Originally aired on December 29, 1995 - In part 70 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the 1864 yuletide battle in Georgia, a conflict for which William Tecumseh Sherman is most remembered.
#70 – The War’s Biggest Christmas Present
The one military campaign of the Civil War commensurate with the Christmas season occurred in 1864 down in Georgia. It was the success for which Union General William Tecumseh Sherman is most remembered.
Sherman was then forty-four, red-headed and gaunt, with a wild expression always around his eyes. His shoulders twitched, and his hands were never still, forever twirling a button, fiddling with his whiskers, or picking at something. Sherman had been a victim of a nervous breakdown early in the war. Thereafter, no one ventured too close to him. An admirer once commented that Sherman’s intellect was a beautifully intricate piece of machinery, with every screw a little loose.
In September, 1864, his capture of the vital industrial center of Atlanta had all but insured Abraham Lincoln’s re-election. Two months later, Sherman began what one writer called “the strangest, most fateful campaign of the entire war, like nothing that happened before or after.” His veteran army would march from Atlanta to the Georgia coast. Both geographically and psychologically, the campaign was designed to slice the Southern Confederacy in two.
Union soldiers were not going to find and fight an enemy army. They were not going to march with any urgency – fifteen miles a day being the assigned task. The mission of Sherman’s men was “to wreck an economy and destroy a faith – the economy that supported the thin fading fabric of the Confederacy, the faith that believed that Confederacy to be an enduring creation.”
Sherman’s men were going to do it by cutting a swath sixty miles from flank to flank. Their aim was to “trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”. This would be accomplished at the direction of an implacable general who, by 1864, saw that the way to stop this war was not merely by beating the enemy armies but by destroying the enemy population’s will be resist.
On November 15, Sherman left Atlanta in flames and began the 285-mile journey toward Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean. His army of 62,000 veteran soldiers moved in four columns of infantry, with blue-clad cavalry weaving back and forth from one flank to the other. Sherman had not only cut himself adrift from railroads, supplies, and reinforcements; he had plunged unsupported straight into the Southern heartland.
The only major resistance Sherman met came in a November 22 fight with a small division of Georgia militia. Seasoned Federals pushed back the threat with ease, then discovered to their dismay that the 600 Georgians killed and wounded were mostly only men and young teenagers.
Looting by Sherman’s men was constant, widespread, and indiscriminate. What could burn was set afire; what could be confiscated was stolen. An Illinois regiment in the middle of it all later computed Union soldiers seized or destroyed 100,000 hogs, 20,000 cattle, 15,000 horses and mules, plus 500,000 bushels of corn and 100,000 bushels of potatoes.
Sherman estimated that his army caused $100 million worth of damage in Georgia, with only $20 million representing material that the army actually needed. The remainder was what Sherman termed “simple waste and destruction”. Another Union officer surveyed the path of the army’s advance and concluded: “Dante’s Inferno could not furnish a more horrible and depressing picture than a countryside when war has swept it”.
On December 21, woefully outnumbered Confederate defenders abandoned Georgia’s principal seaport. The next day Sherman sent a whimsical telegram to Lincoln: “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.”
This message was published in Northern newspapers on Christmas Eve, and it set off a wave of celebration from the Potomac River to Canada. Thanks to Sherman and his Midwestern soldiers, the end of the Civil War was almost in sight.
