The History Room
Nov. 12 marks the 150th anniversary of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous burning of Atlanta in the American Civil War.
Many members believe the US should return to the concept of total war.
***By 1864, as commanding Union General Ulysses Grant and Confederate General Robert Lee became locked in stalemate, Sherman and Grant had come to understand that the conventional, Napoleonic style of warfare would not be enough to end the war without the American public losing morale. They decided that the Confederacy’s economic capacity and its will to fight had to be broken. He planned to march his army toward Savannah on the coast, destroying infrastructure and foraging for supplies along the way.
For two months, Sherman’s armies laid waste to the industrial and agricultural heartland of the Confederacy. Railway rails were heated and then twisted into loops, nicknamed “Sherman’s neckties.” The destruction of rail and telegraph lines throughout Georgia crippled much of the South’s ability to move resources and communicate.
Many Southerners reviled his “scorched earth” tactics, while others saw them as necessary to the end of the war. Sherman’s tactics along with those used by Union cavalry commander Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley are seen as the first use of modern total warfare. While Sherman’s tactics were brutal, a few cities, including Augusta, Madison, and Savannah were spared. Rumors spread that Sherman had saved these places because he had friends and former girlfriends there.
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Originally Posted by Captain Obvious
