This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [232]
Grant’s consent was won at last. Thomas moved his Cumberlands back to Tennessee — the men tended to be a little sullen, feeling that they would have to do any fighting that remained while the men with Sherman would have all of the fun — and the Army of the Tennessee went to work to ruin Atlanta before beginning the march to the coast.
Atlanta was pretty tattered already. The repeated bombardments during the siege had destroyed many houses, and when Sherman occupied the place about half of its normal population of thirteen thousand had fled. Sherman ordered the rest of the civilians out of town and managed to deport some sixteen hundred of them; to Halleck he wrote that “if the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.” During the long Federal occupancy of the town the deserted buildings got rough treatment from the soldiers, who never had any qualms about destroying dwellings that were not currently inhabited. And finally, when it was time to leave, Sherman ordered complete destruction of all factories, railroad installations, and other buildings that might be of any use to the Confederacy.
The soldiers went to their work with zest. By now they understood industrial warfare, they could equate wholesale destruction with a blow at the enemy’s war potential, and anyway it was fun to wreck everything. Troops who marched through Atlanta while the destruction was going on wrote of “flames illuminating the whole heavens … the pandemonium caused by the flames, the yells of the soldiery, the explosion of shells and ammunition.” As the men moved out of town it would happen that groups would break ranks and go back to set fires on their own account; one man in such a group wrote that they were moved by a “desire to destroy everything, and fearful that some old rebel’s property would be saved.” Other men wrote that going through Atlanta “the smoke almost blinded us,” and they concluded that “everything of importance” was on fire.3
Sherman had ordered that no fires be lit except when he himself was present; he wanted the destruction confined strictly to warehouses, factories, and the like. But flames from these buildings spread to others, wandering bands of carefree privates lit fires on their own hook, and an Illinois veteran who had a part in these forays said afterward that “several general officers were there, but they stood back and said nothing, allowing the soldiers to pursue their course.”4 The firing went on all night long, with the band of a Massachusetts regiment playing gaily in an open square. Later, soldiers under Sherman’s orders worked to check the flames.
Smoke filled the sky like a gigantic ominous signal as Sherman’s army pulled clear of the city and started for the sea. The army was moving in four columns, widely spread out — XV and XVII Corps, under Howard, on the right; and XIV and XX, under Slocum, on the left. Orders were that there should be an average pace of fifteen miles a day. Transportation was cut to a minimum, and there was no supply line. The army would feed itself with what it found in Georgia along the way.
And so began the strangest, most fateful campaign of the entire war, like nothing that happened before or afterward. These Federals were not moving out to find and destroy an armed enemy; the only foe that could give them a fight, Hood’s army, was hundreds of miles off to the rear, and everybody knew it. They were not being asked to hurry; fifteen miles a day was much less than these long-legged marchers could easily make, and everybody knew that too. Their mission was to wreck an economy and to destroy a faith — the economy that supported the thin fading fabric of the Confederacy, the faith that believed the Confederacy to be an enduring creation and trusted in its power to protect and avenge. As they moved down the red roads of Georgia, cutting a swath sixty miles wide from flank to flank, they were the conscious agents of this