Upon the Altar of the Nation (68 page)

Davis’s call to fight on without cities or armies was a call to guerrilla warfare and terrorism. If enacted it would complete Sherman’s prophecy, making civilians into soldiers. In a profound—if demonic—sense it represented another side of Sherman’s moral logic that, if implemented, would hoist Sherman and his commanders on their own petard—a literal blurring of the line between Southern soldiers and civilians. Moreover, by making Sherman’s case literally true—no innocents in the white South—it was a war the South could win despite Sherman’s legions.
⁶
Many Southerners, moreover, would have agreed that Sherman deserved it. But was it just? With Missouri in view, most Confederate generals resisted this draconian option. Soon enough, all these cities would indeed fall, leading to the question of who would ultimately control the fate of the Confederacy, the president or the generals?

If Davis’s communications were the language of a doomed cause, they were also a rich source of intelligence for Sherman, who read the Southern papers carefully and learned of Hood’s movements and intentions. He learned as well that Governor Brown of Georgia, a critic of the Davis administration, withdrew his state troops from Hood’s army for the purpose of gathering in the season’s crops. Besides the open feuding between president and governor that this action signaled, it also told Sherman that rich food supplies intended for the people could be his for the taking.

As the country faced its bloodiest battles throughout 1864, the Union generals came to know each other well. They gained a personal sense not only of their fellow generals—with Grant and Sherman being the epitome—but also of the enemy. In correspondence with one another, generals would routinely refer to the enemy army as “Lee” or “Sherman” or “Hood” rather than use the name of the armies themselves. When Lincoln ordered Grant to “Get Lee” instead of “Get the Army of Northern Virginia,” he was instinctively underlining how critical the generals were to the success or failure of the war effort both on the battlefield and, perhaps even more, on the home front.

Well might Lincoln personalize the war around the generals, for in fact, by 1864, they dictated its conduct. And in this arena, at least, it would be inaccurate to say that silence greeted the subject of just conduct in the war. De facto, the generals determined what was “just” conduct through edict and experience and articulated it in the form of orders that were invariably supported by their administrations. And invariably they found any conduct, short of rapine and genocide, just. The generals proved as adept in covering their moral flanks as they were in covering their infantry flanks in time of battle. The war effort depended on both. For the war to play out in the way that it did, it was imperative to protect both flanks or see the cause turned and rolled up.

Many questioned military tactics, especially in defeat, but no voices questioned the generals’ deliberations or rethought criteria for just and unjust conduct. Clergy, intellectuals, artists, and journalists remained silent. The generals made the hard pragmatic decisions of war and then turned to the public moralists—chiefly the clergy—to provide moral justification and endorsement or, failing that, to turn a deaf ear. This conspiracy of silence over just conduct goes a long way to explain how military destruction and civilian suffering reached the levels they did.

In 1864 Sherman
needed
his moral flanks covered even as he traveled into unknown areas—geographically and ethically. Though prepared to support Sherman, Grant and Lincoln were skeptical. The gains, of course, were immense. So were the risks. In the end, the consequences of doing nothing loomed larger than the risks of approving Sherman’s march.

In the Confederacy, Davis and Hood proved a horrible match for one another. In their common repudiation of Johnston’s policy of protraction, they played right into Union hands. A protracted war might have won the South its independence. An attack risked suicide. Grant recognized that at last both sides had grown weary of war, but the South could hold out longer if its armies remained intact and on the move.

“In the North,” Grant later observed, “the people governed, and could stop hostilities whenever they chose to stop supplies. The South was a military camp, controlled absolutely by the government with the soldiers to back it, and the war could have been protracted, no matter to what extent the discontent reached, up to the point of open mutiny of the soldiers themselves.”
⁷
While correct about the South, Grant was wrong to suppose a different North. There, too, war would continue until the soldiers mutinied.

 

To prepare for his grueling march, Sherman spent much of October neutralizing Hood and ensuring that his army could not be attacked from the rear should Hood decide to reverse directions. By October 26, when Sherman learned that Hood was moving south into Decatur, Alabama, he knew the way was paved for his “long-contemplated project.” General Thomas would check (and soon defeat) Hood in Tennessee, and Sherman faced no further significant military obstacles. The heartland would be his for the taking, if only Grant and Lincoln would say yes.

On November I a still-skeptical General Grant instructed Sherman to first destroy Hood’s army. Sherman replied that if he tried, Hood would simply keep running to draw Sherman out of Georgia and delay the whole campaign. Nothing would be gained, especially with General Thomas’s army more than capable of blocking Hood in Tennessee: “I am convinced the best results will follow from our defeating Jeff. Davis’s cherished plan of making me leave Georgia by maneuvering.”
⁸
Finally, on November 2, Grant agreed to sign off on Sherman’s scheme of a “march to the sea.”

With Grant’s and Lincoln’s approval, Sherman decided to leave soon after the presidential election of November 8. On the morning of November 12, Sherman sent his last telegraph message to General Thomas and then severed the telegraph wire, and with it, all communication with his rear. With twenty days’ rations and no supply line, he was effectively on his own.

His army was a marvel. Hardened veterans all, with sick and wounded sent back, it was arguably the most powerful human machine ever assembled. Grant recognized rightly that Sherman’s forces were “as good soldiers as ever trod the earth; better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought. European armies know very little what they are fighting for, and care less.”
⁹

Among the enlisted men, John Emerson Anderson shared Grant’s sense of Sherman’s awesome martial machine: “I will not attempt to describe our feelings of astonishment when it was rumored, or announced, that we were going to sever our communications with the north and march right out into the enemies country.”
¹⁰
While soldiers flexed, Sherman worried. The idea had been his, and all responsibility rested on him as well. Later, he recalled: “There was a ‘devil-may-care’ feeling pervading officers and men, that made me feel the full load of responsibility, for success would be accepted as a matter of course, whereas, should we fail, this ‘march’ would be adjudged the wild adventure of a crazy fool.”
¹¹

In a general order issued on November 9, Sherman had addressed the coming campaign and the subject of just conduct. Foraging, a euphemism for plundering valuables regardless of “military value,” would be necessary, but “soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass.” In areas where the army was left unmolested, it was to show restraint. But in areas of guerrilla activity or burned bridges, the army should respond in kind, including the destruction of homes: “Army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” As for “horses, mules wagons, etc., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit.”
¹²
How these limitations were to be enforced with sixty thousand vengeful soldiers in residential streets and neighborhoods Sherman never addressed.

The first stop on the march was Atlanta, where Sherman’s soldiers burned what was left of the city to the ground and began moving south toward Savannah. The mobile army organized into two wings, with the Army of the Tennessee on the right under General Howard and the Army of Georgia on the left under General Slocum, Sheridan’s roommate at West Point.

Lacking telegraph connections, Grant relied on Richmond newspapers to shadow Sherman’s movements across Georgia. As they marched across the countryside, Union bands played “John Brown’s Body,” striking dread into the hearts of watching civilians who were unable to protect themselves against the devastation they knew was coming. With a front that ranged between twenty-five and sixty miles wide and a pace that covered twelve miles a day, Sherman’s vengeful foragers (“bummers”) cut a swath of destruction that seemed almost a frolic to the virtually unchecked Yankees, but was a terror to defenseless civilians. One New York soldier described the devastation in chillingly entertaining terms: “Destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton and gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally.”
¹³

Clearly the soldiers were having a good time—the kind of good time that omes when you are assured that what you are doing is just and conducive to a swift ending of the war. They encountered relatively little resistance, as the total Confederate defenders included only thirteen thousand troops. In addition, a who’s who of Confederate generals—including Joseph Wheeler, P. G. T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, Dick Taylor, Lafayette McLaws, G. W. Smith, and William J. Hardee—were all present in Georgia to observe Sherman’s progress. With no troops, however, they could do nothing but watch as the people of Georgia groaned.

Foraging. This sketch by Winslow Homer depicts happy Federal soldiers “liberating” a reluctant cow as wheat fields stand in the background ready for plunder.

To disguise his initial destination of Milledgeville, Sherman sent one wing to threaten Augusta and the other to Macon. In seven days they would again link up. After a series of feints and minor skirmishes with hapless Confederates, Sherman’s wings converged at Milledgeville on November 23 and began moving toward Augusta and Savannah. Along the way, Sherman’s bummers destroyed the railroads completely, twisting molten rail tracks around trees to create “Sherman’s pretzels.” As they went, the army destroyed or confiscated all resources and property that could remotely be considered “of military value.” This included, of course, food for civilians now threatened with starvation in the coming winter months.

Not surprisingly, although private homes and property were theoretically protected by Sherman’s orders, commanders could not prevent their troops from exacting revenge on the people. The greatest damages reportedly came with General Hugh (“Kilcavalry”) Kilpatrick’s cavalry, to whom he gave a virtual green light to do as they pleased. By November 22, the pious General Howard (Kilpatrick’s moral opposite) had had enough and issued the following general order:

Noble as Howard’s orders were, no one was shot to death for crimes against civilians, and the devastation ground on. Commanders could complain and issue orders, but what did they expect? The very strategy of inflicting sixty thousand battle-hardened and unsupplied men on defenseless communities could not possibly lead to anything else. And the commanders, being intelligent West Point graduates, knew it. It was a classic case of covering their moral flanks with the rhetoric of “orders,” while knowing that the frontal assault would continue the urban destruction. They knew as well that carnage on civilians who had no one to defend them would further the war aims of demoralization and despair. Sherman understood this more clearly than the “Christian General” Howard and embraced “terror” as a war aim. Having emptied the acts of war of their moral content, he reduced the action to “which party can whip” by whatever means it took.

Sherman pushed forward even though he recognized that he could not control “the fate of a vast machine” as it rumbled to the sea. Reflecting later on the foraging, he conceded that “no doubt, many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence, were committed by these parties of foragers.... [But] I never heard of any cases of murder or rape.”
¹⁵
His friend and commander, General Grant, backed him up. In his memoirs, Grant concluded: “I do not believe there was much unwarrantable pillaging considering that we were in the enemy’s territory and without any supplies except such as the country afforded.”
¹⁶