Sherman's March to the Sea: from Atlanta to Savannah, 1864

In the spring of 1864 Atlanta was the great rail hub of the Deep South. By Christmas, Sherman's armies had taken it, wrecked its military plant, cut loose from their own supply line and reached the Atlantic at Savannah. The campaign made William Tecumseh Sherman the most admired and the most hated general of the war.²

Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Mobile Bay · Next: The Battle of Appomattox Court House

Who won Sherman's March to the Sea and why?

The Union won. Sherman's army reached Savannah on 21 December 1864 at small cost because almost nothing stood in its way: John Bell Hood had taken the Confederacy's western army into Tennessee, leaving only cavalry and militia to face some 62,000 veterans who lived off the land and moved faster than any defense could gather.³

The Atlanta Campaign, May to September 1864

Sherman left Chattanooga, which the Union had held through the siege that followed its defeat at Chickamauga, in early May 1864, in step with Ulysses S. Grant's offensive in Virginia. Jacob D. Cox puts his effective force at nearly 100,000 men and 254 guns; Sherman's own tables give 98,797. Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee fell back along the railroad each time Sherman outflanked it, yielding ground but staying intact.⁴

On 27 June Sherman tried a frontal assault at Kennesaw Mountain and was repulsed. Cox puts the Union loss that day at about 2,500, against just over 500 that Johnston admitted; the American Battlefield Trust estimates about 3,000 Union and 1,000 Confederate casualties.⁵

On 17 July Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood, who attacked at Peachtree Creek on 20 July, in the Battle of Atlanta on 22 July, where the Union general James B. McPherson was killed, and at Ezra Church on 28 July. When Sherman's infantry cut the last railroad at Jonesboro on 31 August and 1 September, Hood evacuated the city that evening, and Union troops entered on 2 September. In Sherman's words, Atlanta was "ours, and fairly won."⁶

The timing was decisive. The Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan on a platform calling the war a failure, and Sherman later recalled that even Lincoln had been in doubt. On 23 August Lincoln had written a sealed memorandum predicting that his administration would not be re-elected. Atlanta lifted Northern morale and helped secure his re-election on 8 November.⁷

Cutting loose from the supply line

Sherman moved the remaining civilians out of Atlanta. When Mayor James M. Calhoun protested, he answered on 12 September: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."⁸

Hood then struck north at the single railroad that fed Sherman from Tennessee. Rather than guard hundreds of miles of track, Sherman proposed to abandon it and strike for the coast. "I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!" he telegraphed Grant on 9 October. Grant and Lincoln would have preferred him to destroy Hood's army first, but Sherman prevailed. George H. Thomas went back to hold Tennessee, and Sherman kept about 62,000 picked men: Cox counts 62,204, cavalry and artillery included.⁹ › Battle of Spring Hill, 1864

The gamble rested on a judgment about Hood. Sherman reasoned that Hood, who had moved west to Tuscumbia to draw him out of Georgia, would have to choose between following him and attacking Tennessee. Hood chose Tennessee, and Thomas, with the troops Sherman had left him, broke his army at Franklin on 30 November and at Nashville in mid-December. By Thomas's report, quoted in Sherman's memoirs, Hood lost 6,252 men at Franklin alone.¹⁰

Before the army left on 15 November, Captain Orlando M. Poe, the chief engineer, destroyed Atlanta's depots, rail yards and workshops; Sherman's report says everything went except the dwelling houses and churches, and fire spread into the town. The historian John F. Marszalek notes that about a third of the buildings were already in ruins from Confederate earthworks and the ammunition Hood blew up, and that some 400 houses were still standing when the army left.¹¹

The March: foraging, bummers and destruction

Special Field Orders No. 120, issued on 9 November, split the army into two wings under Oliver O. Howard and Henry W. Slocum, marching about 15 miles a day without a general supply train. "The army will forage liberally on the country during the march," it ordered. Each brigade was to send out foraging parties under discreet officers; soldiers were not to enter homes, and only corps commanders could order mills, houses or cotton gins destroyed.¹²

Practice outran the rules. The foragers, nicknamed "bummers," stripped farms and plantations along a band that Sherman put at thirty miles on either side of the line of march, and it was they who did most of the damage. Sherman admitted that "many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence" were committed by them, but called them exceptional and said he never heard of a case of murder or rape.¹³

Opposition was thin. William J. Hardee commanded a weak department, Gustavus W. Smith the Georgia militia, and Joseph Wheeler's cavalry could harass the columns but not stop them. The two wings marched on diverging roads that threatened both Macon and Augusta, a front Cox measured at fifty miles at its widest, and met at Milledgeville, the state capital, which was in Union hands by 23 November.¹⁴

Griswoldville: the only pitched battle

On 22 November a division of Georgia militia under Brigadier General Pleasant J. Phillips, marching east from Macon, ran into Charles Walcutt's brigade, the rear guard of Howard's wing, dug in on a ridge at the Duncan farm near Griswoldville. Phillips attacked without orders and threw in charge after charge across open ground until dark. General Charles R. Woods reported 94 Union casualties. Cox puts the militia's loss at over 600 killed and wounded; the American Battlefield Trust estimates about 1,100.¹⁵

Sherman put the damage to Georgia at $100,000,000, of which at least $20,000,000 had served his army: "the remainder is simple waste and destruction." Marszalek rejects both the legend of a horde burning every house and the claim that little happened: many houses were damaged and a minority burned to the ground, while others were left untouched, and that very unpredictability spread fear.¹⁶

Freedom on the road, and the tragedy at Ebenezer Creek

For enslaved Georgians the March brought freedom. Thousands left the plantations to follow the columns; Sherman's own report speaks of "a countless number of their slaves" leaving with the army. Some soldiers welcomed them; others, Sherman included, saw them as extra mouths that slowed the march.¹⁷

On 9 December at Ebenezer Creek, Jefferson C. Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) took his Fourteenth Corps across a pontoon bridge while hundreds of refugees were told to wait, then had the bridge taken up. With Wheeler's cavalry approaching, people plunged into the deep water; many drowned and others were captured by the Confederate troopers. Sherman defended Davis against Northern criticism and called the episode an accident of the march.¹⁸

Savannah: a Christmas gift for Lincoln

Savannah's defenses could be reached by the Navy only once Fort McAllister, on the Ogeechee River, had fallen. Late in the afternoon of 13 December, William B. Hazen's division stormed it in one quick rush while Sherman watched from the roof of a rice mill across the marsh. Cox gives Hazen's loss as 24 killed and 110 wounded and the garrison's as 48; the American Battlefield Trust estimates 134 Union and 230 Confederate casualties.¹⁹

Hardee slipped his outnumbered garrison out of Savannah on the night of 20 December, and the city was occupied on 21 December. Sherman's message of 22 December reads: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah," with 150 heavy guns, plenty of ammunition and about 25,000 bales of cotton. Lincoln answered: "Many, many thanks for your Christmas-gift," and gave Sherman the honor of a plan he admitted he had only accepted.²⁰

Counting the losses

Sherman's headquarters reported 1,338 prisoners taken, and Sherman himself warned that with the command so scattered its return of losses was not accurate enough to be official. Marszalek estimates fewer than 3,000 casualties on both sides for the six weeks, against some 51,000 in three days at Gettysburg.²¹

The Union view

To Sherman and most of his soldiers the March was a way to end the war with fewer deaths. Instead of fighting costly battles, they would destroy the food, railroads and confidence that kept Confederate armies in the field, and show Southerners that their government could not protect them. "This may not be war," Sherman wrote to Grant on 6 November, "but rather statesmanship."²²

The view from Georgian homes

For white Georgians in the army's path, the March meant strangers in the smokehouse, livestock driven off, barns and gins burned and food taken as winter came on. One Georgia woman wrote in her diary that the soldiers rushed in "like Demons" to her smokehouse, dairy, pantry, kitchen and cellar. Sherman himself conceded that jewelry was taken from women and plunder never reached the commissary, and Marszalek adds that Wheeler's own horsemen looted too. In the same counties and weeks, thousands of enslaved Georgians experienced the same army as liberation.²³

What followed: the Carolinas and Bennett Place

In Savannah on 12 January 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met twenty Black leaders, most of them Baptist and Methodist preachers. Their spokesman, Garrison Frazier, told them that the freedpeople's best way to take care of themselves was to have land and work it. Four days later Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside the Sea Islands and the abandoned rice fields thirty miles back from the coast for freed families, in plots of no more than forty acres held by possessory title until Congress decided.²⁴

Sherman then marched north through the Carolinas. After Bentonville in March and Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April, Joseph E. Johnston surrendered 89,270 soldiers to Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina, on 26 April 1865, the largest surrender of the war.²⁵

If you visit

Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, near Marietta, preserves the ground of June 1864: the summit of Big Kennesaw, Pigeon Hill, Cheatham Hill, where the "Dead Angle" saw the worst fighting of 27 June, and Kolb's Farm.²⁶

Bennett Place State Historic Site in Durham, North Carolina, keeps the farm of James and Nancy Bennitt, where Johnston and Sherman met on 17, 18 and 26 April 1865 and the surrender was signed.²⁷

Why the March still matters

The March showed that the Confederacy could no longer protect its heartland, helped re-elect the president who saw the war through, and opened the road to freedom for thousands. It also left a bitterness that shaped Southern memory for generations: as Marszalek puts it, the March is still remembered as barbarism unleashed. For the wider war, see the commanders of the American Civil War, the greatest battles of the Civil War and our on this day in military history calendar.²⁸