In the Civil War, General William T. Sherman, after capturing Atlanta, led a march to the sea. It’s entered our national myth & legend – there’s even a song about it (“While We Were Marching Through Georgia”). He gets his own title card in Gone With the Wind (“Sherman!!”).
What was the military significance of it? GWTW has another card, with something about “bringing the South to its knees” or some such. Why was the march important, and did it have any post-war effect?
Sherman devastated a vast area of land, through a state that was far from any Union territory. Aside from the economic devastation (well over a billion 2022 dollars), it established that the Union could operate freely in Confederate territory for weeks at a time without the Confederates being able to do anything about it, reach the Atlantic and capture a port city for the Union Navy, and be posed to march on Richmond from the South.
Georgia got off easy. Read up on what Sherman did to South Carolina. That campaign effectively ended the war.
It split the Confederacy in half. That’s pretty devastating to armies that are struggling to coordinate activities. By taking the sea ports the Union army had an untouchable resupply route as the there was literally no Confederate Navy by that time.
I think I assumed that by the time Atlanta fell, the war was virtually over anyway, and strategy was no longer necessary.
There are no half measures in a total war, which is what Grant, Sherman and Lincoln were fighting. The Union was tightening the noose around the Confederacy and wasn’t going to let up while the enemy still had a viable army in the field., which it did under Lee.
That was the North’s strategy. Chop the South into pieces and strangle each one. Lee was still in the field, and there were several significant battles during the March, so the war was hardly over just yet.
From the time they fired on Fort Sumpter, the war was virtually over.
It just took the south a few years to realize it. Sherman’s march to the sea helped them to come to that fact.
Stepping away from the impact on the United States…
I’m not a military historian but, from what I understand, Sherman’s march is considered a notable military achievement of maneuver warfare and an early example of total war.
But, in terms of our history, he’s commonly held as a reviled character in Southern mythology because of the damage that he did to their economy. His use of total war went against the gentlemanly rules of warfare at the time and was interpreted as being villainous. Of course, the South was using guerilla warfare (which was also in violation of the gentlemanly rules of warfare) and was fighting the war because they reneged on an agreement to abide by the rules of the Constitution so…eh.
It’s a similar situation to the one that confronted Bush in the War on Terror. The gentlemanly rules of warfare say that you show up to battle in a uniform, on a field, and face off against one another. When one team stops doing that, your team is in a predicament on how to proceed. If you send your guys out in uniforms to stand in a field, not much is going to happen.
An alternative strategy was the one the British followed in the Second Boer War, basically collecting all the civilians in the country and sticking them in prison, so the only people outside were the enemy force.
So far, no one has found a solution to the hide & seek problem that doesn’t make them look like a villain, to at least someone.
The leaders of the Confederacy would have been willing to keep fighting as long as it was black people and poor white people who were bearing most of the burden of the war. But when Sherman started burning plantations, the Confederacy suddenly wanted to end the war.
And Lee’s surrender to Grant didn’t end the war. After Appomattox, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston still remained in the field with a substantial army. His subsequent surrender of all Confederate forces in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida to Sherman was the largest surrender of the war and disbanded the bulk of what remained of the Confederate military.
Once war became advanced over the lances and arrows stage, when an army required gunpowder, machined metal firearms and armies of such size that supply and transport by railroad was the best solution, when communication was often by telegraph - then the industry behind the scenes became as valid a war target. the makers and transporters of supplies are as valid a target as the front line armies. The lines of transport and communication are valid targets. It was what justified the wholesale bombings of WWII also.
The Civil War it can be argued was the first such war. In industrializing western Europe things had been relatively peaceful between the great powers since Napoleon, while technology advanced at a rapid pace. The Union top brass obviously recognized the value of creating chaos behind enemy lines to disrupt supplies and communications and divide the enemy forces, and that is what they did. Outnumbering the enemy and having a bigger industrial base simply helped the process.
Did Sherman burn plantations?
No, for the most part. “Scorched earth” was not literal.
Many, if not most, plantations were however ransacked and many of the key bits of infrastructure, like mills and cotton gins, were destroyed or seized. The economic underpinnings of the plantation system were largely wiped out.
It’s also significant because Sherman fully acknowledged what he was doing. He knew the whole concept of a “gentlemanly” war was hypocritical at its base.
“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
And later, of course, the iconic “war is hell.”
This point should be developed a bit further. Union armies occupying Northern Alabama attempted to conduct themselves as if they were among fellow countrymen with a mild political disagreement.
Instead, they encountered a bitter guerilla/terrorist campaign so vicious that the Union generals concluded that they must abandon this “gentlemanly” approach. They decided on an unrestrained show of force to utterly break the South’s fighting spirit. Sherman’s march was actually staged from that same part of Northern Alabama and they even raised a regiment of men from Alabama to take part in that Union offensive.
So yeah, there’s some real punitive/retaliatory motive there that arose from how Union forces were treated in the Northern Alabama occupation.
There is definitely a valid point here, but a Union victory was far from guaranteed.
Admittedly, the South winning was a long shot. They didn’t have the industrial base and weapons manufacturing capability required to defeat the North. It’s always possible that something weird could have happened which allowed the South to win, so a victory wasn’t impossible. But a Southern victory wasn’t likely.
However, keep in mind that the South didn’t have to win. All they had to do was not lose. A tie that allowed the Confederacy to remain as a country was a win from the Southern point of view.
There is a lot of debate about what would have happened if the South had won Gettysburg. Some say it wouldn’t have mattered. Others say that morale was already low for the Army of the Potomac and yet another defeat would have been devastating.
When the South fired on Fort Sumter, both sides thought that the war would be over within weeks at the most. The South didn’t think that the North had the stomach for war, and the North didn’t think that the South had the military strength to survive any major battles. Both sides were severely mistaken.
By the time Gettysburg came around, there were a lot of folks in the North that were weary of war. A lot of Democrats started arguing in favor of striking a peace with the South, and the Republicans responded by calling them “Copperheads” as an insult, but the peace-favoring Democrats then adopted the term as their own (google Civil War Copperheads if you want more details) . A loss at Gettysburg would have bolstered the Copperhead position.
The combination of a demoralized army suffering more and more losses and a growing political movement to settle for peace could have resulted in a settlement that allowed the Confederacy to survive as a country.
Gettysburg and Vicksburg are generally cited as the turning point in the Civil War. But the Confederacy wasn’t out of it yet. One or two really good military blunders by the Union and the Confederacy could have been right back in it. Sherman’s march to the sea is generally cited as the point where the Union managed to break the Confederacy’s backbone. After that the Confederacy was done.
Count me in that group. Gettysburg was a wonderful victory, but Vicksburg was the key to the South’s defeat. With that, the Union could strike into the heart of the Confederacy at will.
From what I have gathered from American war history buffs on youtube was that the Union was tired of the war and that Lincoln was on track to lose his re-election to a person who was campaigning for a negotiated settlement. Sherman’s march however cut the South in half and assured that the war would be won in short time (Sherman cheekily wrote to Lincoln that he presents Savannah to him as his Christmas present). I’m not American or super knowledgeable in your history so this info is filtered through that lens.
Check out this 5min youtube animation of the daily territory loss/gains of the war. You can clearly see the overarching Union strategy
The war was going for 4 years but officially ended 6 months after the territorial gains from Sherman’s march.
ETA: I just noticed the dates and that Sherman’s march happens in the days/weeks immediately after your presidential elections so he couldn’t have had any political difference at that time.
Sigh, I was reading wikipedia and yes. Sherman winning the battle of Atlanta (pre-march-to-the-sea?) in late July put confidence in Lincoln’s election campaign. History is difficult for me.
Perhaps the result of winning Atlanta for Lincoln, and that helping Lincoln to win the election, put confidence in Sherman to march (I need to do some further reading on this).