William Tecumseh Sherman: He's Back!

There’s a great story up on the website of author J. Mark Powell (a.k.a. the spokesman for S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson) exploring the controversy raging over a new historical marker erected in Atlanta, Georgia.

The controversial new marker pays homage to U.S. army general William Tecumseh Sherman and specifically his “March to the Sea” – six brutal weeks in late 1864 during which more than 60,000 U.S. troops laid waste to broad swaths of Georgia. From November 15 to December 21, 1864, Sherman’s army cut a path of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah – three hundred miles of scorched earth that stretched sixty miles wide.

By this time the War Between the States was effectively over, with Sherman’s march intended to humble the rebellious Southern states as opposed to achieving any military objective against an enemy force.

And humble them he did – doing an estimated $1.5 billion worth of damage (in today’s dollars), most of it to civilian property.

“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want,” Sherman famously said of his scorched earth tactics.

“We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies,” Sherman added in a letter to fellow U.S. general Henry W. Halleck at the conclusion of his march. “I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.”

Anyway, here’s the new marker’s opening line …

On November 15, 1864, during the Civil War, U.S. forces under William T. Sherman set out from Atlanta on the March to the Sea, a military campaign designed to destroy the Confederacy’s ability to wage war and break the will of its people to resist.

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