires continued to spread as Union troops poured into the city and proceeded to burn buildings on their own account. Many soldiers were given alcohol by the local population in a misconceived attempt to pacify their conquerors, but these efforts had the opposite effect.
In the course of the night, much of the city was burned to the ground, as drunken soldiers and freed slaves rampaged through the streets in a wild spree of looting, burning, and vandalism, driving much of the population into the streets. “Streams of pale women, leading their terrified children, with here and there an infant in arms, went by, they knew not whither, amid the fierce flames,” wrote Columbia resident Reverend Anthony Toomer Porter. “The streets were filled with soldiers mounted and on foot, in every stage of drunkenness. . . . Shouts of derision and blasphemy filled the air. Cries of ‘There are the aristocrats!’ ‘Look at the chivalry!’ were yelled into the ears of these defenseless women. Men seemed to have lost their manhood, and the mere beast was in the ascendant.”38
At the Ursuline convent, soldiers broke into the chapel in search of the chalice, ransacked the dormitories of the convent school, and broke into pupils’ trunks before the convent was eventually burned. Union officers made some attempts to put these fires out and control their troops, but numerous eyewitnesses saw soldiers setting fire to private homes and public buildings and cutting fire-engine hoses with bayonets. “I myself saw men with balls of cotton dipped in turpentine enter house after house,” wrote Reverend Porter. “Some would take bottles of turpentine, throw the liquid round about, and then set it on fire.” Other eyewitnesses described how Union soldiers threw grenades and “fireballs” at the women and children who spent the night in the park to escape the fires or because their homes had been destroyed.
By morning Columbia had become a scene of urban devastation with which the twentieth century would become familiar—a city, as Conyngham described it, “wrapped in her own shroud, the tall chimneys and blackened trunks of trees looking like so many sepulchral monuments, and the woe-stricken people, that listlessly wandered about the streets, its pallid mourners. Old and young moved about seemingly without a purpose. Some mournfully contemplated the piles of rubbish, the only remains of their late happy homesteads.”39
The “burning of Columbia” has always been one of the most egregious crimes attributed by Southerners to Sherman’s army. Sherman blamed the fires on the burning of cotton by Wade Hampton’s cavalry and pointed out that his men had tried to prevent it and had distributed food to the homeless population. These claims were rejected by William Gilmore Simms, who fled to the city after the sacking of his plantation. In a detailed account of the sacking of Columbia that was published in installments in a tri-weekly newspaper, the Columbia Phoenix, within weeks of the withdrawal of Sherman’s forces, Simms maintained that Sherman’s army had been under “perfect discipline” throughout the destruction of the city and that “General Sherman knew what was going on, yet kept aloof and made no effort to arrest it, until daylight on Saturday.”40
If Sherman did not specifically order the city’s destruction, he took few precautions that might have prevented it and showed few regrets afterward. “Though I never ordered it and never wished it,” he wrote later, “I have never shed many tears over the event, because I believe it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war.” Many of his soldiers agreed. Even Conyngham believed that the destruction of the city had an exemplary impact on the population of the state, so that “white table-cloths were suspended from windows, with ‘Have mercy on me!’ for a legend, and the fiery spirit of South Carolina was tamed effectually.”41
“. . . like so many sepulchral monuments.” Ruins seen from the capital, Columbia, South Carolina, 1865. Photographed by George N. Barnard. Courtesy of the National Archives (165-SC-56).
These pleas frequently fell on deaf ears, as Sherman’s soldiers continued to burn their way through the state. “From Columbia to Blackstocks, there was scarcely a dwelling left. Horses, barns, ricks, shanties, fences, ploughs, all shared the same fate, while the carcases of horses, mules, cows, hogs, sheep, strewed the earth; killed in the most barbaric wantonness of power,” wrote the Columbia physician Daniel H. Trezevant.42 At Mary Chestnut’s hometown of Camden, the local newspaper reported that Sherman’s army had “run through the gamut, from impertinence to outrage, from pilfering to wholesale spoliation. Many families have been stripped of everything they had in the world.” Whether ordered or not, this destruction was in keeping with Sherman’s concept of devastation as a form of statesmanship and as a means of long-term pacification and punishment, but some of it was also directed toward more immediate purposes.
“Not War but Murder”
In Carolina as in Georgia, the population was mostly unmoved by appeals from Southern politicians, generals, and newspapermen to wage guerrilla warfare against Sherman’s invading army. Nevertheless sixty-four bummers were found dead during the march toward Savannah, and others disappeared, presumably killed by cavalrymen or by local inhabitants. In South Carolina, Confederate cavalrymen executed foragers on sight, sometimes leaving them by the side of the road with their throats cut and a note declaring DEATH TO FORAGERS. In both states, Sherman’s columns came under sporadic fire from bushwhackers and sharpshooters, and the absence of more concerted resistance was partly due to the measures that Sherman took to prevent it.
As military governor of Memphis, Sherman was a stern advocate of collective punishment in response to acts of sabotage or sharpshooter attacks on Union steamboats on the Mississippi. On September 23, 1862, a Union packet steamer came under fire from the vicinity of a small town, Randolph, that was under his jurisdiction. In response Sherman ordered Colonel Charles C. Walcutt, commander of the Forty-Sixth Ohio Infantry Regiment, to burn the town. Walcutt carried out these orders so well that Sherman was able to inform Grant afterward with his usual brusqueness in such matters, “The regiment has returned and Randolph is gone.”
Sherman’s marching orders in Atlanta instructed his officers to inflict “a devastation more or less relentless” in response to acts of resistance or sabotage, and these orders were carried out on various occasions. In one incident, Sherman ordered the destruction of a farm at Buffalo Creek near Milledgeville in retaliation for the burning of a nearby bridge. When Henry Hitchcock suggested that it was unfair to punish someone who might not have been responsible, Sherman replied that individual responsibility was not the issue. “If they find that burning bridges only destroys their own citizens’ houses, they’ll stop it. . . . In war everything is right that prevents anything.”43
Such views were by no means anomalous, either in the Civil War or in the broader context of nineteenth-century warfare. To most nineteenth-century armies, partisans and guerrillas who fought without uniforms or identifying marks were bandits, revoltés, and Francs tireurs rather than legitimate combatants and were not protected by the usages of war. During the Napoleonic Wars, French armies took leading citizens hostage and sometimes fined or shot them in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and carried out indiscriminate reprisals against the civilian population that included the burning of their homes and villages and exemplary massacres. In his Narrative of the Peninsular Campaign, the British general Sir William Francis Patrick Napier stated, “An insurrection of armed peasants is mere anarchy,” and so “the right to burn their villages must rest on the principle of necessity.” 44
The Union Army’s response to bushwhacking and guerrilla warfare belonged to the same tradition. When one of Philip Sheridan’s most popular officers was murdered during his October campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, reportedly by Confederate guerrillas, Sheridan ordered General George Armstrong Custer to burn every home within a five-mile radius.45 Sherman generally ensured that reprisals and acts of punitive destruction were proportional to the acts that had provoked them—in his own mind, at least. During the Atlanta campaign, he decreed that anyone who attempted to damage the railroad or telegraph lines should be “shot without mercy” or deported to Honduras or Santo Domingo, and he ordered his officers to notify the population along the line of march that his army would “of necessity strip the country and destroy all things within reach” in response to any disruption in his supply line.46
In South Carolina, he decreed that any killings of foragers would be followed by the execution of Confederate prisoners. When a Union soldier was found dead near the town of Cheraw in South Carolina, with a DEATH TO FORAGERS placard around his neck, a group of prisoners was ordered to draw lots to see who would be executed, and an aging Methodist preacher named Small drew the black-marked slip and was shot by a reluctant firing squad.
Sherman was particularly outraged by the Confederate tactic of burying shells or “torpedoes” as mines along the roads or along railroad tracks. In his memoirs, he describes how he came across “a handsome young officer, whose foot had been blown to pieces by a torpedo planted in the road,” waiting for a surgeon to amputate his leg at the knee along the road to Savannah. “There had been no resistance at that point, nothing to give warning of danger, and the rebels had planted eight-inch shells in the road, with friction-matches to explode them by being trodden on,” Sherman recalled. “This was not war, but murder, and it made me very angry.”47 In response he ordered a group of Confederate prisoners to clear the rest of the road with picks and shovels. These soldiers “begged hard, but I reiterated the order, and could hardly help laughing at their stepping so gingerly along the road.”
In the event, none of the prisoners was killed. Looking back on this episode, Sherman declared, “Prisoners should be protected, but mercy is not a legitimate attribute of war. Men go to war to kill or be killed if necessary and should expect no tenderness. . . . But it was, I think, a much better show of tenderness for me to have the enemy do this work than to subject my own soldiers to so frightful a risk.” This indignation ignored the fact that he himself sometimes ordered his soldiers to pile branches on top of bent railroad ties to conceal shells that would blow up anyone trying to retrieve them. If Sherman was not always morally consistent, neither was he as implacable as he was sometimes depicted. In Sandersville, Georgia, he watched Confederate cavalry set fire to stacks of fodder just outside the town and use civilian buildings for cover during their retreat. Even though these actions breached the rules that he had imposed, he did not inflict “general devastation” on the town and told a preacher who pleaded on behalf of the female population and their families, “I don’t make war on women and children.” For the most part, Sherman’s resort to collective punishment and reprisals in response to irregular warfare was focused, selective, and pragmatic, geared toward the achievement of his military objectives and the security of his troops.
This pragmatism was also evident in his use of physical destruction as an instrument of pacification and subjugation. On March 7, the advance units of the Twentieth Corps crossed the state line into North Carolina, and the bulk of Sherman’s army followed the next day. Some of the worst environmental destruction of the campaign took place in North Carolina, as soldiers set fire to the pine forests and resin pits that formed the basis of South Carolina’s turpentine and tar industry, causing huge fires that illuminated their progress, till one Union stretcher bearer described how Sherman’s army was visible at night only “by glimpses under the smoke and muffled by the Niagara-like roar of the flames as they licked turpentine and pitch.”
Sherman’s soldiers were generally more restrained in North Carolina, the last state to join the rebellion, than they had been in South Carolina, and Sherman made more effort to restrain them, especially as it became clearer that the war was coming to an end. On February 2, Union troops captured Wilmington, depriving the Confederacy of its last port. On March 11, Sherman’s army reached Fayetteville, where it proceeded to destroy the Confederate arsenal, various foundries, and the offices and paper mills of the town’s three newspapers. After pausing to reoutfit his troops and evacuate the wounded soldiers and slaves who had joined his army, Sherman took his army over the Cape Fear River on pontoon bridges and continued its inexorable advance.
Once again Sherman confused the Confederate defenders, sending four light divisions toward the state capital, Raleigh, in the northwest while the bulk of his army converged in two separate wings on Goldsboro, which was defended by the remnants of Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and other Confederate units. On March 19, Johnston’s forces sallied out of Goldsboro and attacked Slocum’s left wing near the town of Bentonville. A three-day battle produced the bloodiest fighting since Sherman’s army had left Atlanta, before Johnston’s army was driven back at the cost of 2,600 casualties. Sherman called off a follow-up attack by General Joseph Mower’s brigade that might have captured Johnston’s entire army, but this error, if such it was, soon became irrelevant as Sherman’s forces entered Goldsboro on March 23 without resistance, where it joined Schofield’s Army of the Ohio to form a combined force of 90,000 men.
With Union armies tearing through its territory from multiple directions, the Confederacy was now close to collapse. On March 22, Major General James Harrison Wilson, the twenty-three-year-old chief of cavalry in Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi, led 13,480 cavalrymen on a 525-mile raid into Georgia, capturing the cities of Columbus and Macon and destroying their factories, arsenals, railroads, and rolling stock.48 On April 1, Grant finally broke through the Confederate defensive line southwest of Petersburg, forcing Lee’s army to abandon Richmond two days later. On April 9, Sherman told his wife that he was preparing to march on Raleigh to confront the remnants of Johnston’s army. “Poor North Carolina will have a hard time, for we sweep the country like a swarm of locusts,” he wrote. “Thousands of people may perish, but they now realize that war means something else than vain glory and boasting. If Peace ever falls to their lot they will never again invite War.”49
That same day, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and Sherman finally turned off the destruction machine. On April 13, his troops occupied Raleigh, and the following day he issued Special Field Orders No. 55, which ordered his troops to refrain from “further destruction of railroads, mills, cotton, and produce . . . without the specific orders of an army commander” and ensure that “the inhabitants will be dealt with kindly, looking to an early reconciliation.” Even after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 15, these orders were obeyed. On April 26, Joe Johnston surrendered his army at Bennett Farm, near Durham, and the Civil War was to all intents and purposes over, and so too was the seven-hundred-mile march that Sherman described as “by far the most important in conception and execution of any act of my life.”50