September 11, 1864---Atlanta and "The Red-Haired Devil"

SEPTEMBER 11, 1864: 

General Sherman and General Hood agree to a ten day truce so that Hood may, without fear of attack, aid the civilians Sherman evicted from Atlanta. 

 

For Sherman, Atlanta is a logistical nightmare. Despite the eviction order, and despite the fact that the last civilians left the city only 96 hours ago, small groups of civilians have already trickled back and will continue to trickle back into the city and its environs. First among them have been the City Fathers who have already reestablished a pretense of civilian authority in the town. With them have come Civil Engineers to manage Atlanta’s infrastructure. Sherman does not object to their presence; they take the onus from the Yankee army of keeping essential services (like water and sewage) intact. 

However, with them have come and will come older men --- craftsmen and artisans returning to their shops --- shoemakers, tailors, tanners, blacksmiths, coopers, wheelwrights, carters, teamsters, the inevitable sutlers, and others --- that will earn their keep doing the mundane tasks that would otherwise consume the time of the occupying Federal army. 

And with the men will come women (married and not, with children and not), who will, in their turn, earn their own keep by working as laundresses, seamstresses, and cooks for Union men wanting a home-cooked, if definitely Southern, meal. The dance halls and music halls and taverns will reopen in the next weeks, and the red-light district will be doing a land office business within days.

A few merchants have already inquired about reopening their offices and stores, hoping to come to business prominence early in what they assume will be the Federally-held city. 

 

Sherman foresees all this, it is happening before his eyes, and it concerns him. He has no desire to stay pinned to Atlanta, but for the time being he has little choice. His men need to rest and resupply, and he needs time to plan his next moves. He is frankly worried, however, about the burgeoning civilian population. Although temporarily quiescent, Atlantans are notorious for their secessionist sympathies. Sherman cannot afford to leave a very large garrison behind when he moves out, but he estimates that it will take at least one of his three armies to hold the city. 

 

Atlanta is at the tail end of a long, snaking supply line that leads back through Chattanooga and north into Kentucky. Nathan Bedford Forrest is playing hell with the line, disrupting the rails and cutting the telegraph wires far away north. Entire Federal units are being led a merry chase by “The Wizard” with whom they cannot contend and who they seem unable to stop. Closer at hand is John Bell Hood’s exhausted Confederate Army of Tennessee. Although too weak at present to challenge Sherman, Hood may find a new reserve of strength against a garrison force --- even if it consists of an entire army --- but just one. 

 

Atlanta at the end of the evacuation

Sherman knows that if the Confederates can take back Atlanta --- even for a few short hours --- the momentum of the war will shift back in the South’s favor. If the city falls to the Confederacy, even briefly, Lincoln’s almost-certain victory in the November Presidential election will evaporate, the Peace Democrats will gain new strength enough to dictate terms for the end of the war, and, worst of all, the failing Confederate heart will be reinvigorated. Sherman does not want to be the tool of a capricious fate that will doom the United States. Although he tells no one, Sherman reaches a terrible decision this day, and that is to burn Atlanta to the ground as his men march out --- whenever that is. Sherman does not reach this decision lightly and it does not sit easily upon him. Despite his demonic reputation among Southerners, William Tecumseh Sherman is not a monster, though he does, perforce, do some monstrous things. 

William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) was, like his friend and colleague Ulysses S. Grant, a native of the Buckeye State. Sherman’s father, Charles, was an Ohio State Supreme Court Justice. He named his red-haired son “Tecumseh” after the great soldier-statesman of the Shawnee Indians. "William" was added later when the boy started school. 

Sherman's boyhood home

Sherman was not, despite later claims (meant as slanders at the time) of any Native American ancestry. When Charles Sherman died during William’s childhood, the seven Sherman children were parceled out. William (called “Cump”) was raised by his father’s great friend, Senator Thomas Ewing of Ohio. Sherman eventually married Ewing’s daughter, Ellen, a foster-sister whom he’d grown up with. It caused a bit of a scandal.

 

Eventually, the Shermans moved to South Carolina, William’s duty station, where, taking advantage of his father-in-law’s political contacts, he became close with many leading Southerners. 

When the Civil War began, William Tecumseh Sherman was serving as the first Superintendent of the Military School / Seminary that later evolved into Louisiana State University (L.S.U.). 

Although the Ewing-Sherman family as a whole was antislavery, William was tepid on the issue. 

In the days leading up to the Civil War he was mistrusted by the Union military establishment due to his strong Southern connections, but he was unalterably opposed to secession. 

During the “Great Secession Winter” of 1860-1861, he warned his Southern friends: 

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it . . . Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth ----right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.  

When Louisiana went out of the Union, the Shermans moved back north. 

When war came that April, he criticized President Lincoln for asking for 75,000 90-day volunteers --- “Why, you might as well attempt to put out the flames of a burning house with a squirt-gun" --- but in May he asked for a duty posting. 

He was first assigned to Missouri just at the time that Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was leading the unseceded State in a rebellion against the United States; and then he found himself in charge of operations in Kentucky just as that Border State convulsed. Unfortunately for Sherman, events moved so quickly and his superiors gave so many conflicting and contradictory orders, and he was so distressed over conditions in the country, that in November of 1861 he asked to be relieved of duty. General Henry Halleck honored his request for an extended furlough, but humiliated Sherman by leaking word to the newspapers that Sherman had been replaced because he was “insane,” an accusation that nearly destroyed Sherman’s career and which haunted him for the rest of his life (Halleck later relieved Grant after the victory of Fort Donelson with the public explanation that Grant was “a drunk,” and Grant suffered the same consequences as Sherman). 

Despite Halleck’s attempts at character assassination, Grant and Sherman served together at Shiloh where Sherman was returned to duty, and afterward, when Grant became Commanding General he entrusted Sherman with great responsibilities. Working together, the “insane” man and “the drunk” became the great Union generals that won victory in the Civil War. At one point, Congress debated making Sherman a Lieutenant General coeval with Grant; Sherman refused the honor: 

General Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always. 

Although William Tecumseh Sherman was an intensely sensitive man, after his ‘insanity’ he became a dispassionately pragmatic thinker and planner. Despite his ferocious reputation, he hated bloodshed. He took Atlanta essentially by maneuver and with far less casualties than Grant eventually took Richmond. 

His attitude toward the use of United States Colored Troops in battle reflected his dislike of gratuitous violence. During the Atlanta Campaign he came south without a single U.S.C.T. in his ranks, not because he disliked blacks or because he doubted their valor, but because he had noted that Confederate resistance increased significantly (along with casualties) when white Southerners were faced in combat by black soldiers. He also bitterly decried the untrammeled slaughter that was the end result of black versus white combat. He wanted to avoid any more Jenkins’ Ferrys if he could. 

During the Atlanta Campaign and after, Sherman’s armies grew a huge tail of freedmen --- as many as 40,000 former slaves were in the train of Sherman’s forces at one point. Though his troopers called him “Uncle Billy,” the newly-freed blacks called him “Brother Aaron.” 

Sherman, for his part, regarded the liberation of slaves from a pragmatic viewpoint --- if it would hurt the South and aid the North he was for it, even though supporting this literal horde of camp followers put a tremendous logistical strain on his forces. To counter that strain Sherman eventually issued Special Field Order No. 15, on Jan. 16, 1865, promising acreage expropriated from secessionist plantation owners to each freed black family --- "40 acres and a mule." 

Sherman did not see slaughter as the non plus ultra of the Civil War. He saw the subjection of the South, the breaking of its fighting spirit, as his primary goal. And he would do what he needed to do to attain that goal. Cruelty might be necessary. Gratuitous violence was not. Southerners, however, generally failed to grasp this fine distinction. Many still do. 

A Middle School project from Georgia, with a stereotyped view of Sherman

Sherman approached the fate of Atlanta in the same dispassionate spirit. To try and hold the city was risky; it was too great a prize for the Confederacy to recover. Thus, the only practical option was to remove the city from Confederate military and political calculations. And the only way to do that was to destroy it. It was a cruel mathematics, but it was cool, clear, and logical, the right thing to do in keeping with the United States’ war aims at that moment in time.