William Tecumseh Sherman

And the War of Northern Aggression

William Tecumseh Sherman, in late 1864 and for many decades after, was without a doubt the most hated man in Georgia and the rest of the South, and with good reason. Sherman had not only taken the city of Atlanta from the Confederacy in September, but only a few days later he had issued the infamous Special Field Order 120, reprinted in every southern paper and widely distributed to the citizens of Georgia and surrounding states. The order was issued from Sherman’s camp in Kingston GA on November 9, 1864, and directed his entire army of 60,000 men to begin marching east from Atlanta in four parallel columns toward Savannah GA. The unusual parts of the order stated “there will be no general train of supplies, but each corps will have its ammunition train and provision train…The army will forage liberally on the country during the march…and will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn meal or whatever is needed by the command…and to drive in stock in sight of their camp…to army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc.…should the inhabitants…manifest local hostility commanders should order and enforce devastation…according to the measure of such hostility…As for horses, mules and wagons the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit discriminating …between the rich who are usually hostile and the poor or industrious…Negroes who are able bodied and can be of service …may be taken along…to follow the advance guard …and organized into pioneer battalions …and should repair roads and double them if possible…by order of Major General W. T. Sherman.”

In other words, Sherman was violating the unwritten chivalric code of war at the time that characterized the slaughter of soldiers, animals and property on both sides as perfectly acceptable but the inclusion of civilians, infrastructure and personal property, unless accidental or peripheral to a battle or action as barbaric, inhuman and unacceptable.

Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio February 8, 1820, into a politically influential family. His father was a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court but died suddenly from typhoid in 1829.

His mother, Mary Hoyt Sherman, was left with no inheritance and 11 children, so William, at age 9, was raised by a neighbor and friend of the family Thomas Ewing. Mr. Ewing later became a US senator and the first US Secretary of the Interior. Sherman, in spite of suffering from asthma, graduated from West Point Military Academy and stood sixth in the Class of 1840. He was assigned as a 2nd Lieutenant to the 3rd US Artillery as part of the mission to subdue the Seminole Indians in Florida. He was married to his foster sister Ellen Boyd Ewing in 1850, and President Zachary Taylor and VP Millard Fillmore both attended the ceremony. Subsequently he was one of the few West Point graduates that did not serve in the Mexican conflict but was assigned to administrative duties in the recently captured region of California. He briefly left military service in 1853 in an attempt to pursue several “business opportunities” that were ultimately unsuccessful, and in 1859 he re-enlisted and was appointed Superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (now LSU). He resigned that position when Louisiana seceded from the Union and was assigned as a Union army brigade commander for the battle of Bull Run in 1861.

When South Carolina seceded from the Union, he expressed his opinions to friends and fellow officers about the coming conflict: “You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war, you don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it…You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on Earth - right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirits and determination are you prepared for war, in all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.”

He was promoted to brigadier general by Lincoln and reassigned after Bull Run to the Western Theater in Kentucky. While in Kentucky he became pessimistic and depressed about the leadership, direction and prosecution of the war and the pressures of his own command that eventually led to a mental breakdown, and he was placed on leave for a short period of time.

In 1862 General Grant appointed Sherman to his command, and near the end of the war Sherman commented “General Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now sir we stand by each other always.” The relationship proved beneficial to each and to the Union.

Sherman served with Grant at the battles of Ft. Henry and Ft. Donaldson, Shiloh, the Vicksburg campaign and the Corinth MS campaign. When Grant’s first phase of the attack on Vicksburg failed, he developed a different strategy that called for his army to leave its supply train behind and to feed and provision itself by foraging. Sherman was at first skeptical of Grant’s idea but soon came to support Grant’s leadership and became one of his most trusted generals. When Grant was appointed by Lincoln as Commander in Chief of all Union armies, Sherman replaced him as Commander of the Western Theater. Sherman’s capture of the key Confederate rail hubs of Chattanooga and Atlanta also helped ensure the reelection of Abraham Lincoln to his second term as President.

The Union army “living off the land” may have been a novel concept at the time, but considering the southern states in the mid 1800’s were primarily agricultural and composed of thousands of thousands of small farms that each produced cattle, grain, vegetables, pigs and poultry in sufficient quantities to supply themselves and the Confederate armies, it was a relatively easy leap of logic to assume Union forces in the area could find more than enough food and forage to support their needs. History points out several instances where civilians, if not subjected to wholesale slaughter, were at least deprived of shelter, food and safety by marauding armies. The concept was not new, and history provides many examples.

In the spring of 513 BC, for example, King Darius of Persia decided to invade Scythia. The King and his army crossed the Danube and invaded that country, but his planning neglected or ignored the fact that his Scythian opponents were warriors that lived a nomadic life. As Darius pursued them, the Scythians practiced a scorched earth policy that left little or nothing for the invaders or their horses to eat. The Greek historian Herodotus said the Scythians “drove off their herds, choking the wells and springs on their way and rooted up the grass from the earth. None who attacks them can escape and none can catch them if they desire not to be found.”

In 52 BC, the Roman legions killed all but a few hundred of the 40,000 residents of Avaricum in France. Vercingetorix united the Gallic tribes against the Romans and his army burned cities, towns, villages and farms to deprive the invading Romans of food, shelter and forage. He and the Gauls, however, were defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Alesia soon after. There are many other examples; William the Conqueror in 1069 in northern England, Louis the XIV in 1688 against the German Palatinate region, and who can forget the 1901 scorched earth campaign of British General Lord Kitchener against the Boer civilians in an effort to drive the Boer guerillas out of the cover of the African bush. He destroyed about 30,000 farmhouses, more than 40 towns, and imprisoned civilian women, children and blacks in internment camps, where more than 46,000 of them died from disease and starvation. The German night bombing of London and surrounding areas during WWII would also qualify for this dubious honor, as would the US and British bombing of Dresden in the same conflict.

Sherman’s March through Georgia accomplished his goal of ending the Civil War far sooner than was expected. The same farms and homesteads that fed Sherman’s army on their way to Savannah were the ones that Lee and Jefferson Davis had been counting on to feed and clothe the Confederate troops in Virginia and elsewhere before the railroad hub in Atlanta was destroyed. Sherman’s men pulled up the iron train tracks, heated them over bonfires and bent them into the shape of a bow so they couldn’t be reused. They proudly called the result of their work “Sherman’s neckties.” The Union army’s movement east also started a mass migration of civilians, black and white, that changed the demographics of Georgia and the surrounding states. The vast majority of men in the area were either still serving in the Rebel armies or dead, and since the Union army was using any and all available food for itself there was little or nothing left for civilians, they had little choice but to begin moving too. Thousands upon thousands of women, children, old men and former slaves all walked before the Union army or followed in its wake. Most of the rich planters in his path had already abandoned their homes and moved to safety, but the freed slaves and those too poor to run were left to walk to escape starvation and find shelter. With Sherman’s army burning mansions and houses alike in their path, this diaspora also effectively ended the plantation system in Georgia and ultimately in the rest of the South. Sherman, after the war, acknowledged what his men did was theft, but suggested that stealing from traitors to the Union ought to have a better word to describe it than theft. His army either confiscated or burned over 35,000 bales of cotton. Why bother with cotton? Because cotton was currency to the South in a time where Confederate money was virtually worthless, and without cotton the Confederacy had little or nothing to trade to foreign countries for guns, ammunition and clothing. They also took over 20,000 head of cattle, over 7,000 horses and mules, destroyed countless miles of train track and burned, destroyed, ate or took well over $100 million dollars worth of houses, buildings, slave cabins, cannons, plantation houses, steamboats, jewelry and food and every imaginable thing you might think of. Sherman also eliminated Georgia as a place of refuge or base of operations for any Confederate army larger than company size. There was no food, no transportation by rail, wagon or horse or mule and a Yankee army of 60,000 that prevented any Confederate army from retreating to Georgia to escape other Union armies. His men reached Savannah on December 21, 1864, and Sherman sent a message to President Lincoln offering him the city as a Christmas present.

Sherman next pointed his men in the direction of North and South Carolina and continued their swath of destruction northward from Savannah. The damage and destruction was, if anything, greater in South Carolina than that done in Georgia or North Carolina, and Sherman blamed it on the animosity his men felt toward South Carolina because it was the first state to secede and declare itself free from the Union. The burning of the city of Columbia was blamed on Sherman and his men, but Sherman himself said “If I had made up my mind to burn Columbia I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village, but I did not do it.” He blamed the burning on Confederate General Wade Hampton who supposedly ordered the burning of cotton in the streets of the city as his men abandoned their defense of the town. The Civil War ended in April 1865. In May, Sherman wrote to a friend

“I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting - its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers…tis only those who have never heard a shot never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated…that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

Grant was elected president in 1868 and took office in 1869. He appointed Sherman as Commanding General of the US Army and promoted him to full general. Predictably, Sherman did not play well with politicians, and, in a futile effort to escape daily contact with them and with “humanitarians” critical of his harsh treatment of Indians, moved his offices to St. Louis. A new Secretary of War convinced him to return to Washington in 1878.

In 1875 Sherman was one of the first Civil War generals to publish his memoirs. Some historians and critics complained Grant was treated unfairly, but Grant replied, “when I finished the book, I found I approved every word; that…it was a true book, and honorable book, creditable to Sherman, just to his companions - to myself particularly so - just such a book as I expected Sherman would write.”

Sherman turned 71 in February 1891 but died of pneumonia 6 days later. President Benjamin Harrison, one of Sherman’s veterans, declared all US flags be flown at half-staff and sent a message to both houses of Congress “He was an ideal soldier, and shared to the fullest the esprit de corps of the army, but he cherished the civil institutions organized under the Constitution, and was only as soldier that these might be perpetuated in undiminished usefulness and honor.” At his funeral service on February 19, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, the commander of the army that opposed Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas, was a pallbearer.

Sherman’s use of maneuver warfare - the defeat of an enemy through shock, disruption and surprise - rather than frontal attacks on well-defended position - especially in his strategy against Johnston in the Atlanta campaign, was a powerful influence on the theories of strategy and tactics of Liddel Hart, British soldier, historian and military theorist. Hart stated that his theories, based on Sherman’s campaigns, later influenced Guderian’s Blitzkrieg and Rommel’s tactics with tanks during WWII. George Patton also carefully studied Sherman’s campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas and used what he learned in his 3rd Army’s advances from Normandy to Berlin.

Sherman’s legacy to present day generals is clear and removes arguments against “humane” warfare and the politicization of military decisions. After his men captured Atlanta, the city council sent him a written request for leniency in his treatment of the city. His response should be required reading and committed to memory by all prospective and current military leaders:

“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war…I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.” He did so.

As a Mississippian by birth and an Alabamian and Georgian by residence, I have read extensively about “the Glorious Cause,” the battles and disease and pestilence of the Civil War, the genius of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart and often wondered how anyone could possibly fail to be enamored of the Southern rebellion against the War of Northern Aggression. Sherman has convinced me otherwise. He clearly saw the right side of history when the war began, and made damn sure he and his men were fighting not just for a just cause but for as swift an end to the conflict as possible by conducting the prosecution of the war as effectively and efficiently as possible. While I absolutely admire the courage and bravery of my familial predecessors and fellow southerners, I have come to believe their cause was not only poorly chosen but impossible to defend, either militarily or morally. As much as it pains me to say it, Sherman was and is and will be forever correct in his judgements, assessments and actions, and that, in spite of his faults, was the right general in the right place at the right time and for the right side.