Sherman and His Men Had it In For South Carolina
Sherman’s march through Georgia ended on December 21st, 1864, with the capture of Savannah. It capped a month long campaign, in which 62,000 Union troops had marched out of Atlanta, leaving it a smoldering ruin behind them. They then divided into two columns, abandoned their supply lines and plunged into the Peach State. As Sherman put it, his aim was to “make Georgia howl“, and howl it did. The Union forces advanced along a 60-mile front, wrecking military targets along the way, and destroying industry and infrastructure, while living off the land and looting civilian property.
It was a stunning demonstration that the Confederacy had been reduced to a hollow shell, incapable of protecting its heartland or citizens from enemy depredations. Once Savannah fell, the Union army’s general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, wanted Sherman and his men to board ship and join him in Virginia, to help seal the fate of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces there. Sherman countered with a better idea: instead of sail north to Virginia, why not march there, through the Carolinas, and wreck South Carolina – birthplace of the secession and war – while he was at it? After all, the recently concluded march through Georgia had demonstrated that a Union army could march where it pleased in the Confederacy.
Grant was persuaded, and in late January of 1865, about 60,000 Yankees began the march into South Carolina. Many in the Confederacy had anticipated that. As one Southern diarist put it “Georgia has been desolated. They are preparing to hurl destruction upon the State they hate most of all, and Sherman the brute avows his intention of converting South Carolina into a wilderness“. Some southerners had less sympathy for the Palmetto State, and as the Yankees crossed the state line into South Carolina, some Georgians, eager to share their misery, asked Sherman’s men to treat South Carolina like they had Georgia. After all, South Carolinians had started the war, and if Georgia was to suffer, it was only fair that the war’s instigators should suffer as well.
Sherman’s men needed no urging. While in Georgia, they had behaved as if they were out on a lark. The Yankees despoiled the countryside and visited destruction upon the locals in a nearly light hearted manner, resembling nothing more than schoolboys – albeit deadly dangerous schoolboys – let loose to engage in youthful high jinx. They had engaged in widespread vandalism and wrought widespread devastation, but did so in a fun filled (to them) atmosphere, unaccompanied by widespread malice or particular hatred towards their victims.
Things were different once they crossed the state line into South Carolina, and many of the march’s participants noted how a change in attitude descended upon Sherman’s men once they entered the “lair of secession”. Many of them might have gone about wrecking Georgia light-heartedly, but when it came to South Carolina, they entered that state with a grim determination that it should pay. They went about making it pay with plenty of malice aforethought.