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1 introduction Marching through Metaphors Forty-one times a year, twenty-three hundred miles from Atlanta, the legacy of Sherman’s March comes alive on the windswept prairies of Calgary, Alberta , Canada. There, thousands of people regularly brave below-freezing temperatures and head to the Scotiabank Saddledome to cheer on their beloved Calgary Flames of the National Hockey League. Does the name refer obliquely to Calgary’s petroleum industry? To the Calgary Fire of 1886? No. It’s the last remnant of Atlanta’s short-lived NHL franchise, the Atlanta Flames (1972–80). The very fact that Atlanta could glibly memorialize what was arguably the worst moment in its history tells us something about the powerful hold of memories of the American Civil War.1 “Sherman’s March.” The name conjures up a host of images and references, myths and metaphors for Americans. They think of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, silhouetted against the flames in Gone with the Wind; of lone chimneys standing sentinel, all that remained of destroyed plantations; of soldiers stealing hams and silver, chickens and jewelry; of “war is hell,” and “forty acres and a mule”; of the birth of total war. It is, I would argue, the most symbolically powerful aspect of the American Civil War, one that has a cultural dominance perhaps disproportionate to its actual strategic importance. It has come to stand for devastation and destruction, fire and brimstone, war against civilians , and for the Civil War in microcosm. Sherman’s March has been memorialized in fiction and film, been used to explain both America’s involvement in Vietnam and one man’s search for romance. It has been employed as a metaphor for the burned out South Bronx of the 1970s and the gerrymandering of electoral districts.2 Sports teams talk about enacting a Sherman’s March on their opponents.3 Opponents of video poker liken it to the scourge of the March.4 Insects provide a particularly common metaphorical partner; the destruction wrought by the March has been variously compared to that of army worms, fire ants, the boll weevil, and the “Sherman bug” (official name: the harlequin bug).5 One legend holds that the line of Sherman’s March can be traced in the growth of daisies across the South, as their seeds arrived in the 2 : introduction horses’ fodder; another makes a similar argument about the proliferation of wild chives in Savannah; a third claims that the tradition of eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day stemmed from the Yankees leaving only black-eyed peas behind.6 The largest tree in the world, measured by volume, is the General Sherman, in Sequoia National Park, so named in 1879 by a naturalist who had participated in the March.7 Storytellers often claim that the March’s physical scars on the landscape are still visible, making it seem as though the earth itself was one of Sherman’s victims. Certainly, the March obliterated physical structures, broke down fences, chopped down trees, ruined fields. But these effects were temporary, and can no longer be seen.8 William Tecumseh Sherman himself is a figure of profound contradictions . Excoriated by white Southerners as a heartless butcher, one who was, in Henry Grady’s classic phrase, “a bit careless with fire,” Sherman was a firm believer in a “soft peace” and offered surrender terms so generous that his own government rejected them. Hailed by many African Americans as a liberator, he opposed emancipation and was certainly no supporter of racial equality. Future generations would castigate him as the originator of “total war,” even though he was not the only Union general to treat civilians harshly, nor did his way of making war involve wholesale slaughter of noncombatants (as would twentieth-century wars). Just as Sherman could be painted as a hero or a villain, so too could his men. Sherman’s soldiers were and are still roundly condemned as thieves and pillagers, men who ran roughshod over Southern whites and blacks, whose baser impulses could not be controlled. But unlike later generations of soldiers who found themselves struggling with having fought wars against civilians, Sherman’s men seem remarkably untroubled by their weeks on the March. Many of them adopted the initially pejorative term “bummers” as their own, reminiscing good-naturedly about days spent chasing chickens or stealing hams. They believed that they ended the war, and that the end justified their means. For many of these men, the war and the March...

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