William Tecumseh Sherman: the March to the Sea

In 1861 William Tecumseh Sherman was so unsure of himself that newspapers called him insane. Three years later he led an army across Georgia with no supply line, tore up its railroads and presented the city of Savannah to Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Alongside his friend Ulysses S. Grant he helped win the war in the West, then carried it to the Southern home front in a way that has been argued over ever since.¹

Early life

He was born on 8 February 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, one of eleven children of Charles R. Sherman, a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court. His father had admired the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, and in his memoirs Sherman tells how the name, refused for an older brother, was finally given to him; family and friends called him Cump. When his father died suddenly in 1829, the boy was taken in by the family of Thomas Ewing, an influential Ohio politician.²

Ewing obtained him an appointment to West Point, from which he graduated in 1840, sixth in his class according to the American Battlefield Trust. He fought the Seminoles in Florida and served at Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, years that, the Library of Congress notes, taught him the people and geography of the South. The war with Mexico passed him by: he spent it in California as an administrative officer. In 1850 he married Ellen Ewing, his foster sister.³

He resigned from the army in 1853 to run a bank branch in San Francisco and tried law in Kansas, with little success. In 1859 or 1860 (the American Battlefield Trust gives 1859, Britannica January 1860) he became superintendent of a new military academy in Louisiana, the forerunner of Louisiana State University. When Louisiana seceded in January 1861 he resigned and went north.⁴

The first years of war, 1861 to 1862

In May 1861 he was commissioned colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry, and in July he led a brigade at First Bull Run, the Union's first great defeat. Lincoln was impressed, and Sherman was made a brigadier general in August. Sent to Kentucky, he lost his nerve: he warned that the war would be long and demanded so many reinforcements that some newspapers called him insane, and he was relieved.⁵

Henry Halleck gave him a second chance as a division commander under Grant. At Shiloh on 6 April 1862 his division was overrun in the surprise attack that opened the battle, but he held on, fought well through two days, and was promoted to major general of volunteers on 1 May 1862. From then on, Britannica observes, Grant had a calming influence on him, and the two men's careers were bound together.⁶

Vicksburg and Chattanooga, 1862 to 1863

His part in the campaign for Vicksburg began badly with a repulse at Chickasaw Bluffs, but the capture of Arkansas Post (Fort Hindman) restored his reputation, and in Grant's final campaign of 1863 he commanded the XV Corps. In November 1863, in the fighting for Chattanooga, his troops attacked the northern end of Missionary Ridge against Patrick Cleburne's Confederates.⁷

When Grant was called east in March 1864 to command all the Union armies, Sherman took his place as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, with three armies under him: George Thomas's, James McPherson's and John Schofield's.⁸

Atlanta, 1864

In May 1864 he advanced from Chattanooga into Georgia against Joseph E. Johnston. Rather than attack head on, he outflanked the Confederates again and again, and Johnston fell back each time, a pattern Encyclopedia Virginia calls a dance of flank and withdraw.⁹

Atlanta, which in Sherman's words "was known as the 'Gate-City of the South,' was full of founderies, arsenals, and machine-shops," fell at the start of September; the American Battlefield Trust dates the occupation to 2 September, the Library of Congress to 1 September. The victory helped Lincoln win reelection in November.¹⁰

Sherman turned the city into a military post and, by Special Field Order No. 67, expelled its civilian population. When Mayor James M. Calhoun protested, Sherman answered on 12 September 1864 with the letter that defines his thinking: "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."¹¹

The March to the Sea, November to December 1864

Leaving Thomas to deal with John Bell Hood's Confederate army, Sherman set out from Atlanta on 15 November 1864 with about 62,000 men (the New Georgia Encyclopedia and the Library of Congress say about 60,000), in two wings, cut off from his supply bases and living off the land. His foragers, soon known as bummers, stripped farms and plantations, and his men tore up the railroads as they went. Before he left, his engineers wrecked everything of military value in Atlanta.¹² › Sherman's March to the Sea, 1864

Thousands of enslaved people freed themselves and followed the columns. The march's darkest episode came at Ebenezer Creek on 9 December, when the corps commander Jefferson C. Davis had the pontoon bridge taken up before the refugees following his rear guard could cross; many drowned in the flooded creek or were captured by Confederate cavalry. Sherman defended Davis and blamed the refugees for following the army against his advice.¹³

Savannah fell on 21 December, and Sherman offered Lincoln the city, with its 25,000 bales of cotton, as a Christmas present.¹⁴

The Carolinas and the end of the war, 1865

In February 1865 he turned north into South Carolina, the state where secession had begun, and his army's destruction there was, the Library of Congress notes, especially heavy. Columbia, the state capital, was taken on 17 February and large parts of it burned.¹⁵

On 26 April 1865, at the Bennett farmhouse near Durham Station, North Carolina, Johnston surrendered to Sherman. It was the largest surrender of the war: NCpedia says it affected 89,270 soldiers in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.¹⁶

Command style

Sherman's war was a war of movement and logistics. In Georgia he used his greater numbers to outflank rather than assault, and on the march he made his army independent of supply lines. By 1864, the American Battlefield Trust writes, he was convinced that the Union could be saved only by destroying the Confederacy's material and psychological will to fight as well as its armies. Britannica calls him a major architect of modern warfare and says his march is generally regarded as the first example of total war in the modern era, while noting that many historians prefer the term hard war.¹⁷

The destruction was aimed above all at property. The New Georgia Encyclopedia notes that physical attacks on white civilians were few, and John F. Marszalek that many houses were ransacked while only a minority were burned; but the march left a hungry, demoralized people behind it and a resentment that lasted for generations.¹⁸

Later life and death

When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as commanding general of the army, a post he held until 1883 (Britannica gives 1884). Those were the years of the wars on the Plains, and the Library of Congress counts him with Philip Sheridan and John Schofield among the generals who oversaw the forced, violent removal of Native peoples onto reservations. He published his memoirs in 1875 and, unlike Grant, refused to enter politics.¹⁹

The phrase "war is hell" is tied to his name. Its best-documented form comes from a speech to Union veterans at the fairgrounds of Columbus, Ohio, on 11 August 1880, which the Ohio State Journal printed the next day: "There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell."²⁰

Sherman died in New York City on 14 February 1891, of pneumonia according to the National Park Service. Joseph E. Johnston, his old opponent, was a pallbearer at the funeral and stood bareheaded in the winter cold; he caught a cold and died the next month.²¹

Legacy and memory

Few American generals divide opinion as Sherman does. To many he was one of the ablest generals of the Union and a strategist who saw the war whole; to many white Southerners he became a symbol of destruction. Britannica sets out both views, and the American Battlefield Trust's verdict is that he was, after Grant, the most widely renowned of the Union's military leaders.²²

Read on with Ulysses S. Grant, whom Sherman served, compare the great rivals in Grant vs Lee, or meet the rest of the commanders of the American Civil War.