This Hallowed Ground (65 page)

“If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist. This may not be war but rather statesmanship.”
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Grant’s consent was won at last. Thomas moved his Cumberlands back to Tennessee — the men tended to be a little sullen, feeling that they would have to do any fighting that remained while the men with Sherman would have all of the fun — and the Army of the Tennessee went to work to ruin Atlanta before beginning the march to the coast.

Atlanta was pretty tattered already. The repeated bombardments during the siege had destroyed many houses, and when Sherman occupied the place about half of its normal population of thirteen thousand had fled. Sherman ordered the rest of the civilians out of town and managed to deport some sixteen hundred of them; to Halleck he wrote that “if the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.” During the long Federal occupancy of the town the deserted buildings got rough treatment from the soldiers, who never had any qualms about destroying dwellings that were not currently inhabited. And finally, when it was time to leave, Sherman ordered complete destruction of all factories, railroad installations, and other buildings that might be of any use to the Confederacy.

The soldiers went to their work with zest. By now they understood industrial warfare, they could equate wholesale destruction with a blow at the enemy’s war potential, and anyway it was fun to wreck everything. Troops who marched through Atlanta while the destruction was going on wrote of “flames illuminating the whole heavens … the pandemonium caused by the flames, the yells of the soldiery, the explosion of shells and ammunition.” As the men moved out of town it would happen that groups would break ranks and go back to set fires on their own account; one man in such a group wrote that they were moved by a “desire to destroy everything, and fearful that some old rebel’s property would be saved.” Other men wrote that going through Atlanta “the smoke almost blinded us,” and they concluded that “everything of importance” was on fire.
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Sherman had ordered that no fires be lit except when he himself was present; he wanted the destruction confined strictly to warehouses, factories, and the like. But flames from these buildings spread to others, wandering bands of carefree privates lit fires on their own hook, and an Illinois veteran who had a part in these forays said afterward that “several general officers were there, but they stood back and said nothing, allowing the soldiers to pursue their course.”
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The firing went on
all night long, with the band of a Massachusetts regiment playing gaily in an open square. Later, soldiers under Sherman’s orders worked to check the flames.

Smoke filled the sky like a gigantic ominous signal as Sherman’s army pulled clear of the city and started for the sea. The army was moving in four columns, widely spread out — XV and XVII Corps, under Howard, on the right; and XIV and XX, under Slocum, on the left. Orders were that there should be an average pace of fifteen miles a day. Transportation was cut to a minimum, and there was no supply line. The army would feed itself with what it found in Georgia along the way.

And so began the strangest, most fateful campaign of the entire war, like nothing that happened before or afterward. These Federals were not moving out to find and destroy an armed enemy; the only foe that could give them a fight, Hood’s army, was hundreds of miles off to the rear, and everybody knew it. They were not being asked to hurry; fifteen miles a day was much less than these long-legged marchers could easily make, and everybody knew that too. Their mission was to wreck an economy and to destroy a faith — the economy that supported the thin fading fabric of the Confederacy, the faith that believed the Confederacy to be an enduring creation and trusted in its power to protect and avenge. As they moved down the red roads of Georgia, cutting a swath sixty miles wide from flank to flank, they were the conscious agents of this destruction; men who trampled out the terrible vintage of the grapes of wrath, led by an implacable general who was more and more coming to see a monstrous but logical destiny in his mission.

To Emily Hoffman in Baltimore, Sherman had written (in the days when strong young General McPherson still lived) words that partly expressed his feelings: “We of the North have rights in the South, in its rivers and vacant land, the right to come and go when we please, and these rights as a brave people we cannot and will not surrender.” He had made it much more explicit in a long letter to Halleck:

“I would banish all minor questions and assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power to penetrate to every part of the national domain, and that we will do it; that we will do it in our own time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be in one year or two, or ten or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper; that we will not cease until the end is attained. That all who do not aid are enemies, and we will not account to them for our acts.”
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Sherman’s language was often a great deal rougher than his actions, and neither on this nor any other campaign was he out to “take every
life.” But he was undoubtedly moving consciously as an avenging agent, and his soldiers saw themselves in the same role; they were supposed to wreck all railroad lines and any factories or depots or other industrial installations, and in addition the army had to do a great deal of foraging if it was going to survive — and altogether here was the recipe for wholesale destruction.

Every morning each brigade would send out a detail of foragers — from twenty to fifty men, led by an officer and followed by a wagon to bring back what was seized — and this detail, whose members knew the route the army was following, was not expected to return to camp until evening. The foragers were ordered to stay out of inhabitated dwellings and to seize no more food than was actually needed, but they were under the loosest sort of control and in any case they were joined, followed, and aided by a steadily growing riffraff of armed stragglers, who were known contemptuously as “bummers” and who knew very little restraint of any kind. Between the regular foraging parties and the lawless bummers, plantations that lay in this army’s path were bound to have a very rough time.

There were some large and imposing plantations in the territory the army was crossing; Georgia was fat and fertile, the barns and smokehouses were crammed, and the men felt that they were in a land of surpassing richness. Earlier, on the way from Chattanooga down to Atlanta, they had felt that Georgia was a pretty poor state and remarked that they never saw any residences to compare with the regular farm buildings north of the Ohio. But the army had not gone two days on its move east from Atlanta before an Illinois soldier was writing that he “could begin to see where the ‘rich planters’ come in,” and he added: “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned. It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering and promises to prove much richer yet.”

The whole Army of the Tennessee was making the same discovery, and it was responding with joyous whoops; and as it moved, the great march to the sea began to resemble nothing so much as one gigantic midwestern Halloween saturnalia, a whole month deep and two hundred and fifty miles long. A captain looked back on it all as “a kind of half-forgotten dream, now gay and lightsome, now troubled and gruesome.” He recalled that there was “no fighting worthy of the name” and said that he and his mates “occupied ourselves chiefly in marching from one fertile valley to another, removing the substance of the land.” Typical was one veteran’s comment: “Our men are clear discouraged with foraging; they can’t carry half the hogs and potatoes they find right along the road.” In spite of the strict orders that no man not assigned to one of the regular foraging parties should leave the ranks to take any civilian
property, it was admitted that “there is scarcely a one that does not forage from morning to night if he gets a chance,” and the army reveled in elaborate menus — “we live on sweet potatoes, turnips, flour, meal, beef, pork, mutton, chickens and anything else found on the plantations.”
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Eight days after it had left Atlanta the army reached Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia, and one man recorded that “the army had lived high on the products of Georgia and were growing fatter and stronger every day.” Perhaps unnecessarily, he added that “they had come to look on the trip as a grand picnic, and were not getting tired but more anxious to prolong it if anything.” An Ohioan who had joined in much of the foraging saw a justification for it and wrote exultantly: “There is no haggling over prices or terms and no time wasted in coming to an understanding between the planter and a line of bayonets. He silently and with great show of dignity watches the fruits of his slaves’ labor leaving the plantation to supply his enemy. He has sown the seeds of treason that have ripened into supplies to meet the demands of this enemy, and all he can do is to grin and bear it.”
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Near Milledgeville the army had a brush with a few thousand Georgia militia, stiffened by a little regular cavalry. A brigade from the XV Corps routed the militia with practiced ease, and when the men crossed the field after their enemies had fled they saw with horror that they had been fighting against old men and young boys. One Federal wrote feelingly that “I was never so affected at the sight of dead and wounded before,” and asserted: “I hope we will never have to shoot at such men again. They knew nothing at all about fighting and I think their officers knew as little.”
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Plantations were looted outright; men who had set out to take no more than hams and chickens began carrying away heirlooms, silver, watches — anything that struck their fancy. Here and there southern patriots felled trees to obstruct roads, or burned bridges; there was never enough of this to delay the army seriously, but there was just enough to provoke reprisals, and barns and houses went up in smoke as a result. A general remarked that “as the habit of measuring right by might goes on, pillage becomes wanton and arson is committed to cover the pillage.” An Illinois soldier confessed that “it could not be expected that among so many tens of thousands there would be no rogues,” and another man from the same state burst out: “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”
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Day after day crowds of fugitive slaves fell in on the roads to follow the army. A “mammy” would show up, bundle on her head, baby in her arms, three small children at her heels; the soldiers would ask where she
was going and she would say, “To Savannah, sah” — and officers, who were aware that the army’s destination was not known even to the Union rank and file, would wonder how she knew that that was where they were heading.
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Sherman did his utmost to keep these fugitives from following. It was ordered that the army’s progress was on no account to be obstructed or delayed by these hopeful contrabands, but there was no way to keep them from trailing after the soldiers if they chose, and many of them did choose. What became of most of them, no one ever knew. Thousands of Negroes, it was thought, followed the army for a few days and then vanished, going off no one knew where, uprooted persons wholly adrift in a strange and disordered world. In the end, thousands of them did reach the seacoast with the army, but they were only a fraction of the blind, desperate throng that followed for a time and then spun off into unremembered darkness.

They had no historian and they left no records, and the soldiers were by turns amused and bored by them; but as they moved — blindly, hopefully, doomed, going from one misery to another — they gave significance to the entire march, to the long dusty columns in blue with rowdy outriders and with the lines of bayonets that took no arguments from planters. For if this army was destroying much that did not need to be destroyed, it was also destroying slavery; dismantling one of the barricades that stood in the way of the advance of the human spirit, lighting dreadful fires that would finally stand as beacon lights no matter what they consumed.

It was believed that some of the fugitives met death by starvation, yet those who were able to stay with the troops usually got enough to eat. Some queer grapevine of slave-quarter information told the Negroes which regiments in all this army tended to be most kindly and hospitable; also, the soldiers simply had ever so much more food than they themselves could consume. Foragers brought in vast wagonloads of material that was abandoned to rot. Usually the surplus was given to the Negroes.

So much food was taken, indeed, that the soldiers themselves were almost appalled when they stopped to think about it. In one regiment the men made a rough rule-of-thumb estimate of the requisitions that had been made and concluded that the army must have accounted for one hundred thousand hogs, twenty thousand head of cattle, fifteen thousand horses and mules, five hundred thousand bushels of corn, and one hundred thousand bushels of sweet potatoes. Sherman himself later estimated that his army had caused one hundred million dollars’ worth of damage in Georgia. Of this, he believed, perhaps twenty million dollars represented material that the army actually used; the rest was “simple waste and destruction.” One officer wrote about burned houses,
burned fences, roads cut to bits by marching men, fields despoiled and crossed by innumerable wagon tracks, and concluded that “Dante’s Inferno could not furnish a more horrible and depressing picture than a countryside when war has swept over it.”
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As the march went on, it was noted that the word “bummer” changed its character. Originally it had been a term of contempt, applied only to the notorious stragglers who never stayed in ranks, in battle or out of battle, and who were looked down on by all combat soldiers; before the army got to the coast the men were beginning to call themselves bummers, and even Sherman, looking back in post-war years, did not mind applying the word to all of his troops.