On November 15, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman begins his expedition across Georgia by torching the industrial section of Atlanta and pulling away from his supply lines. For the next six weeks, Sherman’s army destroyed most of the state before capturing the Confederate seaport of Savannah, Georgia.
Sherman captured Atlanta in early September 1864 after a long summer campaign. He recognized his vulnerability in the city, however, as his supply lines stretched all the way from Nashville, Tennessee. Confederate raiders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest threatened to cut his lines, and Sherman had to commit thousands of troops to protect the railroads and rivers that carried provisions for his massive army. Sherman split his army, keeping 60,000 men and sending the rest back to Nashville with General George Thomas to deal with the remnants of Confederate General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, the force Sherman had defeated to take Atlanta.
After hearing that President Abraham Lincoln had won re-election on November 8, Sherman ordered 2,500 light wagons loaded with supplies. Doctors checked each soldier for illness or injuries, and those who were deemed unfit were sent to Nashville. Sherman wrote to his general in chief, Ulysses S. Grant, that if he could march through Georgia it would be “proof positive that the North can prevail.” He told Grant that he would not send couriers back, but to “trust the Richmond papers to keep you well advised.”
Sherman loaded the surplus supplies on trains and shipped them back to Nashville. On November 15, the army began to move, burning the industrial section of Atlanta before leaving. One witness reported “immense and raging fires lighting up whole heavens… huge waves of fire roll up into the sky; presently the skeleton of great warehouses stand out in relief against sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames.” Sherman’s famous destruction of Georgia had begun.
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Southerners?
Whenever you are in the north?
Break something.
Geez, it was a long time ago war over human chattel slavery, but it was a war, and one of the Confederate States started it. Is it material that Confederate troops laid waste to their own peoples lands as they retreated through them?
To win the war, the Confederate Army had to be defeated, and eliminating their sources of war material and food and their means of transport and communication was were ways to help defeat them.
Had they not been so foolishly obstinate in believing that continuing to fight would work out for them, Sherman would not have had to march through Georgia.
Some things never change. Different place same type of destruction in the name of peace.
How come he never got shot after the war? That bodes ill for us today.
Jeff Davis should have been hung. Is that what you meant?
My grandmother (Mary Lockhart) said Sherman’s yankee bastards tore down her grand parents barn and house, stole every scrap of food, leaving them to starve, and her grandfather did die of starvation. They had no slaves and didn’t fight anybody. The North hasn’t changed and Affirmative Action is just Reconstruction II; Yankees are not forgiven and the 10th Amendment still applies to Southern and Western States. WDC liberal tyrants are digging their own graves just like the Zionist Fascist will one day get the same from the World as they have given Gaza.
The Battle of Aiken
Sherman’s troops didn’t win every battle.
What happened?
Did someone mix some truth serum into History.com editors’ coffee??
I mean the correct description would have been “Sherman becomes the first Modern Times war criminal”, but what they actually wrote gets pretty close to that already…
The Confederate prison camps were war crimes by modern standards, and they were in existence before Sherman’s campaign through Georgia.
Shouldn’t the people who start wars be called criminal?
In case you don’t know, the slave states could see that more and more states were (finally) outlawing slavery, and feared a Constitutional Amendment to ban it throughout the nation.
So they seceded and started shooting, also sending confederate troops west in hopes of seizing U.S. Territories for themselves, to expand the slave nation they envisioned.
Do you say that was not criminal?
The north didn’t wage war against an existing injustice,it waged war against an AREA and a people……MORE civilians were killed in that war than both armies combined!
The rebelling and seceding states started the war, and they did it in order to preserve and extend the institution of chattel slavery.
Read their constitution if you think I’m making that up.
That seems an unlikely claim… Can you support it?
War criminals are heroes, apparently…
Sure, some people think so.
Did you know that R.E. Lee was planning to live off the land when he invaded Pennsylvania?