Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 18: Sherman marching through Georgia - oh, hell, yeah!

Gen. William Sherman's march from Atlanta to Georgia in December 1864 was a major blow to the still-persisting resistance of the Southern Confederacy. This became a favorite incident in the Lost Cause narrative in which the pore white Southerners were victims of tyrannical Yankee fanatics.

Alan Blinder wrote about Sherman's March in 150 Years Later, Wrestling With a Revised View of Sherman’s March Atlanta Journal 11/14/2014, a story on the occasion of an historical marker being placed in Atlanta that was meant to counter the dishonest Lost Cause version of Sherman's story, which Blinder summarizes this way:

To any number of Southerners, the Civil War general remains a ransacking brute and bully whose March to the Sea, which began here 150 years ago on Saturday, was a heinous act of terror. Despite the passage of time, Sherman remains to many a symbol of the North’s excesses during the Civil War, which continues to rankle some people here.

... One of the marker’s sentences specifically targets some of the harsher imagery about him as “popular myth.”

“ ‘Gone with the Wind’ has certainly been a part of it,” W. Todd Groce, the president of the Georgia Historical Society, which sponsored the marker, said of regional perceptions of Sherman and the Union Army. “In general, we just have this image that comes from a movie.”

And he explains:

The marker near the picnic tables at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum is the fruit of a reassessment of Sherman and his tactics that has been decades in the making. Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy.

They have described plenty of family accounts of cruelty as nothing more than fables that unfairly mar Sherman’s reputation. (my emphasis)

Honorable Southerners making up lying war propaganda to smear the Yankees? Say it ain't so, y'all!

“What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”

To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.” (my emphasis)

I don't know if all of Sherman's actions would be consistent with international humanitarian law in 2022. But the essential point is that Sherman's approach to warfare, including the propaganda-laden March Through Georgia, was not the terroristic military operation directed against civilians depicted in Lost Cause mythology. It was directed against the Rebel armed forces. And Sherman is credited as being something of an innovator in recognizing the importance of disabling economic infrastructure like railroad lines and industrial facilities that were important to the enemy's war effort.

I would be much more inclined to take a critical attitude toward Sherman's postwar stint as Commanding General of the Army (1869–1883), in which he was in charge of the Indian Wars in the western US of that period.

Here's Pete Seeger's version of the Union song Marching Through Georgia from the Civil War days: