Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign (review)

William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea is the stuff legends are made of: huge armies, eccentric generals, and epic battles. Some historians have argued that Sherman’s path through Georgia and the Carolinas marked the implementation of a harsher yet more selective application of the rules of warfare. This approach resulted from not military anarchy but a disciplined strategy aimed at skillfully castigating the southern civilians for their support of the Rebel armies. In short, the quickest way to destroy the Confederacy and win the war was to wreck selectively and to demoralize that which kept it alive. According to Buck T. Foster’s new book, Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign, Sherman pondered these concepts for years and gave them a dress rehearsal in the spring of 1864 in the byways of the Magnolia State. In Mississippi, Foster convincingly argues, Sherman “found the correct combination for success,” cemented his unique style of warfare, and took the “final step in his transition to a hard war mind-set” (168, 173).

The basic outline of Sherman’s Mississippi expedition is well known and was proficiently told in Margie Bearss’s Sherman’s Forgotten Campaign: The Meridian Expedition (1987). In February 1864 the Ohio general marched twenty-five thousand men from Vicksburg across central Mississippi, ending up in Meridian, less than a dozen miles from the Alabama border. While Sherman’s army successfully pushed aside the perfunctory resistance offered by Confederate generals Leonidas Polk and Stephen D. Lee, the second part of his Mississippi strategy began to unfold. Union cavalry commanded by fellow Ohioan William Sooy-Smith left Memphis, Tennessee, and traveled down the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, with the aim of linking up with Sherman and, if all went well, moving into Alabama. Unfortunately for Sherman, things did not go well. On his way to Meridian, Sooy-Smith encountered Confederate troopers commanded by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forest. After a spirited battle, Sooy-Smith ordered retreat, thus bringing Sherman’s Mississippi expedition to an end. The campaign’s hasty conclusion and its modest strategic gains failed to attract the scholarly interest it deserved. Moreover, it has never been analyzed as a watershed moment in Sherman’s tactical thinking.

Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign is the first modern study of not only Sherman’s battlefield tactics in Mississippi but also their philosophical underpinnings. Additionally, the book assesses the expedition in terms of its immediate impact on the western theater of war and its effect on Sherman’s long-term military thinking. The Ohioan, Foster explains, discovered that he could cut loose from his base and survive. Perhaps more important was his decision to intentionally, but not wantonly, conduct war on civilians and the local infrastructure. The contrasting fates of the Mississippi towns of Decatur and Meridian testify to the general’s thinking. Sherman found little strategic value in Decatur and sought, although unsuccessfully, to prevent its destruction. On the other hand, he unleashed the full wrath of the Union forces on Meridian, a town of considerable importance to the southern cause.

Not all readers may agree with Foster’s interpretation of Sherman’s approach to war. That Sherman failed to prevent Decatur’s obliteration might lead some to point toward the uselessness of benign forms of warfare and the hopelessness of limiting collateral damage by military decree. But in the final analysis, war is an untidy business and much advantage can be gained from its speedy conclusion. Buck T. Foster’s Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign is a noteworthy addition to the historiography of the Civil War’s western campaigns and to the military life of William T. Sherman.