The End Game

Atlanta had been holding out for some six weeks after Sherman’s army had defeated the forces under J. B. Hood in a series of bloody battles that pushed the Confederates into defensive positions inside the city where they, and the civilian population, were supplied by a single rail line. When that was cut in the battle of Jonesboro, Atlanta was doomed, and Hood took his troops out of the city, lest they starve there as John Pemberton’s army had at Vicksburg. On his way out, Hood put all useful military supplies to the torch, a scene that was dramatized 75 years later in Gone with the Wind.

A week after sending his message to the president, Sherman ordered that “the city of Atlanta, being exclusively required for warlike purposes, will at once be vacated by all except the armies of the United States.”

In a wire to his superior in the War Department, General Halleck, Sherman went on record. “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity or cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.”

And to the mayor of Atlanta, who did, indeed, protest an action that would make civilians homeless refugees with winter approaching, he said, in effect, that he agreed. That it was a hard and heartless thing, but, he added, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”

He would do what he must, then, and Mayor Calhoun should do the same. Which meant he must leave Atlanta “and take with you your old and feeble, feed and nurse them .  .  . until the mad passions of men cool down and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta.”

And this was just the beginning.

The fall of Atlanta may have secured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, but it did not mean the end of the Confederacy and the war. Lee still had an army in Virginia, besieged as it was. And Hood still had more than 30,000 men who could fight and fight hard. And there was, in Sherman’s rear, his nemesis Nathan Bedford Forrest, the cavalryman and raider who was one of the war’s most aggressive, creative, and lethal generals. In the course of the war, Forrest killed 31 men and had 29 horses shot out from under him.

These two were absolute antagonists, but they had similarly stark visions of war and its nature. Sherman made characteristically plain his desires when it came to Forrest. In the aftermath of the battle of Shiloh, Sherman witnessed the remarkable escape of Forrest, who had taken a ball in the spine but was still in the saddle, using a Union soldier as a shield. “Boys,” Sherman shouted to his soldiers, “forget the rest of the Confederates, run down that man and kill him. Bring me his body; I want to see him dead.”

Forrest escaped and lived to fight many other days, and Sherman went on to the conquests of Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and then Atlanta. He had done the last of these by cutting the final Confederate supply line into the city. Now, it was he who was vulnerable to the same tactic. Or so it seemed. Hood and Forrest could threaten the long Union line extending back into Tennessee and, ultimately, all the way up into Kentucky.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, saw possibility in this situation and took solace from an example in recent European military history. He promised victory to a formation of Confederate troops, “though misfortune has befallen our arms from Decatur to Jonesboro.”

“Our cause is not lost,” Davis said, for “Sherman cannot keep up his long line of communications; retreat sooner or later he must. And when that day comes, the fate that befell the army of the French empire in its retreat from Moscow will be reenacted. Our cavalry and our people will harass and destroy his arms, as the Cossacks that of Napoleon, and the Yankee general, like him, will escape with only a bodyguard.”

To which Ulysses S. Grant—the practical man, confronted by the romantic—said, “Who is to furnish the snow?”

Still, Sherman had not destroyed the army he had chased all the way to Atlanta, and for a few weeks he was obliged to reverse course and pursue Hood over the same ground he had so arduously taken during the summer. In one encounter, Sherman was supposed to have wigwagged a signal from Kennesaw Mountain, which had been the scene of the bloodiest battle in his march on Atlanta. The message became part of the national vocabulary. To an outpost under attack at Allatoona Pass his message read, “Hold the fort, for I am coming.”

The fort held. But this success did not accomplish the mission of closing with Hood’s army and finishing it. The spirit of resistance flickered. So Sherman came up with another plan, one that departed from military orthodoxies and, thus, was viewed somewhat skeptically at first by his superiors, to include Grant and Lincoln. But Sherman was a formidable advocate, and he had a record of success. Against Hood and Forrest, he wrote, “It will be a physical impossibility to protect the railroads” that supplied his army. In an attempt to do so, he would “lose a thousand men monthly and .  .  . gain no result.”

His alternative, breathtaking in both its simplicity and audacity, was to “cut a swath through Georgia to the sea, divide the Confederacy in two, and come up on the rear of Lee.”

The obvious risk in such a plan—and the fuel for the qualms felt by Lincoln and Grant—was that it would leave an enemy army, Hood’s, loose in Sherman’s rear and render him and his lines vulnerable. But Sherman had anticipated this objection. He proposed, first, to place a large element from his force in Hood’s rear. Given the Confederate general’s lust to take the offensive, this force would act almost like bait. At worst, it would keep Hood occupied and, at best, defeat him in battle once and for all.

And then Sherman had no intention of using lines of supply, extending far to his rear, on this proposed march to the sea. He would not, in fact, depend on supply lines at all. His army would supply itself by plundering Georgia.

The logistics were straightforward enough. The troops would take what they needed to feed themselves and their horses and mules. Supplies would be to their front, not in the rear. But there was more to it. Sherman meant, he explained, to break the will of the South. “If we can march a well-appointed army right through [Confederate] territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist.” And, for emphasis, he added this: “I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”

He intended to “make war so terrible” and Southerners so sick of it that “generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

“Know thy enemy” is one of the oldest maxims of war, and Sherman knew and understood his. He had spent long stretches of his early army career in the South and had, in fact, walked and ridden much of the ground over which he later led his army on the way to Atlanta. He had a feel for the terrain in that campaign and an understanding of the character of his opponents drawn from his days, just prior to the war, when he had been superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, which later became Louisiana State University. He had friends in the South and felt a genuine sense of affection for its society and culture, even a willingness to tolerate slavery. He had tried to warn his friends in the South of what they would face if they pushed things too far. 

“The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth. .  .  . You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war.”

Though he felt affection for the South, Sherman was a warrior and then a Union man. There was a sentiment, even a year or two into the war, for thinking of the Confederates “not as enemies.” Lincoln, himself, had said so in his first inaugural, but that was before the fighting began. Sherman had made his feelings clear on this matter in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase several months before the fall of Atlanta. The war, he wrote, had been “complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other side are not enemies.” It was time, Sherman went on, “to proceed on the proper rule that all in the South are enemies.”

Sherman elaborated on this conviction, putting down his thoughts about the kind of people he and his army were fighting, dividing them into four classes of people comprising, roughly, prosperous landowners, small farmers, union sympathizers, and then “the young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about town, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness .  .  . first-rate shots and utterly reckless.” Men of this class, Sherman went on, “must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.”

He went on to write that the South must be made to understand that the Union army would “take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property .  .  . that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are our enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts.”

Lincoln was aware of the letter and wanted its contents published so, in his mind, “the bonds of affection” would plainly be severed. Sherman decided against making the letter public. Not because he was having second thoughts and inclined toward moderation; to the contrary, as he later made clear in word and deed. But he was constantly at loggerheads with the press and did not want to stir things up.

So several months later, when Sherman proposed to “make Georgia howl,” he was utterly in earnest. The essence of his planned march was brutality toward the civilian population. Civilian suffering was the point. Between Atlanta and his objective, Savannah, there were no substantial Confederate units to oppose him, merely some feeble militia formations and small bands of cavalry that were far in numbers and effectiveness from those commanded by Forrest, who would be left in the rear, along with Hood, to do his worst.

But if the point of the march was plunder and destruction, it was still a military operation. Sherman insisted on this. The troops he sent back to Nashville, under generals Thomas and Schofield, were veterans of the campaign that took Atlanta and good soldiers. But the units selected to make the march were the best under his command, 62,500 veterans of the hardest and most successful fighting in the Western theater of the war. And even these formations were culled, with the surgeons inspecting them and dismissing the weak and sick, who were, as one man who made the march recalled, “sent back to Chattanooga and Nashville, along with every pound of baggage that could be dispensed with. The army was reduced, one might say, to its fighting weight, no man being retained who was not capable of a long march. Our communications were then abandoned by destroying the railroad and telegraph.”

It was the beginning of something large, even epic, and the man sensed this. “There was something intensely exciting,” he wrote, “in this perfect isolation.”

The mission was simplicity itself: “We were expected to make fifteen miles a day; to corduroy the roads where necessary; to destroy such property as was designated by our corps commander and to consume everything eatable by man or beast.”

Stripped to the essentials, the troops moved out on November 15, having first set fire to what was left in Atlanta that might be useful to any Confederate units that returned. One Union officer wrote of this second burning of the city: “All the pictures and verbal descriptions of hell I have ever seen never gave me half so vivid an idea of it as did this flame-wrapped city tonight.”

Sherman watched a formation on the march, leaving the smoldering city behind, with a band playing and the troops singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they marched. “Never before or since,” he wrote later, “have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit or in better harmony of time and place.”

The soldiers were not, of course, marching into battle in the ordinary sense. They would fight skirmishes all the way to North Carolina, where their march, and the war, would end, but there were no frightful engagements like Lookout Mountain or Chickamauga. This was a military operation of a different sort. The troops were under discipline, though they were expected to be ruthless in carrying out their duties. “If the enemy burn forage and corn in our route,” Sherman commanded, “houses, barns, and cotton gins must also be burned to keep them company.”

So they burned and foraged and took what they wanted and were not inclined to be polite, or even civil, about it. They spread out across the land and they took what was needed and more. They tore up railroad tracks, heated the rails, and twisted them around trees into what they called “Sherman neckties.” They shared with their commander a sense of mission. They were out to avenge and punish and, being unopposed, they went about it thoroughly and diligently and often roughly. They killed livestock and other animals, including pet dogs. And, as one of them put it, “destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton and gins, spilled their sorghum, burned and twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally.”

Sherman estimated “the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000” during their march to Savannah.

This was, undeniably, a species of “total war.” But there were limits. Historian Shelby Foote said that he was unable to document a single case of rape committed by Sherman’s troops during their sack of Georgia and, subsequently, their even harsher treatment of South Carolina. There was plenty of “fraternization” with the blacks who followed in the wake of the troops who had liberated them. But there were lines, and discipline held.

Still .  .  . it was a brutal business, and in the minds of some, it presaged the atrocities of coming conflicts. John Keegan, the formidable British military historian, calls Sherman’s great campaign “an extraordinary achievement, though it had inaugurated a style of warfare that boded the worst sort of ill for peoples unable to keep a conqueror at bay, as Hitler’s campaigns in eastern Europe seventy-five years later would testify.”

To which any American student of his country’s Civil War (however much an amateur) would have to take strong exception. The atrocities of Nazi armies and soldiers found their example (if they needed one) in the old wars of Europe and the dark, medieval spirit of Hitler and his corps of followers. The March to the Sea was American in its essence. Terrible but paradoxically merciful.

Sherman’s operation saved lives and shortened the war and was restrained enough in its brutality to make possible the long but eventual reconciliation. And it made him one of history’s great generals—in the estimation of historian B. H. Liddell Hart, “the first modern general.”

The American Civil War has often been described as the last romantic war and the first modern war. This is certainly true in the realm of weapons and tactics. In the early days of the war, many infantrymen were still armed with smoothbore flintlocks with an effective range of 30 or 40 yards and with which a good man might get off three shots in a minute. When Sherman’s men ran into resistance from a Georgia militia unit a few days into their march, they returned fire with Spencer repeating rifles. The men could shoot seven times without reloading, and the fight was so one-sided that Sherman’s men felt sorry for the old men and young boys they cut down. 

The nearly exponential increase in firepower led to a reliance on defensive measures that included elaborate field fortifications and trenches anticipating those that came to characterize fighting on the Western Front in World War I. In the Civil War, troops were moved to the front, and between theaters of operation, by train. Warships were clad in iron and there was an attempt to make a submersible. Men were sent aloft in balloons to observe the movements of enemy troops.

And some Civil War weaponry anticipated the twilight guerrilla and terrorist operations of the present. During the course of Sherman’s march, one of his men lost a foot to a weapon that had been improvised by the retreating Confederates and that struck Sherman as especially repellent. The man had triggered an artillery shell that had been buried and booby-trapped. It was what would be called today an IED, and its use infuriated Sherman, who later wrote, “This was not war, but murder.”

Perhaps even he still believed that it was possible to “refine” war.

Even so, Liddell Hart’s judgment stands. Sherman was the first great “modern general.” He understood what war had become and did not flinch from its logic. And while the destruction of property and the suffering inflicted on civilians by his troops was awesome and made more so because it was deliberate, there was very little blood spilled on this long march. He made war on his enemy’s ability to make war, and this was less bloody and more conclusive than the stand-up battles fought by generals still operating on the old romantic premises.

Hood, for example, took the bait Sherman had put out for him back in Tennessee and attacked the numerically superior force commanded by General John Schofield. This army was separated from that of General George Thomas, and Hood evidently believed he could defeat the one and then turn on the other, in spite of the fact that he was outnumbered by both Federal formations.

His subordinate commanders protested against the attack, but Hood insisted. He might have been the last of the Civil War generals still clinging to the stand-up frontal assault as the sine qua non of offensive action. It had worked for him when he was under the command of Lee in the east. The victory at Gaines Mills during the Seven Days’ battles had been won by his brigade, attacking up a hill, into the teeth of Union resistance. The fight had been so fierce that when it was done, he’d been found sitting on a cracker barrel weeping.

There had been many battles and many frontal assaults since then, and they had cost Hood the use of an arm and leg and left thousands of men—his and the enemy’s—dead or mutilated. But he still believed, and he ordered his men in. There was a moment when it looked as though the Confederates had broken the Union line. But as so often happened, the assault failed at the moment when it seemed almost to have succeeded because the losses made it impossible to exploit success. This was the Battle of Franklin, and it was a catastrophe for the South, with 7,000 casualties out of a force of slightly over 20,000. One in three of Hood’s men, then, went down; among them, a dozen generals, with six of them killed, including Patrick Cleburne, who was considered by many to be the finest division commander in that army and perhaps in the entire Confederacy.

Hood fought one more major battle after Franklin. He was, again, outnumbered, and this time, he was attacked. His men held for a time but eventually broke, and the battle became a rout. A few of his men escaped, owing to the rearguard actions of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his cavalry, now the only effective Confederate force in the entire theater and too small, by far, to be much of a threat.

The end of Hood’s army occurred almost simultaneously with Sherman’s capture of Savannah, which he presented to President Lincoln, in another of his wired messages, as a “Christmas gift .  .  . with 150 heavy guns and .  .  . about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

The president wired back his thanks to Sherman and Thomas for his rout of Hood and for bringing “those who sat in darkness to see a great light.”

At the close of the year 1864, with Lincoln safely reelected, the war’s end was inevitable and in sight, for those with eyes to see. Sherman’s great operation had accomplished all that it was designed to do. Georgia was burned and broken. Hood’s army was ruined, and Forrest could not alter the course of things. 

These two—Sherman and Forrest—fought to the end and were, perhaps, the two commanders who left the most compelling lessons for history. Both are still figures of controversy, to the point where they are routinely described as having committed war crimes. The case against Forrest is much the stronger. And outside of the purely military spheres, his reputation continues to fall. Troops under his command almost certainly did commit atrocities at Fort Pillow. However, an investigation after the war did not result in charges against Forrest. The investigation was conducted by, of all people, General William Tecumseh Sherman.

 The case against Sherman is mostly academic. Destruction of civilian property—to include entire cities—is a routine feature of modern warfare. Sherman was a pioneer, in this regard, and a relatively restrained one at that.

It is as strategists and tacticians that their accomplishments still compel the attention of military men. George Patton once spent a long vacation walking and studying the ground over which Sherman had maneuvered his army on his way to Atlanta and, then, to the sea. Liddell Hart’s writings about Sherman influenced a whole generation of military men, many of them German. Forrest, too, was the object of intense study by later warriors, among them, Erwin Rommel. In the popular conversation, Sherman and Forrest are remembered for pithy statements. Forrest never actually said that his design was to “get there firstest with the mostest.” This was a creation of the newspapers. What he actually said, in answer to a question, was, “Ma’am, I got there first with the most men.”

Sherman said and wrote many quotable things, including, about the prospect of being a presidential candidate, “If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.”

But the words that he is best known for, by many who cannot identify the source of the quote, are, of course, “War is hell.”

Yes, one thinks, and he made sure of it.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.