Sherman’s March to the Sea (15 November to 21 December 1864) was a significant military campaign in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Hoping to cripple the Confederacy’s ability to make war, as well as to crush its will to keep fighting, Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman led 62,000 men on a march from Atlanta, Georgia, to the coastal city of Savannah. In between, he conducted a ‘scorched earth’ campaign, destroying farms, factories, railroads, and other resources of military value. By the time Sherman’s army captured Savannah on 21 December, it had caused over $100 million in destruction (over $1.5 billion today) and so thoroughly disrupted Georgia’s agriculture that it would take generations for the state to recover. The ‘March to the Sea’ succeeded in both its goals and played a major role in bringing the war to an end only a few months later.
Making Georgia Howl
On 2 September 1864, a long line of blue-coated Union soldiers streamed into Atlanta, Georgia. Bands played, cannons fired off salutes, and, above city hall, the Stars and Stripes waved for the first time since the state had seceded nearly four years before. The capture of Atlanta had been extremely beneficial to the Union – its fall had demoralized the South, exposed the underbelly of the eastern Confederate States, and destroyed any chance of the Union accepting a peace that did not include total victory. The architect of Atlanta’s fall was the stern, red-bearded Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, who now looked to capitalize on his success and force the rest of Georgia to submit to the might of Federal power. But before he could do this, he would have to deal with the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Lieutenant General John Bell Hood.
Sherman thought it a waste of time to be hunting Hood when he could be marching eastward into the undefended heart of Georgia.
Though Hood’s army had been pretty well beaten during the previous Atlanta Campaign, it had not been destroyed. At the end of September, Hood tried to lure Sherman out of Atlanta by marching westward and threatening the Union supply lines to Tennessee. Initially, Sherman took the bait and pursued Hood through western Georgia and into Alabama. However, Sherman’s heart was not in the chase. Indeed, he thought it a waste of time to be hunting Hood’s depleted army when he could instead be marching eastward into the undefended heart of Georgia, destroying everything of military value in his path. “I could cut a swath to the sea,” he wired to Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies. Such a march, he argued, would “divide the Confederacy in two” and would make a huge psychological impact on the already war-weary Southern population. “If I move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea,” he said, it would be “a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which [the Confederates] cannot resist…I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!” (quoted in McPherson, 808)…