Southern Storm (76 page)

While some Yankees looked at the refugees with sympathetic eyes, many more were captives of the racial stereotypes of their age. Brigadier General William P. Carlin, commanding a division under Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis, thought of them as “useless creatures…encumbering the trains and devouring the subsistence along the line of march so much needed for the soldiers.” A soldier marching under Carlin described the escaped slaves as the most “unadulterated miserable wretches as I ever saw.” “The soldiers had no little fun at the expense of black people on that march,” said a Fifteenth Corps staff officer. A benign incident was recorded by a member of the 100th Indiana who watched as a uniformed orderly stopped before a throng of blacks waiting at a crossroads to tell them that General Sherman was coming, wearing a fancy uniform and riding a mule-drawn carriage. “The poor Darkies took it all in,” chuckled the soldier, “and when…one of our bummers came along dressed in a captured uniform that no doubt had been some cherished family keepsake…they marched along by the side of the road singing their songs till some one told them the truth.”

The presence of a compliant and eager-to-please black population was a boon for Sherman’s March. “We find the colored population our friends at all times,” said an Ohioan. “When, as often happened during the march, information was given by the slaves, it could always be relied upon,” recollected an Illinois comrade. A Connecticut officer in
charge of one foraging party recorded how his command relied on black guides to avoid Rebel cavalry patrols. They enjoyed a peaceful bivouac after cleaning out two plantations. Only in the morning did the local blacks reveal to the officer “that a large Rebel force had passed on a cross-road, less than a mile from me, during the night. These negroes had, on their own hook, gone out beyond my pickets and stood watch for our additional safety.”

Back with the main column, blacks made themselves useful in a variety of ways. “Two Sergeants in Co. C picked up a colored man at Madison, who wished to cast his lot with Sherman’s army,” recorded a member of the 123rd New York. “The very next day he ‘confiscated’ a good horse, and the Sergeants transferred their heavy knapsacks, tents and blankets, pots, kettles, frying pan, coffee pot, etc. to the back of the horse. At night Jack, the name of the colored man, came in with plenty of sweet potatoes, fresh pork, etc., and fodder for his ‘mool’ as he called him…. He said he was going to get a cook next day, and sure enough, next night he brought in two colored girls, one of them a house servant, who was quite aristocratic, the other a field hand…. Those two Sergeants had an easy time of it all the way to Savannah.”

When Sherman’s forces closed on the coastal citadel to plunge into its spongy barrier of swamps and flooded rice fields, the brawn of male blacks became a major asset. “New negro pioneer squads have been temporarily organized & [a] Serg[eant] is detailed from the regiment to take charge of them,” reported a man in the 105th Ohio. An artilleryman with the Seventeenth Corps took note of the “Pioneer Corps now numbering some 600 negroes picked up on the march.” This labor force enabled the Yankees to push through the zone of Confederate road obstructions with relative ease. “Rebels have blockaded roads along the swamps,” recorded a Minnesota soldier, “but they are soon cleared away by our negro pioneers, who carry axes & spades.” “The roads were nothing but quagmires,” added a Fifteenth Corps infantryman. “We had 400 negroes, who constructed of pine logs and poles a double corduroy [road] from our front to the rear.”

The one laboring job that blacks were not allowed to perform was railroad wrecking. Sherman made this task one of the highest, if not the highest, of priorities for his troops. Whenever it was possible, the march route followed a railroad right-of-way so that units—from single
regiments to whole divisions—could be assigned to wrecking duties. “I attached much importance to this destruction of the railroad,” Sherman said, “gave it my own personal attention, and made reiterated orders to others on the subject.”

Major General Henry W. Slocum, commanding the Left Wing, reported that his men had destroyed 119 miles of rail, principally following the Georgia Railroad from outside Atlanta to where the line crossed the Oconee River, east of Madison. An additional six miles’ worth came out of the Eatonton branch of the Central of Georgia around Milledgeville. The infantry of the Right Wing, under Major General Oliver O. Howard, claimed 191 miles destroyed. Their path of destruction followed the Central of Georgia, starting east of Macon, continuing to the crossing of the Little Ogeechee, forty-six miles west of Savannah. Twenty-four miles were ripped out of the Augusta and Savannah line, with more than forty pried from the Savannah and Gulf Railroad beds.

The traditional story of Sherman’s March reckons each of these stretches wrecked with exquisite care. Indeed, when Sherman personally supervised, or the work was carried out by the 1st Michigan Engineers, destruction was total. However, when the job was left to the infantry without Sherman’s presence, the results varied—from a thorough ripping of beds, burning of ties, and twisting of rails to a far more cursory vandalism, which often consisted only of flipping the track over and setting the sleepers on fire.

This helps explain why, on January 3, 1865, Confederate engineer chief Major General J. F. Gilmer was able to report that “cars now run from Macon to Milledgeville.” By the end of the month, a determined traveler could complete a rail journey from Rutledge to Augusta. While it is true that whole sections between Gordon and Savannah would have to be abandoned, it was only because the Federal garrison in the latter place constituted a threat to working parties. This is not to say that the railroad wrecking was superficial. It wasn’t; but it was several degrees less than the absolute destruction usually portrayed. Much the same could be said for the Confederate telegraph system, dismantled along with the railroads. By dint of hard work, the Southern Telegraph Company had service restored between Richmond and Mobile on January 1.

The notion that Sherman’s March to the Sea was the first to display characteristics of widespread destruction is a persistent generalization grafted onto the saga soon after its completion, projected to an even greater degree in the century following the Civil War. Sherman’s inclusion of civilian and commercial property on his list of legitimate military targets led some historians to proclaim that his campaign was one of “total war.” This is to misread Sherman’s intentions and to misunderstand the results of what happened.

“Total war” implies a military operation meant to obliterate civilian infrastructure preparatory to imposing a new order on that society. Sherman had no such desires. His more limited goal was to make any continuance of rebellion so unpalatable to southern civilians that they would view a return to the Union as the lesser of two evils. The overwhelming force he applied made it clear to all that the so-called Confederacy lacked the wherewithal to guarantee personal security. Sherman’s decision to add civilian property to the mix stemmed from his belief in collective responsibility and his determination to punish the Southern leaders who should have been looking out for the welfare of their people by finding an accommodation with him.

Ironically, from Sherman’s standard of values the March to the Sea was a failure. It was his hope to end the Civil War in such a way that the country would be able to turn back the clock to the idealized society that had (in his opinion) existed prior to the outbreak of the conflict. Political and social changes that he neither understood nor could control doomed that aspiration.

Sherman’s metaphor that war was like a fight between two adolescents that ended when one was fairly beaten and agreed to henceforth play by the other’s rules proved not to apply. Beaten Southerners may have rejoined the Union, but they had not renounced the essentials of the social system that had bound their society in 1860. New ways would be found to restore the old balance of white authority and black subservience, through manipulation of law and other forms of physical coercion that would restore the old order for nearly a century.

Sherman’s way of war, however nontraditional in its means, was essentially conservative in its ultimate objectives. It is perhaps the supreme irony that the General departed Atlanta utterly convinced
that his way would set things right again, when in fact he helped usher in changes whose implications must have appalled him.

In 1875, when it was far too late to do anything about it, Sherman tried to discourage the public’s continuing fascination with the March to the Sea. “I only regarded the march from Atlanta to Savannah as a ‘shift of base,’ as the transfer of a strong army, which had no opponent, and had finished its then work, from the interior to a point on the sea-coast, from which it could achieve other important results. I considered this march as a means to an end, and not as an essential act of war.” Nobody paid much attention to his declaration because everybody knew better. The March to the Sea, at least in the popular imagination, was seen as a defining moment in American history. Its significance was promoted by Northerners and Southerners, though for decidedly different reasons.

Those in the North were in the process of enshrining an enduring image of the common men who preserved the Union. From the halls of Congress (where veteran pensions were a hot topic) to the mainstream press (who found that printing soldier recollections often boosted circulation), the picture of “Billy Yank” was taking shape. One problem was that most such chronicles often ended in an untidy and bloody battle. The March to the Sea offered size and scope without the gore—at least, without much. As one veteran officer (though not a march participant) wrote in an article aimed at “Young Folks,” “The romantic character of the march is unsurpassed. That an army should disappear from sight for a month, marching unharmed through hostile regions, its whereabouts unknown to its friends, and emerge at last as if out of a wilderness, with undiminished numbers and increased renown, is a circumstance that equals in interest any in history; and so long as America’s boys and girls read the account of the nation’s achievements, they will find no chapter more fascinating than that which tells of Sherman’s March to the Sea.”

Many of the common soldiers who afterward recounted their experiences in this campaign both shaped and were shaped by its popular conception. “We had a gay trip through the State of Ga.,” wrote an Ohio boy to his “Coz” Sallie in December 1864. “Plenty of fat hogs, sweet taters, molasses, pea nuts, scared niggers and other eatables too
numerous to mention on the whole route.” Twenty-four years later, a best-selling soldier memoir (
Hardtack and Coffee,
by John D. Billings) would remark that “this traveling picnic of the Western armies was unique.” Also enshrined was the image of the bummer as a carefree warrior, ingenious in his means of acquisition, dogged in his determination to fight when challenged.

Usually forgotten in the retellings were the days of miserable weather that accompanied travel along rudimentary roads, the ever-present fear of murderous irregulars lurking just outside the picket lines, the back-breaking toil of shoving loaded wagons by hand through clay gumbo, the almost constant crack of muskets as enemy cavalry pressed the column’s rear, the miles of corduroy lanes, and the briefly violent roadblock actions. While contemporary accounts make it clear that no one was untainted by the foraging operations (if a soldier didn’t personally appropriate the food, he ate it without compunction when it was brought into camp), the passage of time led participants to assuage any lingering guilt by writing about such incidents in broad strokes or illustrating them by means of a humorous anecdote.

In sharp contrast, the other side’s story of the march emphasized and amplified every encounter to an outrage. A sympathetic historian, writing in the 1950s, commented that a “bitter feeling toward the North, a belief that Yankees were barbarians, an utter detestation of Sherman, lived long in the minds of Southerners.” An 1875 Augusta newspaper review of Sherman’s
Memoirs
concluded that the General’s reputation would be forever sullied “by acts of cruelty and brutality which would have disgraced the chieftain of a tribe of Indians or the leader of a band of brigands.” When, in 1911, the U.S. Post Office issued a stamp bearing Sherman’s image, outrage throughout the South was palpable. “If W. T. Sherman’s face must be held up to view, send it to those who love his character and celebrate his victory in song, but not to those whose homes he robbed, whose daughters he insulted, whose sons he murdered, and whose cities and homes he burned,” thundered one editorial.

Perhaps
the
lightning rod for rage at Sherman’s Savannah Campaign was the song “Marching through Georgia,” written in early 1865 by a Chicago-based composer named Henry Clay Work. Although he was a successful creator of melodic material for the commercial marketplace, Work was no hack. He was a meticulous, painstaking tunesmith,
whose war songs were often animated by a humanitarian abolitionism. Unlike many peers who milked black stereotypes for all their minstrel-show guffaws, Work strove for more humane characterizations. Those strains of high craftsmanship coupled with an underdog sympathy came together in “Marching through Georgia.” To an original and compelling melody, the composer set his own verse, which in a remarkably short span managed to touch many of the campaign’s high points. He referenced the slaves who abandoned their owners (“How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound!”), the foraging (“How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found!/How the sweet potatos even started from the ground”), and the hapless opposition (“Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain”).

In the North, much to Sherman’s displeasure, the song became a hit, as well as an obligatory accompaniment to his public appearances. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to listen to that blasted tune,” he was heard to mutter on one such occasion. Its reception farther south was quite different. A human face was put on the issue in 1902 when Miss Laura Talbot Galt, a thirteen-year-old student in the Louisville, Kentucky, school system, refused to sing the song in class. She even put her hands over her ears while her classmates performed the piece. “I did that because I would not listen to a song that declares such a tyrant and coward as Sherman and his disgraceful and horrible march through Georgia…to be glorious,” she declared in an open letter to the press. Fifteen years later, a Macon assembly representing “Children of the Confederacy” passed a resolution protesting “against the use of the so-called ‘hate song,’
Marching through Georgia
, and [we] urge its suppression and elimination in all schools and on all public occasions.”