Sherman's March to the Sea

• 1. Introduction

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  Sherman's March to the Sea began on the 15th of November 1864, when Major General William T. Sherman led 62,000 soldiers out of the smoldering ruins of Atlanta and into the heart of the Confederacy. Sherman himself watched from a hill just outside the old rebel works as the Fourteenth Corps marched steadily ahead. Behind him, black smoke hung over Atlanta like a pall. Ahead of him lay 300 miles of Georgia farmland, railroad, and mill town. A band struck up "John Brown's Body," and the men took up the chorus. No one watching could have known that this single campaign would help end the war, ignite a century of historical argument, and give the English language a phrase it has never let go.

  What drove Sherman to cut loose from every supply line and march an army through enemy territory? How did a poem written by a Union prisoner of war give the campaign its famous name? And what did the march leave behind, in the ground and in the memory of a nation? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name Born in a Prison Camp

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  S. H. M. Byers wrote the poem that named the march while held captive at Camp Sorghum, near Columbia, South Carolina. He titled it "Sherman's March to the Sea" and fellow prisoner W. O. Rockwell set it to music. When Union forces captured Columbia and freed Byers, he walked straight to General Sherman and pressed a scrap of paper into his hand. Sherman read the poem later that day and was moved enough to promote Byers onto his personal staff. The two remained lifelong friends.

  The song spread rapidly through the army and then to the public, and its title permanently displaced the campaign's official designation, the Savannah campaign. A separate song, "Marching Through Georgia," written by Henry Clay Work in 1865 after the war ended, later became even more widely known. It was sung from the point of view of a Union soldier celebrating the freeing of slaves and punishing the Confederacy for starting the war. Sherman grew to dislike it, partly because he was not a man to rejoice over a fallen enemy, and partly because bands played it at nearly every public event he attended for the rest of his life. The song was still popular among American soldiers in the twentieth century.

• 3. The Architecture of Hard War

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  Grant sent Sherman a one-line telegram on the 2nd of November 1864: "Go as you propose." Both Lincoln and Grant had real reservations about the plan, but Grant trusted Sherman's judgment. The strategic logic was precise: Grant's armies were pinned down besieging Petersburg, Virginia, locked in a stalemate against Robert E. Lee. A march through Georgia could strangle Confederate supply lines and pile pressure onto Lee's rear without fighting through entrenched positions.

  Sherman's Special Field Orders, No. 120 set out the rules of the campaign in detail. Brigade commanders were to organize foraging parties to gather corn, meat, vegetables, and forage, keeping at least ten days of provisions in the wagons at all times. Soldiers were forbidden from entering civilian homes. Only corps commanders had the authority to destroy mills, cotton gins, and similar structures, and only then if local inhabitants had shown hostility by burning bridges or obstructing roads. The orders further specified that cavalry could seize horses and mules, but directed them to distinguish between wealthy landowners, who were presumed hostile, and poorer residents, who were presumed neutral or friendly.

  Sherman used livestock and crop data from the 1860 United States census to route the army through the most productive farming districts. His men traveled on two parallel columns, which helped conceal their actual destination. Confederates could not determine at first whether the army was heading for Macon, Augusta, or Savannah. The twisted railroad rails the soldiers heated and wrapped around tree trunks became known as Sherman's neckties, a signature of the campaign visible for miles.

• 4. The Army Itself

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  Before the Atlanta campaign that immediately preceded the march, Sherman had imposed rigorous physical examinations on every soldier. Doctors screened out the weak and the sick; one percent of the men were left behind on those grounds alone. Eighty percent of the soldiers who made the cut were veterans of multiple campaigns, primarily in the Western theatre. The force that left Atlanta comprised 55,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, and 2,000 artillerymen manning 64 guns.

  In 1929, British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart called these men "probably the finest army of military 'workmen' the modern world has seen." Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, after surrendering to Sherman, said of them that "there has been no such army since the days of Julius Caesar." Sherman's personal escort for the march was the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, a unit made up entirely of Southerners who had stayed loyal to the Union.

  The opposing Confederate force was a fraction of that size. Lieutenant General William J. Hardee's department could field only about 13,000 men, and the bulk of Georgia's forces had already left with Lieutenant General John Bell Hood on his separate campaign into Tennessee, a move Sherman welcomed. When told that Hood might push as far as the Ohio River, Sherman is recorded as saying, "If he will go to the Ohio River, I'll give him rations." Major General Gustavus W. Smith's Georgia militia numbered roughly 3,050 soldiers, described in the source as mostly boys and elderly men.

• 5. The March Itself

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  The first real battle came on the 22nd of November at Griswoldville, where Confederate militia launched several hours of badly coordinated attacks against Union infantry positions. They retreated with roughly 1,100 casualties, compared to about 100 Union losses. Three days earlier, on the 23rd of November, Slocum's left wing had taken Milledgeville, the state capital, prompting Governor Joseph Brown and the state legislature to flee in haste. Union troops held a mock legislative session in the state capitol building and jokingly voted Georgia back into the Union.

  The cavalry fights that threaded through the march were sharp and personal. At Buck Head Creek on the 28th of November, Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick was surprised and nearly captured before the 5th Ohio Cavalry halted Wheeler's advance. Wheeler was stopped for good by Union barricades at Reynolds's Plantation. On the 4th of December, Kilpatrick's cavalry routed Wheeler's force at the Battle of Waynesboro.

  Sherman's armies reached Savannah's outskirts on the 10th of December. Hardee had entrenched 10,000 men behind flooded rice fields, leaving only narrow causeways into the city. Sherman could not link up with the U.S. Navy until his cavalry stormed Fort McAllister on the 13th of December; Hazen's division took it in 15 minutes. Some of the 134 Union casualties there were caused by torpedoes, an early form of land mine rarely used in the war. With naval contact restored and siege artillery brought ashore, Sherman sent Hardee a surrender demand on the 17th of December, warning that his guns could reach the heart of the city and offering liberal terms if Hardee yielded. Hardee chose to escape instead. On the night of the 20th, he led his garrison across the Savannah River on a makeshift pontoon bridge. The next morning, the mayor of Savannah, Richard Dennis Arnold, rode out with aldermen and civic leaders to offer the city's surrender in exchange for a promise to protect its citizens.

• 6. The Gift and Its Aftermath

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  On the 22nd of December 1864, Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." Lincoln replied on the 26th of December, writing that he had been anxious when Sherman left Atlanta but had deferred to Sherman's judgment: "the honor is all yours." He closed by asking simply, "But what next?"

  What followed immediately was a month in Savannah. Sherman organized relief for the flood of refugees who poured into the city. He arranged for 50,000 bushels of captured rice to be sold in the North to raise money to feed Savannah's population. Local high society refused to appear at social events where Union officers were present, yet Sherman spent much of that month writing back to Confederate officers who had sent him private letters asking him to protect their families. He honored every such request regardless of rank or social standing.

  Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, issued from Savannah, assigned land to the large number of refugees who had followed the army. In popular culture, those orders have long been identified as the origin of the phrase "forty acres and a mule." A Confederate officer estimated that 10,000 freed enslaved people had followed Sherman's army during the march itself; hundreds died of hunger, disease, or exposure along the way. At Ebenezer Creek, north of Savannah, hundreds of African Americans drowned attempting to cross while trying to follow the army. A historical marker was erected there by the Georgia Historical Society in 2011.

• 7. What the March Left Behind

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  Sherman estimated the total destruction at $100 million, of which he said roughly one fifth served a concrete military purpose while the rest was, in his own words, "simple waste and destruction." His army wrecked 300 miles of railroad, seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle, and confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder. A 2022 study published in the American Economic Journal found that the capital destruction caused by the march produced a large contraction in agricultural investment, farming asset prices, and manufacturing activity, and that elements of the agricultural decline persisted through 1920.

  Historians Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones described the campaign as knocking the Confederate war effort to pieces. David J. Eicher wrote that Sherman had defied military principles by operating deep within enemy territory without supply or communication lines and had destroyed much of the South's capacity and will to wage war.

  The classification debate has never fully settled. Some historians call the march an early example of total war in modern warfare, pointing to comparisons with World War II tactics raised in the years after 1945. Others insist the label is wrong and prefer the term "hard war," arguing that Sherman's orders explicitly limited destruction and that civilian death tolls were low compared to twentieth-century conflicts. W. Todd Groce, President and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society, argued that Sherman's primary targets were foodstuffs and military-industrial property, never mass civilian killing. Historian Daniel E. Sutherland, in a 2014 essay, cautioned that scholars eager to distinguish the Civil War from later conflicts risked sanitizing how destructive it actually was. The march through South Carolina that followed was by Sherman's own admission more destructive still, and the violence against women during the Carolinas campaign has only recently received sustained scholarly attention. That unfinished reckoning is where the historiography of Sherman's March now stands.