Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’: How Should History Judge It? – 19FortyFive

What should history say about Shermans March to the Sea and war tactics used during the U.S. Civil War? Was William Tecumseh Sherman really the destroyer that American lore has made him out to be? For over a century, Shermans name has been shorthand for the destruction wrought by total war against civilian property and infrastructure, a grim harbinger of the brutal campaigns of the 20th century.

He has even been referenced concerning Russias slow-motion offensive in Eastern Ukraine. Ukrainians, among others, have accused the Russians of using Sherman-esque tactics to loot Eastern Ukraine of food and industry and destroy existing infrastructure, rendering the region economically fallow. Given the near-universality of this view, careful consideration of his actual record is warranted.

Historical Legacy

A graduate of West Point, Sherman was eight years retired from service when he commissioned into the US Army as a colonel in May 1861. After fighting at Bull Run, Sherman served in administrative positions in the West. In March 1862, he was assigned a field command beneath Major General Ulysses S. Grant in what came to be known as the Army of the Tennessee. Sherman served with distinction at the Battle of Shiloh during the Vicksburg campaign and eventually as commander of the Army of the Tennessee at the Battle of Chattanooga. In May 1864, he led US Army forces in the Atlanta Campaign, capturing the Confederate-held city in early September.

At this point, Shermans military legacy was assured. However, Shermans most enduring fame has come from his March to the Sea, which followed the capture of Atlanta. At the head of the Army of the Tennessee and parts of the Army of the Cumberland, Sherman set out to wage economic war against Confederate infrastructure and the property of the Confederate elite while marching his forces to Savannah. Sherman broke from his supply lines, meaning his army needed to draw food and other resources from the land. The economic war involved the seizure of vast amounts of food, animals, and fodder, as well as the destruction of whatever industry Shermans army could find. After reaching Savannah, Sherman turned north, wreaking damage on the Carolinas before the final surrender of Confederate forces in the spring of 1865.

In the post-war Southern imagination, Sherman became the barbarian who had savagely destroyed the economic heart of the Confederacy. At the same time, U.S. Grant became the brute who battered his way to victory over Robert E. Lee without either art or honor. Painting Sherman as the Destroyer served many political ends in postbellum America. To Southerners, it helped explain why the North had won the war; Sherman and others had violated norms of honorable conduct. In the North, Sherman became synonymous with savage vengeance, the terrible swift sword of retribution for slavery and secession.

The Revisionists

For some time, revisionists have been altering this picture of Sherman, just as theyve altered the understanding of the nature of Grants campaigns. As Anne Bailey has argued, the available evidence suggests that the damage inflicted on Georgia was less catastrophic than reported. As a general rule, the persons of civilians (although not their property) were spared from attack, in stark distinction to the anti-civilian campaigns of World War I and especially World War II. It is also worth noting that the capacity of a pre-industrial army (of which the US Army of the Civil War still mostly counts) is simply an order of magnitude different than the industrial colossi of the twentieth century.

Time has not been kind to the legacy of Shermans victims, many of whom were wealthy slaveholders who held the bulk of their wealth in slaves rather than land. Shermans March necessarily led to the liberation of much of this wealth in the form of Black Americans, who freed themselves from bondage to follow Shermans armies. As Sherman and others pointed out, large slaveholders formed the core of the Confederacys military and political elite and thus bore considerable direct responsibility for the war.

At Parameters, the journal of the US Army War College, Mitchell Klingenberg has argued that Shermans legacy is as much a literary embellishment as anything else. Rather than the destructive butcher, Klingenberg paints a picture of Sherman as a careful and astute observer of military affairs who exerted a strong influence on the culture and institutional nature of the US Army. Sherman wrote extensively on both the campaigns of the Civil War and on the war in general and did not consider his actions to have been in any way indiscriminate.

Shermans Later Career

Shermans later career involved operations against Native American nations that often undertook an extraordinarily destructive nature. Indeed, it is during the Indian Wars that Sherman can perhaps truly be said to have earned the label Destroyer, facilitating brutal punitive raids that absolutely were not discriminate in their effect. Sherman also supported economic war against the Native Americans, including the destruction of remaining bison herds. But in this Sherman was not particularly distinguished from other US Army commanders, or indeed from the generals who led European armies in the final waves of nineteenth-century colonization. This is not to excuse Shermans actions (tension even developed between Sherman and President Grant over the brutality of US Army activity), but rather to acknowledge that there was nothing special about an American general engaging in genocidal policies in the American West.

Relevance

William Tecumseh Sherman was an extraordinarily gifted military leader who acted as one of the two most important US military figures of the Civil War. His action in Georgia did not set the tone or the terms of what would come to be called total war in the 20th century. Analogies are always inexact, but we should take care before taking responsibility for the reality that war is cruelty on a nineteenth-century American commander.

A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor,Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

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Sherman's 'March to the Sea': How Should History Judge It? - 19FortyFive