This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [233]
To Emily Hoffman in Baltimore, Sherman had written (in the days when strong young General McPherson still lived) words that partly expressed his feelings: “We of the North have rights in the South, in its rivers and vacant land, the right to come and go when we please, and these rights as a brave people we cannot and will not surrender.” He had made it much more explicit in a long letter to Halleck:
“I would banish all minor questions and assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power to penetrate to every part of the national domain, and that we will do it; that 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 proper; that we will not cease until the end is attained. That all who do not aid are enemies, and we will not account to them for our acts.”5
Sherman’s language was often a great deal rougher than his actions, and neither on this nor any other campaign was he out to “take every life.” But he was undoubtedly moving consciously as an avenging agent, and his soldiers saw themselves in the same role; they were supposed to wreck all railroad lines and any factories or depots or other industrial installations, and in addition the army had to do a great deal of foraging if it was going to survive — and altogether here was the recipe for wholesale destruction.
Every morning each brigade would send out a detail of foragers — from twenty to fifty men, led by an officer and followed by a wagon to bring back what was seized — and this detail, whose members knew the route the army was following, was not expected to return to camp until evening. The foragers were ordered to stay out of inhabitated dwellings and to seize no more food than was actually needed, but they were under the loosest sort of control and in any case they were joined, followed, and aided by a steadily growing riffraff of armed stragglers, who were known contemptuously as “bummers” and who knew very little restraint of any kind. Between the regular foraging parties and the lawless bummers, plantations that lay in this army’s path were bound to have a very rough time.
There were some large and imposing plantations in the territory the army was crossing; Georgia was fat and fertile, the barns and smokehouses were crammed, and the men felt that they were in a land of surpassing richness. Earlier, on the way from Chattanooga down to Atlanta, they had felt that Georgia was a pretty poor state and remarked that they never saw any residences to compare with the regular farm buildings north of the Ohio. But the army had not gone two days on its move east from Atlanta before an Illinois soldier was writing that he “could begin to see where the ‘rich planters’ come in,” and he added: “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned. It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering and promises to prove much richer yet.”
The whole Army of the Tennessee was making the same discovery, and it was responding with joyous whoops; and as it moved, the great march to the sea began to resemble nothing so much as one gigantic midwestern Halloween saturnalia, a whole month deep and two hundred and fifty miles long. A captain looked back on it all as “a kind of half-forgotten dream, now gay and lightsome, now troubled and gruesome.” He recalled that there was “no fighting worthy of the name” and said that he and his mates “occupied ourselves chiefly in marching from one fertile valley to another, removing the substance of the land.” Typical was one veteran’s comment: “Our men are clear discouraged with foraging; they can’t carry half the hogs and potatoes they find right along the