March to the Sea
Our camp-fires shone bright on the mountain
That frowned on the river below,
As we stood by our guns in the morning
And eagerly watched for the foe
Then sang we a song for our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars of our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea
General William Tecumseh Sherman thought it wise to elevate the status of the Negro in America to something closer to the white man but he did not desire it be equal nor did he make it a hobby of his own to see this change of status occur. His attention to the crisis of the civil war was realized when he was living in the South and Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. A slave revolt was an old nightmare of the South and the South was to establish a separate nation in order to preserve slavery as an institution. Sherman moved out of the South in order to join the northern cause of fighting in order to preserve the Union. Ulysses S. Grant becomes Abraham Lincoln’s fighting man and General Sherman becomes Ulysses S Grant’s Raider of the Deep South.
Then cheer upon cheer for bold Sherman
Went up from valley and glen,
And the bugles reechoed the music
That came from the lips of the men;
For we knew that the stars in our banner
More bright in their splendour would be
And that blessings from Northland would greet us,
When Sherman marched down to the sea!
Then sang we a song for our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars of our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea
After Grant and Sherman graduate a political and administrative labyrinth they secure the navigation of the Mississippi River. Lincoln then promotes Grant to be commander of all Union forces between the Appalachian mountains and Mississippi river. The first thing Grant does is secure advancement for Sherman. When Lincoln promotes Grant to Lieutenant General and Commander of all the Union armies Grant puts Sherman in charge of the forces of the West and the campaign to penetrate the Deep South.
Then forward, boys! Forward to battle!
We marched on our wearisome way,
We stormed the wild hills of Reseca -
God bless those who fell on that day!
Then Kenesaw frowned in its glory,
Frowned down on the flag of the free;
But the East and the West bore our Standard,
And Sherman marched to the Sea!
Then sang we a song for our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars of our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea
While Grant becomes known as “The Butcher” for a fighting philosophy that includes sending as many forces into the fray as possible and known for the quote, “We will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer”, Sherman gains a reputation for commanding technical soldiers that lay waste anything in their path. Both strategies are successful and come to be known as total warfare. Sherman calls his specific strategy of damaging resources as enlightened war.
“We will do it in our own time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be in one year, or two, or ten, or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems to us proper, that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are enemies and that we will not account to them for our acts.” - William Tecumseh Sherman
Still onward we pressed, till our banners
Swept out from Atlanta’s grim walls,
And the blood of the Patriot dampened
The soil where the traitor-flag falls;
But we paused not to to weep for the fallen,
Who slept by each river and tree,
Yet we twined the a wreath of laurel,
As Sherman marched down to the Sea!
Then sang we a song for our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars of our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea
Sherman's Army of the West burns Atlanta and this cuts out southern reinforcements for General Lee of the Confederate army, saves the election for Abraham Lincoln and stops demands that Ulysses Grant be removed from his position. Sherman then moves his 62000 men on a march to the sea campaign from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. He does not take supplies and essentially goes off the grid from correspondence with anyone for two months. His mission is to destroy the South's will to resist by destroying railroads, houses, people's lives and livelihoods while crippling military resources and foraging liberally on the country. The location of each advancing corps could be seen by the flames along its route and Sherman's signature “neckties” that were created by an engineer regiment who would twist railroad bars with claws after heating so that they could never be used again.
Oh, proud was our army that morning,
That stood where the pine darkly towers,
When Sherman said, “Boys, you are weary,
But today fair Savannah is ours!”
That echoed over river and Lea,
And the stars in our banner shone brighter
When Sherman camped down by the Sea!
“It seemed to me then that the terrible energy they had displayed in the earlier stages of the war was beginning to yield to the slower but more certain industry and discipline of our Northern men.” - William Tecumseh Sherman
From Savannah Sherman marches across South Carolina with more looting and burning even more earnestly than before. His troops' marches draw comparisons to those of the roman legions while the South compares him to the Goths sacking the Romans. After the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Lincoln, Grant and Sherman are united in not further molesting the South. Abraham Lincoln is shot and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, is captured disguised as a woman while wearing his wife's raincoat and shawl with half a million worth of stolen gold that he had taken when abandoning his post. After the war Grant, Sherman, Phillip Sheridan and an unlikely figure, George Custer focus on the settlement of the plains, the Indian wars and Reconstruction in the South.
Let them see us the way they are,
They said. Clean weapons and bare feet.
Let them look at us in our rags.
They’ll know who we are.
We are Uncle Billy’s men.
Flood, Charles Bracken. Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Saved the Civil War. Harper Perennial, 2005.
Sherman, William Tecumseh. Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman. Literary Classics of the United States, 1990. New York, New York.
