American History Hit - Sherman's March: Invading the South

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

General William Tecumseh Sherman's famous invasion of the Confederacy in 1864 has become American legendary... but what did Union troops do along their route and how consequential was it to the final defeat of the Confederacy?Our guest today is Anne Sarah Rubin, professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of ‘Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory’, and her most recent work is ‘The Perfect Scout: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas,’Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's mid-November, 1864. Nearly four years of civil war have torn the United States apart.

Across the south, cities have burned, while armies have lost hundreds of thousands of men killed and wounded. Yet the Confederacy fights on, hoping to turn the tide. Now the Union plans to drain that hope once and for all. Deep in Georgia, an audacious and brutal campaign is now underway. Tens of thousands of Union soldiers will march hundreds of minds, miles east towards the Atlantic. Severed from supply lines, the army will forage off the land as they seek and destroy

whatever sustains the Confederate war effort. Their commander, the man behind this scorched earth effort, is already an American legend. Major General William Tacumseus Sherman. By carrying the war to Georgia's heartland, uprooting railroads, leveling factories, burning plantations after seizing crops, livestock, and supplies, he aims not merely to crush the Confederates militarily, but to break the Southern will to fight. To make the people of Georgia feel the dire consequences of the war they have chosen to wage. In his own immortal words, Sherman means to make Georgia howl.

I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Anne Sarah Rubin, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Go Dogs. She is the author of Through the Heart of Dixie, Sherman's March and American Memory, as well as editing the Perfect Scout, a soldier's memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas, which makes her the ideal guest for today's episode on Sherman's March to the Sea. So let's have at it. And Sarah Rubin, Professor, so glad you could join us. Thank you for having me. On this series, we have referred to William Ticumseh Sherman and his infamous March for so many years. I'm astonished it has taken us so long to do this episode. But perfect timing. All Civil War roads eventually lead to it, and here you are the perfect experts, so we're right on time. Let's start, as we always do with these Civil War events,

some background and context, please. Sherman's March to the Sea takes place in November and December 1864, leading to what will be the final four months of the war. Abraham Lincoln, reelected for a second term this past November, and the Union now has a sense, at least, that they've got the Confederacy on their heels, I guess. But not yet. At this point, what do both sides have to achieve to attain their objectives? So it's a little bit harder for the Confederacy at this point to achieve its objectives because their goal for a long time had really been just to hang on until the union, until Northerners had gotten tired of the war and tired of fighting. And so they really had pinned a lot of hopes on Lincoln not being reelected in the 1864 election.

So when he's reelected, they really are a little bit stuck. Their main army is in the trenches at Petersburg, up in Virginia, about 20 miles south of Richmond. They had smaller armies spread out throughout the rest of the south. But they're really just trying to keep going. Maybe they can have one last campaign season in the spring. One of the kind of quirks of the civil war is that the armies don't really fight during the wintertime. They go into winter camps. From the union side, actually, they're also readying themselves really for a final push.

Opposite Lee's army in the trenches at Petersburg, you have Grant and the Army of the Potomac. They also, they've been in a siege basically since mid-summer, really early. summer, late June. And at the same time, you have Sherman who had taken the city of Atlanta in September, arguably helping Lincoln on the road to victory in the 1864 election. And so now Sherman has this idea that he's going to march his army across Georgia, make Georgia Howell, in his words, and bring his army to Savannah to the sea, where it can then be resupplied by Navy ships, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, listeners might remember that just a few episodes ago we did the surrender at Appomattox,

which was full of surprises for me. I did not understand how many armies still existed in the South, you know, in the Confederacy, and how many additional logistics were at hand in even the months after the surrender, never mind before. What we're going to talk about today very soon is a dramatic strategy on the part of an operating to the south of Grant, which is Sherman's army, and that's what we're going to get into. As you say, the war is reaching its final phase, but there's still plenty of fighting to do. I want to talk about the Atlanta campaign, which precedes everything we're talking about today.

It took place from May to September. That was a long campaign, wasn't it? It is a long campaign. It's actually kind of in two phases. So the first bit is May and June, and that's where through this series of, of basically Sherman advancing and Joe Johnston Army, the Confederate Army, retreating it's kind of like a minuet as they go down from Chattanooga to outside Atlanta. Then they're actually kind of stymied the outside of Atlanta from late July until the

breakthrough on September 2nd. The Confederacy Switches commanders, Johnston is replaced by John Bell hood. So it is this, but all of this is happening kind of on the backdrop also of what's happening in Virginia with Grant getting stymied outside of Petersburg trying to break through the Petersburg lines if you've ever heard of the Battle of the Crater. And so once it seems that Grant is going to be at Petersburg for a while, it's even more important for Sherman to take Atlanta. And the reason that Atlanta matters is because it's a rail hub. And so it's a place where a bunch of railroads come in and then the main line kind of heads up to supply the Confederate Army in Virginia. So that's why it's so important.

Yeah. It's kind of fair to say that the north and south are mirror images. If D.C. is the capital, federal capital, and New York is the commercial capital, it's sort of the same in reverse down south. You've got Richmond, the Confederate capital. And then Atlanta is really the big time city in the same. South, right? It isn't really. It's interesting. No, no. And it's great that you say that because I think that's a real misconception people have. That's what I'm here for. That's what I do. No, no, I would say the commercial capital of the South would have been New Orleans for sure. And maybe Charleston because of their ports.

Atlanta exists because of these rail lines. So it's bounded only in the late 1840s. Its original name was terminus. But what happens, I mean, we're getting ahead of ourselves, but is, actually after the war, when Atlanta has to rebuild, it rebuilds itself bigger and better and kind of consciously tries to make itself into a commercial place. And so that by the 1880s, people are calling it the Chicago of the South. But it's definitely not that in the 1860s. Right. Okay. Well, a series of battles, as you say, has taken us to this point. I guess you could call that a siege, I suppose, after the Union sort of camps outside. of Atlanta for so long, no? Yeah, it's not a full siege because people are able to kind of move in and out.

And there's battles kind of to the south and skirmishing around it. And the Confederate Army is still in Atlanta until September 2nd, which is when they retreat, you know, the Sherman's army assaults, John Bell Hood's Confederate forces retreat. And that's when you have a little bit of Atlanta burns, not all of it. If you've ever seen Gone with the Wind, which I know a lot of, I will say there's a generation gap. I think my students are much less familiar with it. But the, the climactic scenes of Scarlet fleeing Atlanta and all of that fire, that's the September 2nd, Sherman breaking through into Atlanta. There you go. I don't want to date myself, but I saw the 1968 restoration of the Gone with the Wind in my hometown theater that my father dragged me to,

and I fell asleep in part one before the intermission. I saw it in eighth grade history class. So, So when Atlanta is attained early September, it obviously provides a huge boost. It's a gift to Lincoln. It's really what brings on his reelection. But it's really just the beginning. What were the options at this point for the union? Why not turn around ahead for Richmond? I mean, they could.

And in some ways, Sherman's March, not so much of the March to the Sea, but the second part, the march up through the Carolinas, is, in fact, him heading through Richmond. But part of it is also he needs to stay in what historians call. the Western Theater. He needs to stay down in Georgia to tie up Confederate forces to some extent. And also, what Sherman is thinking is, you know, the easiest way, if he were to do that, would be to use ships, to use the Navy. So he wants to get to the coast regardless. And the other factor is central Georgia has been largely untouched by the war, which means that it's full of food and supplies. And so that's really Sherman's objective in the march is, yes, he's moving his army, and he would sometimes joke it was just a movement, you know, just moving the army from one

place to the other. There's so much food there. There's so much supply. There's so many, so much livestock, horses, everything that both his army could use, but that the Confederate army would desperately need. And he also recognizes that in this patch of country that has been relatively untouched by the war, he can really affect civilian morale by showing essentially that the union is unstoppable and that supporting the Confederacy is not going to help people. It's going to lead them nowhere. Let's talk about William Tecumseh Sherman. One of the highest ranking generals in the army, essentially the equivalent of a two-star general. He was a major general. He had been active throughout the war, joined in May of 1861, fighting largely in the West under Grant from Fort Donaldson

to Shiloh to Vicksburg, the whole string of big battles going down to, you know, towards New Orleans. He has a very, very close relationship with Grant by the time we're talking about. Yes. They work really well together. And one of Sherman's biographers, Michael Feldman, described Sherman once to me as a born number two, which means he doesn't really want to be number one or he doesn't actually excel at being number one. I mean, he does go on. He does. spend many years after the war as general and chief of the U.S. Army. But in this civil war context, he's really, he's great at what he does. And I think where Sherman shines, and he struggles at the beginning of the war, he has kind of a mental breakdown early on, where he shines is he's

very clear-eyed about what war is. And so his theory is the worst you make war, the faster it will end. And he loves the South, actually, and he loves white Southerners. He'd been stationed in the South early in his career when the war broke out. He was actually at the Louisiana Military Academy, which ultimately becomes LSU, Louisiana State University after the war. And he is not an abolitionist by any stretch of the imagination. He's really not in favor of black equality at all. He does not want black troops under his command. He does everything he can to not have them. So he really sees this as, you know, that white Southerners, Confederacy can end this war and end his march and end everything he does just by surrendering. And then everything will just go back and everyone can be

happy again. It's important to realize that he does, he has quite a resume before we get to this point. But really what he goes down in history is is the march to the sea. That's such an interesting irony because it was such a much bigger story before that. The struggles of winning those battles out West had a lot to do with things. This is kind of a capper on this. The broad union strategy at this point is not just to defeat the Confederates militarily, but also, as you mentioned, destroying their ability to continue fighting and also psychologically to affect the civilian population.

In Sherman's style, to end the war as quickly as possible with the least loss of life on either side. It was to deny resources, right? it was to begin this new idea. You know, when I heard we were doing this, I immediately went and looked for, where did Sherman get this idea? And actually, the sources I looked at was it was a pretty innovative idea. It wasn't based on the Romans. It wasn't classical.

Maybe Napoleon. Like that was the only kind of reference that I could find. Yeah. I mean, he's actually not the first in the Civil War to do this. The Union has been getting to this point. So that actually, right before Sherman's March, you have. have the 1864 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley under Phil Sheridan, where Grant actually says to Sheridan, you know, you need to, I can't remember quite the exact phrasing, but the gist of it is,

is you need to take all the food out of the valley, as Grant says, so that a crow flying over has to carry his own provender. So the union has been getting to this point. It's just, and one of the reasons I think that Sherman's march has the big impact that it does is it just there's sort of an inherent drama to it, right? This idea of the march to the sea and being kind of unstoppable. And whereas the Valley Campaign is on a little bit of a smaller scale, maybe, it's hard to say why. I do think that, you know, in the 20th century, you can't really underestimate the impact of films like Birth of a Nation and then ultimately, of course, gone with the wind, which, you know, Sherman is the great villain in Gone with the Wind, but you never actually see him, which is fascinating to me.

Quick definition. We're talking about a march that lasts about 300 miles from Atlanta to Savannah. There's two wings of this army that go down this path, and we'll go into detail about what happens after we take a break. But that's the idea is that they march onward. And there's not a lot of resistance, is there? No. So it's two wings and then each wing is subdivided into two. So there's actually four columns. And no, they face very little resistance in Georgia. There's one kind of battle, which we can talk about later in Griswoldville, but it's against the Georgia militia. It's really teenage boys and old men. So they do march largely unimpeded.

And it's also, I think, one of the misconceptions about the march, people say, oh, it's 50 miles wide. It cuts this 50 mile wide swath. It's not like a 50 mile wide lawnmower stripe. It's like it's 50 miles from one column all the way to the fourth column. With a lot of space in between those. There's a lot of space. Yeah. And the idea, again, is that they will be marching without supply lines.

They will be foraging off the land. This is a very unique way to fight a war. It really stands alone in the 19th century as a completely, not a completely unique idea, as we say, but it really was surprised to everyone. I want to read a little bit of a telegram that Sherman sent to Ulysses-A-Grant on October 9, 1864, outlining this plan. So if you'll indulge me, I propose we break up the railroad from Chattanooga and strike out with wagons for Millageville, Milan, and Savannah. Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it. But the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources. By attempting to hold the roads, we will lose a thousand men monthly and will gain no result.

I can make the march and make Georgia howl. Those are the famous words that you have quoted already. Make Georgia howl. So who in Georgia is howling? What's the point of that? The people who are going to be howling in Georgia are non-combatants. They're white civilians, white plantation owners, but also white small farmers, you know, non-slaveholders. But it's also the enslaved population.

of Georgia who winds up howling in some ways. Because, of course, when Sherman and his men take food off of a plantation, they're not taking food from whites and leaving it for blacks. And so it's kind of everybody is howling. He does also, and I think one of the really important insights of Sherman's March and why it's effective is he doesn't leave people behind to hold the territory. He's just constantly on the move. He empties out. Atlanta of civilians about a week after he takes control of it. And he does that because he doesn't want to have to leave men behind to hold the city. That, I think, is one of his great insights is that if you destroy the territory, you don't need to leave people behind to hold on to it and to guard

against sabotage or spies or anything like that. And so it's just this constantly moving line. Right. How did Lincoln and Grant feel about this? Were they apprehensive? They're a little apprehensive about it. It's interesting, you know, Grant had used a similar tactic, I guess about a year and a half earlier in the Vicksburg campaign to go once his army is ferried across the river and they go up towards Jackson and then back over towards Vicksburg. Lincoln is, I think, more cautious about it. But Grant essentially, because Grant trusts Sherman, he's able to convince Lincoln to give it a try. And part of also what is concerning about this plan, right, they're cut off from supply. lines. They're also cut off from real contact. You know, they don't have telegraph lines going back up to Washington. So for X period of time, they're really not going to be in contact at all with Washington. And that can be concerning. Extensibly, they're trying to, you know, negate military targets and factories and, you know, things that are going to supply the Army. But of course it's going to get messy. Of course plantations are going to burn. That gone with the wind thing is going to happen. From here,

you know, it's hard to control men on a 50 mile wide span. Things are going to happen. And in Atlanta, those, the famous burning of Atlanta was supposed to be government buildings. Of course, the fire spread elsewhere. Right. Now, there are rules. Sherman does issue a set of general orders where there are actually rules about how the sparaging is supposed to happen. And they're supposed to be under these regular parties and they're supposed to be controlled by officers. And he actually is very, he's, injects this little class dynamic where he says you should really just attack the rich because the poor are going to be more likely to be supportive of us. The problem is that these orders are ignored, basically. And so there's just so much unauthorized foraging. There's so much unauthorized

straggling. They're not supposed to go into houses unless they're attacked, but they obviously go into people's houses. They go through people's personal, you know, they don't just take food. They steal people's personal property. They're silver, their clothing, their alcohol. I think that in Georgia, it is chaotic, but still somewhat controlled. The second phase in South Carolina is even more destructive. So much of the South's culture was about this chivalry idea. You know, this whole thing was knights of, they were all, you know, kind of harketing. back to the medieval idea for a northern army to come in kind of unopposed and then just do this and burn and forage where they wish that is very unschivalrous and completely antithetical to

the southern way of life that had to be on their minds that had to be in chriber's mind i think there's an element of that but there's also i will say there are many instances where these union troops are protective of women and children not protective necessarily of their property. They will take their property, but they will, like, set up guards around people's homes. And the key thing I think that people forget about Sherman's March is it is a war against property. It is not a destruction of population. This is not total war in the 20th century sense of whether it's, you know, strategic bombing or fire bombing or just ethnic cleansing. It's not like that. Now, you can make an argument, right, that if you take everybody's food in November, they're going to starve. But it's not that kind of direct, you know, they're not rounding up groups of civilians. They're going to have to make their fancy gowns out of curtains and drapes and things like that. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm not, I'm both not, I don't want to minimize it, but I also think that we sometimes see it as worse maybe than it was, even though it was bad.

He commands an army roughly of 62,000 divided, as we say, into two, the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Georgia, which are then divided themselves. Many are hardened veterans of the Western Theater. He's been carrying these guys along all the way through so many campaigns. As we said, a meager force is opposing him. Eventually, General John Bell Hood has taken a large contingent of troops from Georgia to Tennessee in the hopes that he would divert Sherman. This doesn't work. it actually leaves Georgia open to attack. November 15th, Sherman initiates the march. We rode out of Atlanta by the Decatur Road, filled by the marching troops and wagons of the 14th Corps.

And reaching the hill, just outside of the old rebel works, we naturally paused to look back upon the scenes of our past battles. Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city. Some band, by accident, struck up the anthem of John Brown's body. The men caught up the strain, and never before or since have I heard the chorus of glory, glory, hallelujah, done with more spirit or in better harmony of time and place. Welcome back. We're discussing Sherman's March to the Sea with Professor Sarah Ann Rumen, author of Through the Heart of Dixie, Sherman's March and American Memory. And in November 1864, Sherman's men have just begun their March to the Sea. Can you describe how this works? Are they just walking along, singing songs and, you know, hunting down livestock? So Sherman's men loved being on the march because it is so much easier. You mentioned before that they're veterans of the Western campaigns.

These men have been most of them enlisted for three years at this point. They are experienced. They are tired. And so for them, Sherman's March is a lark. They are only moving about 10 miles a day, whereas under normal conditions, you could expect them to go 20 miles a day. So they're not going that far. And nobody, by and large, is shooting at them, only occasionally. There's some Confederate cavalry, Wheelers, Confederate Cavalrys, sometimes attacking them, but not really significantly. And they have more to eat and drink and more of a variety than they've had for years. I often refer to one account of a soldier who writes in his diary or in a letter in November

that he's had the first glass of milk that he'd had since the previous December. So for them, they look back on the march as a kind of highlight of their time. Because again, right, so they'll march part of the day, they'll forage, they've got, then they set up their camp for the night. It's as good as it gets for them. would say. Some of the most famous images revolve around the destruction of the railroads, which was really so much the point, as you said before, the troops continue through there and they take up the railroads, of course, wherever they find them. And I'm sure that sort of designs

their trek, I guess. They're basically following that path. They tore up the tracks, melted them over the ties over bonfires, the rails over bonfires, until they were pliable and tied them into large loops. These knotted railway lines are given this nickname, which is Sherman's neck ties. Does this happen a lot or are we just making a lot? It did happen a lot. The Sherman's neckties because it's, you know, it's one thing, right? Yeah, you can pull up the rails, but unless you destroy them, it's actually pretty easy to rebuild a rail line if it's just been kind of quickly destroyed. And so the idea of you take the ties, you make a giant bonfire and then you start melting the rails and twisting them is it will be that much harder for the Confederates to come and

rebuild. And yeah, the kind of classic Sherman's necktie is you just make kind of a loop. But again, soldiers talk about like everyone who did it had like their kind of own style. So some would try to make like a little corkscrew or yeah. And you know, this very obvious symbol of the destruction that they're wreaking in their wake. It's so much about the foraging, isn't it? In the getting of food, they are achieving their objective. Yes, because again, you have to think about it as this kind of encounter. between, you know, women, children, maybe some older men, enslaved people who may remain, quote, unquote, loyal to the white family, but very well may not, because Sherman's army is, in fact, a great army of emancipation. I mean, Sherman, not himself personally, but the army, brings emancipation with it. And you can kind of track it going across Georgia. But then these soldiers come in, And you don't know how that encounter is going to go.

Are the soldiers going to be relatively courteous as they take things? Is the white family going to be resistant or compliant? Are the soldiers going to be drunk? If they're drunk, it's all a lot more unpredictable. And also, you know, this food that people have been put away, and it is right after the harvest, this is supposed to keep them going. You know, often dozens of people, if you're, on a large plantation through to the spring.

And it's striking how much food there is for them to forage. I mean, people have full smokehouses. People have been putting up vegetables from their garden. They've got corn. They've got, you know, live pigs, live cows, chickens, turkeys, all kinds of food that's there. And then, of course, you know, any kind of like delicacies, right, whether that's jam, and jellies or, you know, cakes or wine.

So it's just, it's ripe for conflict. And then also valuables, right? Whether it's silver that people try to hastily hide, books, any kind, you know, they talk about coming in to a house and maybe forcing girls in the house to play piano. So it's this very fraught series of encounters. Right. And they're moving fairly, I mean, not as fast as usual, but fairly quickly. people know they're coming and they're hearing this from from neighbors. This is a terrifying

psychological effect on people's lives. Was there any kind of compensation? Was that part of this deal at all? Did they come up to these plantations to say, hey, we're here, we're taking it all. And, you know, no, I don't think there's much compensation. You know, they're not really leaving receipts. I will say that after the war, theoretically, and I'll be the first to admit, I haven't really looked at this closely. Theoretically, unionists could, get reimbursed by the federal government. There's something called the Southern Claims Commission, but I don't know how many people tried to file claims in the wake of Sherman's March. I would imagine not too many of those claims would have been filled. So no, you're not getting much

compensation, if anything. Who are the bummers? So the bummers are, if you have like the foragers who are kind of quasi-official, the bummers are kind of the stragglers and the guys who become, they're both real and become the scapegoats for the worst excesses of the march. So they're basically just unorganized soldiers who are foraging. But what's interesting, again, so Bummer is used as an epithet at first, and it means kind of like a skulker, you know, someone who's not doing their job. But Sherman's men take that epithet and they run with it and they become, they They take pride in being called Sherman's bummers. There's songs about being bummers.

They, in a lot of their reminiscences, they talk about being one of the bummers and how great it was. Their stories written during and after the war about it. So again, it becomes kind of part of the legend of it. The way that Union soldiers reminisce about this is with a kind of lighthearted tone. I know that when I was doing research for my book about the memory of the march, I came into looking at veterans' memories thinking that this was, maybe this was going to be a little bit like a Vietnam memoir or even some of the World War II memoirs where men were traumatized. Yeah.

Or troubled even by making war against civilians. You do not find that in the reminiscences of Sherman soldiers. Interesting. The bummer, that that is that character who sneaks up on Vivian Lee and she shoots him in the hallway, right? That's the idea. Right. George and woman, Dolly Lunt Burge wrote in her diary describing an encounter with these troops, quote, like demons, they rush in, my yards are full, to my smokehouse, my dairy, pantry, kitchen, cellar,

like famished wolves they came, come, breaking locks and whatever is in their way. Okay, so that's the vibe. A big factor is what you've mentioned, of course, as they approach these plantations, the enslaved population there has to deal with it as well. They have to, they're greeting, obviously, this, this moment as the emancipators have come. But then what? You know, like, what are they going to do? Are they going to just follow them down the road or ask for guidance? I mean, what do they do? So what they do is a real mixture, because on the one hand, enslaved people greet Sherman's army usually as liberators. And most of them are happy to see them. Oftentimes they will say, like, well, you know, They buried the silver in the, you know, the pig pen or whatever. But they're also somewhat cautious because they recognize that Sherman's men are not sticking around. So they're careful. Thousands of them, maybe as many as 30 to 40,000 do start following the march. They pick up and leave home and follow Sherman's army.

Sherman does not like this. Sherman does not want this. He thinks that these African Americans are. slowing down his army. He is worried about having to provide for them, feed them. He is willing to take able-bodied men and put them into what was known at the time as a pioneer corps, basically to use them as labor, but he doesn't want to deal with women, children, the elderly. And so this is a source of real strife and conflict because how do you stop people from doing this? And yet, you know, you can't stop them. So what sort of what morally almost does the army owe this population of brand newly emancipated people? Right. And if you're doing 10 miles a day, you're pretty much out of town after you've been there. Absolutely. Right. You are not sticking around. Maybe you camp for two

nights someplace or whatever. But no, you are not sticking around. It's also interesting, though, that there's, I looked at the WPA narrative, so narratives of slavery that were taken down in the 1930s. And it is really interesting to see how African Americans, if they talk about experiencing Sherman's March, remember it. And some of them remember it. You know, some of them tell the story of Sherman himself, of freeing them, which I think is probably not the case. You know, he certainly didn't free everybody who said he, that he was, that he freed them. Some of them remember hardship coming afterwards, right, if they didn't follow the army because there's very little left to eat where they are. So it's a real, I would say it's a

real mixed bag of memory for African Americans. It's a really mixed experience. We mentioned that there's very little opposition, but there was a battle. Pretty much a week after they start, November 22nd near Griswoldville, where Confederate militia attack Sherman's rearguard troops. So they're fighting from behind or coming towards the rear, who had dug in. Tell me how that plays out. And does it have any impact on how the march proceeds from that point on? It does not slow down the march. It has no real appreciable impact on the march itself.

What it does, though, is it really shocks Sherman's soldiers because as the smoke clears, they see that they're fighting boys, you know, teenage boys and old men. And what it shows them is that the Confederacy is down to the bone, that the Confederacy has really mobilized and put into military service all of its able-bodied, you know, men. I mean, they mobilize something like close to 90 percent of their white male population. So it's that impact that Griswoldville has, but it seems almost inexorable. Like you kind of can't stop it. They just keep going.

I mean, but Wheeler's got a significant cavalry. And yet even that doesn't really, that sort of bounces off, doesn't it? It does because, again, Sherman's got enough men that he can use his own cavalry to kind of screen. He has scouts moving ahead and behind. And so, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there. But again, it's just, it's hard to slow down, especially in Georgia. I want to talk about the darkest chapter of this campaign, which is known as the Ebenezer Creek Massacre. We're later in the campaign now. It's December 9th, 1864, really close to the end. Union Major General Jefferson C. Davis.

Ooh, that's a name to have for in the Union. His troops were crossing a flooded creek on a pontoon bridge. Can you explain what happened in this and the results of it? Yeah. So Ebenezer Creek, to describe it as a flooded creek, doesn't. really do it justice. I've actually been out there. It's outside of Savannah. It's really kind of a cypress swamp. So there's a lot of water. And so Davis and his men are crossing on pontoon bridges. There are these, you know, portable bridges. And there are, as I mentioned before, thousands of African Americans following in their wake. And then behind them is Wheeler's cavalry. And so what Davis orders is that the pontoon bridges, as soon as the last soldiers

across, to pull up the pontoon bridges, which means that all of these African Americans are trapped. They're going to get trapped and captured by Wheeler's cavalry. And who knows what's going to happen to them, right? Are they going to be in prison? They're certainly going to be re-enslaved. And so that's what happens. And then it's just chaos because many of these African-Americans try to swim across, try to get themselves across. It's cold. The waters are deep. And I don't know, I don't think there are any good statistics. Like, we don't know how many people drowned at Ebenezer Creek, but certainly they drown. Some are recaptured. And Davis doesn't really think much of it. But one of the, I think he was a captain or a lieutenant, I can't quite remember

off the top of my head now, was so appalled by this that. he wrote to his congressman in Washington describing what happened. And as a result, Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton comes down to, by this point, it's early January, comes down to Savannah to meet with Sherman. Because Sherman also, when he hears about it, he's like, eh, you know, it happens. He doesn't reprimand Davis or anything like that for it. And then Stanton comes down and meets with Sherman. And then he and Sherman actually have a meeting with a group of about 20 African American ministers in Savannah and have this really fascinating exchange about what to African Americans want and what should the government be providing for them and things like that. Wow. Does that play forward in an interesting way? It does play forward in a really interesting way because what Sherman then comes up with and he's,

mad at Stanton because he doesn't think he needs to be reprimanded for this. What Sherman comes up with is a plan for what comes to be known as the Sherman Reserve, which is to take a huge section of land along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, where the sea islands are in that area, where whites have fled largely and left quote unquote abandoned, use that to settle all of these African Americans who have been following Sherman. And to give them, each head of household is supposed to get 40 acres as their own plot. It was going to be a kind of rent to own scheme for them. And this is where you get 40 acres and a mule because the idea is the mules are these broken down government army mules that each family would be entitled to want to help them farm.

And this actually does start happening early in 1865. And several thousand people are settled in the Sherman Reserve. But then what happens is once Andrew Johnson becomes president, he pardons most of these landowners. They get their land back. And that's kind of the end of that, that land redistribution scheme. 40 acres in a mule. Yeah. Is William becomes a Sherman speaking out of school?

Yeah. He takes his own actions. but it speaks to his... Well, he proposes it to Stanton, and he thinks it's so outrageous, Stanton won't go for it. And Stanton says, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's do it. Interesting. It's one of the first moments of reconstruction, really.

It's one of the first steps in sort of a broad stroke and how to fix this problem. And Agrarian Reform is one of the great shortcomings of reconstruction. Two weeks later, after this terrible event, where I can, we can fairly say about 100 people, at least die in this? I mean, is that, that's kind of... I would think, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a huge amount of people. Two weeks later, Sherman's Army reaches the sea, which was his objective, reestablishing a naval supply line, announcing the objective attained. Savannah is taken. He sends on December 21st a telegram to Abraham Lincoln. I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about 25,000.

bales of cotton. There you go. Job well done. Unlike other cities, Savannah ultimately surrenders. And so that's why you have a lot of pre-Civil War mansions. A nice city to go to now. Yeah, it's beautiful. Partly because they do surrender rather than face bombardment. And so Savannah, unlike, say, Atlanta or, you know, spoiler alert, Columbia, South Carolina doesn't burn. Right. In fact, the mayor of Savannah gives the key to the city to Sherman. Yeah. Yeah. They had about six weeks to get ready for this.

They were seeing what was coming. Right. And there is, you know, there are Confederate troops in the city and they sort of slip out. Right. Before Sherman can take the city completely. Let's take another break. And after that, we'll talk about the aftermath of the campaign and how it all sort of wraps up. Welcome back.

Sarah. After 37 days and almost 300 miles, Sherman's army has captured Savannah. What were the immediate consequences brought about by this march? Well, it's a huge celebration in the north, right? I mean, this is a huge bump of morale for them to show, you know, it does, it has exactly the psychological impact that Sherman wants it to have, which is it shows the Confederacy that he seems literally unstoppable. For the people of Savannah, they have about six weeks of union troops living all over the city.

Sherman gets the nicest mansion in town to use as his headquarters, but there are troops bivouacked everywhere, including in some of the cemeteries. And they kind of continuing on in the bummer vein vandalize a lot of the cemeteries. They knock over a lot of the headstones. You can still see some of them today so that they sometimes would go through. and like change the birth and death dates and make people like 200 years old. And in fact, in a couple of the cemeteries now in Savannah, if you go, they have headstones

bricked into the walls because they couldn't figure out where they were supposed to go. So it's really, again, it's, they do also, they have an instance where some troops dress up like Santa Claus and distribute food and gifts to the children in town. So it's all in all, I think it's not, again, it's like not terrible. for the people of Savannah. And then, though, you know, Sherman's not done when he gets there,

because now his next objective is, in fact, to start heading towards Virginia to reinforce Grant at Petersburg, but he's going to do it via a somewhat circuitous route, which is, we didn't talk about it, but on the march, one of the places that they marched through is Millageville, which was the capital of Georgia at the time. And so their next objective, is really, they start heading, in late January, early February, they start heading up through South Carolina towards Columbia, which is the capital. And there, it's also interesting, which is that Sherman has this great passage in his memoirs where he's very disingenuous. And he says, like, you know, the men, somehow the men had in their head that South Carolina was the cause of all this

misfortune. And they're harsher in South Carolina. Basically, they're, they're, sort of take the gloves off in South Carolina. And Sherman's like, I couldn't restrain them. You know, how could I? And so they get to Columbia, South Carolina, around February 14th, and the night of February 15th, the city of Columbia burns. And it's a subject of considerable dispute whether that fire was started by retreating Confederates burning the cotton, Wade Hampton, as his confederates, retreated out of the city, set the cotton on fire, or did Sherman's men really torch the city? I think, I mean, I think the scholarly consensus is it's sort of everybody's fault. But that city burns, they, you know, that's the second state capital that Sherman has

taken control of. And then from there, they start marching up towards North Carolina. They get into North Carolina in early March. There are actually a couple of battles there. At this point, Joe Johnston has taken over from John Bell Hood. His troops face Sherman and are trying to stop Sherman at the battles of Aversboro and Bentonville. But they really can't, you know, they really don't slow down the march. And so by mid-April, they have taken, Sherman and his men have taken Raleigh.

First, Goldsboro and then over to Raleigh. and then Lincoln is assassinated. Right. It's their path up north from what has already been become a very famous event that is additional pressure on Lee up there. There's essentially a pincer attack happening where Grant's already there, but here comes Sherman from below. Yeah, it's not that they're pinchingly. It's just that when Sherman's men get there, Grant will have so many reinforcements. Yeah, exactly.

And it is also a little bit, I think, lighting a fire under Grant. because Grant also does not want to have to be bailed out by Sherman. Interesting. Much as he likes the guy. He likes him, but like, look, he's been there for nine months, and I think nobody wants to have to be rescued. Right, exactly. And so, you know, Grant stages his attack on April 2nd

to break the siege at Petersburg, and that's when Richmond falls. And, you know, the surrender at Appomattox is April 9th. It's a whole chain reaction there. Exactly. Simplistically speaking. Exactly. Did Sherman's March actually help end the war, would you say? I mean, obviously it did, but in what regard would you say? Yeah, I think it absolutely helps end the war because for all the reasons we've been discussing, which is both the emotional and the morale component and then just the material component. There's so much, you know, Lee's Army is literally starving. Confederate people in certainly in Richmond and in other parts of the South are literally starving. I'm actually, the book that I'm currently working on partly spurred on from this Sherman book

is looking actually at hunger and starvation in the Civil War South. So it's just, you know, to take all of these supplies and remove them from Confederate hands is a huge impact. And it's also, again, it's showing that Lincoln's going to keep fighting, right? Lincoln's not going to surrender or sue for peace or allow for anything like that. And the Confederacy just cannot really hold on anymore. The economic impact alone estimated to be about $100 million. That's $100 million in 1865 money. Interesting. Wow. So I just, I was reviewing some things before this talk. And I think someone said that's about $1.75 billion in today. in today's money. Yeah. If nothing else, you have gutted the economy of Georgia, which is largely. And a lot of South Carolina and part of North Carolina, too. Yeah.

I think that's the takeaway here for me is it's one thing to do this march, which is in, you know, in the context of the Civil War, a fairly simple operation unopposed and so forth. But it's really attached to the greater movement later that takes up into South Carolina and even to North Carolina, finally spurring the end of the war. These days, we think of the Sherman Tank, the name Sherman Tank. You know why that's a name that applies to that tank because it was an unstoppable force moving through Georgia. However, I think of William to come to Sherman in a different regard. There's a certain elegance to this man.

I don't know why I feel this way about him. But every time I see a picture of the guy, every time I read about his emotional crises, there's a fuller figure than just a tank like, you know, patent type guy. But that's maybe a misconception that history has brought us. Yeah, I think that you're not wrong about that. There is a certain kind of maybe it's like a kind of dignity to him. Certainly, he certainly knows how to pose for a photograph. And I think that is something.

I mean, he's, you know, he's so photographed throughout his life. And then, you know, I think part of the mystique of Sherman also is, of course, that, you know, his famous, right, I'm not going to campaign for the presidency, and if it's offered, I won't take it. So Americans love that kind of Cincinnati's figure, right, who doesn't want that. I think Sherman definitely helps bring about the end of the Civil War. He then, though, is the architect of a lot of the atrocities against Native Americans out in the West. So he is a harder figure, I think, to praise in retrospect for that. And so ironic that his first, his middle name is Tecumseh named after the chief, you know,

by his father who loved the guy or at least admired him. You know, he's this really kind of beloved figure later in life. And he goes back to Atlanta a couple times in the late 1870s and early 1880s. And he's kind of welcomed really openly, actually. People really like him in Atlanta. because, you know, there's these jokes, they joke about like, hide the matches. Sherman is coming, but they recognize that he did like white southerners. And then when he dies, you know, there's just an outpouring of national mourning for him. Again, so that he is, there's something about him.

And he did really love his soldiers. And he goes to a bagillion dinners and veterans reunions and things like that. And certainly the favorite photograph I have of him in my book is of Sherman with a group of veterans. And they don't even know who they are or what veterans reunion it is. And it's kind of gray-haired. And there's just something about it that you can see. Like, that's where he is most at home. Right.

In many ways, the march to the sea, unique as it was, an army marching without supply lines with this certain purpose of destruction, was the beginning of almost 20th century modern warfare, right? So I think that's what people say is that that Sherman's March really kicks off 20th century modern warfare. It's the birth of total war is often the phrase that people use. I am more careful about that because I think that warfare in the 20th century becomes so much more horrific and so much more targeted against civilians. So for example, in the, around 1980 or the early 80s, James Reston Jr. writes a book called Sherman's March and Vietnam, where he tries to make this argument that you can kind of draw a line from Sherman's March up through the Milai massacre. I don't think you can do that. And that's because of what I said earlier, which is that Sherman is not killing civilians. This is not, you know, the fire bombing of Tokyo. This is not the fire bombing of Dresden. This is not search and destroyers. missions. It is a kind of total war, but it is a total war that is bounded and is a war against

property and not people's bodies. Interesting. And I think that's really an important distinction. Was it then a convenient target of the lost cause, folks? It's absolutely a convenient target of the lost cause. And like I said, right, Sherman goes to Atlanta in 1880, I think. He's welcomed with open arms. In 1881, Jefferson Davis publishes his rise and fall of the Confederate government, and he goes hard after Sherman. And that's where you start to see the kind of cultural tide turn a little bit towards Sherman as a villain and Sherman's march as this great evil. And that only is intensified. Then, you know, it's a big factor in the film Birth of a Nation in 1915. And then in gone with the wind. And so there's a cultural shift where Sherman and Sherman's March becomes

the sort of shorthand for all the atrocities of the civil war. And it becomes just this metaphor for violence and destruction in all kinds of capacity. So even now, people say, oh, we should, you know, if only we had Sherman to let loose on Iran is something that I've seen people, just like people on the internet. I mean, I don't think anyone thinks this is a serious policy. But that kind of shorthand that people use is really interesting. Thank you. And Sarah Rubin is a professor of history at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. She's the author of Through the Heart of Dixie, Sherman's March, an American Memory, as well as editing the perfect scout, a soldier's memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the campaign of the Carolinas. When's your new book going to come out?

Oh, it's going to be a while. It's been a slow. It's been a slow right. Right. It's a siege. Yeah, it's a bit of a siege. All right. Nice to meet you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. From mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.