On November 15th, 1864 Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Grand Army of the West, embarked on a raid which would become known as the march to the sea designed to cut a 60 mile wide swath from Atlanta to Savannah. Once in Savannah he would turn north through South and North Carolina and on into Virginia to help Grant defeat Lee at Richmond. As Sherman’s soldiers were leaving Atlanta, now in flames, they went forward with the intent of shortening the Civil War. Sherman’s troops accomplished this with a brand of warfare seen only sporadically in the previous four years of battle. Sherman decided to turn his attention on destroying the “enemy’s war economy” (Oates, 1998, p.594), going after the infrastructure of the South. Along the way his troops burned, pillaged, stole personal belongings, and confiscate possessions and property of the civilian population. Did the end justify the means and was this a just course of action?
By November 1864, the Civil War had seen gruesome days to be sure. By the end of the war the total number of soldiers killed in combat and by disease and other non-combat re
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With just tens of miles to go before Sherman’s troops reached Savannah, they had at their rear 25,000 blacks who had left their plantations and were determined to follow Sherman to freedom (Foote, 1974). This was significant because Hood’s aggressiveness, it was feared by his troops, would surely get them killed (Carter, 1976). If Jeff Davis and Hood didn’t like it, *censored* ‘em” (Oates, 1998, p. In Atlanta, the Mayor “begged Sherman to rescind his order expelling the citizens from the city” (Groom, 1995, p. The end most certainly justified the means. “That Goddamned Hood was afraid to fight me on open ground and therefore moved around and north of Atlanta…” (Oates, 1998, p. 112) which Sherman refused to do because he was about to fire the town. If that were to happen today, Sherman had a 50/50 chance of being charged.
Sherman had taken command of the Western Theater and pushed Joseph Johnston off Lookout Mountain outside of Chattanooga, then maneuvered him out of position after position until Johnston fell back upon Atlanta, where Joe Johnston was relieved and the firebrand John Bell Hood took command.
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