The Atlanta Campaign

          This volume begins with his move against the Confederate Army at Dalton, Georgia in the spring of 1864.  Then, in a brilliant series of flanking movements, he slowly pushed the Confederates further south, with much less loss of life than Grant suffered in his head on attack policies in Virginia.  Due to his failure to stop Sherman, General Joseph E. Johnston was replaced by John B. Hood, who did no better against Cump Sherman.    The Confederates were forced out of Atlanta and Sherman occupied the city in time to swing the presidential election in Lincoln’s favor.  When Hood attempted to relieve the pressure on Georgia by turning back to invade Tennessee, Sherman followed him back into Alabama, and then left his destruction to General George Thomas at Nashville, while he turned south for his famous march to the sea.

The photographs used to illustrate this volume were taken by George N. Barnard, who was the official photographer for Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign.

Both of the armies that fought in the American Civil War produced some outstanding heroes.  Nevertheless, when being considered from a purely military standpoint, the one man who did more than all the others to determine the outcome of the war was General William Tecumseh Sherman.  “Cump” Sherman, as he was to know his friends, was a vicious fighter who adapted to concept of total war and coined the philosophy that “War is Hell.”  He could be as hard on his own men as on the enemy, and always told them that in his army there were no non-combatants.  His decisive nature and sense of orderliness led him to the most extreme action against perceived foes, and to great kindness to open friends. His keen favor for Union law and order led him into direct conflict with the Seccesionists who he saw as a clear challenges to his sense of authority and order.  His career led the well known military historian Basil Liddell Hart to declare that Sherman was “the first modern general.”

Sherman served under General Ulysses S. Grant in 1862 and 1863 during the campaigns that led to the fall of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and culminated with the routing of the Confederate armies in the state of Tennessee. In 1864, Sherman succeeded Grant as the Federal commander in the western theater of the war. He proceeded to lead his troops to the capture of the city of Atlanta, a military success that contributed to the re-election of President Abraham Lincoln. Sherman's subsequent march through Georgia and the Carolinas further undermined the Confederacy's ability to continue fighting. He accepted the surrender of all the Confederate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida in April 1865.  In spite of his harsh treatment of the Confederates during the war, he gave them such liberal terms at the surrender that his enemies in Congress accused him of taking bribes from the defeated rebels.

In the following pages, written in General Sherman’s own words and taken from his Memoirs, originally written in 1875, ten years after the end of the Civil War, you will read his account of the Atlanta campaign—a campaign that changed history and in many ways made the country that we have today.  Sherman was one of the first Civil War generals to publish a memoir.  His Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. By Himself, published by D. Appleton & Co., in two volumes, began with the year 1846 (when the Mexican War began) and ended with a chapter about the “military lessons of the [civil] war” The memoirs were controversial, and sparked complaints from many quarters. Ulysses S. Grant, who was serving as President of the United States when Sherman’s memoirs first appeared, later remarked that others had told him that Sherman treated Grant unfairly, but “when I finished the book, I found I approved every word; that . . . it was a true book, an honorable book, creditable to Sherman, just to his companions — to myself particularly so — just such a book as I expected Sherman would write.”