December 22, 1864: William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” ends.
Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Savannah Campaign, which famously employed scorched earth and total war tactics to devastating effect, began as the general’s forces left Atlanta on November 15, 1864 and made its way south-east to the strategically-important port city of Savannah. Sherman later recalled how his men, suddenly and almost accidentally, began to sing “John Brown’s Body” in unison as the troops left Atlanta. As they traveled the 480-km route, Sherman’s men burned crops, killed livestock, destroyed or stole supplies, and reduced cotton gins and railroads to rubble. Sherman issued the details on what practices should be employed during the march in his Special Field Orders, No. 120, which ordered, among other things, that commanding officers” “order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility” if met with opposition. Sherman even ordered his 62,000-strong force to heat up railway rails until they were malleable, and then twist them until they were nearly irreparable. These misshapen metal railways came to be known as “Sherman’s Neckties” because they were often twisted around trees to resemble neckties.
After their month-long march, the Union soldiers captured Savannah, leaving a trail of destruction and devastation behind them. Shortly afterward Sherman telegrammed President Lincoln:
I beg to present to 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.
Sherman estimated that his campaign had caused around $100 million in damage, and his feat was made even more incredible (and terrible) by the fact that his forces had entered and traveled deep through enemy territory with no supply lines or reliable means of communication, forcing them to live off the land. Slaves received Sherman and his men differently according to their individual loyalties to the South and to their masters. Still, around 10,000 dropped their work and attempted to follow Union forces to Savannah.
Sherman himself was criticized for his harsh strategies (his armies were even harsher on South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union), but he was also dubbed by B.H. Liddell Hart “the first modern general”, and he was also the man who ironically (or appropriately?) once said “I am tired and sick of war… It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”