DECEMBER 26, 1864:
Abraham Lincoln telegraphs Sherman in Savannah:
Many, many thanks for
your Christmas gift . . . Please make my grateful acknowledgements to your
whole army, officers and men.
The
legend of Sherman’s cruelty toward Georgia is so ingrained that it is hard to
find people who disbelieve it. Yet Sherman spared Savannah in whole (some say
because he had a paramour in the city). But he also had spared residential
Atlanta, residential Milledgeville, and the residential districts of scores of
other towns. Homes, even plantation houses, were generally let be. Inevitably,
there was damage and injury done to homes and to the people in them. Sherman
was followed by a host of profiteers, sutlers, emancipated slaves, and others
who took what they could when they could. His often unsupervised “bummers” also
caused harm despite his strict orders, but not to the degree that the
collective memory recalls --- at least not in Georgia.
Railways,
roads, and bridges were routinely destroyed, as were cotton gins, mills, warehouses,
barns, and anything else that might be of use to the Confederate war effort. Sherman
would issue no such order for restraint against homes when crossing into South
Carolina, the next target of his March.
