Southern Storm (75 page)

O
n January 21, 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman boarded the army steamer
W. W. Coit
, which carried him to Beaufort, South Carolina, where he would begin what he later called “the active campaign from Savannah northward.” Some hundred or so miles inland from where he came ashore, a Union prisoner of war in a stockade outside Columbia put pen to paper to praise the man he much admired and, by so doing, helped transform the March to the Sea from another military campaign to an American epic.

Samuel H. M. Byers was soldiering with the 5th Iowa when he was captured in fighting near Chattanooga in 1863. By his own account, he subsequently made several escape attempts, “only to be retaken” each time. Perhaps as a way of combating the psychological debilitation of confinement, Byers became obsessed with Sherman’s successes, as he gleaned them from camp rumors and occasionally smuggled newspapers. He had actually viewed Sherman just before his capture, and never forgot the General’s apparent fearlessness. Once it became known that Sherman’s Savannah campaign had accomplished its objective, Byers funneled his emotions into a five-stanza lyric poem with chorus that took considerable liberty with the facts, but which was unabashed in its adoration of this great American hero. The verse-poem concluded:

A fellow POW set the verse to music to produce a song that the other prisoners enjoyed singing to mock their guards. According to Byers, the piece “soon reached the soldiers in the North, and before I knew it, it was being sung everywhere.” He would successfully escape captivity, and when Union forces reached Columbia, he actually met his hero, who added him to the headquarters staff. Sherman, who far preferred myth-making to objective reporting, informed Byers: “You hit it splendidly.”

The Union men who marched with Sherman to the sea expressed equal fervor when it came to evaluating what they had together accomplished. “The importance of the march through Georgia has never been overestimated,” wrote H. Judson Kilpatrick in 1876. “The very moment that Sherman reached the sea, demonstrating the fact that a well-organized army, ably led, could raid the South at pleasure; there was not a man in all the land but knew the war was virtually over, and the rebellion ended.” Much closer to the actual events, a triumphant Illinois soldier, writing from the streets of Savannah, had no hesitation in stating that the campaign “will go down in history, and be told over and over again as one of the greatest achievements on record.” Another Illinoisan was equally unequivocal that the “march has been the greatest blow to the Confederacy that has yet been struck.”

Few of the Yankee boys shed a tear over what they had done to the central and eastern portions of the state. “This part of Georgia never realized what war was until we came through on this expedition,” said a Minnesota man. “It is terrible to think of,” professed a Connecticut officer, “but only as an act of retributive justice to these people here.” “As you are aware,” a Wisconsin boy told his parents, “we have…made a big hole in the Confederacy. Will not the North rejoice when it real
izes the effects of this great movement?…[N]o more [a] terrible blow has been dealt the South than that has just been given it in Ga.”

Recent memories of heavily laden foraging parties or the sights of pillaged homesteads were amplified in the imagination until many Federal participants became utterly convinced they had scoured Governor Brown’s state to the bedrock. “Georgia [is] in a helpless condition, not to recover from the terrible shock of war till reconstructed,” said a Wisconsin soldier, while a staff officer reflected that it “looks hard to see a large, prosperous, fruitful country thus laid in utter ruins, but it is the only way to conquer rebellion.” “On our march to the coast we have ploughed through [the] garden and granary of the Confederacy, laying waste the country and cutting things up root and branch,” reported a Pennsylvania officer to the folks back home. “We have effectively severed their railroad lines of communication; we have swept off thousands of their slaves; and not to put too fine a point upon it, Sherman’s scythe has cut a clean swath just fifty miles in width.” “On the entire route, the destruction was more devilish than you can imagine,” a Seventeenth Corps staff officer assured his family. “The Union army was a besom of destruction, sweeping across the country, leaving in its wake devastated farms and the smoke of burning buildings,” said another soldier.

The ever-present Major Hitchcock penned his assessment of the campaign before Savannah was captured. Overall, he decided that Sherman’s columns had been “most fortunate in weather…. The health of the whole army…has been unusually good,—and mortality very small…. We have escaped more than was thought possible the obstacles which might have been interposed…. The great object of the march,—the destruction of R.R. on the vital chain of rebel communication from E. to W.—has been more than accomplished, and it is shown that a large army can march with impunity through the heart of the richest rebel state…. Our supplies are yet hardly drawn on at all, our…men are in the finest spirits, ready for anything ‘Uncle Billy’ orders…. I do not forget, and God knows I am sorry for the people of the regions we have traversed [but this]…Union and its Government must be sustained at any and every cost…. To do this implies…war now so terrible and successful that none can dream of rebellion hereafter.”

Sherman’s final report on the Savannah Campaign was measured in its praise for his officers and men. Generals Howard and Slocum were described as “gentlemen of singular capacity and intelligence, thorough soldiers and patriots, working day and night…for their country and their men.” Those leading Sherman’s divisions and brigades received his “personal and official thanks,” while the rank and file were lauded for carrying out their duties (be it combat, road fixing, foraging, or track wrecking) “with alacrity and a degree of cheerfulness unsurpassed.” Sherman singled out Brigadier General Kilpatrick in both his final report and in a personal message sent on December 29.

In the latter, the General said: “I beg to assure you that the operations of the cavalry have been skillful and eminently successful…. [At] Thomas’ Station, Waynesboro’, and Brier Creek, you whipped a superior cavalry force, and took from Wheeler all chance of boasting over you. But the fact that to you, in a great measure, we owe the march of four strong infantry columns, with heavy trains and wagons, over three hundred miles through an enemy’s country, without the loss of a single wagon, and without the annoyance of cavalry dashes on our flanks, is honor enough for any cavalry commander.”

The first reactions to the campaign from the other side were often a mixture of concern and disbelief. Many a distant Georgian’s letters home during this period echoed the sentiments of one coming from Petersburg in early December: “I am nervous and exceedingly anxious to hear from you.” Some who wrote wondered why the state had apparently lain supine before the Yankee advance. “The people of Georgia should all unite and repel Sherman and destroy him at every post, destroy and carry off provisions and forage from his front,” wrote a bellicose member of the 3rd Georgia fighting under General Robert E. Lee. Another in the regiment was more acidic. “Even Georgian soldiers in Virginia don’t understand why Sherman marched through the State without resistance,” he wrote on Christmas Day. “Was it a lack of patriotism in the people that they did not fly to arms to stop the invader?” “I feel very little inclined to call myself a Georgian any more,” ruminated one more, “and if it were not that you all live in Macon I should disown the state
in toto
and transfer my allegiance.”

When Governor Joseph Brown stood before the reconvened Georgia legislature in early 1865, he was compelled to officially rebut imprecations against his state’s will to resist “because her people did
not drive back and destroy the army of the enemy.” The fault, Brown insisted, lay with the central government in Richmond, which held back fifty regiments of Georgia veteran soldiers in Virginia when they were urgently needed to defend their homes. Brown’s prideful bitterness found an echo in a young Georgia militiaman on picket duty after Savannah’s fall when he was confronted by a South Carolina squad who asked “what in the hell we meant by letting Sherman march through Georgia. I told them; allright, You will have a chance of it in a few days, for he is sure coming, and you will not be able to stop him either.”

Only later would people become aware of the extent of destruction along portions of the march route. Where it was bad, it was often really bad. “All around the grove were carcasses of cows, sheep and hogs, some with only the hind quarters gone, and the rest left to spoil,” remembered a resident living near Louisville. A neighbor suffered much the same, recollecting that the hogs were “killed, mules taken, corn taken to feed the horses, anything, everything to eat.” Even the preponderance of homes that survived the passing storm were nonetheless badly treated. “Where there were no houses burned, they destroyed all the fencing and palings, so that when they left, the houses stood out in the bare yards and fields,” reminisced a Bulloch County civilian. “Many of us are utterly ruined,” contributed a Clinton homeowner. “What the people in this country are to do God only knows for starvation is certainly staring them in the face,” wrote a woman near Sandersville. A neighbor added that it “was now winter, too late for crops; what were we to do?”

Once the shock had passed, however, a determination to survive emerged. Hardly had the last Yankee soldier disappeared down the road than most Georgians caught in their path began picking up the pieces. One resolute household existed on scraps scavenged from abandoned Union camps until “kind relatives in another part of Georgia, who had not been robbed, came to the relief.” For those who lived off the land, the prospect of a sudden catastrophe was never far from their thoughts, so recovering from Storm Sherman was no different. “Now I reckon you want to know what the Yankees did for us,” scribbled a McDonough mother to her daughter. “Well, bad enough but no worse than I expected…. You must not be uneasy. We will live but not so Plentiful as we used to.” “There was a great crop raised in 1864,” a
Bulloch County farmer reminded his readers in 1914. “It was one of the most fruitful years in my memory…and even the Yankee army could not eat it up and carry it off in two days.”

Sherman always believed that his march helped break Georgian support for the Confederate cause. State governor Brown might well have agreed, at least based on some of the petitions he received. One submitted in mid-January, from Wilcox County in the south-central portion of the state, declared that the “time has come when our authorities should go boldly to work to negotiate a peace before we are entirely ruined.” The great losses suffered outside the state by Georgians under arms lent an urgency to this appeal, which demanded that talks begin “before the whole white male population is butchered.” Other citizens were equally determined to keep resisting. “I hope that S.C. will accomplish what Ga. should have done, capture Sherman and his vile pack,” wrote a Rockbridge resident in February 1865.

Just about everyone wanted the outsiders to go away. A Georgia soldier’s wife, living just outside the zone of Sherman’s destruction, reported a rumor making the rounds in mid-January that France and England were ready to guarantee Confederate independence if a policy of gradual emancipation was adopted. “I would rather do that than continue fighting or go back to Lincoln,” she declared. A northern man visiting conquered, conciliatory Savannah in late January 1865 observed that the “real Union sentiment in this city, I fear, is small. The people look upon the Confederate cause as lost, and therefore come forward and take the oath of allegiance to the United States; but they still retain their Southern sympathies and have no love for the Union.”

Sherman’s March dramatically fractured the social fabric by shattering the binds of custom and coercion that held together white and black Georgia. The placid exterior of antebellum southern life masked a balance of terror coursing underneath—terror felt by blacks who were arbitrarily subject to cruel punishments unto death for any sign of resistance; terror felt by whites who viewed themselves as living atop a dormant but active volcano. Three years of war had already slackened the bonds by siphoning away many white males (the chief enforcers); the passage of Sherman’s columns severed most (but not all) of the remaining ones.

“We fear the negroes now more than anything else,” declared a
Sandersville resident in late November 1864. Yet amazingly, in the often complicated chronicle that was Sherman’s March, minor incidents of black-on-white retribution were rare, major ones virtually nonexistent. “When Sherman’s army marched through the South, did we take advantage of this (as we might) to commit acts of lawlessness and violence?” asked a black Augusta newspaperman right after the war. “No, never!”

Blacks who voted with their feet met a reception from Sherman’s men that ranged from a bemused paternalism to outright racism. “They thronged the line of march wide-eyed and wondering,” wrote a Pennsylvania soldier. “It was very amusing to see the darkies in the city [of Savannah] and villages,” wing commander Henry W. Slocum told a New York friend. “They came out in groups and welcomed us with delight, they danced and howled, laughed, cried and prayed all at the same time.”