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In Georgia, General Sherman had initiated his own version of scorched-earth tactics. The Federal Army of the Tennessee had occupied Atlanta since September 2; finally, on November 15, Sherman gave the order to evacuate. His next destination was the city of Savannah, 285 miles to the east. He did not expect much resistance from Lee, who could not afford to detach a single regiment from the siege around Petersburg; nor was he frightened of General Hood and his little Army of Tennessee, which was lurking somewhere in the countryside. Before he left Atlanta he set the city on fire and expelled its remaining residents, telling the mayor, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”51 Five thousand houses were burned to the ground in a single night. “Behind us lay Atlanta,” Sherman recalled in his memoirs as the army began to march, “smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.”

Sherman’s plan for Georgia was effective and simple. He divided his army into two wings and cut a devastating trough more than fifty miles wide through the state. Foragers, known as “bummers,” had broad orders to do as they pleased short of mass rape and murder. Fearful that the Federals might first head south toward Andersonville, which was only 120 miles from Atlanta, Confederate prison commandant Wirz sent hundreds of Union prisoners on forced marches to various locations around the state. He could not feed them all anyway; James Pendlebury received a pint of corn for a four-day march. “A poor fellow asked if he could lie beside me and in the morning he was dead,” he wrote. “During that march I don’t think beasts could have been more savage.”

The economic catastrophe caused by Sherman’s march sent immediate ripples across the South. At Salisbury prison, North Carolina, where Robert Livingstone had been sent in October, ten thousand prisoners were living outdoors in a large pen. “Some dug holes in the ground to shelter themselves from the cold winds at night,” wrote Archibald McCowan, a Scotsman who arrived at the same time as Livingstone. As the rations grew smaller and smaller, the prisoners feared that the Confederates would starve them to death before the war ended. Walking past the prison well on November 24, McCowan noticed a small group of prisoners lounging around, each carrying a club made from a tree branch. “One of these men was very conspicuous on account of his uniform; the red breeches and Turkish cap of a Zouave regiment.” Suddenly, the group attacked the prison sentries. “Each of the other conspirators knocked down his man and with the arms thus obtained they rushed to the large gate which generally stood open to allow teams to pass in and out,” wrote McCowan.52 The other prisoners joined in. Two of the guards were killed before the sentries on the other side of the pen realized what was happening. In a few minutes, every prisoner was running toward the gates. McCowan had intended to join the mêlée, but a friend grabbed him by the arm and pulled him down. “Stay where you are you damn fool,” he said. The commandant climbed to the roof and turned the prison’s howitzer onto the crowd below. McCowan waited until all was silent before raising his head. He saw a number of bodies sprawled on the ground. “I learned later that 15 prisoners were killed and about 60 wounded, not one of whom knew anything about the matter.” Robert Livingstone had tried to run away with the others and been shot down. He lived for ten days before dying of his wounds on December 4, when his body was dumped in a trough alongside the other casualties of the failed rebellion.

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34.1 A completely separate operation led by a Kentucky doctor, Luke P. Blackburn, had been inspired by the yellow fever epidemics in Bermuda. Dr. Blackburn was an expert on the disease and twice in 1864 offered his services to the Bermudan authorities, once in the spring and once in the autumn. Believing, mistakenly, that yellow