For a conquered population in wartime, the first sight of an invading or occupying army in their streets and cities provides definitive proof of its own defeat and the overwhelming power of the victors. In August 1914, many Belgians heard the advancing German army long before they saw it, through the rhythmic pounding of hobnailed boots on the roads. The American journalist Richard Harding Davis described the arrival of the first German units in Brussels as “something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain.”1 On April 27, 1941, the French consul in Greece, Xavier Lecureuil, witnessed SS troops marching through the port of Patras “with a heavy but quick step, human ‘robots’ forming two rectangles of iron, they give an impression of invincible force.”2
In the course of America’s wars, civilian populations throughout the world have witnessed the arrival of victorious U.S. armies. In 1805, U.S. Marines and assorted mercenaries briefly occupied the city of Derna in Cyrenaica during the First Barbary War, the first time that the U.S. flag was flown over a foreign city. Since then U.S. armies have marched as conquerors, liberators, occupiers, and sometimes as a combination of all three through an extensive list of foreign capitals and cities that includes Mexico City, Manila, Berlin, Rome, Palermo, Tokyo, Paris, Seoul, Santo Domingo, Port-au-Prince, and Baghdad. In some cases, U.S. soldiers have been greeted with kisses, flowers, and celebrating crowds; at other times, with sullen defiance, anger, and resentment, followed by bullets and bombs.
Many Southerners regarded the “Yankee ruffians” and “Yankee Vandals” who marched through their previously inviolable heartlands as a foreign army. In 1861 the Raleigh Banner described Lincoln’s armies as “the sewers of the cities—the degraded, beastly outscourings of all quarters of the world.”3 For many Georgians and Carolinians, their first sight of Sherman’s army was a terrifying and also awe-inspiring spectacle. Grace Elmore, the daughter of a wealthy Carolinian family in Columbia, watched Sherman’s army take an entire day to pass her front gate in the state capital like a “a huge serpent trailing its mighty length throughout our land, the maker of famine and desolation wherever it goes.”4 Another Columbia resident, Mrs. Harriott H. Ravenel, described how “the immense column of men, cannon and baggage wagons filed past us, on its way to North Carolina . . . like a world in arms” following the burning of the city. “The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war,” remembered the Georgia female suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton, who was visiting her grandmother in Crawfordville when Sherman’s army feinted toward Macon.5
Cinematic references to Sherman’s campaigns in The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind portray Sherman’s army as a conquering horde or an irresistible juggernaut, trampling everything in its path. In D.W. Griffiths’s racist epic, a homeless and terrified Georgia woman huddles with her children in the countryside while Sherman’s triumphant army marches below them, accompanied by the caption “While the women and children weep, a great conqueror marches to the sea.” This image of Sherman the Great Destroyer overwhelming a defenseless civilian population with ruthless Yankee power has remained essential to the Lost Cause myth. But the encounters between soldiers and civilians in Georgia and the Carolinas produced a strikingly wide range of responses on both sides, some of which are common to all wars, and some of which can tell us a great deal, not only about the prevailing norms and expectations of wartime during the Civil War, but also about the interactions between the U.S. army and civilians in the wars that followed.
A Hostile People
Most civilians encountered Sherman’s army for less than twenty-four hours, but the meeting was often a harrowing ordeal, as a seemingly endless line of soldiers marched past and often into their homes, stripping them of the food and possessions that their predecessors had not taken. “Like demons they run in!” wrote Dolly Sumner Lunt Burge, a New England native and widow of a Southern husband, about Union soldiers at her plantation near Covington, Georgia. “My yards are full. To my smoke-house, my dairy, pantry, kitchen, and cellar, like famished wolves they come, breaking locks and whatever is in their way.” By the time the last remnants of Sherman’s army had left the next day, Lunt Burge claimed to have been left “poorer by thirty thousand dollars than I was yesterday morning. And a much stronger Rebel!”6
Many Georgians and Carolinians were terrified of the “Vandal Sherman” long before they saw his army. “Yesterday I broke down—gave way to abject terror under the news of Sherman’s advance with no news of my husband,” wrote Mary Boykin Chestnut on January 14, 1865. Grace Elmore agonized over whether it was sinful to commit suicide to avoid being “maltreated” by Union soldiers as the “Sherman horror” approached Columbia. Sherman was amused by the dread reputation that preceded his army, but he also recognized its usefulness. “The soldiers and people of the South entertained an undue fear of our Western men and, like children, they invented such ghostlike stories of our prowess in Georgia, that they were scared by their own inventions,” he recalled. “Still, this was a power and I intended to utilize it.”7
With most military-age men in the army or in hiding to avoid military service, this power was directed mostly at women, children, the elderly, and their slaves and servants, the ones who remained on farms and plantations. Among the white population, the reactions to the Federal army covered a wide gamut of fear, anger, sullen defiance, and resignation or stunned disbelief. One Union soldier mocked the local inhabitants who “look and act scornful and indignant to think that the Yankees should have dared to tread the sacred soil of Georgia.” An Illinois soldier from the Seventeenth Corps passed an “old man to right of road—arms folded, looking over his silent home and desolate fields!” as the Union army crossed the Oconee River in Georgia. Another described householders watching their homes being looted “with grim despair depicted on their countenances.”
Rich plantations were always more likely to suffer such depredations, but poverty did not guarantee immunity. Union soldiers were often shocked at the primitive living conditions of the Southern “white trash” they encountered. Nevertheless foragers stripped even the humblest farms and shacks and sometimes burned them, particularly in South Carolina. Nor was age always respected. Sherman had declared his intention to make “old and young” feel the weight of war, and elderly people were sometimes selected for special treatment because of their vulnerability, rather than in spite of it. Caroline Ravenel, a resident of Anderson, South Carolina, described how soldiers threatened to hang her grandmother if she did not reveal where her family had concealed its valuables, and went on to hang her sixty-year-old uncle from his bedstead, pulling him up and down various times before beating him with a shovel in an attempt to make him talk.8
Such practices were fairly common, according to George Pepper, who described a typical routine in which Sherman’s bummers “come to a house where an old man may be found . . . they assume that he has gold and silver hidden, and demand it. If he gives up the treasure cheerfully he escapes personal violence. If he denies the possession of the treasure and they . . . do not believe him they resort to violent means to compel him to surrender.” Children were also exposed to the “hard hand of war” in various ways. In Atlanta, young children were killed during the Union bombardment and lost their homes when Sherman expelled the civilian population from the city. Some became refugees a second time when his army marched into central Georgia. “Sherman is swooping down through Georgia from mountains to coast, scattering frightened women and children in his path, like a swooping eagle among a flock of doves,” reported the scientist Joseph LeConte, a Georgia refugee working in Columbia who returned to his plantation in December 1864 to evacuate some of his relatives before the Union army reached them.9
As in all wars, children were entirely dependent on the adults who looked after them. When their parents went hungry, they also went hungry. When their homes were destroyed, they also became homeless. Three days after the capture of Atlanta, James Comfort Patten saw a mother skinning a dead cow by the side of the road as his unit marched into the city, while her six-year-old daughter held “a piece of the raw meat in her hands devouring it with the eagerness of a starving dog.”10 If children were not deliberately targeted, it was nevertheless a tacitly accepted consequence of Sherman’s strategy of war that terrorizing and inflicting hardship on them would increase the pressure on their parents and families, especially those who had fathers and brothers fighting in the war. Many children witnessed the destruction and vandalism of their homes.
On February 22, 1865, soldiers sacked Otranto Plantation, part of modern Berkeley County, in South Carolina. The plantation was occupied by an entirely female household consisting of Mrs. Louise Porcher, her two daughters and two aunts, and their servants. One of Mrs. Porcher’s daughters watched soldiers sack the house and outbuildings, driving off and killing livestock. “It was awful to hear the screams of cattle and hogs as they were chased and bayoneted, and the scatter and terror of the sheep was terrible to see,” she later remembered. “Even my pet calf . . . was killed; and dear old Aaron, our house cat, was cruelly run through with a bayonet, right before my eyes.”11
In Columbia, female pupils at the burned Ursuline convent were turned out into the street while Union soldiers ransacked their trunks and possessions. One of them later described how she and her companions followed the nuns and a priest with “up-turned crucifix” into the burning streets in a “sorrow-stricken cortege” with “the schoolgirls, some of them little things, clinging to their older companions in terror, lest they might be torn away.”
Rebel Women
Such episodes cannot be attributed entirely to out-of-control soldiers acting on their own behalf. Sherman’s strategy of intimidation was intended to break the morale of the Southern population, and to that end the horrors were often specifically directed against the white female population. A ghoulish caricature in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on May 17, 1862, entitled “The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir” shows a wealthy Southern woman reading a letter from her soldier husband in a room decorated with the skulls and bones of Union soldiers. Union soldiers in the South often commented on the hostility they encountered from females. Sherman himself, despite his fondness for Southern women in his prewar military postings, was no exception. “I doubt if history affords a parallel to the deep and bitter enmity of the women of the South,” he wrote to his wife from Vicksburg in June 1863. “No one who sees them and hears them but must feel the intensity of their hate.”12
There is no doubt that many Southern women were ardent supporters of the Confederacy, regardless of whether or not they owned slaves or even approved of the “peculiar institution.” “If every man did not hasten to battle, they vowed they would themselves rush out and meet the Yankee vandals. In a land where women are worshipped by the men, such language made them war-mad,” wrote one English immigrant to Arkansas who enlisted in the Confederate Army. At Richmond, one observer reported that “ladies are postponing all engagements until their lovers have fought the Yankees.”13 The diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut was disgusted by slavery, but she nevertheless wrote that the Carolinian men who had not joined the army “are wasting their time dancing attendance on me. I can not help them. Let them shoulder their musket and go to the wars like men.”
The Southern press also regarded the female population as a military asset and frequently exhorted the “women of the South” to use their influence to send more men to the front and stem the rate of desertions. Female support for the war was expressed through Ladies Aid societies and Soldiers’ Relief or Ladies Clothing associations, which made socks and uniforms for soldiers or prepared food parcels for them. When the Union Army invaded and occupied the South, its soldiers were frequently shocked at the extent of female hostility, as women spat at and insulted occupying troops, refused to walk under the Union flag, or threw stones and even fired on the invaders. Retreating through the town of Winchester, Virginia, in June 1862, one Massachusetts officer reported that women “fired at us from windows and then hand grenades and bottles of fulminating powder and hot water and even chamber pots were used as missiles.” In New Orleans in 1862, General Benjamin “Beast” Butler outraged Southerners when he issued General Orders No. 28, which declared that any woman who spat at or insulted his troops would be treated as “a woman of the town plying her avocation,” i.e., as a prostitute.
Sherman’s army often encountered such hostility during its marches. In Georgia, one divisional commander and his staff were insulted by women using “language which no well bred ladies use.” At Milledgeville a woman threw a stone at passing soldiers from a second-story window. Other women openly berated soldiers as they passed. The twenty-six-year-old Charlestonian Emma Holmes, who was working as a governess on a South Carolina plantation when Sherman’s army arrived, harangued soldiers for the best part of an hour on the iniquities of making war on women and children, and proudly related afterward that one admiring officer had called her “the best rebel he had ever met.” Union soldiers were often amused by such behavior and sometimes deliberately provoked rebel women to “hear them roar,” as one soldier put it.
Others were angered by it and locked some of the more vocal “secesh” women in cupboards or cellars to shut them up. One woman who shouted at a group of foragers was dumped in a barrel of molasses. In South Carolina, General Smith D. Atkins told a female house owner, “We shall soon see the women of South Carolina as those of Georgia with tears in their eyes begging crusts from our men for their famishing children. O it was glorious to see such a sight . . . you women keep up this war. We are fighting you.”14 If the open defiance of so many rebel women in Georgia and the Carolinas, which Southern accounts of Sherman’s march often celebrated, suggested that there were limits to how far Union soldiers were prepared to go to intimidate them, their obvious commitment to the Confederacy also prompted many soldiers to call their nonbelligerent status into question. Told by a teenage girl at Sandersville that the Union army “had no right to punish helpless women who had never done anything, etc., etc.,” Henry Hitchcock asked her “where her young men friends were gone” and whether she had used her “influence” to keep them at home. When his interlocutor replied that she had not, Hitchcock told her, “Then you have done all you could to help the war, and have not done what you could to prevent it.”
Many women in Georgia and the Carolinas had already experienced the “hard hand of war” indirectly, long before Sherman’s soldiers arrived on their doorsteps, and some had lost their earlier enthusiasm for it. In her diary, Mary Boykin Chestnut describes how her enthusiasm for the Confederate cause was tempered by her growing depression and despondency at the growing numbers of men who came back wounded or not at all and by her horror at the sight of wounded Confederate veterans in local hospitals.15 In South Carolina, George Pepper met wealthy Carolinian ladies who told him “they had lived on bread and water for two months at a time—others that they had seen meat but once a week.” Many women in the path of Sherman’s army now found themselves deprived of some or all the food they needed to feed their families and their slaves. Others lost their only source of income. At the novelist Alice Walker’s birthplace at Eatonton, Georgia, Orlando Poe destroyed a textile factory that made Confederate tents and uniforms, even though its twenty to thirty female workers begged the Federals to spare it. At the village of Saluda, South Carolina, Conyngham observed female factory workers “weeping and wringing their hands in agony, as they saw the factory, their only means of support, in flames.”
Despite Sherman’s orders not to enter private houses, the more relentless foragers searched through beds and blankets for hidden goods even when sick women and children were lying in them. On December 1, 1864, Sue Sample visited her aunt’s house next door to her plantation in Georgia with her sister-in-law and found that “the beds were torn open, feathers all out. The bedsteads were chopped to pieces, books stolen, and not a thing left worth sleeping on.”16 Such acts went beyond the destruction of war resources or simple thieving. In some cases, soldiers singled out women for particularly vindictive acts of destruction, which included slashing paintings and furniture or destroying daguerreotypes and other objects of particular sentimental value. Pianos were a common target and were often deliberately destroyed or chopped up with axes after their female owners had been forced to play them.
Such behavior is not an aberration in the history of war. Both conquering and defeated armies have often inflicted particular forms of violence and intimidation against women, whether motivated by a desire for vengeance, a demonstration of male power and virility, or the emasculation of their menfolk. The wartime dispatches of the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman describe the frequent fury and amazement of Red Army soldiers in Nazi Germany at the prosperity and normality they encountered, which became a justification for violent retribution against the civilian population and women in particular.17 Some of the vandalism carried out by Sherman’s soldiers was undoubtedly motivated by similar anger at the comfortable domestic worlds they encountered, which intensified their resentment toward the women who in their view had incited rebellion while escaping its consequences.
Such sentiments have often provided a context for sexual violence. In a society where (white) female honor and purity were sacrosanct, the prospect of mass rape by Yankee “mudsills” was a persistent theme in the Southern press. In November 1864, the Macon Telegraph urged Southern men to “hasten to the front . . . to die for home, altars and female purity” and prevent Sherman’s army from “subjecting our wives, daughters and sisters, to the brutal lusts of an infidel, coarse, and fiendish horde.”18 Sherman’s army was often accused of putting these fantasies into practice. As Federal troops closed in on Savannah, the Louisville Times claimed that Sherman “left in his track hundreds of violated women and deflowered maidens.” On December 7, 1864, a letter from Milledgeville to the Richmond Dispatch accused Sherman’s troops of systematic “violence towards the ladies. At least six or seven suffered the last extremity. One young girl became crazed in consequence, and has been sent to the asylum. Other ladies were stripped of their garments, and in such a plight, compelled to play the piano.” On December 17 the Macon Telegraph reported that Southern women were now exposed to “the lustful appetites of the hell-hounds” and the “cesspools of Northern infamy and corruption.”
Much of this was rumor and fabrication. Sherman later claimed that there were only two reported cases of rape, one of which took place at Winnsboro, South Carolina, on February 27, 1865, when a black woman was raped by two soldiers of the Thirty-Eighth Ohio Volunteers, who were court-martialed and sentenced to ten and four years’ hard labor. In another incident in South Carolina, Sergeant Arthur McCarty of the Seventy-Eighth Ohio Regiment was court-martialed for the rape of a girl near Bennettsville and drummed out of the army. There were other cases that Sherman may or may not have been aware of. At Milledgeville, Mrs. Kate Latimer Nichols, the twenty-seven-year-old wife of a Confederate captain, was raped by two soldiers while lying sick in bed and later died in a mental institution. At Aiken in South Carolina, a detachment of Wheeler’s cavalrymen were told by a weeping Baptist minister that a group of Union soldiers had just raped his daughter. Wheeler’s men caught seven of the men responsible and cut their throats, leaving them with a sign that read THESE ARE THE SEVEN.
There were numerous testimonies of rape carried out by Union soldiers during the calamitous occupation of Columbia. Daniel Trezevant described how soldiers broke into the home of a Mrs. Thomas B. Clarkson Jr. and “forced her to the floor for the purpose of sensual enjoyment” before raping her maid instead.19 There are also accounts of Federal soldiers gang-raping black women and of naked black women’s bodies lying in the streets of Columbia bearing “such marks upon them as would indicate the most detestable of crimes,” as one eyewitness put it.20 According to William Gilmore Simms, “The poor negroes were terribly victimized by their assailants, many of them . . . being left in a condition little short of death. Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women to the torture of their embraces.”21
Simms was a prominent advocate of slavery whose sympathy for the “poor negroes” can certainly be called into question, but similar events were reported elsewhere. According to South Carolina resident Mrs. Sarah Trapier, “A gentleman in our neighborhood assured us that not a female slave on his plantation (with a single exception) was allowed to retain that which should have been dearer to her than her life.” The full extent of rape during Sherman’s marches will never be known; many women would have been too ashamed to report it, and some incidents would have gone unrecorded, particularly on isolated farms or when they involved black slaves rather than upper-class white women. Sexual relations between female slaves and Union soldiers were also consensual—up to a point. Conyngham observed “negro wenches, particularly good-looking ones, decked in satin and silks, and sporting diamond ornaments,” who accompanied Union soldiers returning from foraging expeditions. The South Carolina naturalist and Lutheran minister Reverend John Bachman remembered how soldiers descended on his house and “stole the ladies’ jewelry, hair ornaments, etc., tore many garments into tatters, or gave the rest to the negro women to bribe them into criminal intercourse.”
Nor were relations between the army and the white female population always so acrimonious. In many cases, Sherman’s officers responded positively to requests from women to guard their homes, and some soldiers spontaneously offered to protect their property from their own comrades. In South Carolina, one soldier nearly died when an elderly woman begged him to save furniture and a photograph of her husband from the house that the army had just burned. A Mrs. Alfred P. Aldrich described how a soldier threatened to burn down her house at Barnwell unless she told him where her silver was, only to be stopped by a Union officer who “repeatedly expressed his disapprobation of war, and his sorrow for what was going on around him” and ordered the soldier to “let the lady alone.”
Northern views of Sherman’s army: “The Halt: A Scene in the Georgia Campaign,” Thomas Nast, 1866. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Sherman’s soldiers often expressed their amazement and disgust at the “ugliness” of rural white women, and were appalled by their propensity for swearing and their unladylike habit of chewing tobacco. But many of Sherman’s battle-hardened soldiers also admired the “pretty smart pieces” they encountered during the march, finding their elegance and femininity a pleasing contrast to the brutal campaigns they had endured, a reminder of the female world of wives, mothers, and sisters that they had left behind them. Some formed temporary and even permanent relationships with white women and married them after the war.
Such events do not belong to the image of Sherman’s march depicted in Gone with the Wind, when Scarlett O’Hara shoots a lascivious Union intruder on her stairwell. But for all their anger toward the “hostile people” and the women whom some soldiers blamed for the war, Sherman’s army remained for the most part a controlled and disciplined army, whose treatment of women was in keeping with the moral conventions of nineteenth-century society. Such an army might be willing to chop up pianos, raid smokehouses, and steal cows and chickens, but it generally stopped short of resorting to sexual violence either as a right of conquest or as a weapon of war.
The Jubilee
Southern condemnations of Sherman’s “Vandal army” were often reinforced by the many instances of vandalism and destruction of private libraries and scientific laboratories carried out by Sherman’s soldiers. Descriptions of soldiers trampling on books at the Milledgeville statehouse or making bonfires of books on South Carolina plantations support a wider depiction of the Civil War as a confrontation between a refined, cultured, and lettered Southern civilization and the materialistic, utilitarian North. But there was always another side to this “civilization,” which tended to be ignored in subsequent Southern condemnations of Sherman’s march. On December 4, the pious Grace Elmore passed the prisoner-of-war compound of Camp Sorghum, near Columbia, on the way to a classical music recital and recorded her pleasure on witnessing “one fellow riding a rail and another bucked and gagged, hoped they were native born Yankees and not poor foreigners.”22
In addition to her vituperative outbursts of hatred toward a Yankee enemy she regarded as “a blot upon the whole creation,” Elmore’s diaries are also laced with racial contempt for “the negro,” whom she called “the most inferior of the human race, far beneath the Indian or Hindu.” The feminist Rebecca Latimer Felton, who so plaintively evoked the experience of defeat, stridently advocated the lynching of black males for real or imagined sexual relations with white women in the Reconstruction years and once told a group of farmers, “If it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.”23 Lynching continued to take place even during Sherman’s advance. On March 15, 1865, a slave named Saxe Joiner from Unionville, South Carolina, wrote to two white women in the house where he worked and offered to conceal them in a “safe place” from the approaching Union Army. There was nothing to suggest that Joiner’s intentions were anything but honorable, but he was nevertheless accused of inappropriate behavior and imprisoned in a local jail, before a lynch mob dragged him from the courthouse and hanged him.
For tens of thousands of slaves, Sherman’s army brought freedom, or at least the possibility of it, from this world of whippings, bloodhounds, lynchings, violence, and terror on which the Southern social order depended. Even before Sherman’s army reached them, plantation owners were uncomfortably conscious that the “breath of Emancipation” had reached their slaves, and some owners removed “bad negroes” to more distant plantations to prevent them from trying to escape to the Union lines. Some slaves, particularly house servants, remained loyal to their masters and mistresses and suffered at the hands of Sherman’s army, but many recognized the opportunity presented to them and seized it. At Madison, a slave owner pleaded with an elderly black couple not to leave the plantation with the Union Army on the grounds that he had always treated them kindly. The couple agreed that he had, but nevertheless explained, “We must go, freedom is as sweet to us as it is for you.”24
Hitchcock records an incident at a plantation near Covington, Georgia, where Sherman pressed a reluctant old slave for his views on the war. He eventually responded, “Well, Sir, what I think about it, is this—it’s mighty distressin’ this war, but it ’pears to me like the right thing couldn’t be done without it.” Hitchcock concluded, “The old fellow hit it, exactly.”25 For some slaves, the arrival of Sherman’s army provided an opportunity for vengeance as well as freedom. At the rice plantation of Gowrie, one of several plantations owned by the wealthy South Carolina Manigault family, slaves fled to Savannah on flatboats following the arrival of Sherman’s army on Christmas Eve, while soldiers proceeded to seize ten thousand bushels of rice before burning the plantation house, the steam thresher, and a rice-polishing mill.
In February, Sherman’s army reached the sumptuous Manigault plantation of Middleton Place, near Charleston, where slaves broke open the vaults of the family graveyard and scattered the bones about the landscaped grounds, while soldiers burned the mansion and destroyed its library and gardens in what Gabriel Manigault called an act of “Gothic barbarity.” Manigault’s father, Charles, was appalled at what he regarded as the disloyalty of his slaves when Sherman’s army reached two more Manigault plantations, New Hope and Silk Mill, near Charleston, and slaves seized family portraits and paintings from the plantation house and nailed them to the walls of their own quarters or left them in the rain, “to shew their hatred of their former master & all his family.”26
Other slaves provided Sherman’s army with information of military value, told soldiers where their masters and mistresses had hidden livestock and valuables, or simply refused for the first time in their lives to obey orders. As they marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Sherman’s soldiers were frequently greeted by ecstatic crowds of slaves, who danced and sang and kissed them. At Milledgeville, a New Jersey soldier described “old negroes and young negroes, males and females, house servants generally, blessing us—cheering us—laughing—crying—praying—dancing and raising a glorious old time generally, even trying to hug the men as they go along.” In a letter to his wife, General Oliver Howard described freed slaves following his troops on the road to Lafayetteville with “bundles on their heads, children in arms, men on mules, women in old wagons & many with little to eat. They will do anything, suffer anything for freedom.”
Many slaves saw the arrival of the Union army as the fulfillment of the biblical Day of Jubilation, the Jubilee promised in Leviticus 25: 8–13, where God exhorts the Israelites every fiftieth year to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.” Sherman had mixed feelings about this reception. His own attitudes toward slavery were strongly imbued with white supremacism. “All the Congresses on earth can’t make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or he must be destroyed,” he told his wife on July 11, 1860.27
Whatever his personal views, Sherman was obliged to implement Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and he recognized its military usefulness at a time when the Confederacy was desperate enough to consider the previously inconceivable step of drafting black soldiers for its own army. At the same time, Sherman did not want his army to be encumbered by a refugee population that might slow its progress. His general policy was to inform slaves that they were free and advise them to remain on their plantations, while offering the more able-bodied men the opportunity to become paid pioneers—but not to carry weapons—with his army. Hundreds of freed slaves accepted this offer and worked as servants and laborers during the march. As many as twenty thousand black men, women, and children nevertheless ignored his instructions to remain on their plantations and followed his advancing columns.
The attitudes of Sherman’s soldiers toward the slaves were a microcosm of the Union itself. Some soldiers were passively or actively racist, like the German soldier who told a Southern woman near Atlanta, “Fight for the nigger! I’d see ’em in de bottom of a swamp before I’d fight for ’em.” Two or three black soldiers were killed by Union soldiers in Savannah. At Robertsville, South Carolina, a white resident reported that Sherman’s bummers were murdering black men driving wagons on the roads and seizing their loads. According to Conyngham, many other freed slaves “died in the bayous and lagoons of Georgia” of hunger because “when food was getting scarce, we turned them adrift, to support ourselves or perish.”28 On December 8, during the approach to Savannah, Major General Jefferson C. Davis, commander of the Fourteenth Corps, ordered his troops to pull up a trestle bridge between Ebenezer and Lockyer creeks, leaving five hundred to six hundred slaves stranded. Dozens drowned trying to swim or make their way across in homemade rafts to escape the approaching Confederate cavalry, while others were returned to slavery or killed.
Davis was a notorious racist, who once described the refugee columns as “useless creatures . . . encumbering the trains and devouring the subsistence along the line of march so needed for our soldiers.”29 But such attitudes were not universal. One soldier with the Fourteenth Corps described the slaves who joined the march at Jacksonboro as “a nuisance to the army; but we could not drive them back, as they were seeking their freedom, and so they trudged on after us and we divided our rations with them.” One semiliterate private wrote, “I can afoard to go hungry somb times if it will help to free the slaves.” Many officers and soldiers—including Sherman himself—were deeply moved by the reception they received from the freed slaves and the accounts of slavery they heard, and some, like the fervently abolitionist George Pepper, were fascinated by Southern black culture and attended church services or asked slaves to sing and dance for them.
In effect, Sherman’s army inadvertently became an instrument of the social revolution that Lincoln’s proclamation had authorized. On January 16, 1865, Sherman co-wrote Special Field Order No. 15 in Savannah with Lincoln’s secretary of war Edwin Stanton, which set aside four hundred thousand acres of coastal land in South Carolina and Florida for freed slaves to settle and cultivate as they pleased. This policy of “forty acres and a mule,” as it came to be known, was undertaken largely as a temporary measure, in order to reduce the numbers of slaves accompanying Sherman’s army, but the dispensation of white-owned land to freed blacks in the South was nevertheless an extraordinarily radical gesture in its context, which Michael Fellman has called “the single most revolutionary act in race relations during the Civil War.”30 Within six months, the “Sherman lands” were settled by some forty thousand freedmen, before the policy was revoked by Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.
Not surprisingly, Sherman was highly regarded by Southern blacks. Presented by Stanton with stories circulating in Washington that he was racist and discriminatory, Sherman summoned a deputation of leading black dignitaries to testify on his behalf, all of whom spoke in his favor. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Du Bois looked back on the “Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro” as the three essential components of Sherman’s “raid through Georgia” and concluded, “Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them.”31
The “dark human cloud” was also celebrated in “Marching Through Georgia,” a song written for Sherman by the Connecticut songwriter and fervent abolitionist Henry Clay Work, with its rousing depiction of his troops as an army of liberation carving “a thoroughfare for freedom and her train / Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main.” Many marching armies have sung that song in very different circumstances, and many have done so without understanding the line “How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound!” or the meaning of the chorus, “Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.” But just as the “peculiar institution” calls into question the very idea of Southern civilization, so the crowds who followed Sherman’s army invest the destruction that it inflicted on Southern society with a poignancy and a moral ambivalence that has rarely, if ever, accrued to a similar campaign.
Refugee “contrabands” following Sherman’s army. Harper’s Weekly, 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In The Trojan Women, Euripides denounces the victorious “spear-carrying Greeks” as barbarians because of their vindictive treatment of women and children after the Trojan armies have been defeated. Both during and after the Civil War, Sherman was also denounced by Southerners as a coward and a barbarian who made war against “defenseless women and children.” On the one hand, Sherman’s campaign was seen as an expression of brutal and brutish Yankee warfare, which violated the chivalrous “Celtic” warrior code that supposedly defined the Southern military tradition. At the same time, the campaign was depicted as a retrograde anachronism, an accusation that was often accompanied by references to the “Vandal Sherman” and historical comparisons between his army and the Goths, the Thirty Years War, the French Army in the Palatinate, or the “savage” warfare of the American West.
When the Reverend William W. Lord pleaded with Sherman not to “burn and pillage” the town of Winnsboro in South Carolina on the grounds that it “sheltered only helpless women and children,” Sherman testily replied, “Burn and pillage be damned! My soldiers may do as they please!”—to which the reverend responded that this was “an eleventh-century answer to a nineteenth-century appeal.”32 In 1881 the South Carolina rice planter Daniel Heyward recalled a meeting in Savannah with Robert E. Lee after the war, in which he asked Lee, was Sherman “justified under the usages of war, in burning as he passed through South Carolina, the homes of our women and children, while our men were in the field, fighting him bravely?” According to Heyward, Lee replied “in a voice more emphatic than I ever heard him: ‘No sir! No sir! It was the act of a savage, and not justified by the usages of war.’ ”33
Such accusations were not limited to Southerners. In December 1864 the New York correspondent for The Times of London condemned the “American barbarism” of the Civil War and suggested that “the war had lost its original character, and is fast degenerating into a savage contest”—a development that he primarily blamed on Union invaders in the South who had first decided to engage in “hostilities against women and children, and forgo the decencies and amenities of civilization in [their] treatment of the helpless inhabitants of conquered cities.”
The idea that Sherman’s campaigns represented a form of moral atavism reflected a widespread assumption that warfare between “civilized nations” had undergone a process of moral advancement in the nineteenth century, regarding the protection of civilians and noncombatants. Such preoccupations were not new. The “laws on truces and peace” drawn up by Pope Gregory IX in the thirteenth century included pilgrims, monks, peasants, and the “naturally weak”—women, children, widows, orphans, and their animals, goods, and lands—among those who merited such protection. Emmerich de Vattel’s hugely influential The Law of Nations; or, the Principles of Natural Law (1758) states, “Women, children, feeble old men, and sick persons, come under the description of enemies, and so we have certain rights over them, inasmuch as they belong to the nation with whom we are at war, . . . but these are enemies that make no resistance; and consequently, we have no right to maltreat their persons or use any violence against them, much less to take away their lives.”34
The principle of civilian immunity was firmly embedded in the West Point tradition to which Sherman belonged and was reiterated in the Lieber Code, which declared that among civilized nations “protection of the inoffensive citizen of the hostile country is the rule; privation and disturbance of private relations are the exceptions.” Lieber acknowledged the international consensus in the nineteenth century in establishing a distinction between the “private citizen belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself,” in which “the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as far as the exigencies of war will admit.” Article 37 specifically mandated Union commanders to “acknowledge and protect, in hostile countries occupied by them, religion and morality; strictly private property; the persons of the inhabitants, especially those of women: and the sacredness of domestic relations,” while Article 44 proscribed “all wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country, all destruction of property not commanded by the authorized officer.”
At the same time, Lieber also established conditions under which these principles might not be binding. It was, for example, legitimate for the “citizen or native of a hostile country” to be “subjected to the hardships of the war.” Though “wanton” violence and physical destruction were not permitted, military necessity may make an exception of “all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy.” Lieber also distinguished between “loyal citizens,” whom commanders were obliged to protect, and rebels or “disloyal citizens,” on whom “the commander will throw the burden of the war, as much as lies within his power.”
Much of what Sherman’s army did in Georgia and the Carolinas fell within these parameters, or at least it was possible to argue that it did. Had the Union lost the war, Sherman might well have been put on trial for war crimes, and he might have cited Lieber in his defense. His lawyers could have argued that most of the destruction carried out by his army was not “wanton” but was directed at military resources, communications, and matériel of potential use to the enemy. They might have cited Article 17, which declared that “war is not carried on by arms alone” and that it could therefore be lawful in certain circumstances “to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy.” They could have argued that his army needed to take food from the population in order to survive and also to prevent it from being exported to Confederate armies, that many of the more extreme actions carried out by his soldiers were in contravention of Sherman’s orders, and that the burning of Columbia was not his decision and that he tried to prevent it.
Even if this hypothetical court ruled that what Sherman’s army did was legal, it is difficult to imagine that it would have ruled that it was moral or even that Sherman would have offered such a defense. He might have argued, as he often did, that the rules, laws, and moral codes that regulated civilian society in peacetime were not necessarily the same as those prevailing in war and that the actions of his army in Georgia and the Carolinas were not designed “to meet the humanities of the case.” Sherman might also have reminded his accusers that Confederate bushwhackers fired on passenger trains and steamboats and killed or beat up Union loyalists and burned their homes. He might have mentioned Chambersburg or Lawrence. Sherman could also have quoted the Confederate “Gray Ghost,” J. Singleton Mosby, who justified shelling Union trains even when they had women and children aboard on the grounds that he “did not understand that it hurts women and children to be killed any more than it hurts men.”35
In the course of the war, men killed men in their hundreds of thousands, as artillery and the new rifled muskets wreaked terrible carnage on the battlefield. In his memoir of Grant’s campaigns in Virginia, Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter describes the “unutterable horror” of the Battle of the Wilderness: “Forest fires raged; ammunition-trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along, with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of blood-stained clothing. It was as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.”36
The Civil War contained an abundance of such horrors, which Sherman himself often described with disgust. Few Americans on either side questioned the right of soldiers to shoot, bayonet, maim, and bludgeon their opponents to death in battle, but neither the Union nor the Confederate Army was expected to steal and pillage, terrorize women and children, and violate “the sacredness of domestic relations” through the destruction of private property. Then as now, the American soldier was expected to behave as “an officer and a gentleman” and limit the use of force as much as possible to armed combatants. We have already seen how Sherman, Sheridan, and other Union generals came to disregard such limitations, but how did Sherman’s soldiers come to terms with the peculiar forms of destruction that his marches entailed?
The Citizen Army
Southerners often described Sherman’s army as a rabble, a mob, whose behavior was sometimes attributed to the numbers of soldiers from the urban slums in its ranks. But the Army of the West included men from a variety of social backgrounds, from comfortable New England middle-class families and recently arrived German immigrants who barely spoke English to Midwestern farm boys and East Coast Irishmen. By the time they reached Atlanta, many of them had already fought and marched for more than a thousand miles, in some cases without boots or shoes, barefoot or with their feet wrapped in cloth and gunnysacks. They were tough, supremely fit, and imbued with a strong sense of their own invincibility and the infallibility of their commander, and also with an egalitarian spirit that owed much to the fact that more than 50 percent of captains and 90 percent of lieutenants had once served as enlisted men.
Observers commented on the motley appearance of Sherman’s army. Their put-together Confederate and Union uniforms, sometimes with mixed boots, top hats, and even women’s bonnets, contrasted strikingly with the scrupulously well-turned-out Eastern armies. In Beaufort, South Carolina, one observer described Sherman’s “western marauders . . . strange, rough-looking, unshaven, and badly dressed: they seem like a gang of coal-heavers” and “roaring out songs and jokes, making sharp comments on all the tidy civilians, and over-flowing with merriment and good-nature.”37
Most of Sherman’s soldiers had “seen the elephant,” as Civil War soldiers called combat, both before and during the Atlanta campaign. Many had seen their comrades, friends, relatives, and neighbors maimed or killed. Some soldiers were undoubtedly hardened by the experience of war. At Jonesboro during the siege of Atlanta, the Third Brigade of Sherman’s Fourteenth Corps scaled Confederate redoubts and shot or bayoneted soldiers who tried to surrender. Soldiers capable of such actions were not likely to quibble about slaughtering livestock or burning barns and houses. For many of its participants, the March to the Sea was a relief from the danger of battle. Charles Wills called the march “the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned.” Another soldier from Slocum’s corps cheerfully recorded in his diary, “Destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned and twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally.”38
Some soldiers took a vindictive pleasure in the destruction they inflicted and the distress of the local population. A resident of Winnsboro in South Carolina described soldiers “like truants out of school” cheerfully tossing unwanted molasses and foodstuffs into the streets in a “high carnival” of destruction. In Georgia a soldier, confronted with a sobbing woman who pleaded with him not to take her last chickens after a day of depredations, replied, “Madam, we’re going to suppress this rebellion if it takes every last chicken in the Confederacy.”39 In Columbia, Harriott Middleton, the daughter of a wealthy planter, described how her elderly father was turned out of his house by Captain Pierce of the 157th New York Volunteers, who told him, “You damn old rebel you, get out your house this minute. I mean to burn it down and set you afloat in the world.”40
Sherman’s soldiers often expressed a particularly republican contempt for the pretensions of the Southern aristocracy, but they were not necessarily any more enamored of poor whites, whom Thomas Osborn described as “lower than the negro in every respect, not excepting general intelligence, culture and morality” and “not fit to be kept in the same sty with a well to do farmer’s hogs in New England.” The tempo of destruction was sometimes fueled by anger at the sight of Confederate POW camps, where captured soldiers lived—and often died—in horrific conditions. At Camp Lawton, near Millen, Georgia, soldiers found the corpses of Union prisoners still lying in holes they had dug with their bare hands—a sight that moved many of them to take revenge on Millen. At the infamous Andersonville prison camp in Georgia, thirteen thousand men died in little more than a year due to lack of food, sanitation, and medical care. Seven thousand died in the summer of 1864 alone, mostly of scurvy. John McElroy, a former prisoner at Andersonville, subsequently observed that this outcome could have been avoided by “a few wagon loads of roasting ears and sweet potatoes,” which were readily available in the state, and condemned the failure to do so “in the midst of an agricultural region filled with all manner of green vegetation” as something that “must forever remain impossible of explanation.” 41
Many of Sherman’s soldiers were mystified and outraged by the condition of Georgia’s prisoners. During the Thanksgiving Day celebrations held by Sherman’s troops at Milledgeville, the appearance of emaciated prisoners from Andersonville “sickened and infuriated the men who thought of them starving in the midst of plenty,” according to one officer, and intensified the level of destruction in the surrounding area as a consequence. A similar reaction followed the Union liberation of Camp Sorghum, near Columbia. “The doom of Columbia was sealed at Camp Sorghum,” wrote Pepper, “and neither General Sherman nor any other man could have saved it from severe treatment, even had no other circumstances occurred.”42
Some of Sherman’s soldiers clearly reveled in their power, such as the soldier who watched his comrades set fire to the burning Ursuline convent in Columbia and asked the evacuated nuns and their charges, “What do you think of God now? Is not Sherman greater?” Some soldiers took an almost aesthetic pleasure in the strange and often beautiful landscapes of destruction that they created. One soldier was awed by the sight of the burning pine forests of North Carolina “as big as a mountain and roaring like a bursting volcano.” Watching a forest fire near Saluda, George Nichols found a “terrible sublimity in the scene that I shall never forget” as frightened animals and men with smoke-blackened faces fled the “flames, galloping over the ground like a frightened steed.”43 At Columbia, Thomas Osborn described the “magnificent splendor of this burning city” as “an advantage to the cause and just punishment for the state of South Carolina.”44
Sherman’s army was not an army of brutalized insensate avengers, however. At the battle of Griswoldville, soldiers expressed sympathy for the old men and boys they killed and wounded. “The scenes of death, pain, and desolation seen on the field will never be erased from the memory of those who witnessed it,” wrote one Iowa soldier. “I could not help but pity them as they lay on the ground pleading for help but we could not help them as we were scarce of transportation.”45
Many soldiers were similarly sympathetic to the civilians they encountered. On entering Columbia, one Union soldier saw a young girl playing with a puppy on a porch and promptly brained the dog with his rifle, leaving her crying. Another soldier soothed her by converting a cigar box into a tiny coffin before burying the dog. In Georgia two homeless orphaned girls were cleaned up and fed by soldiers and brought to Savannah, where they were taken back to the Union by a wounded lieutenant and adopted. In North Carolina, the Ohio infantryman S.A. McNeil recalled how “a little girl of perhaps ten years came from a house wringing her little hands and crying ‘Soldiers, our house is burning,’” whereupon “at least a hundred” soldiers rushed to the house and put the fire out.46
The presence of children often induced soldiers to spare their homes or leave enough food for them to eat, and there were also cases in which soldiers gave children their own rations. On Christmas Day, 1864, a Union captain near Savannah ordered ninety men to load wagons with food, which was then distributed to the needy in an area stripped by both Federals and Confederates, with branches tied to the heads of mules to make them look like reindeer. Many soldiers were appalled by the behavior of their army. “You never can imagine a pillaged house, never—unless an army passes right through your town,” wrote Charles Brown, a clerk with the Twenty-First Michigan, of the destruction in South Carolina, “and if this thing had been [in the] North I would bushwhack until every man was either dead or I was.” Major James A. Connolly declared himself “perfectly sickened by the frightful devastation our army was spreading on every hand” in South Carolina. Of the destruction inflicted on Louisville, Georgia, on November 27, an Illinoisan soldier wrote, “I never can sanction such proceeding, believing that no man who ever was a gentleman could enter a private house & disgrace our uniform and the service as many of our men did today.”
Even Sherman often felt pangs of conscience at the reality of the policy that he had adopted. Hitchcock records a campfire conversation in which Sherman recounted that he had refused a request from an old woman for a guard for her house and told his officers, “I’ll have to harden my heart to these things. That poor woman today—how could I help her? There’s no help for it. The soldiers will take all she has.” Such regrets, in typical Sherman fashion, were rationalized on the basis that “Jeff Davis is responsible for this.”47
Many soldiers justified their actions in the same way, not because they reveled in cruelty—though some certainly did—but because they believed that the South had brought such treatment on itself and that their actions would bring the war to a swifter conclusion. Some argued that such destruction was necessary to preserve the Union and insisted even to those on the receiving end that it was ultimately for their own good. “Is this the way to make us love them and their Union?” asked Dolly Lunt Burge. “Let the poor people answer whom they have deprived of every mouthful of meat and of their livestock to make any!” One Columbia resident sarcastically compared Sherman’s soldiers to “crusaders”: with “‘this glorious Union’ constantly on their lips, they wanted to re-establish the Union even if by doing so they annihilated the present population.”
Most of Sherman’s soldiers were interested in subjugating rather than annihilating the South, and some regarded what they were doing as less destructive than the battles they’d taken part in and a preferable alternative to them. “It is terrible to consume and destroy the sustenance of thousands of people, and most sad and distressing in itself to see and hear the terror and grief of these women and children,” observed Henry Hitchcock. “But personally they are protected and their dwellings are not destroyed. . . . It is mercy in the end.”48
Many Northerners took the same view. On May 24, 1865, the Armies of the Potomac and the James paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on the first day of the Grand Review of the Armies. The following day, tens of thousands of Northerners turned out to watch Sherman’s ragtag army parade through the capital. Unlike the Eastern armies, Sherman’s army made no attempt to spruce itself up for the occasion. The soldiers, many still barefoot, proudly sported the motley uniforms they had assembled during the march along with their faded battle flags. They brought with them turkeys, raccoons, hogs, and chickens from Southern homes, as well as some of the freed slaves who had followed their march, all of which impressed the cheering crowds who watched them pass throughout the day. “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent . . . greater than the day before,” wrote a reporter from the New York World.
It is doubtful whether these cheering crowds cared very much whether the actions of Sherman’s citizen army were in accordance with the usages of war or the morality of making war on civilians. To most of those present, victory negated the need for such questions, and to many it seemed that Sherman had saved the Union by defeating its enemies, not with a battle but with a march.