Hard war

One hundred fifty years ago, while Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac was attempting to strangle the capital of the Confederacy at Richmond, there was another campaign going on in what was called the Western Theatre, with another strategic railhead city at the core of it.

We’re talking the concept of total war, which General (yes mam) Sherman was introducing to the South, starting around Chattanooga, Tenn., and moving towards the Atlantic. His idea was basically to manifest the Clausewitzian precept that the object of war is not to win battles, kill armies or even conquer lands; it’s to destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war. And you do that by destroying anything that can contribute to the war effort.

This is how successful he was: you mention his name anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line even now and you’d better be prepared for stick. It’s as though he was there last week.

The idea was that Sherman’s armies would rely less on Union supply lines and more on what the farms of Georgia could provide in the spring and summer of 1864. This would at once support mobility, deprive the Confederate armies of those supplies, and attack the morale of the entire South. What the Federals couldn’t take, they torched, pretty much.

The policy, delineated later in Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 120, was aimed primarily against property, but of course it rendered thousands of civilians homeless—shelterless—and without the means of feeding themselves. He called it “hard war”, and it was.

On 2 September 1864, Atlanta finally surrendered, after a battle that started six weeks before. Sherman then moved on to the Atlantic.

Essentially, Sherman’s campaign broke the back of the South. The fall of Atlanta also gave Abraham Lincoln something to take to the Presidential election that November, to use against George B. McClellan (ex-commander of the Army of the Potomac).

McClellan was running on a platform demanding a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Atlanta gave Union voters hope that Mr. Lincoln’s armies actually might be able to end the rebellion by military means, so they reelected him by a comfortable margin.

So 150 years ago today, the nation drew its breath, hitched up its trousers and carried on.