Sherman's March to the Sea was the Union campaign of 15 November to 21 December 1864 in which William T. Sherman led about 62,000 men some 285 miles from Atlanta to Savannah1, Georgia, living off the land and wrecking railroads, crops and property to break the Confederacy's ability and will to fight.
In the spring of 1864 Atlanta was the great rail hub of the Deep South. By Christmas, Sherman's armies had taken it, wrecked its military plant, cut loose from their own supply line and reached the Atlantic at Savannah. The campaign made William Tecumseh Sherman the most admired and the most hated general of the war.
Below: the Atlanta Campaign, the March, and what it meant for enslaved Georgians, for whom it was a road to freedom and, at Ebenezer Creek, a betrayal.
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Mobile Bay · Next: The Battle of Appomattox Court House
The Atlanta Campaign, May to September 1864
Sherman left Chattanooga, which the Union had held through the siege that followed its defeat at Chickamauga, in early May 1864 with about 110,000 men2, in step with Ulysses S. Grant's offensive in Virginia. Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee, about 54,500 strong, fell back along the railroad each time Sherman outflanked it. On 27 June Sherman tried a frontal assault at Kennesaw Mountain and was repulsed, with about 3,000 casualties to Johnston's 1,000.
On 17 July Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood, who attacked at Peachtree Creek on 20 July, in the Battle of Atlanta on 22 July, where the Union general James B. McPherson was killed, and at Ezra Church on 28 July, losing heavily each time. When Sherman cut the last railroad at Jonesboro on 31 August and 1 September, Hood evacuated the city, blowing up his ammunition train. Union troops entered on 2 September. "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,2" Sherman reported.
The timing was decisive. The Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan on a platform calling the war a failure, and Sherman later recalled that even Lincoln had been in doubt. Atlanta lifted Northern morale and helped secure Lincoln's re-election on 8 November.
Cutting loose from the supply line
Sherman ordered Atlanta's remaining civilians to leave. When Mayor James M. Calhoun protested, he answered on 12 September: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.3"
Hood then struck north at the single railroad that fed Sherman from Tennessee. Rather than guard hundreds of miles of track, Sherman proposed to abandon it and strike for Savannah. "I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!3" he telegraphed Grant on 9 October. Grant and Lincoln agreed after some hesitation; George H. Thomas went back to hold Tennessee, and Sherman kept about 60,000 picked men.
Before the army left on 15 November, its engineers destroyed Atlanta's depots, rail yards and shops, and fire spread into the town. The American Battlefield Trust notes that about a third of the buildings were already in ruins from Confederate works and the exploding ammunition, and that some 400 houses were still standing4 when the army left.
The March: foraging, bummers and destruction
Special Field Orders No. 120, issued on 9 November, split the army into two wings under Oliver O. Howard and Henry W. Slocum, marching about 15 miles a day without a general supply train. "The army will forage liberally on the country during the march,3" it ordered. Soldiers were not to enter homes, and only corps commanders could order mills, houses or cotton gins destroyed, and only where the inhabitants showed hostility.
Practice outran the rules. The foragers, nicknamed "bummers", stripped farms and plantations along a band that Sherman put at thirty miles on either side of the line of march, and it was they who did most of the damage. Opposition was thin: Joseph Wheeler's cavalry, estimated at 3,500 to 8,000, and Georgia militia, who at Griswoldville on 22 November lost about 650 men to some 62 Union casualties5. Milledgeville, the state capital, fell on 23 November.
Sherman put the damage at $100,000,000, of which at least $20,000,000 had served his army: "the remainder is simple waste and destruction.6" Historians reject both the legend of a horde burning every house and the claim that little happened. Property was destroyed on a vast scale and civilians were robbed and left hungry, but no town was leveled and violence against people was far rarer than against property. Mark Grimsley calls the policy7 "directed severity", hard war aimed at resources and morale rather than lives.
Freedom on the road, and the tragedy at Ebenezer Creek
For enslaved Georgians the March brought freedom. Thousands left the plantations to follow the columns; Sherman's own report speaks of "a countless number of their slaves" leaving with the army. Some soldiers welcomed them; others, Sherman included, saw them as extra mouths that slowed the march.
On 9 December at Ebenezer Creek, Jefferson C. Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) took his Fourteenth Corps across a pontoon bridge while some 650 refugees were told to wait4, then had the bridge taken up. With Wheeler's cavalry approaching, people plunged into the cold water. Soldiers threw logs and a few were saved on makeshift rafts, but many drowned and others were captured. Sherman defended Davis against Northern criticism.
Savannah: a Christmas gift for Lincoln
After Fort McAllister fell on 13 December, opening contact with the Navy, Hardee slipped his outnumbered garrison out of Savannah on the night of 20 December, and the city was occupied on 21 December. Sherman's message of 22 December, sent by ship to Fort Monroe, reads in the Library of Congress transcription: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah8", with 150 heavy guns, plenty of ammunition and about 25,000 bales of cotton. Lincoln answered: "Many, many thanks for your Christmas-gift".
The Union view
To Sherman and most of his soldiers the March was a way to end the war with fewer deaths. Instead of fighting costly battles, they would destroy the food, railroads and confidence that kept Confederate armies in the field, and show Southerners that their government could not protect them. "This may not be war," Sherman wrote to Grant, "but rather statesmanship." For weeks the North heard almost nothing of the army, so its reappearance on the coast was greeted as a triumph.
The Confederate and Georgian civilian view
For white Georgians in the army's path, the March meant strangers in the smokehouse, livestock driven off, barns and gins burned, and families short of food as winter came on. Anne J. Bailey concludes that the army left behind a hungry and demoralized people. Many civilians saw the foragers as plain thieves who violated their homes, and Confederate soldiers in Virginia and Tennessee read the news with anger and dread. That suffering was real; in the same counties and weeks, thousands of enslaved Georgians experienced the same army as liberation.
What followed: the Carolinas and Bennett Place
In Savannah on 12 January 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met twenty Black leaders, mostly ministers. Four days later Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside some 400,000 acres along the coast9 for freed families in 40 acre plots. About 40,000 people settled there before President Andrew Johnson overturned it that fall; it is the likely origin of "forty acres and a mule".
Sherman then marched north through the Carolinas. After Bentonville in March and Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April, Joseph E. Johnston surrendered 89,270 soldiers to Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina, on 26 April 1865, the largest surrender of the war.
If you visit
Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park preserves 2,965 acres of the ground10 fought over between 19 June and 2 July 1864, including the "Dead Angle" on Cheatham Hill, Pigeon Hill and Kolb's Farm, with a visitor center and trails up Big Kennesaw.
The Atlanta History Center shows the restored 1886 cyclorama The Battle of Atlanta, 49 feet tall and longer than a football field, in Cyclorama: The Big Picture, opened on 22 February 2019. The exhibit explains how the painting was altered after it came to Atlanta in 1892 and advertised as "the only Confederate victory ever painted", changes mostly reversed in the 1930s.
Why the March still matters
The March showed that the Confederacy could no longer protect its heartland, helped re-elect the president who saw the war through, and opened the road to freedom for thousands. It also left a bitterness that shaped Southern memory for generations. For the wider war, see the commanders of the American Civil War, the greatest battles of the Civil War and our on this day in military history calendar.