Vernon Carne/AJC
"If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking."
AP
Posted on 05/08/2004 3:37:03 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
One hundred and forty years ago this month, 100,000 Union soldiers marched into Georgia. Less than eight months later, the Yankees captured Savannah. Along the way, they fought more than 20 major battles, crushed Confederate resistance, destroyed at least $100 million worth of railroads, warehouses, plantations and factories, and left Atlanta in smoking ruins.
It remains one of the most famous military campaigns in American history: Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's March through Georgia. It's still taught to cadets at West Point as an example of how to break an enemy's will to fight. And without the trauma of Yankees plowing from Dalton to Savannah, "Gone With the Wind" could have to be called something like "It's Kind of Breezy." Civil War buffs would consider Georgia to be, well, just Alabama with major league baseball.
But the current consensus of historians and other academics is that Sherman's vilification by the South stems from tall tales. Uncle Billy, the gruff Ohioan who promised to "make Georgia howl," did destroy a lot of infrastructure and military targets in Georgia. He ordered railroads ripped up and food confiscated.
Still, by the standards of war at the time, "that devil Sherman" really wasn't that bad a guy.
"It was pretty scary, but the destruction is not that bad," said Anne J. Bailey, a professor at Georgia College and State University and the author of "War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign."
"If [Sherman] had told his men to lay waste to the land, they could have done a lot worse than they did."
A growing body of research shows that long-standing horror stories about Sherman's pillage and mayhem — everything from widespread reports of rape to pouring syrup into church organs — cannot be documented.
"Sherman's bark was a lot worse than his bite," said Richard McMurry, author of "Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy."
Many Southerners consider Sherman the quintessential villain, sort of a cross between Attila the Hun and Godzilla.
The famous editor of The Atlanta Constitution, Henry Grady, chided Sherman for being "careless with matches." But today the criticism is blunt. On Web sites, in newsletters and in books, Sherman is referred to as "the Nero of the 19th Century" or "the grand arsonist." One Web site has gone so far as to put up a doctored photo of the general with horns and a tail.
"He's a general that many people still love to hate," said Steven Woodworth, a Sherman biographer and associate history professor at Texas Christian University.
Sherman and his men did do a lot of damage in Georgia, as well as the Carolinas. They laid waste to large swaths of countryside. His soldiers ransacked and looted farms for food. They confiscated animals. Newly freed slaves fled farms when his troops showed up.
His artillery bombed Atlanta, which later burned after he captured it. He ordered the destruction of factories, warehouses, railroads and plantations. Battles between Sherman and Georgia's Confederate defenders caused tens of thousands of casualties.
His army slugged its way through North Georgia from May through July, when it surrounded Atlanta. After heavy fighting around the city for the next two months, the Confederates pulled out. On Sept. 2, 1864, Sherman took Atlanta. Later that month, he ordered all remaining civilians to leave.
Sherman wrote a letter at the time to officials in Washington: "If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking."
Selective targets
On Nov. 15, he left Atlanta with about 60,000 men and marched in three columns across Georgia. As he left, much of what remained in Atlanta burned.
Many Southerners have been reared to believe he ordered his troops to burn the entire city. In fact, he ordered soldiers to burn military targets that the Confederates had not destroyed themselves when they abandoned Atlanta, according to his official orders issued at the time.
In his memoirs, Sherman writes that the area of downtown near the depot, where the Confederates had stored supplies, "was in flames all night, but the fire did not reach the parts of Atlanta where the courthouse was, or the great mass of dwelling houses."
According to Sherman biographers, the general personally ordered many of his troops to fight to contain the fires, though other soldiers set fires that he had not authorized.
Sherman's efforts, such as they were, appeared to have little effect in saving Atlanta. The next day, Sherman rode out of town toward Savannah. He wrote in his memoirs: "Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city."
His march through the rest of Georgia did not involve many major fires. Macon, Milledgeville, Madison and other cities were not burned, though select military targets, including a pistol factory in the now-extinct town of Griswoldville, were destroyed.
Sherman captured Savannah shortly before Christmas. After making arrangements with local authorities, he occupied the city without burning it. From Savannah, Sherman marched into South Carolina, where his troops were much more destructive than they ever were in Georgia.
Mark Grimsley, an Ohio State University professor and author of "The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865," said historical records show that Sherman destroyed accepted military targets.
"What Sherman did was more spectacular than what anyone else did, these marches through whole states," Grimsley said. "It was really dramatic and it arrested people's attention, but his army went after targets that by the standards of the time were considered fair game."
Grimsley, who grew up in North Carolina, said he heard the Sherman-as-devil legends, but historic facts don't support this idea, especially in Georgia. "That's not to say that what Sherman's army did was mild-mannered," he said. "It wasn't. It was destructive, but it was within bounds."
McMurry, author of "Atlanta 1864," and one of the nation's leading Civil War historians, said the lore of Sherman the destroyer was bolstered, in part, by Sherman himself. He used Southern fears to help cow them into submission.
"It's partly his doing," McMurry said. "If he conveys that myth to the Confederate soldiers, he really undermines their will to fight."
Confederate soldiers in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia deserted in larger numbers upon hearing of Sherman's march. Confederate diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she heard all Sherman's army left in its wake were charred chimneys.
Not a one-man gang
Lee Kennett, retired University of Georgia professor and author of "Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman's Campaign," said a myth has developed in the minds of many Southerners that "every shell [fired in the campaign] was personally aimed by Sherman."
"It was a nostalgic myth that was added to by succeeded generations," he said.
Elissa R. Henken, a UGA folklorist, has been collecting local tales about Sherman from small towns in Georgia for more than 10 years. She finds Sherman stories are widespread and even crop up in areas the Union army never reached.
In these tales, Sherman appears to serve as a personification of the carnage and cruelty of war. "He still figures so prominently in people's imaginations. He is that devil Sherman," Henken said. "He is this humongous representation of evil."
Against that backdrop, a lot of towns had to invent stories to explain why they had not been ransacked or burned.
"Each town treats itself as the one and only one that was saved," she said. "But they all have similar stories. . . . Why would such evil leave you alone? They come up with all kinds of reasons."
Most "saved from Sherman" stories involve Southern belles charming the general or Masons giving him special handshakes or great cooks serving him special local food. These stories enforce the Southern view of itself as genteel and the North as apish.
"The South has a view of itself, a stereotype of itself, of being civilized, of having good manners," she said. "They may have lost the war, but they have still conquered their enemy."
Lore of Madison
Madison, a hamlet of well-preserved antebellum homes in east Georgia, has at least six legends about how the town was spared Sherman's wrath. The most popular is that Sherman found the town "too beautiful to burn." In truth, the town's military stores and railroad were burned, and the rest of the town was spared by Sherman's soldiers. No one is exactly sure why, but it likely had little to do with the general himself. He never came within miles of the place.
Tina Lilly, director of the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, said Madison residents have a running joke: If they see a pothole in the asphalt street, they say, "The Yankees did it." Visitors come to the center's museum, she said, often arrive looking for evidence of "Yankee destruction."
"They want to see the horrible things the Yankees did," she said, "as if there is still going to be a fiery path all the way from here to Savannah."
Bailey, who lectures on Sherman's march to groups across Georgia and the South, said the myth of Sherman is much more powerful with many Southerners than the historical reality. She said she encounters "real hostility" when she suggests his march was not as devastating as many Southerners have been taught.
"When you talk about Sherman in the Deep South, there isn't really anything you can do to resurrect his reputation with some people," she said.
"If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking."
AP
If you ever get the chance, do yourself a favor and sign up for a talk or trip with Richard McMurry. You will never find a more engaging lecturer or guide.
Asked and answered:
"We cannot change the hearts of these people of the South but we can make war so terrible...make them so sick of war that generations will pass before they ever again appeal to it."
You're right, it is easy to re-write history. Or at least try to. Most of Sherman's army was from the west - Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, etc. - and your claim that most were criminals is southron myth-making at its best. And as for Sherman not wanting a disciplined fighting force, well, his army beat the snot out of every southern general sent against it, Bragg, Johnston, Polk, Beauregard, you name it. Not bad for an undisciplined band of unbridled terrorists, is it?
No need hating a man for doing what he had to do.
Not at all.
"War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. And I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave-in until we are whipped - or they are." -- William T. Sherman
But it's for a good cause.
We seem to have forgotten this.
I think most of America and the world gets this. The partisan media and the preening Congress and Senate are thrilled. They gleefully shout it from the rooftops and denigrate the military in the eyes of our youth.
What goes around, comes around.
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