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By Root 1763 0

to disrupt Federal supply lines and other arrangements. As far as they could be said to have a base, they were based on Meridian, and Sherman felt that if Meridian became an ash heap the Yankee machine in northern Mississippi and in Tennessee could operate more smoothly. So he brought troops down to Meridian — feinting smartly so that Bishop Polk, Confederate commander in the state, thought that Mobile was being menaced and took his own troops down there to head him off — and on February 14 Sherman’s heavy-handed foot soldiers reached Meridian and began to destroy the place. The railroads were torn up for twenty-five miles around; an arsenal, two hotels, various shops and factories, vast quantities of cotton and any amount of food, textiles, army equipment, and unassorted private property were burned. The soldiers said that they had been ordered to lay hands upon every sort of property “which could in any way be applied to aid the Rebel armies” — which, when one stopped to think about it, was a category broad enough to include anything from a railroad bridge to a smokehouse full of bacon — and they were men to whom such orders did not need to be given twice. (A year earlier Sherman had told Admiral Porter that “our new troops came in with ideas of making vigorous war, which means universal destruction,” and nothing that had happened in the past year had weakened that notion in them.) The 10th Missouri, it was said, took particular pleasure in the work; it contained men who had been driven from their homes by Confederate guerrillas, and they were out to get even. Their comrades in arms, however, acting without animus, were just about as effective.

In any case, Meridian was thoroughly sacked. Sherman had appointed a solid column of cavalry to come down from the Memphis area and join him, and he had further ventures in mind, but the cavalry ran afoul of Bedford Forrest along the way and went back in ignominious defeat, so Sherman pulled his infantry out, loaded down with all the loot that could be carried (as the Confederates charged) in three hundred wagons which had been appropriated in the nearby countryside. Black smoke lay on the land as the troops marched away, and a scar that would be a long time fading; and as the column swung back toward home territory it was followed, as Sherman recalled, by “about ten miles of Negroes.”4

No other Yankee raid into southern territory brought back such an array of contrabands — five thousand of them by soldiers’ count, at least eight thousand by the estimate of angry Mississippians. These fugitives had swarmed in from long distances, some of them carrying small children, none of them equipped for a long journey. Soldiers said some had come three hundred miles to join the column. Many died along the way. All were hungry and weary, yet they seemed to be cheerful, and while they had no real notion where the Army of the Tennessee was going they knew that its road was the road away from slavery, and they followed it with pathetic eagerness.

A Wisconsin soldier who watched them suspected that the average colored refugee had, deep within him, some very sober thoughts, for all his surface gaiety. “He was not only breaking up old associations, but was rushing out into a wholly new and untried world.… He was not certain of a full meal three times a day, or even once a day, and he must have sadly wondered what was to become of him.” Reflecting on all of this, the soldier remembered that a number of people in the North and in the South were arguing that the Negro slave was in reality quite satisfied with his lot, and he wrote angrily: “Such talk is mere twaddle.”5

Grant and Sherman were right; slavery was doomed, and the war was passing sentence upon it, no matter what doubts might assail the President. Of all societies, that of the South was least fitted to stand the shock of revolution, and the war was revolutionary. The destruction of Meridian and the ten-mile column of hopeless, hopeful colored folk who trailed out behind the triumphant northern army simply underlined the Confederacy’s