Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea

War is Hell.

— William Tecumseh Sherman

My Dear General Sherman: Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift, the capture of Savannah. When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that “nothing risked, nothing gained,” I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce. And taking the work of General Thomas into the count, as it should be taken, it is indeed a great success. Not only does it afford the obvious and immediate military advantages, but, in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole – Hood’s army – it brings those who sat in darkness to see a great light.

— Abraham Lincoln

The Union men who marched with Sherman to the sea expressed equal fervor when it came to evaluating what they had together accomplished. “The importance of the march through Georgia has never been overestimated,” wrote H. Judson Kilpatrick in 1876. “The very moment Sherman reached the sea, demonstrating the fact that a well-organized army, ably led, could raid the South at pleasure; there was not a man in all the land but knew the war was virtually over, and the rebellion ended.”

— Noah Andre Trudeau

No event in American history has seared the national consciousness more profoundly or for a more prolonged period than the great conflict we know as the American Civil War. Even today, more than a hundred forty years after the guns fell silent, the diminishing echoes resound. And with the single exception of the battle of Gettysburg, perhaps no other incident of the war has been more prominently retained in the collective memory than Sherman’s march to the sea, scorching a swath of Georgia’s earth sixty miles wide and 300 miles deep, from Atlanta to Savannah.

Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea is an intimately detailed, superbly researched and documented recounting of the day to day events of Sherman’s march. If you read no other book on the subject, read this one.

Told largely in the words of those who were there, perceptively related in the contemporary context, thoroughly researched and extensively illustrated with maps, Trudeau’s book is now the definitive work on Sherman’s march.