Sherman's March

Interesting new historical marker just installed in Atlanta by the Georgia Historical Society. I have written before about the notion that Sherman's March to the Sea was some sort of titanic act of wanton brutality, which is much more a product of Jim Crow era politics than Civil War reality. In the 1880s Sherman visited Atlanta and was toasted at dinners sponsored by Civil War veterans. They understood that he had just been doing his job in 1864, and they were very pleased about the way he was leading the US Army in the Indian wars.

On the other hand, I do not entirely agree with this marker, either. One reason Sherman got such a bad reputation was his own mouth, since he kept saying things like, "What we're going to do, is make the Confederacy howl" and "War is hell." When you talk like that, you are bound to make some people hate you. Plus his march was not really about destroying material stuff at all -- it was an act of psychological warfare, the outcome of a high-level discussion that he, Grant, and their top aides had been engaged in for months about how to bring the war to a close. By showing that he could go wherever he wanted and do whatever pleased, he hoped to convince Southerners that their government could not defend them. By leaving his intentions mysterious he hoped to spread terror far beyond the route of his march. And one reason he cut himself off from supplies was that constantly raiding supply lines gave the Confederates a string of little victories that, he and Grant thought, helped keep up their morale. No supply lines meant no triumphs for bold Confederate raiders like Forrest or Morgan, no positive headlines in Southern newspapers.

This marker also verges on that cleaned-up language that has been the hallmark of American propaganda in recent wars -- "surgical strikes," "collateral damage," that sort of thing. Sherman's march was quite destructive and it was attended by thousands of acts of cruelty and vandalism. Sherman may not have ordered them, but he didn't do much to stop them, either. A line like "primarily destroyed only property used for waging war" can cover a lot of horrors, since one kind of property used for waging war was food. Also draft animals, milk cows, cotton gins, and pretty much everything else that Southern farmers depended on to earn their livings. A surgical strike on war industries it was not -- as Sherman would have been the first to admit.

Yet the final evaluation has to be the one that this marker offers: Sherman's march hastened the end of slavery and the reunification of the nation. Southerners could have ended the war at any time by accepting what they accepted in 1865. But the war had to go on, as Longstreet said of Picket's Charge, until honor was satisfied. The planter class engineered the war to protect their own power and uphold their own precious honor, and if the result was that they lost all their property to Sherman's "bummers," that was only what they deserved.