Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (review)

Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy. By Richard M. McMurry. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 229. $35.00.)

Ferocious attacks on the character and competence of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman have continued unabated since the Civil War. For generations, the moment dividing the Old South from the New was the arrival of Sherman and his army. Whether it was ordering civilians out of Atlanta, cutting a swath across Georgia in the march to the sea, or repaying South Carolina for inaugurating secession by burning Columbia, Sherman always seemed at the center of controversy. A legion of historians has long found this mythmaking irresistible. In the third volume of his Military History of the Western World (1956), J. F. C. Fuller, the British military historian, described Sherman as "the first of the modern totalitarian generals." More recently, Charles Royster opened The Destructive War (1992) with a chapter on the burning of Columbia, portraying it as practically a war crime, rather than the accident and tragedy that Sherman and his defenders claimed.

A second front has now opened in the long campaign to blacken Sherman's reputation. Following in the footsteps of Albert Castel's Decision in the West (1992), Richard M. McMurry indicts Sherman in the present volume for dismal generalship in the Atlanta campaign of 1864. McMurry contends that Ulysses S. Grant's strategy making Virginia the principal Union theater in 1864 and his subsequent decision to command from the East were the two "greatest military blunders made by Federal military authorities during the war"(17). Grant's move elevated Sherman, his close friend and protege, to command in the West. McMurry deplores Sherman's promotion for two reasons. First, he insists that Sherman "had never been, was not in 1864, and probably never would have become a very good battlefield commander" (49). Second, he argues that if Sherman's rival, George H. Thomas, had been named commander he would have destroyed Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston's forces before Atlanta, a defeat McMurry claims might have ended the war outright.

McMurry's criticisms of Sherman's actions are typical of a kind of armchair generalship in Civil War scholarship that ignores the central problems of military command and engages in speculative scenarios that are impervious to historical analysis. With regard to the first criticism of Sherman, McMurry seems astonishingly oblivious to the gravity of the situation facing the Union in 1864. By mid-1864, the Union army, the Republican party, and the White House were desperate for any tangible success that demonstrated progress toward eventual victory. Abraham Lincoln was so pleased with the fall of Atlanta that he promptly proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. In his eyes, Sherman's victory was more than enough.

McMurry's second criticism, that Grant neglected the better battlefield commander in favor of a personal friend, may well be true but is entirely beside the historical point of fact: Grant did pick Sherman and Sherman accomplished the job. As to McMurry's speculation that Thomas would have destroyed Johnston's army and ended the war, there can be no historical proof one way or the other, but McMurry's readers are entitled to treat his fanciful scenario with a skepticism at least equal to his enthusiasm. Johnston's army was much improved over the one that fled from Missionary Ridge under Braxton Bragg in November 1863. Let us assume that Thomas had taken command, abandoned what McMurry calls Sherman's "strategic ballet" around Johnston's army, and launched a frontal assault. Grant did just that at Cold Harbor in June of 1864, resulting in a spectacular defeat and considerable damage to morale in the Army of the Potomac. Could the Union war effort have absorbed a second such battlefield disaster? Fortunately for the fate of the Union, we shall never know.

 

James K. Hogue
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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