Last Year's Lesson: Sherman's March to the Sea - Nov. 15, 1864

Sherman's March to the Sea began on this day in 1864.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, here's a rerun for today, brought to
you by Tracy V. Wilson. We hope it makes previous
episodes for this date easier to find in the feed.
Welcome to this Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick

(00:20):
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and it's November.
Major General William To come to Sherman's March to the
Sea began on this day in eighteen sixty four. This
happened during the US Civil War, and it's more formally

(00:42):
known as the Georgia and Carolina's Campaign. The Union Army
had captured Atlanta in September and had removed its civilian
population with the intent of keeping Atlanta as a strictly
military base. It had also, though, destroyed factories and railroads
and buildings based anything that might be useful to the Confederacy.

(01:03):
Many homes in Atlanta were also burned, although it wasn't
the wholesale destruction of the entire city, as it's often
popularly imagined. The march from Atlanta started on November, and
Sherman's force was divided into two approximately equal wings. They
continued southeast towards Savannah, Georgia, where they would arrive on December.

(01:27):
This was not though a straight, unbroken line. The two
wings progressed in four columns, with the right wing shifting
south toward make In, Georgia, and the left wing shifting
north toward Augusta, Georgia. This was to make it seem
as though maybe those cities were the real objective, but
both columns shifted once again and bypassed both cities. This

(01:52):
march was incredibly destructive. The intent was to rob the
Confederacy of anything it could possibly make use of, and
to terrify the civilian population and try to encourage a
faster Southern surrender. So the Union army took anything that
was edible or valuable from plantations and from farms that

(02:13):
they passed. Sherman had promised to make Georgia howell, so
they burned outbuildings and farms and sometimes homes. They kept
destroying railroads and cutting telegraph lines and burning stores and supplies.
They were as they went also emancipating people who were
enslaved on these properties. So, in theory, this destruction, and

(02:37):
it was definitely destructive, was supposed to have some limits.
Sherman gave orders not to enter people's homes, and when
seizing livestock, they were supposed to focus on things that
were owned by rich people rather than what was owned
by the poor. The people who weren't resisting were supposed
to be left alone as much as possible. The intent,

(02:58):
after all, was to pride the Confederacy of anything that
could be useful and to terrify people into surrendering. It
wasn't to punish the poorest civilians and the freed people
who really had nothing else. But in practice, these orders
that were supposed to sort of temper this whole process
were often not followed at all. Soldiers carried away as

(03:20):
much as they could and destroyed what they couldn't, and
a lot of people who were left in the path
of all of this destruction were women and children because
a lot of the men were away fighting. This also
meant that the people they were liberating from enslavement were
liberated now, but they were left with nothing to support themselves,
no way even necessarily to have shelter or food, and

(03:43):
Sherman and his army were taking no responsibility for them
or for making sure that they were going to be
able to survive. Once they had moved on, the two
wings of Sherman's march reconnected in December. They took Fort
McAlister before bombarding the city of Savannah, and then after
capturing Savannah, Sherman sent this telegram, his Excellency, President Lincoln,

(04:06):
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the
city of Savannah with a hundred and fifty heavy guns
and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty five thousand
bales of cotton. W. T. Sherman, Major General. The destruction
in all of this was massive. The Union army lost
fewer than two thousand of the sixty thousand men that

(04:28):
it left Atlanta with over this more than a month
of the campaign, and it was also disastrous for southern
morale as it was intended to be, especially for the
civilians who had thought that the Confederate Army would protect
them and instead had no protection. Sherman estimated that the
march through Georgia caused about one hundred million dollars worth

(04:49):
of destruction, and then the following year they turned north
toward the Carolinas, and that march probably also did an
equal amount of damage through the Carolinas. After the war,
Sherman's March became part of the Lost Cause propaganda that
reframed the Confederacy's role in the war as a noble
and heroic but doomed struggle to preserve a genteel way

(05:13):
of life. It even appeared in the nineteen fifteen Birth
of a Nation and then was later part of Nazi propaganda.
Thanks to Christo Frosciotis for his research work on Today's podcast,
and thanks to Casey Pigraham and Tandler Maye for their
audio work on the show. You can subscribe to the
Stay in History Class on Apple podcast, Google podcast, and
where a World you get your podcasts, and you can

(05:34):
tune in tomorrow for a battle that led to the
end of an empire.