JANUARY 17, 1865:
Having rested and resupplied his army,
General William Tecumseh Sherman U.S.A. is prepared to leave Savannah. In the
three weeks he has spent there he has done much to encourage the revival of
Unionism in the city, which has begun to regain its prewar importance as a port
and a commercial center. Although
Ulysses S. Grant had asked Sherman to leave Savannah by sea and make landfall
on the Virginia Capes as part of Grant’s grand strategy to choke off Robert E. Lee
and the Army of Northern Virginia in an (hopefully) more successful replay of
the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, Sherman has demurred with a plan of his own ---
another March, this time to spread destruction across the heart of South
Carolina. Sherman’s plan is to march his army into North Carolina in order to
lock down the Confederate forces there. Grant takes some persuading, but
impressed with the psychological toll the March to The Sea has exacted on the
Confederacy, he finally agrees.
A
winter campaign through the heart of the Carolinas --- with their many broad rivers,
their low-lying swamplands and bogs, their Jurassic-reminiscent woodlands, and
their rolling landforms --- will be far harder than the fairly straightforward autumn
hike across Georgia’s open fields that made up the March To The Sea. Then too,
the winter season will be farther advanced, and the climate more northerly than
Georgia’s, especially as Sherman moves
due north.
Many
of Sherman’s subordinates are concerned that there will be no forage for the
horses and that the fall harvest that sustained them in Georgia will have been
consumed in the Carolinas. And their concerns seem to be confirmed when
torrential rains begin to fall this day.
The deluge that follows is the worst in twenty years. For the next ten
days it will rain unceasingly, bringing the rivers to flood, washing out the
bottomlands, and turning every dale and hollow into a lake. Although the storms
do nothing to deter Sherman from marching, the ten-day delay encourages him to
have his combat engineers devise all types of ingenious devices to speed the
army along in hostile territory under hostile skies. Sherman intends to move
fast and to leave nothing --- nothing ---
in his wake.
“[I]
never saw a more confident army . . . The soldiers think I know everything and
that they can do anything," Sherman writes, and General Joseph E. Johnston
C.S.A. later concurs. Upon hearing that Sherman's men were advancing on
corduroy roads through the Salkehatchie Swamps at a rate of a dozen miles per
day, Johnston "made up his mind that there had been no such army in
existence since the days of Julius Caesar.”
