War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War

FOUR: Devoured Land: Sherman’s Georgia and Carolina Campaigns, 1864–1865

{93} chapter four Devoured Land Sherman’s Georgia and Carolina Campaigns, 1864–1865 “we have devoured the land,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman in a letter to his wife, Ellen, in June 1864. “All the people retire before us, and desolation is behind. To realize what war is one should follow our tracks.” Sherman was reflecting on the damage wrought by the protracted battle for control over northern Georgia between his Union forces and Confederate general Joe Johnston’s army. Neither side intended to destroy the landscape; the devastation was instead an unavoidable result of armies in motion and one of the inevitable costs of war. By November, however, Sherman implemented a strategy that shifted devastation from a regrettable, haphazard consequence into a deliberate weapon of war. Sherman’s campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas from November 1864 to April 1865 focused on destroying the physical, economic, and cultural landscapes of the region. The campaigns succeeded in revealing the Confederacy ’s inability to militarily and politically control its own territory by undermining its capacity to marshal critical resources through managing nature in meaningful and productive ways. Like similar operations around Vicksburg and in the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman’s marches displayed Union power over the Confederate government, its army, and its residents by denying them the ability to transform nature into culture, thus depriving them of a fundamental source of security. By imposing his own (and the federal government’s) will over the fertile southern landscape, Sherman attacked and destroyed the agroecological system on which the Confederacy and its citizens relied and hastened the end of the conflict. Although Sherman’s operations in Georgia and the Carolinas have inspired an impressive array of critical analysis, few scholars have acknowledged or examined the operation’s implications from an environmental perspective. Much of the scholarship focuses on the military and social issues surrounding the marches: it debates the novelty and efficacy of Sherman’s strategy, questions Sherman’s March: The shading on this map indicates the areas affected by Sherman’s operations in Georgia and the Carolinas. Civil War Maps Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, g3701s cw0071c20. devoured land {95} whether the marches ushered in the modern era of “total war,” and provides intricate details of the experiences of the common soldier and those who lived in the army’s path. All of this is important, and the magnitude of the literature reveals the strategic, social, and psychological impact this single set of campaigns had for Americans during the war and since. But equally important, and inextricably related to each of those other areas, are the ways in which American relationships with nature shaped and in turn were transformed by Sherman’s operations in Georgia and the Carolinas. As historian Jacqueline Glass Campbell has argued, “Sherman’s March was an invasion of both geographic and psychological space. The Union Army constructed a vision of the Southern landscape as military terrain.” Even more than reenvisioning the landscape in military terms, however, Sherman’s operations were predicated on gaining control over the landscape. Control—over nature, labor, and territory—formed the basis of the campaign. In the end, Sherman’s marches were not just expressions of political and military power as he envisioned them; they also revealed the Union’s power to exert control over and shape the southern environment. That environment, however, had power of its own and could be just as hostile as the people who fought to protect it. Terrain, weather, and disease proved to be as threatening as, or more threatening than, any human enemy Sherman’s troops encountered. Taking power away from the local populace and the Confederate government thus required Sherman to assert control over various elements in the landscape, or at least minimize their hold over him. Union success was not always certain, but by deploying several weapons in their arsenal—foraging, fire, and the science of engineering—Sherman’s army brought war upon the land, transforming gardens into wastelands and leaving a lasting imprint on the southern landscape. Sherman’s stated goal for his operations in late 1864 and early 1865 was to dismantle the industrial infrastructure and transportation networks that supported the Confederate army. Fire was one of Sherman’s greatest tools, which he used to reduce the Confederacy’s military assets to ashes. Sherman’s men set fire to any building, warehouse, or structure that could be...