The March to the Sea was a scorched-earth campaign mounted by the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman as his army marched through Georgia from Atlanta to the Atlantic coast at Savannah. His army desolated the Georgian countryside, looted and burned farms, and destroyed railroad lines, demoralizing the South in an early instance of "total war". The campaign concluded with his capture of Savannah, which he presented to President Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas present.
Background[]
After the fall of Atlanta, Sherman weighed up his next move, even as Confederate General John Bell Hood intended to maneuver him into battle.
Having left Atlanta, John Bell Hood and his Army of Tennessee still hoped to bring Sherman to battle. But after pushing Hood into northern Alabama, Sherman left him there, assigning George Henry Thomas' Army of the Cumberland to protect the Union rear. He turned his back on Hood, having persuaded a reluctant Lincoln and Grant to approve instead a march through Georgia to the sea.
Philip Sheridan, in devastating the Shenandoah Valley, had demonstrated the effectiveness of a scorched-earth policy. Sherman planned a similar campaign on a larger scale, torching everything that his army could not consume and waging total war on the South.
History[]
On 15 November 1864, General Sherman's 62,000 soldiers filed out of their camps around Atlanta, many marching over the battlefields of the previous summer. From their high vantage point, they could look back over the debris of empty cartridge boxes and shredded breastworks, and observe a terrible sight - Atlanta, in the distance, engulfed in a vast sheet of flame and smoke. Sherman, having declared it a Union fortress and deported its citizens, was burning the city in the process of abandoning it. Atlanta would never be useful to another Confederate army.
Before them more destruction awaited. Sherman's rule of never returning by the road he had come meant his veterans were leaving behind their old lifeline - the single-track railroad around which they had maneuvered their way to Atlanta. Having dispatched adequate forces to shadow General John Bell Hood's wounded Army of Tennessee in Alabama, Sherman was heading for the sea. He had persuaded Lincoln and Grant that a march to the Georgia coast was a good idea - putting his chosen 62,000 within easy reach of troop transports that could ferry them to Petersburg. The general had convinced himself that by cutting a path of destruction through the heart of the Confederacy, he might "make Georgia howl."
Sherman's orders[]
Heading generally southeast toward Savannah, the army advanced in two columns, staying 20-40 miles apart. They carried supplies with them but intended to live off the land. Each brigade was allotted its share of the army's 2,500 supply wagons along with its own party of foragers, or "bummers." Sherman had given his forces strict instructions in the form of his "Special Field Orders, No. 120." The order gave broad freedom in the requisitioning of horses, mules, forage, and provisions, but expressly forbade entering civilians' property or using "abusive or threatening language" to householders. If, passing through any given district, the army was unopposed, mills, cotton gins, and homesteads were not to be destroyed. If opposed, however, commanders should impose "a devastation more or less relentless." But the rules were not enforced. In fact, the two columns gauged each other's position by the pillars of smoke on the horizon; burnngs marked their progress.
It might have been the war's most roguish march were it not for its punitive intent. In Milledgeville, Georgia's capital, the invading army held a mock session of the legislature in the abandoned chambers, repealing the ordinance of secession. Sherman slept that night in the Governor's pillared mansion, but in his own camp bed because all the furnitue had been hidden. The soldiers destroyed railroads, ripping up tracks and twisting them into "sherman neckties." They devoured all livestock in their path. They stripped farms of all their forage and root crops. They burned barns, corncribs, cotton gins, houses, and once an entire town. Coming across Camp Lawton, a prisoner-of-war stockade, the veterans were so enraged by the brutalities they found that Sherman ordered nearby Millen to be destroyed with "ten-fold" times the usual measure. As the Union army advanced over a front nearly 60 miles wide, all the South could do was narrow the zone of destruction.
Rebel resistance[]
The only formal resistance was met near Griswoldville, where Georgia militia tried to stem Sherman's advance. The militia were slaughtered - 650 killed or injured, with only 62 Union casualties. Most of the fighting took the form of skirmishing against scattered militia and the few thousand Confederate cavalrymen led by General Joseph Wheeler, whose men took horses and valuables well before the army arrived. They even applied the torch themselves, using scorched-earth tactics to foil the bummers.
The devastation inevitably got out of control, and was further aggravated by marauding groups of deserters and renegades. Even the Confederate cavalry - now branded "Wheeler's robbers" - let discipline slip. And, to complicate matters, thousands of jubilant ex-slaves were swept up in the wake of the march.
Savannah in sight[]
By early December, as the army skirted the low country swamps and marched beneath trees festooned with Spanish moss, Sherman's increasingly scruffy soldiers were being called the "Lost Army" by the North. The men emerged into view by 11 December, "within sight of the spires of Savannah," one of them wrote, "if there were not so many trees in the way."
Savannah was garrisoned by 10,000 soldiers and was protected by a ring of defenses mounting over 100 siege guns. But the packed-earth Fort McAllister, 12 miles below the city, was Sherman's main concern. It had long defied Union warships; but on 13 December, in an all-out assault, his infantrymen stormed through the circle of sharpened stakes and mounted the parapets. Its 230 defenders resisted bravely but futilely. Four days later, Sherman formally demanded the city's surrender. The garrison commander, General William J. Hardee, chose to evacuate instead. After dark on 20 December, lit only by distant fires as the navy yard was set alight, a line of men and wagons moved across the Savannah River to South Carolina on a vast pontoon bridge. The next night the ironclad CSS Savannah exploded, lighting up the sky for miles. "The concussion was fearful," one witness reported, "rocking the city."
Sherman's gift to Lincoln[]
When nervous city fathers gathered to surrender the city to the Union, they had to scramble to find carriages, most having been stolen by Wheeler's vacating cavalry. Many citizens were frantic that their city would go the same way as Atlanta. But when Sherman rode in on 22 December, he found the same town of handsome squares and shade trees that he remembered so fondly. As his tattered legions marched down the grand avenues, he sent a telegram to President Lincoln": "Dear sir," he began, "I beg to present you as a Christmas Gift, the City of Savannah..."
Aftermath[]
Sherman's March to the Sea had inflicted a devastating blow on Southern morale while making Sherman a hero in the North.
Sherman did not burn Savnanah like he did Atlanta and Columbia, South Carolina. Instead, he spent the winter there, putting his veterans on the road again a few weeks later - this time headed north. And rather than dispatching his men to Petersburg to reinforce Grant, he plundered his way through the Carolinas in the same way he had done through Georgia. General Joseph E. Johnston, brought back from retirement, would try to stop him with an army of barely 30,000 men.
Before Sherman departed Atlanta, he had quipped that if Hood would go "to the Ohio River, I'll give him rations...my business is down south." Hood had tried doing just that, but he and his Army of Tennessee were virtually destroyed by George Thomas at the Battle of Nashville.