William Tecumseh Sherman and the Moral Impetus for Victory

Author’s Note: This is the first of three articles for The Objective Standard dealing with military history and its lessons for the modern day. The articles are adapted from my book in progress, Nothing Less than Victory: Military Offense and the Lessons of History. The second article will consider the British appeasement of Germans in the late 1930s, and the ideas that disarmed the British and prevented them from stopping Hitler when they could have. The third will consider the lessons of the victory over Japan in World War II.

The response of Americans to September 11, 2001, was of an entirely different caliber than their response to December 7, 1941. In contrast to “the Greatest Generation,” Americans of the third millennium made no formal declaration of war, and did not unleash their weapons against those governments that had openly incited, financed, and celebrated fifty years of similar attacks. The American military offensive trained diplomatic envoys rather than missiles at the ideological, financial, and military center of the militant totalitarian Islamists. The political centerpiece of worldwide jihad—the Islamic Republic of Iran—remains untouched and is capitalizing on the vacuum in Iraq to bolster its power. This is not a situation forced upon us—it has been chosen. If Americans have not directed their forces toward the heart of the threats facing them, it is not because they cannot do so. It is because they think they should not do so.

History tells us that it need not be this way. Since time immemorial people have faced military attacks by motivated foes, and have had to choose between marching into an enemy’s own territory or retreating into defensive maneuvers. One case in point may be found at a turning point in our own nation’s history—the American Civil War—in which an ideology of slavery led to a deadly rebellion against the U.S. Constitution. Next to Iran, of course, the Confederacy was a paradise of rationality; the parallels between the two cultures do not extend to the death-worship emanating from Tehran. But the Civil War does offer a powerful lesson about how to win a war: by destroying the psychological and material foundations of an enemy’s will to fight.

The first shots in the war were fired by southern gunners against a Union garrison on April 12, 1861. For three years armies marched and countermarched between horrific battles, which slaughtered thousands but allowed neither side to prevail. A conflict that many thought would be settled quickly grew into a nightmare that butchered more than 600,000 young men. To restore the constitutional authority of the federal government, the North needed an integrated understanding of means and ends—of a military goal to be attained and a strategy to attain it—pursued with vigor against the heart of the South. For three years President Lincoln sought a general who could understand this—and do it. He found that man in General Ulysses S. Grant, who formulated a successful strategic vision and empowered the Union armies to use it. But it was Grant’s southern commander, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who thrust a dagger into the heartland of the South and brought the Union to victory.

By 1864 the northern Army in Virginia had failed to break the deadlock with the Confederates under Robert E. Lee. But Grant and Sherman, commanding the armies to the west, had taken control of the Mississippi River, and had cleared a path into the South. When Grant assumed command of all the Union armies in March of 1864, and proceeded to tie Lee down in Virginia, Sherman marched into the South. He moved from Tennessee into Atlanta (September 1), across Georgia to Savannah (November 12 through December 22), and then northward through the Carolinas (beginning February 1, 1865). He tore up rail lines, burned plantations, and utterly destroyed the material and psychological foundations of the southern war effort. By April—five months after leaving Atlanta—the war was over.

Sherman’s march demonstrates how a forthright, confident, singular offense, directed against the center of the aggressor’s power—and armed with moral certainty in one’s own cause—can extinguish the fire behind the war. Sherman understood an important truth: that to return the nation to constitutional government, freedom, and peace, the North had to break the southern will to fight by bringing the consequences of war into the South. The southern slave society had to be shocked to its roots, its material ability to support the army destroyed, its claim to virtue and honor unveiled as a fraud, and the bankruptcy of the southern aristocracy made undeniable.

This is a lesson of timeless importance. As we today face attacks by a highly motivated, worldwide movement of suicidal warriors, we urgently need to reconsider our goals and our strategy for attaining them. To do this, we must reexamine the nature of the conflict, the nature of our goals, and the nature of our enemy. This process is essential to waging the right war in the right way against the right regime—and winning it. In this regard, there is no better example than that set by Sherman.

The Nature of the Conflict

The Civil War remains the bloodiest internal crisis ever to strike the United States of America. People on both sides rallied with feverish energy and commitment: northerners to maintain the Union that made freedom possible, and southerners to protect their way of life against “federal aggression.” Their conflicting claims reflected a fatal contradiction in America’s original Constitution. This document, which was intended to uphold man’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, did not do so consistently or for everyone. It enabled the perverse notion of “States’ Rights”—which, in practice, meant the right to own slaves—to supersede the principle of individual rights—a principle incompatible with slavery. The war was the price paid by Americans for this contradiction.

Despite many complexities, one ideological issue was at the center of the conflict between the North and the South—individualism versus statism—and it took the form of one concrete alternative: individual freedom versus chattel slavery. Individualism—the dominant theme of the American Constitution—places the individual over a government that is strictly limited to the protection of the freedom of the individual. Statism, on the other hand, places the government over the individual, and enables the former to violate the rights of the latter. Examples of statist governments include: communism, in which the so-called proletariat or underclass violates the rights of producers; theocracy, in which a religious clique violates the rights of men in the name of God; and democracy, in which (contrary to a widespread misunderstanding) the majority has unlimited power, and can vote to deny the rights of a minority. Any government or doctrine under which the state is permitted to violate individual rights is a statist government or doctrine.

The doctrine of “States’ Rights” is statist through and through: It gives state governments the political authority to legalize, institutionalize, and defend the ownership of human beings. Southern leaders saw any sign of infringement upon this “right” as “Federal aggression”—as if freedom included the freedom to enslave, and property rights included the right to own human beings. Despite a marvelous beginning in colonial Virginia, the overall trend of the antebellum South was toward the enslavement of an entire class of people, and the extension of this monstrous practice into new territories. The overall trend in the North, even if evolving slowly, was toward liberty for everyone. The war would determine which of these two trends would guide America’s future.

Although the war was not seen by most people, including racists in the North, in terms of slavery versus individual rights, this was in fact the case, and many people knew it. Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, expounded upon this at the Georgia convention on March 21, 1861:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [from abolition]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.1

Many southerners, however, were not slave owners and did not think that chattel slavery was worth defending. This was a problem for the southern aristocracy, which needed non-slave-owning southern whites to bear the brunt of the fighting. State governments, largely controlled by the aristocracy, had to rouse the population into a frenzy of hatred against northern “devils.” The solution was to motivate poor whites to defend their states, and to preserve their way of life, against “northern aggression.” It worked. Many poor southern whites, who did not own slaves, charged Union guns for years to defend their individual states.

It is important to recognize this: Many southerners fought not for the Confederacy, but for their own particular state. Alexander Stephens, for instance, had argued against secession, but sided with the Confederacy because his home state of Georgia was seceding. Robert E. Lee himself, who declined an offer of command over the Union armies, said that he could never fight against his beloved Virginia, and that, except in defense of her, he would put down his sword. Sam Houston, governor of Texas, saw his state’s secession as “usurpation” with “revolutionary schemes”—yet proclaimed, “I went back into the Union with the people of Texas. I go out from the Union with them.”2 It was this elevation of the states—controlled by a southern aristocracy—over the Constitution that had to be broken if America was to return to peace.

The North was not blameless in the conflict; contradictions in its policies led to righteous indignation among southerners. Northern politicians had enacted tariffs impinging on the rights of southern farmers to trade, and southerners properly condemned such policies. Complex debates and compromises ensued. Economics, however, was not the primary issue in the conflict; slavery was. Moreover, the crisis came to a head not over demands that slavery be ended in the South, but rather over its extension into new territories. Many southerners had argued that white settlers everywhere should be able to vote on whether their state would permit slavery.

The election of Lincoln, who opposed slavery in new territories even while accepting the constitutional right of the southern states to keep it, spurred those states to secede. On December 24, 1860, South Carolina was the first to do so. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, in March of 1861, six more states had followed. Moved by impassioned calls to oppose the “federal aggressors,” many southerners had come to view the existence of Union forts in their homeland as foreign occupation. On April 12, 1861, the state militia of South Carolina fired on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, forcing its evacuation two days later. The Civil War had begun.

Strategic Integration and Goal-Orientation

The war began with expectations of a quick end. Northern civilians went to the first Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, as sightseers, expecting an enjoyable day in the sun watching the “Rebs” learn their lesson. Both sides suffered a rude awakening, and found themselves thrust into a bloody nightmare of attrition. As the war progressed, and grew ever bloodier, many people came to realize that a permanent division between North and South would lead to permanent hostilities.

From the outset, many northerners thought that the conflict could be ended without a direct attack on the South. Union General George McClellan took this position and suffered the consequences. In his Virginia campaign, he stood a few miles away from the Confederate capital, Richmond—with some 110,000 men, facing southern forces of some 62,000—yet held back when he could have attacked, and soon withdrew, effectively chased off the peninsula. Certainly a full assault on Richmond would have been a horrific affair, and McClellan wrote about his revulsion toward the slaughter he saw on the field. But the results of his strategy were neither a sparing of lives nor a reciprocal retreat by the South, but rather the bloodiest days in American history: the battles of Second Bull Run and Antietam. McClellan stopped Lee’s invasion of the North, but the creek at Antietam ran red, and the promise of a swift end collapsed into gruesome carnage across the face of America. President Lincoln despaired at getting the man to fight, and relieved him of command.

McClellan was not an incompetent general. As an organizer he was superb, and many of his troops loved him. The logistics involved in keeping a hundred thousand men on the field were extremely complex, rivaling the organizational demands of a large corporation today, and the commander who could handle the task was an individual of special intelligence and stamina. But there is more to commanding an army than keeping it organized and supplied. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles recorded a diary entry for September 3, 1862, following McClellan’s retreat after the Second Battle of Bull Run, as Lee stood poised to march into Maryland:

Washington is full of exciting, vague and absurd rumors. There is some cause for it. Our great army comes retreating to the banks of the Potomac, driven back to the entrenchments by the Rebs.

The army has no head. Halleck is here in the Department, a military director, not a general, a man of some scholastic attainments, but without soldierly capacity. McClellan is an intelligent engineer and officer, but not a commander to head a great army in the field. To attack or advance with energy and power is not in him; to fight is not his forte . . . Wishes to outgeneral the Rebs, but not to kill and destroy them . . . He detested, he said, both South Carolina and Massachusetts, and should rejoice to see both states extinguished. Both were and always had been ultra and mischievous, and he could not tell which he hated most . . . He was leading the men of Massachusetts against the men of South Carolina, yet he detests them both equally.3

This passage illustrates a variety of deadly cracks in the Union position. A general who thinks that his own troops are as bad as those of the enemy is in no position to put forth the demanding effort, in the face of indescribable slaughter, needed to win. He can have no moral certainty in his cause if he is convinced that the heart of his side is as bad as that of the other. This lack of contempt for the enemy may lead a commander to misjudge his own strength and the strength of his enemy; he may overestimate the strength of the opposing army over his own (an error that can be as disastrous as overestimating one’s own advantage). McClellan often did this. At one point his opponent’s actual army, some 45,000 confederate soldiers, became 170,000 in his mind, and he acted more slowly than the situation required.4 As a result, McClellan did not use his superiority decisively against the enemy’s capital. The war dragged on.

Other generals made similar decisions. In May of 1862, following a narrow Union rescue at Shiloh, Union General Henry W. Halleck moved more than 100,000 men slowly toward Corinth, Mississippi, against an inferior Confederate force. By the first week of June, the southern army had withdrawn from Corinth right under Halleck’s nose, and he set off in pursuit of that army. Halleck followed the conventional wisdom of taking the fight to the enemy’s army, which put him in the position of reacting to that army rather than driving toward an objective. New Orleans and Memphis had been captured, but Halleck did not turn these successes into victory. He divided his forces into eastern and western armies, and into units needed to guard rail lines. As a result, by October of 1862, the Union and Confederate armies were back to fighting over Corinth, the same place that Halleck had failed to control when he had an overwhelming advantage five months earlier. Halleck’s cautious actions—and his inability to overcome massive problems of provisions and logistics—left him running in circles. What was needed was an offense directed at the motor of the South.

McClellan and Halleck are representative of a failure, early in the war, to recognize the nature of the conflict, to face squarely the need to defeat the southern will to fight, and to devise a plan to do so. This failure was magnified, on the strategic level, by the divided nature of the Union command structure. The army had no integrating principle, no clear lines of command directing it to a single purpose, and no unified strategy by which to act in a focused manner. For instance, during McClellan’s retreat from the Richmond area, General John Pope took command of a new Union Army of Virginia in June of 1862; three months later the army was disbanded, following the Battle of Second Bull Run, and Pope lost his command. Lee was then set to invade the North through Maryland. And after the Battle of Antietam on September 17, McClellan was replaced as commander over the Army of the Potomac by Ambrose Burnside—who lasted until January 1863, replaced by Joseph Hooker—who lasted until June, replaced by George Meade three days before the Battle of Gettysburg. In the face of such disorganization, the slaughter continued.

A unified, focused northern strategy finally emerged not in the northern theater, but in the West. The Union armies achieved their first solid victory, and may have turned the course of the war, with the capture of the Mississippi River. Lincoln had long recognized this as the key to dividing and defeating the Confederacy, because it kept northern transportation open and cut off the South from the West. In June of 1862, Ulysses S. Grant took charge of the Army of the West, in command over Major General William Tecumseh Sherman and Acting Rear Admiral David Porter. Halleck became general-in-chief. Grant organized a coordinated land and sea assault against Vicksburg, Mississippi (a city on the Mississippi River, about half way between New Orleans and Memphis). The Union faced staggering problems of logistics and coordination, including hundreds of miles of marches through swamps and a serious possibility of starvation. Nevertheless, by March of 1863, Grant had isolated Vicksburg and begun a siege. On July 4, 1863, Confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered, along with 29,000 soldiers. With New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, and Memphis in Union hands, the South was soundly divided from the West, and unable to use the river.5

In this campaign Grant and Sherman not only succeeded in the long-range goal of taking control of the Mississippi—they also solved the problem of divided strategy, at least in the territory that Grant commanded. Grant’s focused directions, boldly enacted by generals toward a clear goal, created an army that functioned as a unified whole. Commanders in the field still had enormous discretion, especially in comparison to armies today, and there was often bitterly competitive infighting among them; but, unlike those in the fragmented Army of the East, they would no longer act independently of a single, overriding strategy.

By early 1864, Lincoln realized that he had found his new general-in-chief: Ulysses S. Grant. Grant understood the nature of his task—to break the southern will to fight—and the means to attain it—an integrated, goal-directed strategy. Grant’s Memoirs demonstrate his thoughts about the improper fragmentation of the Union forces when he took supreme command and indicate how these forces had to be united by a single strategy directed offensively at the South:

The Union forces were now divided into nineteen departments, though four of them in the west had been concentrated into a single military division. The army of the Potomac was a separate command and had no territorial limits. There were thus seventeen distinct commanders. Before this time these various armies had acted separately and independently of each other, giving the enemy an opportunity often of depleting one command, not pressed, to reinforce another more actively engaged. I determined to stop this . . . Accordingly I arranged for a simultaneous movement all along the line. Sherman was to move from Chattanooga, Johnston’s army and Atlanta being his objective points. Crook, commanding in West Virginia, was to move from the mouth of the Gauley River with a cavalry force and some artillery, the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad to be his objective . . . Sigel was in command in the Valley of Virginia. He was to advance up the valley

. . . Butler was to advance by the James River, having Richmond and Petersburg as his objective.6

Grant unified these forces into a single army, composed of four main military elements, each moving toward a specific objective, and acting in unison toward a common goal. The two broad strokes of this strategy would be Sherman’s army in the West and the South, moving from Tennessee into Georgia, and the Army of the Potomac in Virginia under Grant. In essence, Grant was to defeat—or at least pin down—Lee in the North, while Sherman swept up from the South, catching Lee in a giant pincer. To the west of this vise would be an army in Tennessee, to prevent an invasion from the West, and other forces with the same function in the East. Thus followed a series of battles between Lee and Grant; the devastation of the Shenandoah Valley by Union General Philip H. Sheridan’s cavalry; the destruction of the southern armies by Union General George H. Thomas at Franklin, Tennessee; and the advancement of Sherman from behind the enemy lines, to march through Georgia and northward through the Carolinas.

Grant knew that the war could not be won as long as material and psychological support continued to flow from the South. His long-range policy consisted of two main aspects. The first—the means—was an integrated, strategic plan that multiple armies were to follow in order to strip the South of the ability to wage war. The offense would commence as a singular motion. This broad strategy would be the guide to narrower, particular tactics.

The second aspect concerned the nature of the goal itself—not primarily the destruction of the enemy’s armies (which is always a means to a military end), and not even primarily the destruction of the enemy’s material resources—but the utter defeat of the enemy’s will to fight, and the summary death of anyone who refused to surrender. Grant, according to Sherman’s later encomium of his commander, “penned Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia . . . for ten long months on the pure defensive, to remain almost passive observers of local events, while Grant’s other armies were absolutely annihilating the Southern Confederacy.”7

General W. T. Sherman’s Educational Program

The south was ultimately defeated by Sherman’s destruction of the social, economic, and psychological support radiating from the center of the Confederacy, which led to the swift collapse of the armies defending that center. To see how this happened, let us begin by considering some of the tactical and logistical problems that Sherman solved in order to achieve Grant’s broader strategy. Sherman’s view of his enemy—and his views of war as such—developed along with these solutions, and his wider goals could not have been achieved had he not solved these particular problems. We will then turn to Sherman’s views of the South as an enemy and how those views influenced his actions.

For the first three years of the war, the approaches of both Union and Confederate armies were dominantly tactical moves; armies searched out and attacked enemy armies, and many battles involved head-on military assaults against entrenched positions. An enormous number of young men met their ends in brutal face-to-face assaults against lines of other men. These confrontations were consistent with the prevailing wisdom that the army of the enemy was always a general’s primary concern, and that an attack on that army was the best strategy; but this was conducive neither to a general’s need to maintain the strength of his army, nor to a young man’s desire to stay alive. Nor could it extinguish the motivations for war that radiated from the enemy’s homeland.

Sherman himself, moving south through Tennessee in 1863 and 1864, was not successful when he followed the wisdom of attacking entrenched positions. Facing the usual grim casualties from frontal assaults—as at Chickamauga in September 1863—he recognized the ineffectiveness of these attacks. After systematically outflanking the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, Sherman took control of Atlanta after a siege on September 1, 1864. The Confederate army—now headed by General John Bell Hood—turned north into Tennessee. Sherman was now poised in northwest Georgia and had a decision to make. Should he march into Georgia, moving even further from supplies, or follow Hood north into Tennessee?

According to the prevailing wisdom, he should have followed his enemy’s army. But Sherman almost immediately recognized the drain on his resources caused by chasing an enemy through the woods, and he refused to fall for Hood’s attempts to draw him north. Rather than following Hood, Sherman sent a force of more than 40,000 men north to assist General Thomas in Tennessee, and then left Thomas to deal with Hood. Meanwhile, Sherman steeled himself and his forces—some 62,000 men—for a strike against the heart and soul of the South. The tactics that had led McClellan to abandon his objective—Richmond—did not work on Sherman.

Sherman’s goal-directed mind-set allowed him to overcome the many distractions he faced, to break with the prevailing rules when they served no good end, and to avoid digressions from his main objective: striking the heartland of the South itself. He remained obsessed with his goal and with winning the war as a whole. Sherman wrote that he “Felt more anxious for General Thomas’s forces” than for his own, but events vindicated his decision to divide his troops.8 Thomas was able to defeat Hood at Nashville, and the South remained helpless before Sherman’s steamroller.

With his northern flank protected, Sherman’s main problem was logistical: how to supply his huge army. He had only one rail line connecting Atlanta to Chattanooga—a jugular vein upon which his army depended. Earlier invasions of the South had been stillborn because of the need to maintain supply lines, and Sherman used the two-and-a-half months in Atlanta to solve the problems of logistics. Even Grant, as late as September 1864, did not see how Sherman could supply his army; he continued to think in terms of taking and holding important cities, connected by rails, as his primary strategy. In a letter to Sherman he wrote:

What you are to do with the forces at your command, I do not exactly see. The difficulties of supplying your army, except when they are constantly moving beyond where you are, I plainly see . . . [Given new forces sent from the north, to fortify Mobile and Savannah,] You could then move as proposed in your telegram, so as to threaten Macon and Augusta equally. Whichever one should be abandoned by the enemy, you could take and open up a new base of supplies.9

Sherman responded:

I would not hesitate to cross the state of Georgia with sixty-thousand men, hauling some stores, and depending upon the country for the balance. Where a million people find subsistence my army won’t starve . . . But the more I study the game, the more I am convinced that it would be wrong for us to penetrate further into Georgia without an objective beyond. I would not be productive of much good . . . I should keep Hood employed and put my army in fine shape for a march on Augusta, Columbia and Charleston; and start as soon as Wilmington [SC] is sealed to commerce, and the city of Savannah is in our possession.10

Among the myriad details involved in provisioning such a campaign, Sherman recognized the profound weakness of moving without a goal. Sherman was obsessed with where he was going. Grant had sent him to do as much damage as possible, but Sherman saw little good in this without a meaningful objective. For a man with such a goal-directed view, the enemy’s army and supplies are means to the end, not the end itself. Sherman realized, however, that he could combine the means and the end into a logical whole, if he prepared his forces correctly.

The overarching problem any general faces in marching through enemy territory is maintaining the strength of his force as he advances—a difficult problem recognized by military theorists. In his classic treatise On War, Baron von Clausewitz observed seven ways that the overall strength of an attacking army may be depleted. As he wrote in On War, military strength may be lost:

1. If the object of the attack is to occupy the enemy’s territory (Occupation normally begins only after the first decisive action, but the attack does not cease with this action.)

2. By the invading army’s need to occupy the area in their rear so as to secure their lines of communication and exploit its resources

3. By losses incurred in action and through sickness

4. By the distance from the source of replacements

5. By sieges and the investment of fortresses

6. By a relaxation of effort

7. By the defection of allies.11

Sherman recognized that the traditional way of controlling enemy territory—taking a position by force, establishing supply lines, and then leaving a portion of one’s forces to control the position as one moves on—progressively weakens an army and leads to destruction down the road. At each stage men are lost in assaults, in protecting supply lines, and in fortifications needed to guard the rear of a fighting force that is steadily losing strength. By the time the force reaches its goal, it may be too weak to attain it. Were Sherman, for instance, to leave a garrison at Atlanta, and then move to Augusta, to be taken by siege and garrisoned, all the while posting guards along railroads, he would deplete his army to an ineffectual force. He needed to end his reliance upon supply lines in the rear.

To prevent the combat losses that usually accompanied an army’s march through enemy territory, Sherman abandoned any idea of fighting entrenched enemy armies, besieging secondary targets, or capturing hostile cities along the way. This would lessen the need for heavy guns and the animals to pull them. (Every heavy cannon required twelve horses, plus their feed.) Further, an army of 62,000 men, traveling as a single unit, would take days to pass a single point, thus spreading its forces out and weakening any particular point. Forward and rear positions would be open to enemy ambushes, and would be difficult to protect. Therefore, he divided his forces into four corps to invade in parallel, which would speed him up, maximize his impact on the South, minimize the danger to his flanks, and best enable him to gather resources as he proceeded.

But how could he protect his army’s rear, and keep it supplied, without leaving such garrisons? The logistical problems here were staggering, involving thousands of tons of supplies and hundreds of railroad cars. One incident may illustrate something of the scope of this problem. In his letter to Grant of April 24, 1864, written while Sherman was still in Tennessee, he reported that in recent weeks, 60 to 85 railroad cars per day had been arriving to provision his army. As substantial as this may sound, however, it was a recipe for starvation. Sherman actually needed 145 cars each and every day—with thousands of laborers to keep them flowing—all under constant threat of attack. Sherman’s progress had been good; in the two days before the letter, he wrote, 327 railroad cars had arrived.12 When he reached Atlanta, he created a howl by ordering that railroads would be used only for military supplies; no civilian loads would be allowed. He needed thirty days’ supply before setting off, and nothing was allowed to interfere with this goal.

By this point Sherman also recognized the possibility of dropping all replenishment from the rear and living off the land. He wrote that he had obtained and studied the United States census tables of 1860, as well as a report of the controller of the State of Georgia with the population and statistics of every county in the state.13 Sherman knew from the outset that the land he was passing through was rich in foodstuffs; in a letter to Grant of April 10, 1864, Sherman wrote:

If Banks can at the same time carry Mobile [Grant’s plan called for Banks to take Mobile] and open up the Alabama River, he will in a measure solve the most difficult part of my problem, viz. “provisions.” But in that I must venture. Georgia has a million of inhabitants. If they can live, we should not starve. If the enemy interrupt our communications, I will be absolved from all obligations to subsist on our own resources, and will feel perfectly justified taking whatever and wherever we can find.14

Instead of protecting rail lines as means of supply and guarding them to prevent their use by the Confederates, Sherman would tear them up. This would prevent the South from reinforcing its own army, while cutting Richmond off from communication with the South. He understood that destroying the ability of the southern leaders to supply their army—both materially and with psychological encouragement—was crucial to his goal. His army built fires out of railroad ties and heated the rails until they could be twisted around trees into “Sherman’s Neckties” and made unusable.

To create the leanest force possible, he cut down his army to only the fittest men, leaving the wounded and the slow in Atlanta, and directing his men to carry three days’ rations.15 He organized foraging squads—not looting parties, but squads of specialized teams charged with feeding his army. Sherman gave strict instructions on how they were to conduct these operations; for instance, soldiers were required to turn all foraged food over to quartermasters for use by the army—and Sherman personally rebuked those who strayed from this mission. Those parties would provide not only food for his men, but also a demonstration to the southerners of his capacity and will to end their support for the war.

Sherman knew that the morality of his cause gave him the sanction to take whatever he needed. He placed the value of his own men above that of the enemy, and he would not be demoralized by specious claims of his cruelty. In the end, this moral certainty would save untold thousands of lives.

His army, his plan, and his moral certainty allowed Sherman to be flexible about his precise route through the South. His goal was the sea, and then north to Lee’s army; but he left open where he would arrive at the sea and how he would move north. He adopted a strategy of “multiple objectives,” which would allow him to shift his direction as circumstances demanded and to keep his enemy off-balance. A firm goal and fluid actions to attain that goal were not incompatible; flexible tactics within an integrated strategy could achieve an inflexible purpose. “I can take so eccentric a course,” he wrote, “that no general can guess my path.”16 Should the enemy think he was heading for, say, Augusta, he’d send a small force in that direction. When the enemy prepared for battle in Augusta, he would bring his force back south, leaving the enemy ill-deployed, and saving thousands of lives by avoiding a battle, all the while furthering his mission.

Sherman’s plan was in place: his objective, the sea; his means, a magnificent army; his innovative tactical deployments; and his purpose, ending the South’s ability to wage war. Armed and ready, on November 12, 1864, he boldly separated himself from communication with the rest of the world, and with the railroad station in Atlanta burning behind him, he set out to cut a sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction through southern society, using overwhelming force to obliterate the South’s material and psychological ability to continue the war.

Sherman’s preparations, and his march, depended upon his deeper views of his enemy, and his understanding of the motivations that had driven the South to rebellion. In a letter to Grant, Sherman showed his awareness of the broader context of his actions. The political aims of the North and the operations the various armies used to end the southern will to fight would become an integrated whole when his mission against the South was accomplished:

I propose to act in such a manner against the material resources of the South as utterly to negate Davis’ boasted threat and promises of protection. If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it will be 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, nevertheless, it is overwhelming to my mind that there are thousands of people abroad and in the south who will reason thus—“If the north can march an army right through the south, it is proof positive that the north can prevail in this contest,” leaving open only its willingness to use that power. Now Mr. Lincoln’s election which is assured, coupled with the conclusion just reached makes a complete logical whole.17

Sherman’s attack on the South was a pivotal action. His demonstration of overwhelming force, and the tactics by which it was accomplished, were the culmination of a distinct change in the character of the war. John Esten Cooke, a Confederate officer, observed:

Once, under McClellan, they seemed only bent on fighting big battles, and making a treaty of peace. Now they seem determined to drive us to the last ditch, and into it, the mother earth to be shoveled over us. Virginia is no longer a battlefield, but a living, shuddering body, upon which is to be inflicted the immedicabile vulnus of all-destroying war. So be it; she counted the cost, and is not yet at the last ditch.18

Sherman’s tactics—like those of General Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley—would shock southern society to its roots by the sheer force of his onslaught, and truly drive the secessionists into the last ditch. Southern civilians had incited war for years, and their sons had first fired on Union troops. These civilians had no right to complain if the war they had brought to the nation came to them in their homes. The voices inciting the war had to be silenced, and the pipelines bringing material and psychological comfort to the southern armies had to be cut, if the guns were to be silenced.

Further, the southern will to fight received constant reinforcement from the South’s mistaken views of what was actually happening with its armies. From the outset both sides—but especially southern aristocrats—had serious misunderstandings about the course of the conflict. Those errors of knowledge kept hope of victory alive, and thus fueled the South’s willingness to fight on. The diary of the southern lady Floride Clemson is typical of southerners who believed all was well on their side. While in Beltsville, Maryland, prior to moving south, Miss Clemson wrote:

Grant is not even in the papers with his grand “Onto Richmond.[”] I suppose he is stuck in a swamp down there. Gold is about 275 per cent & everything in proportion. We have constant company here, & are having a very pleasant time. Indeed I sometimes think I am too happy, I have so much to be thankful for.19

Such sentiments were typical. The diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck, a lady of the Shenandoah Valley, a daughter of a slave owner, and, in the words of her editor, a “stereotypical southern belle,” shows similar misunderstandings about the progress of the war. In an early entry, April 28, 1862, she tempered her misery with hope:

Was miserable—whiled the time away reading northern newspapers. It is exasperating to read their “canards” and their poor attempts at wit at the expense of the Confederacy and the Secessionists. I wonder if they suppose that we are crushed and discouraged because of a few reverses in the tide of fortune. If they do I hope they’ll ere long have optical demonstration of the fallacy of their opinions. Father heard that there had been a complete and decisive victory by our army at Yorktown. Oh, for truth!20

Oh, for truth indeed! There was no battle at Yorktown, and the southern armies retreated from the city on May 4. A year later, on May 30, 1863, Miss Buck wrote of a Confederate victory at Vicksburg; in fact, the town fell to the North on July 4. In her entry of July 10 she wrote dismissively of the news of its fall: “which, by the way, we didn’t believe.”21 Miss Buck refused to believe that her cause was lost. But she was sublimely correct about one thing: A clear, optical, demonstration of the truth was in order—for both sides.

Such diaries reveal a spirit in the South that was a foundation of the rebellion. Sherman recognized the motivations that fueled southern society and its aristocratic culture. As a student of history, and a man who had lived in the South (he was founding superintendent of the school that became Louisiana State University), he knew that many southern leaders had corrupt values and a powerful will to incite their followers to fight. He knew that hot-headed legislators in the South were inciting war in the North while avoiding the consequences of that war in their personal lives. They were mouthing the abstraction “war,” and claiming the mantle of “glory,” but were not experiencing the concrete reality of their words. Such leaders were detached from reality, and Sherman aimed to bring it to them—on the point of a bayonet if they so chose.

Sherman recognized that many southerners—in some states the majority—were not in favor of secession. Many had been coaxed into the conflict by lying newspapers and legislators, who demonized the North. The major division in the South was not primarily one of whites versus blacks, or even of chattel-holding whites versus their slaves. Rather, it was one of a southern aristocracy—who claimed to stand for the values of the South as a whole—versus those southerners who were the sons of patriots and wanted to stay in the Union. The aristocracy defended its prerogatives against all challengers, including those at home, and worked ruthlessly to impose its will.22

The Civil War has been called a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” in which rich southern slaveholders, many of whom were serious instigators of the war, were given exemptions from the draft. The “twenty-slave law,” for instance, exempted those with twenty or more slaves from military service—thus absolving the greatest supporters of the war from potential slaughter. Such plantation owners stayed home and kept the fervor for war alive, while poor southerners died on the battlefield. Many plantations were required to grow cotton for export rather than food, while their boys went hungry, marching through enemy territory with feet bleeding from lack of shoes.23 This is what a slave culture does for those who defend it.

One southern soldier, High Private Sam Watkins, wrote that from the day Tennessee seceded,

almost every person was eager for the war, and we were all afraid it would be over and we not in the fight . . . But we soon found out that the glory of war was at home among the ladies and not upon the field of blood and carnage and death, where our comrades were mutilated and torn by shot and shell. And to see the cheek blanched to hear the fervent prayer, aye, I might say the agony of mind were very different indeed from the patriotic times at home.24

Sherman saw vividly the divisions between those pushing the rebellion, and the many who were not so motivated:

They allege they cannot abide us. I know that is the feeling of some, but the masses can. I have associated with rebels & have seen our troops do it under flags of truce, and during lulls in war, but I do admit that Some of them are so embittered that all would be benefited by an eternal separation. They cannot kill us all, but we may them. They must be killed or sent away.25

To rip out the source of the rebellion, Sherman set out on what is, in effect, one of the great educational missions of his time: to teach the southern aristocracy—indeed the whole world—the nature and meaning of war. He brought the war to them in order to make them suffer the consequences of their actions—but the deeper meaning of his actions was conceptual. He corrected their understanding of what war is. His actions served to connect the abstraction “war” to its concrete referent in reality: the smell of smoke, and immediate, personal destruction. From this point on, any southerner who thought of “war” would think not of the glory of the battle, but rather the smell of smoke, death, and defeat.

This is the true meaning of the burning of Atlanta and Sherman’s march through the South. It was a demonstration in the form of massive destruction of property in order to concretize the consequences of resistance and thus to end it. Sherman’s optical demonstration united force and will in a way that left no doubt as to the outcome should the South once again rebel against the Union.

In a letter to Union General Thomas, Sherman had written: “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the south, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.”26 Every word of this is important. He intended to make the vulnerability of the South explicit, to southerners, northerners, and foreigners alike, in the kind of “optical demonstration” that Lucy Buck had not envisioned: the destruction of the property, and if necessary, the lives, of those who had unleashed war in America. To say in this context that “war and individual ruin are synonymous terms” is to uphold a principle of causality in human action, and to refuse to exempt those who initiate the use of physical force from the consequences of that decision. Sherman sought to affect more than a detached intellectual understanding; he wanted the South to feel this truth. As Sherman put it in a letter to General Halleck:

This movement is not purely military or strategic, but it will illustrate the vulnerability of the South. They don’t know what war means, but when the rich planters of the Oconee and Savannah see their fences and corn and hogs and sheep vanish before their eyes they will have something more than a mean opinion of the “Yanks”.27

To those who were willing to return to the Union, surrender would be followed by peace, and Sherman pledged to become their protector. To those who could not abide by a return to the Union, only exile or death were possible. In some cases, Sherman realized, southerners would be unwilling, under any conditions, to give up their hatred of, and desire for war with, the North. Such “Belligerents,” wrote Sherman, would have to be killed:

The young Bloods of the South, sons of Planters, Lawyers about town, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work, or never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to brashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense . . . They must all be killed, or employed by us before we can hope for Peace . . . In accepting war it should be pure & simple as applied to the Belligerents. I would Keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our Nation and Sue for Peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that Generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”28

Sherman did not hide these thoughts behind facades of fancy language, diplomatic doublespeak, or appeals to “prudence” designed to convey something other than the truth. He thought that the reasons for the war, and his terms whereby southerners could avoid destruction, needed to be made explicit, and then upheld without pity. He wrote a letter, excerpted here, to the people of Huntsville, explaining the situation and the alternatives at hand:

I believe that some of the Rich and slave-holding are prejudiced to an extent that nothing but death & ruin will ever extinguish, but I hope that as the poorer and industrial classes of the South realize their relative weakness, and their dependence upon the fruits of the earth & good will of their fellow men, they will not only discover the error of their ways & repent of their hasty action, but bless those who have persistently maintained a Constitutional Government strong enough to sustain itself, protect its citizens, and promise peaceful homes to millions yet unborn . . .

To those who submit to the Rightful Laws & authority of their State & National Government promise all gentleness and forbearance, but to the petulant and persistent secessionist, why death or banishment is a mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.29

Sherman wanted nothing less than to end the tyrannical culture of the South. Of course, to those today who accept the tenets of multiculturalism—the idea that all cultures are equal—this laying waste to an entire culture will seem presumptuous and barbaric. But it is the doctrine of cultural egalitarianism that is barbaric. All cultures are not equal, neither politically, socially, nor morally. The slaveholding society of the South was not equal to the free North, even if some northerners accepted the same racist premises as the South and tried to compromise with southerner slaveholders. Institutionalized human bondage is not an alternate form of economic activity. This was a political and economic conflict that had deep moral implications, and there was only one solution: The South would have to give up every vestige of claim to her slaveholding culture. This would require a clear demonstration of the failure of that culture. The consequences of the war had to be thrown into the face of every secessionist, with a demand that he give up or die.

Two incidents during Sherman’s march through Georgia reveal his attitude toward those southern aristocrats who occupied the highest levels of southern society. On November 22, near Milledgeville, he came onto the plantation of a southern legislator who had incited war for years. Howell Cobb was a general in the Confederate army and a former secretary of the Treasury under President Buchanan. Upon Sherman’s approach, this self-styled “patriot” did not stand and fight; he ran, abandoning his plantation and the townspeople to the “devils” from the North. When Sherman learned that this “patriot” had run, he had food from the plantation distributed to the people left behind, so that noncombatants would not starve. Then he ordered the place burnt to the ground: “spare nothing” were his words. “That night huge bonfires consumed the fence-rails, kept our soldiers warm, and the teamsters and men, as well as the slaves, carried off an immense quantity of corn.”30

For that southern leader, war and individual ruin were now synonymous. The cowardice and failure that Cobb’s life represented would be indelibly etched into the minds of everyone looking on; his claims to virtue were hollow, his cause was a sham, and now his support was gone. The locals crowded around Sherman and abandoned their former leaders.

On November 23, Sherman entered Milledgeville, the seat of the Georgia legislature. In the preceding weeks, Confederate legislators and military officers had exhorted civilians to defend Georgia to the last man. Prisoners were released with promises of freedom if they fought; teen-aged cadets from the military school were armed; southern loyalists prepared to burn supplies in Sherman’s path. Southern leaders knew that Sherman’s army was cut off from Atlanta, and intended to starve him by destroying supplies in the countryside. Meanwhile, the southern press produced a stream of propaganda predicting Sherman’s starvation, in order to keep southern hopes alive while demoralizing northerners. This point has often been lost on students of the war: It was the southern leaders who ordered a policy of systematically burning the South, in order to starve Sherman’s army and win the propaganda war.

Prior to Sherman’s arrival, the Georgia legislature had exhorted citizens to “die freemen rather than live slaves.” Newspapers had been full of such stuff; the following letter, from Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard, was printed in Corinth, Mississippi, November 18, 1864:

To the People of Georgia:

Arise for the defense of your native soil! Rally around your patriotic governor and gallant soldiers! Obstruct and destroy all the roads in Sherman’s front, flank and rear, and his army will soon starve in your midst. Be confident. Be resolute. Trust in an overruling Providence, and success will soon crown your efforts. I hasten you to join in the defense of your homes and your firesides.31

When Sherman arrived, he found that the “brave and patriotic” governor had stripped the “Governor’s Mansion” (Sherman showed his disdain for the place by placing it in quotation marks) of carpets, curtains, and furniture, while leaving behind public records, arms, and ammunition. Such courage! This was the man who had urged southerners to fight to the death in a scorched-earth policy against the supposed tyranny of the North. His hypocrisy knew no bounds.

Again, there was only token local resistance; a miniscule “army” of dead-enders retreated, and Sherman occupied the mansion. (His soldiers held a mock legislative session in the statehouse, appointed themselves the legislature of the State of Georgia, and repealed the ordinance of secession!) Sherman systematically destroyed the arsenal along with every public building that could be used for hostile purposes, giving orders that private property be left intact so long as it could not be used on behalf of the Confederacy. He spared, for instance, several mills and thousands of bales of cotton, now assured that they would not be used for his enemies. Among the population, any residual desire to resist evaporated. Word of Sherman’s march went ahead to the next city, and prepared the ground for his bloodless advance toward Savannah.

Sherman continued to follow this policy toward noncombatants and their property, connecting his principled understanding of warfare to his tactics, attacking any who resisted but sparing those who opened their doors to him. When he entered the town of Sandersville, he saw rebel cavalry burning supplies in a field. In response, Sherman ordered buildings in the area burned, and as the smoke wafted through town he told the citizens that if they made any attempt to burn supplies on their route, he would execute his orders “for the general devastation.” The burning stopped. As Sherman observed, “with this exception, and one or two minor cases near Savannah, the people did not destroy food, for they saw clearly that it would be ruin to themselves.”32

Upon reaching Savannah he demanded the surrender of the southern garrison:

Should you entertain the proposition, I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, then I shall feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army—burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war.33

Confederate General William J. Hardee responded with a refusal, taunting Sherman with the claim that he (Hardee) had to this point operated according to the rules of civilized warfare—presumably by fortifying himself in a city full of civilians. Despite Hardee’s promise of a fight, however, on December 21 he ran northward with his forces through routes that Sherman had not yet secured (Sherman may have allowed them to escape, in order to take the city without losses). The next day Sherman moved bloodlessly into the city. Hardee had left behind heavy guns, stores, and cotton—and a population that had no desire to fight. Most Georgians had never been in favor of secession, and Sherman was their liberator. Many wanted him to take his army north and to make South Carolina, “the cause of all our troubles,” pay for the war.

These were the results of Sherman’s march: In six weeks, from November 12 through December 22, 1864, he cut through Georgia, destroyed the rail lines supplying the Confederate armies, ruined the plantations and motivations of those who felt they had the right to own human beings like stockyard animals, took the earthen Fort McAllister—which had withstood two years of sieges—in fifteen minutes, and captured Savannah, its arms, and its goods without firing a shot. Sherman sent a telegraph to Lincoln on December 22, 1864: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”34 The North erupted in celebration, for all anyone had heard for two months were southern press reports of Sherman’s starvation. This was the climax of the war, for from this moment on, the victory of the Union was never in doubt.

The southern garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina—the site of the first shots in the war—had held off northern sieges for four years. Seven million pounds of artillery shells had reduced its walls to rubble, but had not brought its defenders to surrender. When the garrison heard that Sherman was on the way, they abandoned the fort without a fight.

Sherman’s casualties? For the Georgia campaign in toto, of the 62,204 men that left Atlanta, Assistant Adjutant General L. M. Dayton reported 103 killed, 278 missing, and 428 wounded. This was in an age when 10,000 young men could die in a single morning during head-on assaults, and when prison camps and hospitals were filled with the screams of dying young men and piles of amputated limbs. There had been some 100,000 casualties at the battles of Gettysburg, Second Bull Run, and Antietam alone—the fruits of McClellan’s delays. General Grant lost more than 7,000 men in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor. Take a look at one of those famous photos of a Civil War army, and project how many men lived to an old age because Sherman refused to sacrifice them to attain the glory of the frontal charge.

In his preliminary report, sent to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton after the capture of Fort McAllister, Sherman reported that he had not lost a single wagon on the trip, and that “Our teams are in far better condition than when we started.”35 He had left Atlanta with five thousand head of cattle, and arrived in Savannah with ten thousand. This was an army that got healthier—and more highly motivated—as it marched through enemy territory. In the last year of the war, from Virginia southward, the safest place to be was in Sherman’s army. Thousands of locals voted with their feet as they tried to follow him.

“I do not like to boast,” said Sherman, “but I believe this army has a confidence in itself that makes it almost invincible.”36

Prior to the capture of Savannah, Grant had ordered Sherman to transfer his infantry by ship to Virginia. Although Sherman wanted to move north through South Carolina, he prepared to comply. After Savannah, however, Grant altered his orders, giving Sherman the initiative he needed: “Without waiting further directions, then, you may make your preparations to start on your northern expedition without delay . . . I will leave out all suggestions about the route you should take. . . .”37 Grant had come to see the power of Sherman’s judgment.

On February 1, 1865, Sherman left Savannah and cut north into the Carolinas, again deceiving his enemy by leaving his objectives ambiguous to them. He bypassed the places they expected him to attack, especially Charleston and Augusta—the former he called a “dead cock in the pit”—and wreaked his army upon the prime instigator of the rebellion: the capital of South Carolina, Columbia. He arrived on February 17. Public buildings were burned, and Sherman’s men wrecked every arsenal and every rail line they could find. To this day many in the area consider Sherman the greatest devil who ever lived. Sherman left on February 20, “having utterly ruined Columbia,” in his own words.38

As he marched through the Carolinas—with 60,079 men, out of the 62,204 he had begun with in Atlanta—Sherman observed the morale of the civilian population. He wondered why his enemy allowed him to take easy possession of alluvial land in South Carolina. The reason, he surmised, was the “terrible energy” that his army had displayed in the earlier campaigns. “I would not restrain the army lest its vigor and energy should be impaired,” wrote Sherman.39 Sherman’s men—veterans of Grant’s successful western campaigns on the Mississippi River, rather than of McClellan’s stalemates in Virginia—were feared and respected. Their reputation marched ahead of their boots, preparing the locals for their arrival, leaving the decision to fight up to the enemy, but admitting no doubt of the outcome should they decide wrongly. Although some in South Carolina might have been prepared to fight with greater courage than the Georgians,

It was to me manifest that the soldiers and the people of the south entertained an undue fear of our Western men, and, like children, they had invented such ghostlike stories of our prowess in Georgia, that they were scared by their own inventions. Still, this was a power, and I intended to utilize it.40

As he again marched, this time northward, he was armed with an exquisite plan and a magnificently confident army, facing an enemy who was psychologically groomed for his approach. His arrival was preceded by a myth of invincibility, a reputation that grew with the telling, and a weapon more powerful than bullets. “I observe that the enemy has some respect for my name, for they gave up Pocotaglio [in South Carolina] without a fight when they heard that the attacking force belonged to my army. I will try and keep up that feeling, which is real power.”41 This power spread in two directions: to his enemy, who collapsed before the very rumors of his approach, and to his own men, who knew that they were winning. In less than three months America’s national nightmare was over.

As to the charge that he was some kind of a warmonger who gloried in fighting for its own sake, Sherman had done his work so well that one outstanding fact defines his campaign: His army did not have to fight a single major battle after the siege of Atlanta. That is what a proper demonstration of force, and the clear willingness to use it again, can accomplish. Sherman was too busy winning the war to waste his precious men fighting battles.42

Sherman’s Moral Lessons

Sherman’s writings about the purposes of war, and the proper attitude toward noncombatants, are powerful statements about deeper aspects of a principled military policy. In essence, he refused to accept unearned guilt for the military actions necessitated by the aggression of others. As far as he was concerned, the southern states—by attacking Union forts—had renounced the U.S. Constitution and had demanded that political issues be resolved by force of arms. Sherman used the methods of their choosing—guns and bayonets—to bring the conflict to an end. It was up to the South to renounce those methods or face the consequences.

Sherman’s attitude toward his enemies, his task, and the war as a whole—an attitude of which we are in dire need today—is illustrated in a series of exchanges, first between Sherman and Confederate General John Bell Hood, who defended Atlanta, and then between Sherman and the mayor and the city council of Atlanta. Sherman’s correspondence here cuts to the heart of the moral issues involved in fighting a war—and demonstrates that he was not only a successful general, but also a profoundly principled thinker.

The issue began with Sherman’s need to fortify Atlanta, and to remove all opposition at his rear before moving to the sea. He needed complete use of the single railroad supply line back to Chattanooga to gather resources for the march. Thus he made plans to move the population of Atlanta—some 9,600 persons—out of the city, either north or south as they wished. He would supply transportation to drop-off points under a two-day truce, to be presented to Hood. He first presented this plan to the Union War Department on September 4, 1864:

I propose to remove all the inhabitants of Atlanta, sending those committed to our cause to the Rear & the Rebel families to the front. I will allow no trade, manufactories or any citizens there at all, so that we will have the entire use of the railroad back and also such corn & forage as may be reached by our troops.

If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking. If they want peace, then they and their relatives must stop the war.43

In his later report to General Halleck, he gave his reasons for the movement as (1) to use houses for military purposes; (2) to shorten lines of defense; (3) Atlanta was fortified and stubbornly defended, and “we have a right to it”; (4) to avoid starvation; and (5) to prevent inhabitants from corresponding with enemies. “These are my reasons; and, if satisfactory to the Government of the United States, it makes no difference whether it please [Confederate] General Hood and his people or not.”44

Sherman then sent his proposal of a truce to General Hood, who was forced to accept Sherman’s plan. Hood then dared to lecture Sherman on the morality of his actions:

And now, sir, permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever brought to my attention in the dark history of war.

In the name of God and humanity, I protest, believing that you will find that you are expelling from their homes and firesides the wives and children of a brave people.45

Sherman responded, detailing the numerous cases in which Confederate armies, on the approach to Georgia, had also—and rightfully—removed civilians from battle zones. He then demolished Hood’s mini-sermon with satire:

I say it is a kindness to those families of Atlanta to remove them now at once from the scenes that women and children should not be exposed to, and the “brave people” should scorn to commit their wives and children to the rude barbarians who thus as you say violate the Laws of War, as illustrated in the pages of its dark History.46

Hood had also castigated Sherman for trying to justify his shelling of Atlanta without notice. Sherman, according to Hood, was supposed to alert an enemy to his intentions to attack. Incredibly, Hood made this claim after Sherman had spent months chasing the Confederate Army from Vicksburg to Chattanooga to Atlanta—as if Sherman’s arrival were some kind of sneak attack—and after Hood had retreated into civilian areas behind military defenses.

Sherman would hear none of it. He had ordered his men to cannon buildings from which they are fired upon. This could result in the deaths of civilians. But Sherman understood why he should not accept blame for this from his enemy. Hood was a hypocrite for leaving civilians near his defensive lines and then blaming Sherman for casualties:

I was not bound by the laws of war to give notice of the shelling of Atlanta, [quoting Hood’s own words] “a fortified town, with magazines, arsenals, foundries, and public stores;” You were bound to take notice. See the books.

This is the conclusion of our correspondence, which I did not begin, and terminate with satisfaction.47

“See the books” was a personal jab at Hood, who had graduated near the bottom of his class at West Point, having not read his lessons well enough. Sherman had graduated sixth, and was far better versed in history and military science. Hood could not deny that he knew a war was underway, or that Sherman was approaching. More broadly, a general—not his opponent—is responsible for securing the areas under his control. If Hood wanted to protect civilians, he should have either moved his troops away from those civilians, or moved the civilians—as Sherman now proposed and Hood protested. Sherman would not leave true noncombatants to starve—if providing for them would not hinder his efforts to end the war. But true noncombatants were slaves or virtual slaves who had no desire to continue the war. They were not enemy sympathizers, like many of those who lived in Atlanta, who might pass information to the rebels. Sherman was correct, as he wrote, “to prevent inhabitants from corresponding with enemies.”

Sherman’s plan for the evacuation of Atlanta did not send civilians to firing squads or prison camps, but rather to areas away from the fighting. The evacuation was an orderly movement, under a truce, by railcars, and with provisions for the civilians’ survival. It is revealing that while southern officers and newspapers were representing Sherman as a rapacious killer of all that moves, southern leaders entrusted their own families to his care. Generals Hardee and Smith directed their families in Savannah to seek the care of Sherman, while Hood wanted civilians in Atlanta to remain under Sherman’s control and not to be moved to Hood’s own areas.

As far as Sherman was concerned, the fundamental point remained that all blame for the war lay with the South. Southern states had rejected debate in Congress in favor of military attack, whipped their own people into a fury against the Union, and fired upon the Union flag. For this they deserved what they got. Again, writing to Confederate General Hood:

You who in the midst of peace and prosperity have plunged a nation into War, dark and cruel war . . . talk thus to the marines but not to me who have seen these things and who will this day make as much sacrifice for the peace and honor of the South, as the best born southerner among you. If we be enemies let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity.48

The criticisms that Sherman has faced over the years—of cruelty to civilians, and of shelling and burning civilian targets—began during his siege of Atlanta. The mayor and two members of the city council joined Hood to complain against Sherman’s evacuation order:

Many poor women are in an advanced state of pregnancy . . . some say “I have such a one sick at my house; who will wait on them while I am gone?”

. . . what has this helpless people done, that they should be driven from their homes, to wander strangers and outcasts, and exiles, and to subsist on charity?

But no one was in a position to tell Sherman that war is cruel. He responded famously to their complaints, in a chain of reasoning that warrants emphasis in today’s day and age:

I have read it carefully, and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, and yet shall not revoke my orders, because they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles in which millions of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest. We must have peace, not only in Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies which are arrayed against the laws and Constitution that all must respect and obey. To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses, provided with the arms and instruments which enable us to accomplish our purpose . . . The use of Atlanta for warlike purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families. There will be no manufactures, commerce, or agriculture here, for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later want will compel the inhabitants to go. Why not go now, when all the arrangements are complete for the transfer, instead of waiting till the plunging shot of competing armies will renew the scenes of the past month? . . .

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know that I will make more sacrifice to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division too. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war . . . Once admit the Union, once more acknowledge the authority of the national Government, and, instead of devoting your houses and streets and roads to the dread uses of war, I and this army become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may.49

This passage cuts to the heart of Sherman’s attitude toward an enemy who had started a war that his command now charged him to end. He accepted no unearned guilt. This sense of rightness allowed him to prosecute the war to its proper conclusion quickly, with his force directed at the true source of southern power rather than merely at military positions dependent upon that power. He saved the lives of his own soldiers, refusing to sacrifice them to arbitrary rules, dictated by an incompetent enemy, who impudently claimed a higher moral position by virtue of his military defeat, invoked “God and humanity” only after his own bullets failed, and all the while hid behind crying, unarmed, pregnant women.

This was total war—not total destruction, and not a gratuitous attack of unarmed civilians—but rather war that reached into every recess of southern society, that exempted no pocket of resources from its grip, and that allowed no enemy to go on thinking that victory was possible.50 If this evacuation order hurt those privileged with aristocratic birth and wealth, then so be it. War is indeed hell; it is supposed to hurt. A war that doesn’t hurt is a contradiction in terms. As General Lee had said, looking upon the carnage at Fredericksburg, “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.” It was crucial that the people of Atlanta experience directly the nature of the war they had been advocating; this was the only way to make them reject it.

Sherman also understood that his job had a scope wider than the immediate task he was facing. His job was not to ensure the comforts of the people of Atlanta, but rather to make possible “peace, not only in Atlanta, but in all America.” His job was to destroy the source of the rebellion as a whole—to break the will of the southerners from continuing the war everywhere—not to make the struggle easy for them in Atlanta.

Sherman showed the same wide-ranging understanding toward the matter of slavery. Accused of cruelty against blacks by political opportunists in the North, he observed:

The idea that such men should have been permitted to hang around Mr. Lincoln, to torture his life by means of suspicions of the officers who were toiling with the single purpose to bring the war to a successful end, and thereby liberate all slaves, is a fair illustration of the influences that poison a political capital.51

This was Sherman’s task: a wide resolution to a deep problem in American life. But like any problem concerning individual rights, no meaningful solution could be enacted until the authority of the Constitution had been restored over all the states. Sherman understood that a peace—if it is to last—must be created on proper, that is, constitutional, terms. To fail to establish those terms is not pacific, but rather solidifies the conditions that make further war inescapable. It is not a kindness to accept a peace today that turns tomorrow’s children into soldiers—a point that Thomas Paine had understood: “let us,” he wrote, “not leave the next generation to be cutting throats. . . .”52 Sherman was unwilling to meet his enemy halfway, because he knew that to do so would leave in place the seeds of the next war.

To end the motivations for war, there would have to be more than mere defeat of southern forces; the southern leadership would have to surrender abjectly. There is a difference between defeat and surrender. A defeat is a fact: One side’s ability to prevail in the fight is destroyed past the point of rebuilding; the physical capacity to continue the fight toward any meaningful end no longer exists. Surrender is a decision: The political leadership and the dominant voices in the culture openly accept the fact of defeat. Surrender is recognition of the reality of the situation, an admission of impotence, the collapse of all hope for victory, and the permanent renunciation of aggression. Under the shock of defeat, the leadership accepts the situation publicly; militant voices lose their legitimacy; civilians no longer predict victory; and the population gives up.

As Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein wrote in “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense”: “Achieving the purpose of ‘self-defense’ means the complete restoration of the protection of individual rights and thus the complete return to normal life, achieved by the permanent elimination of the threat. This is the only proper meaning of ‘complete victory.’” A complete victory, Brook and Epstein continue, requires the victor to make clear to the enemy that “the cause is doomed.”53

This is what happened in the American South. Before their surrender, southern leaders would not even consider a negotiated end to the war that did not include recognition of the South’s “independence” and its “right” to keep slaves. As late as February of 1865, Jefferson Davis refused to meet with Lincoln without prior recognition of this status. Southern leaders, and those who supported them, had to be defeated and forced into complete, sincere surrender before they would abandon this position. After the surrender at Appomattox, Lee told Grant that the emancipation of slaves was not likely to be a problem, since few in the South would want to restore slavery even if they could.54

Five months after Sherman left Atlanta, the war was over, and the restoration and extension of freedom could begin.

Sherman and Grant had more than the physical accoutrements of war; they had the will to use them—the will to defend the constitutional government that makes peace possible. Today, 140 years later, we still live under the peace, and the Constitution, defended by Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Thank you, gentlemen. Well done.

Evaluating Sherman

Any evaluation of William Tecumseh Sherman must begin by recognizing the thousands who would have died, had he thrown his army into brutal assaults against enemy positions and failed to cut off the physical and psychological support flowing to the Confederate Army. Any evaluation of Sherman must project the consequences of calls by southern leaders for civilians to stand with hoes against hardened soldiers with cannons. To evaluate Sherman, one must consider what might have occurred, had he left any hope in the minds of southerners that an uprising could work. He used sound strategy and overwhelming force—a combination that could not be resisted—to destroy property, save lives, and end the scourge of war. Sherman did not destroy the South; he saved it—not its slaveholding culture, but its proper, uniquely American roots. He induced a shock into the South that “allow[ed] the Union and peace to settle once more over your old homes.”55

Nevertheless, since the end of the war, Sherman has repeatedly been condemned for his heroic actions. Negative evaluations of him and his campaign are accepted by many people; he is often seen not as a symbol of constitutional order, but as one of animal brutality. Some have gone so far as to call him a terrorist and the father of the Ku Klux Klan, and to blame him for segregation lasting into modern day. In the light of the facts, such assertions are absurd; but to see this, one must first recognize those facts, and then evaluate them.

Some historians credit Sherman with effective, indeed brilliant, military tactics—but are quick to criminalize his approach to civilians. Former President Bill Clinton exemplifies the infiltration of this view into American culture:

In the Civil War, General Sherman waged a brilliant military campaign to cut through the South and go to Atlanta. It was significant and very helpful in bringing the Civil War to a close in a way to, thank God, save the Union. On the way, General Sherman practiced a relatively mild form of terrorism—he did not kill civilians, but he burned all the farms and then he burned Atlanta, trying to break the spirit of the Confederates. It had nothing whatever to do with winning the Civil War, but it was a story that was told for a hundred years later, and prevented America from coming together as we might otherwise have done. When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, when we should have been thinking about how we were going to integrate the schools and give people equal opportunity, people were making excuses for unconscionable behavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago. So, it is important to remember that normally terrorism has backfired and never has it succeeded on its own.56

If “terrorism” is taken to mean any destruction of civilian property, then all wars are “terrorist,” since every war takes place where somebody lives, and anyone in that area lives in terror (if they live at all); terrorism thus becomes a useless term—or a term useful only to denigrate those who end popular support for aggression. But that is not the meaning of the concept, and terrorism actually is a useful term; it denotes a specific tactic. Terrorism is the tactic of initiating aggression against civilians for a political purpose. Retaliatory force used by a government to eliminate a population’s support for aggression is not terrorism; it is moral and political justice.

For instance, someone who blows himself up in a crowded market in order to bring about a theocratic dictatorship is engaging in terrorism; a government that bombs an enemy neighborhood where the people behind such suicide attacks are hiding is engaging not in terrorism, but in justice. In all such cases, it is the aggressors and those abetting them who are at fault and to blame for civilian deaths.

In Sherman’s time the South had institutionalized the ownership of human beings. Southerners were willing to plunge the nation into war to defend this monstrosity. Was it terrorism to burn the farms of those who controlled the government and enabled slavery? Should the blacks that Sherman liberated have thrown themselves back into the furnace of slavery—in order to avoid terrorizing those who claimed to own them? Should Sherman have pretended that the southern armies were not being reinforced by civilians who supported the southern cause? Should he have seen his army shot to pieces in order to spare southern plantation owners from the consequences of their rebellion? Is this the result desired by a former president, who describes both the actions of Sherman and the actions of those who destroyed the Twin Towers as “terrorism”?

In any event, to blame Sherman’s actions in 1864 Georgia for racial segregation in 1960s Arkansas is beyond the pale. Sherman strove to end institutionalized slavery across the Union as a whole. As Clinton admits, he heard segregationists “making excuses for unconscionable behavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago.” Nor are the rationalizations of such racists the fault of Sherman, whose actions have been twisted past recognition. Such excuses are the fault of those who invent them; it is they who must be held responsible for advocating outrages that should have ended at Appomattox.

Self-preservation demands a clear historical account of the effects of bringing the consequences of starting a war to those who started it. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta—a fortified city that had opposed his advance by force—was followed by the collapse of military actions in Georgia, and a refusal by the civilian population to follow their leaders’ admonishments to oppose his march. Sherman’s army allowed the majority, who were not in favor of secession, to raise their heads and be counted. His actions caused so many civilians and former slaves to flock to his army that he had to turn them away. Sherman’s recognition that he was dealing not only with an enemy army, but also with a hostile population in the form of the “persistent secessionists,” moved him to set clear terms for that population as well as for the enemy army. The result was an end to the southern motivation for war, and the extension of freedom to those who had been enslaved.

Sherman Speaks to Us

As Sherman prepared to move north from Savannah into the Carolinas, he wrote to Major General Halleck, with words that should resonate for all those marching into dangerous territory for the highest cause:

I think that the time has come now when we should attempt the boldest moves, and my experience is, that they are easier of execution than more timid ones, because the enemy is disconcerted by them—as, for instance, my recent campaign. . . .

I think our campaign of the last month, as well as every step I take from this point northward, is as much a direct attack upon Lee’s army as though we were operating within the sound of his artillery. . . .

I attach more importance to these deep incisions into the enemy’s country, because this war differs from European wars in this particular: we are fighting not only hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time now realize the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.57

To understand the lessons of history is to gain a powerful weapon: the knowledge that the capacity to oppose the declared enemies of freedom is directly under our control. But to use this knowledge, we must judge whether slave states—or medieval theocracies—are morally equal to constitutional republics. Where do we stand? Is the American Republic worth defending in the face of international unpopularity? Should we accept blame for casualties in a war we did not start? What would Sherman do? To those who respect man’s ability to control his destiny using his mind, the answers are morally instructive.

William Tecumseh Sherman’s defense of his country, his Constitution, and his values offers a great lesson for us. We can preserve our own freedom only if we recognize ourselves as good, and act with clarity, purpose, and resolve. We should observe the parallels to the modern day, including the enemy that brought down the Twin Towers, its subjugation of women and “infidels” to a brutal totalitarian ideology, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And we should consider where we would be today had Sherman compromised with his enemy.

About John David Lewis

John David Lewis was a contributing editor to TOS from the journal’s second issue, in 2006, until his death, on January 3, 2012. He was a visiting associate professor in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program at Duke University. He held a PhD in classics from the University of Cambridge and taught at the University of London. He had also been a senior research scholar in history and classics at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, and a fellow of the Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship. He published in journals such as Journal of Business Ethics, Social Philosophy and Policy, Polis, Dike, and Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and lectured on classics, military history, and contemporary political issues at numerous universities and for private groups. His research interests were in ancient Greek and Roman thought, military history, and their connections to the modern day. His books are Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens (Duckworth, 2006), Early Greek Lawgivers (Bristol Classical Press, August, 2007), and Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History (Princeton,2010). Dr. Lewis also wrote for Capitalism Magazine. His website is www.JohnDavidLewis.com.

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