Sherman's Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War

217 Pages·2015·2.34 MB·English

by  Matthew Carr

Sherman’s Ghosts
ALSO BY MATTHEW CARR
Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent
Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism
My Father’s House: In Search of a Lost Past

© 2015 by Matthew Carr
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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015
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ISBN 978-1-62097-078-2 (e-book)
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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
For Graham Usher, 1958–2013
To realize what war is, one must follow our tracks.
—WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, 1864
Contents
Introduction: From Georgia to FM 3-24
Part I: The March
1. The Iron Hand of War
2. Uncle Billy’s War
3. The Destruction Machine
4. Civilians and Soldiers
5. “More Perfect Peace”
Part II: Legacies
6. Soldiers
7. Civilians
8. The New American Way of War
9. Wars Without War
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Sherman’s Ghosts
INTRODUCTION
From Georgia to FM 3-24
On November 15, 1864, one of the most celebrated and controversial campaigns of the
American Civil War began when sixty thousand Federal troops under the command of
General William Tecumseh Sherman marched out of the burning city of Atlanta into
central Georgia. Disregarding conventional military wisdom that an advancing army
should not break contact with its line of communications and supply, Sherman had ordered
his troops to evacuate the city they had only recently captured and sever the Western &
Atlantic Railroad link that connected them to the Union’s nearest supply depot at
Chattanooga, Tennessee. Apart from the reduced provisions his soldiers carried with them,
Sherman’s army was now dependent for its survival on what they could take from the
local population in the hostile Confederate heartlands of the Deep South.
Sherman’s destination, though few of his soldiers realized it at the time, was the city of
Savannah, three hundred miles away on the Atlantic coast, where he hoped to be
resupplied by the Union Navy and then proceed northward into Virginia to assist his great
friend Ulysses Grant, whose armies were locked in a brutal deadlock with Robert E. Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia at the Confederate capital, Richmond. But Sherman also had
very specific strategic intentions regarding Georgia itself. For more than a month,
Sherman’s army marched through the state known as the granary of the South, seizing or
destroying vast quantities of food and provisions, demolishing and burning public and
private property, and leaving a trail of devastation fifty to sixty miles wide. On December
21, Sherman’s army captured Savannah in a triumphant conclusion to the “March to the
Sea.” In February the following year, Sherman led his army northward into South
Carolina.
Here the destruction was 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
secession before moving on to North Carolina, where the march finally came to a halt in
Goldsboro on March 23, 1865. On April 16, the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston
surrendered ninety thousand troops to Sherman at the Bennett Farm near the state capital,
Raleigh, thus removing the last major Confederate army from the Civil War. By that time
Sherman’s seven-hundred-mile rampage had already begun its transformation into a
military legend. In the North, it was acclaimed as a strategic masterstroke that transformed
Sherman into a national hero. In the South, Sherman was vilified as a brutal military
destroyer, a nineteenth-century Genghis Khan who violated the principles of “civilized
warfare” and chose to make war on civilians and noncombatants.
This image of Sherman as the Great Destroyer has been handed down to posterity and
reinforced in films, such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, as part of the
“Lost Cause” mythologies of Southern victimhood, which present Sherman as the iconic
symbol of Yankee barbarity. Today Sherman’s army is still remembered throughout the
South as the instrument of vengeful destruction described in the narrative voice-over