The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (22 page)

In any case, after Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman was not about to risk another set battle against a desperate Confederate army. He would leave behind General George Thomas to deal with Hood if the latter went northward into Tennessee. Rather than being trapped in a destroyed city, Sherman was liberated—free to cut his supply lines, leave an Atlanta a wreck, ravage where he pleased, and live off the post-harvest Georgia landscape.
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For a public sickened by the Richmond campaign, anything Sherman did that did not result in comparable carnage was welcome. But once Atlanta fell, everything changed. The reaction up north was electrifying. Sherman had taken a symbolic Southern city. His army was still intact. He was preparing even more campaigns. Who knew what the wily wild Sherman would do to the rebels next?

The once venomous press that had damned Lincoln, Grant, and at times Sherman was calling Sherman a national savior and a brilliant strategist who could not be stopped. All worries about the escape of Hood’s army or uncertainties over Sherman’s next move were drowned out by the public exultation. President Lincoln wrote Sherman the next day, “The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations, that have signalized the campaign, must render it famous in the annals of war, and
have entitled those who have participated therein to the applause and thanks of the nation.”
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The papers, both pro- and anti-Lincoln, went wild. The pro-Lincoln
New York Times
blared, “The political skies begin to brighten.” The
Chicago Tribune
boasted, “The dark days are over.” The erstwhile Lincoln antagonist Horace Greeley in his
New York Tribune
announced, “Henceforth we fly the banner of Abraham Lincoln for our next president.” A reporter for the
Cincinnati Commercial
wrote of the capture and destruction of Atlanta, “Grant walked
into
Vicksburg, McClellan walked
around
Richmond, but Sherman is walking
upon
Atlanta.” In turn, the once cocky South that had been assured that Grant’s terrible losses would usher in a Northern peace party was stunned. Most Confederates wailed that Lincoln would be reelected. The loss of Atlanta proved even more disheartening than that of Vicksburg or Gettysburg. The issue was not just the loss of Atlanta, but how and where Sherman could be stopped.
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The electoral effects were immediate. In an eerie happenstance, the antiwar Democrats had just met in Chicago on August 31 to nominate George McClellan. Abruptly “Little Mac” was put in the impossible position of either seeming churlish by downplaying Sherman’s magnificent achievement, or praising it and thereby diminishing the reason for his own anti-Lincoln peace candidacy. The growing jubilation among the ranks of voting soldiers ensured that most would favor Lincoln—not an apparently has-been general, tainted by a Copperhead platform, who would throw away all the past sacrifice to make an unconditional peace with a spent South reeling and on the verge of collapse. The Union heretofore may have been sick of a losing war, but it was not sick enough to give up on what at last appeared to be a winning cause.
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Sherman himself was always acutely aware that the capture of Atlanta would be critical to Lincoln’s success in defusing the recently nominated McClellan. In his memoirs, he recalled a conversation with Lincoln in which the president gave credit to Sherman for his reelection:

The victory was most opportune; Mr. Lincoln himself told me afterward that even he had previously felt in doubt, for the summer was fast passing away; that General Grant seemed to be checkmated about Richmond and Petersburg, and my army seemed to have run up against an impassable barrier, when suddenly and unexpectedly, came the news that “Atlanta was ours, and fairly won.”

In critiquing the importance of the McClellan candidacy, Sherman himself concluded of his capture of Atlanta:

Success to our arms at that instant was therefore a political necessity; and it was all important that something startling in our interest should occur before the election in November. The brilliant success at Atlanta filled that requirement, and made the election of Mr. Lincoln certain.
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In a September 15 letter to his foster father, Thomas Ewing Sr., right after the capture of Atlanta, Sherman also pointed out that all the grand Union schemes hatched in March 1864 had until then come to naught—except his own: “The Grand Outlines contemplated these Grand Armies moving on Richmond, Atlanta & Montgomery Alabama, & Mine alone has reached its goal.” Sherman was not much of a Lincoln partisan (“I suppose Lincoln is the best choice, but I am not a voter”), but he knew well enough that without Lincoln’s reelection—the choice was either an unstable Frémont on the left or an appeasing McClellan to the right—his own efforts might come to naught.
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In a belated letter, nearly a month after the fall of Atlanta, the new Democratic candidate, General George McClellan, sent Sherman a word of congratulations: “Your campaign will go down in history as one of the most memorable of the world.” His apologies for the tardy thanks reflected the embarrassment of his own position, given the sudden radical improvement in Lincoln’s reelection chances.
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Despite the contemporary consensus, controversy still persists over whether the fall of Atlanta—coming more than two months before the election on November 8—by itself saved Lincoln’s presidency. Skeptics point out that the tide had already turned somewhat by late summer. Admiral David Farragut, for example, had taken Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864. By the end of September, General Philip Sheridan had cornered Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley, and so devastated the rich Virginia landscape that it would never again serve as a Confederate conduit into Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Moreover, Lincoln would win the November election by over 400,000
votes, 55 percent of the votes cast, with a huge Electoral College win of 212 to 21. McClellan carried only New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware. Surely not all of Lincoln’s success was predicated on the news of Atlanta’s fall. While Lincoln won overwhelmingly among on-duty Union troops (especially in Sherman’s army, where he won an 80 percent majority), the soldiers’ vote probably did not provide the margin of victory. And even had Lincoln lost to McClellan, Little Mac might not have been able to quit the war without splitting the Northern citizenry in two.
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All that said, a shift of a mere 80,000 votes in certain key states would have won McClellan the Electoral College vote in an election that did not seem to break until September and October—and only on good news from the west. Moreover, it was not just Sherman’s capture of Atlanta that restored Northern confidence, but the manner in which he took, occupied, and was planning to leave the city. By late August, most in the North, depressed over the near-destruction of Grant’s army in Virginia, had forgotten the capture of Mobile. In addition, Sheridan’s success followed Sherman’s. While it enhanced the sense of momentum, Sheridan’s devastation did not in itself foster a newfound Union confidence. Liddell Hart called all of these political considerations, both in the east and west, “the dark background to the final phase of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign,” adding, “Grant could do nothing, and any serious repulse to Sherman might have a fatal effect on public opinion. Caution was essential, yet success was equally so.”
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As he occupied Atlanta, Sherman soon tired of being continually harassed by Southern cavalry and Hood’s flying columns. He delegated the problem of Hood to the reliable George Thomas. Sherman was happy to see Hood go northward to meet the numerically superior and utterly reliable Army of the Cumberland under Thomas, thus enabling him to cut loose from Atlanta to head eastward. Yet he was wise enough to stay in Atlanta until after the election to avoid the implication to Northern voters that he had given up or been forced out of the key city—and to ensure that he did not begin a risky new campaign before the ballots were cast. After examining a number of possible marches to Southern ports, Sherman set out across Georgia soon after the election, on November 17, by cutting loose and living off the country. That gambit (“Let Hood go north, and I’ll go south”) made Hood’s efforts at cutting Northern supply lines superfluous. Sherman believed that he could reach Savannah,
after making Georgia “howl”; but he doubted that Hood could do the same in his northward march to Nashville.
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Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and subsequent plans for further great marches helped to restore Grant’s reputation among the Northern public. Whereas in spring 1864 the North expected that the hero of Vicksburg would shortly come east, take command of the Army of the Potomac, capture Richmond, defeat Lee, and end the war—perhaps within a hundred days—now, by the end of August, they had no such illusions. After the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Grant transmogrified into “the butcher” and lost the goodwill of the public.

But after Sherman took Atlanta and rumors spread that the city’s capture was the beginning, not the end, of his extensive marching, Northerners gradually began to see Grant in a different, much more favorable light. As Sheridan, Sherman, and Thomas operated more freely and deeply in Southern territory (and without incurring great losses), Grant’s campaign began to be seen as a necessary holding action—a gritty effort to tie Lee down, isolate the Confederate capital, and wear down the Army of Northern Virginia while other Confederate armies were routed and Southern soil violated by more mobile Northern forces.

The North would reelect Lincoln despite Grant’s terrible losses—but only if the Union public could be convinced that such sacrifice would be capitalized on by generals like Sherman. As Sherman best put it to Grant in magnanimous fashion after taking Atlanta, “In the mean time, know that I admire your dogged perseverance and pluck more than ever. If you can whip Lee and I can march to the Atlantic, I think Uncle Abe will give us twenty days’ leave of absence to see the young folks.”
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History is replete with successful invaders—Xerxes at Athens, Napoleon in Moscow, the Germans inside the rubble of Stalingrad, the Chinese Communists at Seoul in 1951—who found their occupation of an enemy’s defeated capital or key city of either little value or real peril, given that a large undefeated enemy force was still nearby and most of the occupied city lay in ruins or was without supply. In contrast, Sherman saw Atlanta as the beginning, not the end, of his Georgia campaign. Sherman was sometimes unsteady—especially between Bull Run and Shiloh, when he suffered severe depression. He often overstated his own case in his memoirs and unfairly deprecated the efforts of others. There were plenty of
better battlefield tacticians on both sides of the Civil War—Lee, Long-street, or Jackson, and Grant, Thomas, or Sheridan. He seemed surprised at Kennesaw Mountain—and both earlier at Shiloh and later at Bentonville. That said, no Civil War commander possessed a more astute appraisal of the nature of contemporary warfare, how to form and pursue grand strategy, and the critical nexus between war, civil society, popular support, and electoral politics. And few American generals have since.

After the capture of Atlanta, to the shock of its remaining residents and to the outrage of John Bell Hood, Sherman forced most to flee the city and set about garrisoning it as a depot for further operations. He neither apologized nor expressed one iota of regret for shelling the city on his approach. As he put it to John Bell Hood, in an exchange of letters after taking the city, “I was not bound by the laws of war to give notice of the shelling of Atlanta, a ‘fortified town, with magazines, arsenals, foundries, and public stores’; you were bound to take notice. See the books. This is the conclusion of our correspondence, which I did not begin, and terminate with satisfaction.”
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Sherman set out on November 17 from Atlanta on his famous five-week March to the Sea, reaching and capturing Savannah on December 21. From there, he undertook an even more arduous march through the Carolinas in an effort to enter Virginia at the rear of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. When the war ended in April 1865, Sherman had torn apart the South, humiliated the enemy, and caused massive defections from Lee’s army as Confederate soldiers in Virginia heard constant bad news of a huge Union force running amok among their friends and family to the rear.
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Sherman, as an Ohioan with long residence in California, was at heart a westerner, familiar with navigation and supply over the new nation’s great distances by wagon, train, and ship. He felt comfortable with like kind, especially marching, camping out, and meeting the challenges of wide-open spaces and rough terrain. After Bull Run, the first great battle of the war, Sherman never again fought in Virginia or Maryland—the meat grinders that would devour the Army of the Potomac.

Indeed, he would not return to the east until his final great march through the Carolinas. Pitched battles in the Richmond and Washington corridors were of an entirely different sort from the long marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, for which Sherman was far better suited. We do not know what Sherman might have done in Grant’s place during the awful spring and summer of 1864, but he might well not have
had the same avenues to enact his evolving ideas about modern total war as he did out west.

Sherman is often characterized as a heartless prophet of modern, total, and merciless war, with the burning of Atlanta or Columbia serving as a sort of precursor to Dresden or Hamburg. That characterization—fanned by Sherman’s own vivid and occasionally hyperbolic use of nouns and verbs such as “cruelty,” “hell,” “ruin,” “howl,” “smashing,” and “breaking”—is not accurate, if such a charge refers to the level of damage he inflicted on either the Confederate army or its population. In comparison to horrific battles elsewhere, few of the enemy—soldiers or civilians—died, either inside Atlanta or on his subsequent marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. Where Sherman, in the moral sense, proved a revolutionary figure was not in the killing of civilians or waging “total war,” but through his radical notions of proper culpability in war.