by Jerry Curtis

Created on: March 20, 2010

The beginning phase of William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea and from there up through the Carolinas is best described in the general’s own words:

“As my combined armies moved southwest toward Atlanta, all the people fled before us and there was nothing but desolation behind. We burned all the factories and shops in northwest Georgia that made cloth and other things for the rebel government…”

Sherman’s march, then, was nothing less than total war. He and his 100,000 veteran westerners had straightforward orders. They were simply “to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country. . . Inflicting all the damage you can.” So in May of 1864 as Grant and Lee struggled in the Virginia, Sherman went for his foe, Joe Johnston.

Both Sherman and Johnston were wary tacticians. Sherman had superior numbers and rarely made mistakes. He disdained frontal assaults against entrenched enemies. Johnston specialized in defense and believed in counter punching when his enemy made mistakes. Sherman’s veterans were rough and ready westerners accustomed to winning. Johnston’s rebel troops, recently rid of a hated General Braxton Bragg, were game and well motivated defenders of their home territory.

The rebels were doomed from the outset. In a sort of tactical ballet of Union attack followed by Confederate defense followed by the threat of Union flanking or surrounding the outnumbered Confederates, Johnston had little choice but retreat. Sherman did make one error at Kennesaw Mountain. He attacked well-dug-in Confederates and failed. Sherman nevertheless resumed his flanking strategy and forced Johnston to retreat to lines less than ten miles from Atlanta.

Then an impatient Jefferson Davis made a move that would hasten Georgia’s doom Georgia. Davis replaced the cautious and ever-retreating Johnston with the impetuous and reckless John Bell Hood.  Hoods army, like ocean waves being absorbed by rocks on a sea shore, put up a brisk fight, but Atlanta was lost.

On September 2, 1864, Hood retreated south. Abraham Lincoln, facing defeat for reelection received the good news of the Union victory when Sherman wrote, “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” The impact of this victory was clear, even to the “Richmond Examiner,” whose editor wrote that Atlanta’s fall came “in the very nick of time when a victory alone

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