{"id":27370,"date":"2015-07-18T01:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T05:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27370"},"modified":"2018-08-10T15:24:37","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T19:24:37","slug":"qotd-shermans-march-to-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/18\/qotd-shermans-march-to-the-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Sherman’s March to the Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Southerners grew confident that the besieger Sherman would become the besieged in Atlanta after the election, as his long supply lines back to Tennessee would be cut and a number of Confederate forces might converge to keep him locked up behind Confederate lines.<\/p>\n

Instead, Sherman cut loose on November 15, 1864 \u2014 despite Grant\u2019s worries and Lincoln\u2019s bewilderment \u2014 and headed to the Atlantic Coast in what would soon be known as \u201cThe March to the Sea,\u201d itself a prelude to an even more daring winter march through the Carolinas to arrive at the rear of Robert E. Lee\u2019s army, trapped in Virginia at war\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

After daring Sherman to leave Atlanta, and declaring that he would suffer the fate of Napoleon in Russia, Confederate forces wilted. The luminaries of the Confederacy \u2014 Generals Bragg, Hardee, and Hood \u2014 pled numerical inferiority and usually avoided the long Northern snake that wound through the Georgia heartland. Sherman\u2019s army had been pared down of its sick and auxiliaries, but was still huge, composed of Midwestern yeomen who liked camping out and were used to living off the land. Post-harvest Georgia was indeed rich, and Sherman\u2019s more than 60,000 marchers soon learned that they could live off the land in richer style than they ever had while occupying Atlanta. In their wake, they left a 300 mile-long, 60 mile-wide swath of looting and destruction from Atlanta to Savannah.<\/p>\n

Yet there was a method to Sherman\u2019s mad five-week march. He burned plantations, freed slaves, destroyed factories, and tore up railroads \u2014 but more or less left alone the farms and small towns of ordinary Southerners. His purposes were threefold: to punish the plantation class, the small minority of Confederates who owned slaves, as the culprits for the war; to destroy the Southern economy and remind the general population, as Sherman put it, \u201cthat war and individual ruin were now to be synonymous\u201d; and to humiliate the Confederate military, especially what he called the cavalier classes that boasted of their martial audacity but would not dare confront such a huge army of battle-hardened troopers from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and other Midwestern states. In this context, the message was not lost: Unionists were not just New England Yankee manufacturers, but farmers who did their own hard work in harsh, cold lands more challenging than temperate Georgia; material advantages and repeating rifles were not antithetical to martial audacity, as a Michigan farmer with a Sharps rifle was more than a match for a plumed Southern cavalryman who boasted of killing Yankees.<\/p>\n

Victor Davis Hanson, “Sherman at 150”, Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Papers<\/em><\/a>, 2014-08-06.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Southerners grew confident that the besieger Sherman would become the besieged in Atlanta after the election, as his long supply lines back to Tennessee would be cut and a number of Confederate forces might converge to keep him locked up behind Confederate lines. Instead, Sherman cut loose on November 15, 1864 \u2014 despite Grant\u2019s worries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5,13],"tags":[650,1220],"class_list":["post-27370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","category-usa","tag-civilwar","tag-georgia-us"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-77s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27371,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27370\/revisions\/27371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}