Sherman's March to the Sea

Between 15 November and 21 December 1864, Union Major General William T. Sherman led some 62,000 soldiers about 300 miles across Georgia, from captured Atlanta to the port of Savannah. Cut off from their supply lines, his troops lived off the countryside and deliberately wrecked railways, factories, farms and other property along the way. Officially called the Savannah campaign, the march crippled the Confederacy's economy and morale in the last months of the American Civil War, and it remains one of the most controversial operations of that war.

Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864 after a long campaign. He and the Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant, believed the war would end only when the South's capacity to wage it was broken. A march through Georgia's heartland would destroy resources the Confederacy depended on, show Southern civilians that their government could not protect them, and put pressure on the rear of Robert E. Lee's army, then besieged at Petersburg in Virginia.

Instead of chasing the Confederate army of John Bell Hood, which had moved north towards Tennessee, Sherman sent George H. Thomas with two armies to deal with it and kept his best troops for the march. Lincoln and Grant both had doubts, but on 2 November Grant telegraphed his approval.

Sherman's men carried only about 20 days' rations and stripped their wagon trains to a minimum. His field orders told them to "forage liberally": organised parties would take food and livestock, while only corps commanders could order the destruction of mills, houses and cotton gins, and then only where the army met resistance. Foragers nicknamed "bummers" fed the army from local farms while others tore up railways and destroyed factories and farm buildings. Soldiers heated railway rails over bonfires and twisted them around trees, leaving what became known as Sherman's neckties.

The army left a smouldering Atlanta in two wings, moving so that the Confederates could not tell whether it was heading for Macon, Augusta or Savannah. Resistance was weak: Confederate forces in the state, mostly cavalry and Georgia militia, never numbered more than about 13,000. At Griswoldville on 22 November, militia attacks were repulsed with heavy losses. The next day Union troops entered the state capital, Milledgeville, after the governor and legislature had fled, and held a mock session voting Georgia back into the Union. Cavalry skirmishes continued until early December.

Sherman reached the outskirts of Savannah on 10 December and found it defended by about 10,000 men behind flooded rice fields. On 13 December his troops stormed Fort McAllister in about 15 minutes, opening contact with the Union navy and its supplies. Sherman demanded the city's surrender, but the Confederate commander, William J. Hardee, slipped away across the Savannah River on the night of 20 December. The mayor surrendered the city the next morning. Sherman telegraphed Abraham Lincoln, offering him Savannah as a Christmas gift.

Thousands of enslaved people left the plantations to follow the army; one Confederate officer put their number at 10,000, and hundreds of them perished from hunger, illness or cold. Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside land for freed families, later remembered as the origin of the promise of "forty acres and a mule".

Sherman himself estimated the damage at $100 million, most of it, in his words, simple waste and destruction. His army wrecked around 300 miles of railway and seized thousands of horses, mules and cattle. From Savannah he turned north through the Carolinas, and on 26 April 1865 he accepted the surrender of Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina. Some historians see the march as a forerunner of modern total war, and many Southerners long execrated Sherman's name.

The campaign fell between our map years: the 1815 map shows Georgia within the United States, and the 1878 map shows the country after the defeat of the Confederate States.