On 15 November 1864 Major General William T. Sherman's Union army marched out of Atlanta and set off across Georgia toward the Atlantic. Some 60,000 men strong, it abandoned its supply line, lived off the land and wrecked railroads, crops and property along a wide path, to show Southerners that their government could not protect them. Facing only cavalry and militia, it reached Savannah, which fell on 21 December. The March to the Sea made Sherman a hero in the North and a villain in the South.
Leaving Atlanta
Sherman's armies had taken Atlanta on 2 September 1864. Rather than stay there or march west to Mobile, he proposed to cut loose and strike southeast for Savannah or Charleston, studying census returns to pick a route that could feed his men and animals. Lincoln was skeptical, but Sherman won over his friend Ulysses S. Grant, who persuaded the president, and the march was delayed until after the presidential election of 8 November.1
The Confederate Army of Tennessee under John Bell Hood had moved away into Alabama, hoping to draw Sherman after it, and Sherman sent George H. Thomas to Nashville to deal with Hood. Before leaving, his men wrecked Atlanta's railroads and military plant. The American Battlefield Trust notes that the city was not burned to the ground as Gone with the Wind suggests: much of the damage came from Confederate entrenchments and the ammunition Hood blew up on leaving, and about 400 houses were still standing when Sherman left.2
Across Georgia
The New Georgia Encyclopedia puts Sherman's army at about 60,000 men, and the American Battlefield Trust at 62,000, in two wings under Oliver O. Howard and Henry W. Slocum, with Judson Kilpatrick's cavalry screening them. The wings marched twenty to forty miles apart, feinting toward Macon and Augusta before converging on the state capital at Milledgeville, which surrendered on 23 November. Foraging parties, the soldiers called them bummers, stripped farms and plantations, and the troops tore up rails, heated them over bonfires of ties and twisted them into what became known as Sherman's neckties.3
Resistance was thin. Joseph Wheeler's Confederate cavalry harassed the columns, though the sources disagree on its size: about 8,000 according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, 3,500 according to the American Battlefield Trust. The New Georgia Encyclopedia counts only two real battles: Griswoldville on 22 November, where Georgia militia lost about 650 killed and wounded against some 62 Union casualties, and at Fort McAllister, stormed on 13 December.4
Freedom and betrayal
Enslaved people freed themselves by following the army. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, at Ebenezer Creek on 9 December the Union general Jefferson C. Davis had the pontoon bridge taken up before the freedpeople following his corps could cross, and many drowned trying to reach safety. Sherman defended him as having done what was militarily necessary.5
Facing a siege he could not survive, the Confederate commander William J. Hardee slipped out of Savannah into South Carolina, and the city surrendered on 21 December. The next day Sherman telegraphed Lincoln offering him Savannah and 25,000 bales of cotton as a Christmas present. The march destroyed the food Georgians had stored for the winter, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia links the hardship at home to rising desertion in Lee's army in Virginia. The whole campaign, from Atlanta to Savannah, is told in our article on Sherman's March to the Sea, and the man in our biography of William Tecumseh Sherman.6
