This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [236]
Sherman would come out where he had intended to, at Savannah. The soldiers, nearing the seacoast early in December, found that they had marched out of the rich land of plenty. This was rice country, and although the foragers could load the wagons with plenty of rice they could not seem to find much else. Soldiers learned to hull the rice by putting it in haversacks and pounding it with musket butts, and to winnow it by pouring the pounded grain from hand to hand, and they speedily got sick both of preparing it and of eating it. The country was flat and a good deal of it was under water, and the campaign’s picnic aspects abruptly disappeared.
The army came up to Savannah on December 10. Sherman led it around to the right, striking for the Ogeechee River and Ossabaw Sound, where he could get in touch with the navy, receive supplies, and regain contact with Grant and with Washington. The XV Corps found itself making a night march along the bank of a canal; there was a moon, the evening was warm, and the swamp beside the canal looked strange, haunting, and mysterious, all silver and green and black, with dim vistas trailing off into shadowland. The men had been ordered to march quietly, but suddenly they began to sing — “Swanee River,” “Old Kentucky Home,” “John Brown’s Body,” and the like, moving on toward journey’s end in an unreal night. An Iowa soldier remembered how “the great spreading live-oaks and the tall spectre-like pines, fringing the banks of the narrow and straight canal, formed an arch over it through which the shimmering rays of the full moon cast streaks of mellow light,” and the picture stayed with him to old age.12
The army went along the Ogeechee River, overwhelmed Confederate Fort McAllister, and met the navy’s gunboats and supply ships, and the days of the rice diet were over. Now the men could have army bacon and hardtack again, for the first time in weeks, and after the rich fare they had been getting in Georgia, army rations seemed good. Sherman missed a bet at Savannah, just as he had done at Atlanta. The Confederates had between ten and fifteen thousand soldiers there, and all of these might have been captured, but while he was investing the place Sherman incautiously left open a line of escape, and the defenders got out and moved up into the Carolinas.
Yet this did not really matter in the least. Prim General Hardee, the Confederate commander, might get his garrison away unscathed, but the war would not be prolonged ten minutes by this fact. For Sherman was not fighting an opposing army now; he was fighting an idea, knocking down the last shredded notion that the southern Confederacy could exist as an independent nation, moving steadily and relentlessly not toward a climactic engagement but simply toward the end of the war.
His soldiers found Savannah unlike any town they had ever been in before. They entered the place on December 21, marching formally for a change, with bands playing and flags flying, Sherman himself taking a salute as they marched past. Savannah had a tropical air; the yards were filled with blooming flowers, palm trees and orange trees were to be seen, the houses looked old and inviting, and war seemed not to have touched the city. The men looked about them, reflecting that they had finished one of the great marches of history, and they suddenly went on their good behavior; Savannah was spared the devastation and pillage so many other places in Georgia had endured.
Sherman sent off a whimsical wire to Abraham Lincoln, offering him the city of Savannah, with much war equipment and twenty-five thousand bales of priceless cotton, as a Christmas gift. To Grant and Halleck he wrote urging that as soon as his army had caught its breath it should be allowed to march straight north across the Carolina country. To