“Yeah, when he says Until we can repopulate Georgia
Why do you think he used ‘repopulate’?”
Don’t be fatuous. They didn’t repopulate, did they? I must have missed the part of “history” where the people of Georgia were relocated to concentration camps and folks from New York, etc. moved into their houses. No “repopulation” ever happened, which would lead normal people to believe Sherman didn’t mean it literally. Unless Sherman wanted to do it but didn’t get his way. In that case, what’s the difference, since he didn’t do it anyway? The best you could allege at that point is that it was a failed genocide.
When he says “until,” you’d be better off imagining it as “unless,” because that’s more to the point. Unless the Union army could magically replace the Southerners in Georgia with loyal union men, they’d constantly be a sore spot. Sherman’s saying he knew the local population would never sit idly by and let him occupy them. He knew it’d be prohibitively costly to hold onto the roads and such while leaving their backside exposed.
He might have done what other Union generals did and fought the other side’s army. But he didn’t want to, not least because his fighting prowess was far below his current reputation. He wanted, instead, to destroy the South’s “fighting ability,” which is not the same as committing genocide. But which, incidentally, involved killing civilians.
Oh, he did plenty of fighting during the war, and he was pretty good at it too. Remember, he had to take Atlanta from Hood's army just to have the opportunity to do what he did later.
But he realized that victory would not be measured in the amount of blood spilled. It would finally be decided when one side or another either lost the will, or the ability to continue the war.
His plan for the March through Georgia was to destroy the supplies and transportation that supplied Lee and the other Southern armies that allowed them to continue fighting.