|
The General
- Posts:
- 2,098
- Group:
- Members
- Member
- #14
- Joined:
- Nov 27, 2010
|
On September 1, 1864, Confederate forces abandoned Atlanta, giving general Sherman a good starting ground for his famous march. Found an article on History Today that might spawn an interesting discussion here.
- Quote:
-
General Sherman’s Total War
‘War is an uncivil game and can’t be civilised’, said one Union sergeant of General Sherman’s rampage through Georgia in 1864. Matt Carr discusses this turning point in the American Civil War.
On November 15th, 1864 60,000 Union troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman abandoned the burning city of Atlanta and marched into central Georgia to begin one of the most celebrated campaigns of the American Civil War. Only two months previously he had become the hero of the North when his 100,000-strong army took Atlanta after a gruelling summer campaign, effectively saving the incumbent President Abraham Lincoln from defeat in the autumn presidential elections. It was an action that surprised his contemporaries. Having conquered the ‘Gateway to the South’, most observers assumed that Sherman would garrison Atlanta and head northwards into Virginia, where the Union’s eastern armies, under the command of his great friend Ulysses S. Grant, were locked in a bloody stalemate with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia around the Confederate capital, Richmond.
On taking Atlanta, Sherman stunned the Confederacy by ordering the evacuation of the entire civilian population, apparently for purely military purposes. He then proceeded to reduce the city to an uninhabitable wreck. Disregarding conventional wisdom that an advancing army should maintain contact with its line of communications, he reduced the size of his force almost by half and ordered his officers to destroy all storehouses, factories and warehouses that could be used for military purposes, including the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which had kept his men supplied throughout the summer.
Sherman’s ultimate destination was the city of Savannah, 300 miles east on the Atlantic coast, where he hoped to be resupplied by the Union navy, before proceeding northwards into Virginia. Until then his army would be largely dependent for its survival on what it could take from the local population. The plan was partly intended to assist Grant in Virginia by cutting off the flow of supplies to the Confederate armies and disrupting their communication, but it also had a more nebulous ‘psychological’ purpose. After more than three years of violent and seemingly endless conflict, Sherman had decided to take the conflict beyond the battlefield and subject Georgia to a level of devastation that would make its population realise that ‘war and ruin are synonymous terms’. By making civilians pay a price for supporting the war, Sherman hoped to break the Confederacy’s will and to demonstrate that its leadership no longer had the ability to protect the South’s population even in their own homes.
This strategy marked a dramatic shift in Union policy toward the South. When the war began in April 1861, President Lincoln ordered Union armies not to confiscate or damage Southern property in the belief that Southerners could still be wooed back into the Union. By the time Sherman’s army marched out of Atlanta, such restraint had long since been abandoned. In the summer of 1862, unable to translate victories on the battlefield into an overall strategic outcome and shocked by the popularity of the secessionist cause, Lincoln authorised Union armies to adopt increasingly harsh measures in an attempt to quell Southern resistance.
Martial law, forced requisitions and ‘foraging’ expeditions, which stripped entire communities of food, deportations of disloyal citizens, destructive raids aimed at wrecking Confederate war resources, acts of collective punishment in response to guerrilla attacks and slave emancipation – were all innovations of the Union’s ‘hard war’ policy. Few generals applied it more relentlessly than Sherman. A former bank manager, lawyer and school superintendent, he had already shown his willingness to extend the ‘hard hand of war’ to Southern civilians as military governor of Memphis, Tennessee in June 1862; in the destruction of Jackson and Meridian during Grant’s operations in Mississippi in the summer of 1863; and in reprisals against Confederate guerrillas during the invasion of northern Georgia in May 1864. His evacuation of Atlanta transformed him into a hate figure in the Southern press.
Sherman’s reputation as the nemesis of the South was confirmed by his Georgia campaign, as his army rampaged through the ‘granary of the South’, raiding farms, seizing provisions, slaughtering or confiscating livestock and demolishing and burning property. Targeting the Georgia railroad, they tore up and melted down tracks before twisting them into ‘Sherman’s neckties’ and burned or demolished stations and warehouses, leaving a path of chaos around 50 miles wide. ‘No one, without being there, can form a proper idea of the devastation that will be found in our track’, wrote one Union chaplain: ‘Thousands of families will have their homes laid in ashes, and they themselves will be turned beggars in the street. We have literally carried fire and sword into this once proud and defiant land.’
The speed with which Sherman’s soldiers moved through Georgia was partly due to the absence of any serious Confederate resistance, as well as to his skilful tactics. By reducing his army’s provisions to a minimum and marching his troops in two parallel ‘wings’ around 20 miles apart, the sparse Confederate defenders scattered across the state were unable to predict their opponents destination and concentrate their forces against them. Rather than attack well-defended cities, Sherman simply bypassed them to maintain the forward momentum of his highly-motivated army. Although facing probably the best fighting force in the world at the time, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, urged the population to emulate the Russian partisan war against Napoleon and turn the Georgia campaign into Sherman’s ‘retreat from Moscow’. It was an aspiration that never came close to realisation.
On December 21st Sherman’s army captured Savannah in triumphant conclusion to the ‘March to the Sea’. The news was greeted with rapturous acclaim in the North. The following February he marched his men northwards into the swampy lowlands of South Carolina, where he proceeded to use the same tactics. Here the destruction was even more extensive and more explicitly punitive, as his soldiers burned and looted their way through the state that they regarded as the spiritual home of the rebellion and the heartland of the Southern slaveowning ‘aristocracy’. ‘Every house, barn, fence and cotton gin gets an application of the torch’, observed one Ohio sergeant, ‘that prospect is revolting, but war is an uncivil game and can’t be civilised.’
This was the view of many Union soldiers, who dubbed the campaign the ‘smoky march’. It reached a peak on February 17th, 1865, following the surrender of the state capital, Columbia. Despite the fact that its defenders had abandoned the city, much of Columbia was razed to the ground that night in a spree of drunken mayhem. Though Sherman subsequently blamed retreating Confederate cavalry for causing fires by burning bales of cotton, numerous witnesses saw his soldiers deliberately setting alight individual homes. There is little doubt that many Union soldiers, plied with alcohol by the local population in a mistaken attempt to placate them, were determined to torch the city. If Sherman did not order the destruction, he did little to prevent it, even though he was perfectly aware of the mood of his men. In any case, the ‘burning of Columbia’ served his strategic objectives and he subsequently made it clear that he had no regrets. On March 7th, 1865, Sherman’s army entered North Carolina, the last state to secede. Though Union troops continued to destroy factories, foundries and railroad links, the damage was more restrained than in South Carolina, as it became clear that the war was nearing an end.
By the end of March Union armies were tearing into the Confederacy from all sides and its position had become untenable. On April 3rd Richmond fell to Grant’s troops as Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia retreated westwards. Six days later, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. On 13th, Sherman’s troops entered the state capital Raleigh and the following day he issued Special Field Orders, No. 55, which commanded his men to refrain from ‘further destruction of railroads, mills, cotton and produce’ and to ensure that ‘the inhabitants will be dealt with kindly, looking to an early reconciliation’. Even after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 15th, 1865 these orders were largely obeyed. On April 16th, Sherman accepted from his great adversary, General Joseph E. Johnston, the surrender of 90,000 Confederate troops at the Bennett Farm near Raleigh, thus removing the last major Confederate army from the Civil War.
By this time Sherman’s 700-mile rampage had already begun its transformation into a military legend. In the North it was acclaimed as a strategic masterstroke that had dealt a decisive blow to Confederate morale. In the South Sherman was vilified as a cruel and merciless destroyer, a 19th-century Genghis Khan who waged war on civilians and non-combatants, rather than armies. The image of Sherman the Great Destroyer has been handed down in popular culture and memory. In D.W. Griffith’s racist film of 1915, Birth of a Nation, a homeless and terrified Georgia woman huddles in the scrub with her children as Sherman’s triumphant army passes below. The caption reads, ‘while the women and children weep, a great conqueror marches to the sea’. In Waylon Jennings’ 1978 song, ‘They Laid Waste to Our Land’, a voiceover describes Sherman’s soldiers ‘with hate in their hearts, they moved in a line, cutting a scar through God’s Blessed country 50 miles wide. Burning, looting and gutting our land like vultures’. Today Sherman is still remembered in parts of the South as a symbol of Yankee barbarism, a view that is not merely confined to ‘Lost Cause’ narratives of Southern victimhood, which present the Confederate rebellion as a romantic and essentially noble endeavour in which the better side was defeated.
Perhaps more than any military campaign in history, Sherman’s March has become a paradigm of wartime devastation. Some historians have depicted him as the spiritual father of ‘total war’, whose ‘strategy of terror’ ushered in a new era of warfare against civilians. In 1948 the Southern historian John Bennett Walters published an article, ‘General Sherman and Total War’, in the Journal of Southern History, which accused Sherman of breaking with the 19th-century conventions of war and establishing a ‘record for systematic torture, pillage, and vandalism unequalled in American history’. Others have cited the marches as a watershed in the evolution of modern warfare. The former British general and military historian J.F.C. Fuller described Sherman as the architect of the ‘moral retrogression’, which he regarded as a particularly malign consequence of the American Civil War, and the ‘leading exponent of this return to barbarism’. Some have seen Sherman’s campaigns as a precedent for the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
Sherman’s many admirers take a more positive view of his achievements and contribution. Some have pointed out the discrepancy between his pungent rhetoric and his actions. Few generals are more quotable and of Sherman’s many aphorisms none is more widely repeated than his extemporaneous insistence that ‘war is all hell’ (more often rendered as ‘war is hell’). Though, before the conflict, he was a great admirer of Southern society, Sherman was prone to making bloodthirsty pronouncements and on more than one occasion threatened Southerners with ‘extermination’, if they continued with the war. These threats were not carried out and his defenders have argued that Sherman’s campaigns of devastation were not ‘total’, but a proportionate and relatively bloodless use of force that was justified on military grounds.
In a hagiographic biography written in the 1920s, the British military theorist Basil Liddell Hart hailed Sherman as the unacknowledged genius of the American Civil War, whose methods presented a less destructive alternative to the meat-grinding battles of the First World War. He subsequently argued that Sherman’s campaigns anticipated the Nazi Blitzkrieg tactics in the Second World War and their adaptation by General Patton during his 1944 Normandy campaigns.
There is no doubt that the claims made by ‘Lost Cause’ adherents such as Walters are overstated. For the most part the destruction inflicted by Sherman’s army was directed towards property rather than people. Few civilians were killed during the marches and the isolated killings that did take place were the work of soldiers acting on their own volition. Even the damage to property was not always as extensive as has been portrayed. In Georgia private property was often spared and even in South Carolina the destruction was confined to a relatively small area. Though incursions of Union soldiers into farms and homes were certainly terrifying for the inhabitants, these people mostly escaped unharmed and untouched. Most Confederate men of military age were fighting in the army and the households that Sherman’s army encountered were generally comprised of women, old men and children. In Southern society white female virtue was sacrosanct and the possibility of sexual violence was routinely invoked in lurid anti-Union propaganda to galvanise resistance. Allegations of rape were frequently directed at Sherman’s ‘Vandal’ army by the Southern press and these accusations have also passed into Southern mythology. In Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind Scarlett O’Hara shoots a lascivious and brutish Yankee soldier who enters her house to rob it and clearly regards her as sexual prey. Such accusations were not entirely without foundation. Though in theory rape was subject to harsh punishment, there must have been numerous incidents, of which Sherman would have been unaware or which were never reported. In Columbia, in particular, there are a number of testimonies to the rape of white and black women. Nevertheless the documentary evidence suggests that sexual violence was comparatively rare and that Sherman’s men did not regard women as spoils of war.
The demonisation of Sherman in the South is often contrasted with the chivalrous ‘Celtic’ warfare that supposedly defined the Confederacy. But Confederate armies also targeted Union civilians and loyalists, albeit on a more limited scale. Furthermore, despite the Union’s ‘hard war’ policy, its armies were also subject to what was then the first attempt by any national government to impose binding laws of conduct, in the form of the Prussian jurist Francis Lieber’s General Orders No.100, also known as the Lieber Code, many of whose recommendations later formed the basis of the Hague Conventions on Land Warfare in 1899 and 1907.
These laws contained various articles extending protection to civilian life and property, but they also allowed for numerous exemptions according to the principle of ‘military necessity’. Much of what Sherman’s armies did in Georgia and the Carolinas fell within this principle, or at least Sherman believed that it did, whether forced requisitions or the destruction of property with a potential military purpose, a designation that was largely determined by individual military commanders. As part of Special Field Orders, No.55, before leaving Atlanta, the Union soldiers were under strict orders regulating their conduct and prohibiting them from entering private houses without authorisation.
Orders were not always obeyed, nor was it always possible to enforce them. Sherman’s foragers often acted independently some miles away from the line of march. There were incidents in which soldiers beat up and tortured civilian householders or slaves in order to force them to reveal where their valuables were hidden. Compared with the behaviour of some 20th-century armies, however, Sherman’s soldiers were relatively restrained and subject to sufficient discipline to keep their worst instincts in check for most of the time.
Had this not been the case, it is unlikely that the March to the Sea and its devastating sequel would have been received with such acclaim in the North. Part of the appeal of Sherman’s methods to the Northern public and to many of his soldiers lay in the relative absence of bloodshed, compared with the horrific loss of life on both sides during Grant’s campaigns in Virginia. To a war-weary Northern population, Sherman’s strategy appeared to have unlocked the Civil War and precipitated its ending. The burning of Southern towns and plantations was regarded as a legitimate punishment for rebellion and there were other positive consequences to these campaigns. Though Sherman himself was a white supremacist who refused to allow black soldiers to bear arms in his army, his marches liberated tens of thousands of slaves in fulfilment of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Sherman and many of his officers preferred the freed slaves to remain on their plantations rather than slow down the progress of the Union forces. Nevertheless, thousands of men, women and children greeted his soldiers with rapturous enthusiasm and abandoned their masters and mistresses to join the march. In effect, Sherman’s army dealt a fatal blow to Southern slavery. In doing so it added a poignant corollary to the devastation celebrated in the popular song Marching Through Georgia, which declares: ‘So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train/Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main.’
These aspects of Sherman’s marches tend to be played down by those who see them as a template for 20th-century barbarism. The idea that Sherman opened the door to ‘total war’ is to overstate the historical novelty of his campaigns. ‘Ravaging’, ‘marauding’ and the destruction of crops and property were well-established practices that can be traced back to the sacking of cities in the ancient world. French armies during the Napoleonic wars behaved far more brutally towards the populations that resisted them in Calabria, Spain or the Tyrol than Sherman’s soldiers did. The conventions of ‘civilised’ war were frequently ignored during European campaigns in wars of colonial conquest in the 19th century.
What was new about Sherman’s campaigns was the targeting of civilians as part of a comprehensive psychological and military strategy in the context of an ‘industrialised’ war between two societies unable to defeat each other through conventional military methods. Not only did Sherman identify civilian ‘morale’ and the psychology of the enemy population as decisive military factors in themselves, but he also expressed, with eloquence and persuasion, the idea that, if it brought conflict to a swifter conclusion, harshness or ‘severity’ was ultimately preferable and more humane than attempts to ‘refine’ war, as he put it. In the 150 years since Sherman’s army marched into Georgia that philosophy has been put into practice to far more devastating effect than Sherman contemplated. This does not mean, as some of his detractors claim, that he single-handedly ‘invented’ a new form of warfare, or even that those who subsequently put such methods into practice looked to him for inspiration.
Such influence is not absent, however. American soldiers in the Philippines cited Sherman’s campaigns as a justification for atrocities against Filipino civilians. In Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary The Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who helped plan the US air war in Japan, cites Sherman’s campaigns as a precedent for the firebombing of Tokyo. Yet many armies have attacked civilians without ever studying Sherman’s campaigns in Georgia. Campaigns such as Kitchener’s scorched earth policy during the Second Boer War, the Nazi anti-partisan operations in Ukraine and Belorussia, and the Japanese ‘kill all-burn all-loot all’ offensives against communist guerrillas in northern China and the Allied bombing of German cities during the Second World War all reflect a common recognition by 20th-century armies that civilians as well as soldiers are objects of war.
In the early 21st century civilians have become the primary victims of modern warfare, whether as a direct or indirect consequence of military operations. Sherman’s destructive marches perhaps anticipated these developments, but they did not cause them. The general who said that ‘war is all hell’ may well have been astonished and shocked by the hellishness of the wars that followed.
Matthew Carr is the author of "Sherman’s Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War", published by The New Press, 2014.
|