He stripped his army of all baggage that could in any wise be dispensed with, but organized perhaps the greatest wagon train that any army had ever carried with it, for the transportation of food supplies and ammunition. His was now an army without a base and without communications. It was his purpose to subsist his men upon such supplies as he could take from the country through which he intended to march, but for the sake of perfect security he planned to carry fully ten days' rations with him at all times, or quite enough to feed his army on short rations for three or four weeks in the event of necessity.
Now that Hood had gone northward, Sherman knew that he had no enemy in his pathway except an insignificant cavalry force, and that he might march whithersoever he pleased without fear of serious molestation or opposition. With ten days' full rations in his wagon train and with the country to live upon there was simply no possibility of harm coming to him or his army.
He hoped that one or other of the expeditions planned by Grant against the southern Atlantic coast might reduce the defenses of Savannah and capture that city before his arrival there. If not, he had force enough to take the town himself, or, failing that, to capture Charleston or Mobile or Wilmington, in any case establishing a new base for himself on the sea.
Many years later, at the Authors Club in New York, in the presence of the writer of these volumes, some one mentioned this operation to General Sherman, speaking of it as "The March to the Sea." Thereupon General Sherman turned to the writer and said—as nearly as a good memory can report—
Just see how poets glorify things! That march was nothing more than a change of base,—an operation perfectly familiar to every educated soldier. But a poet got hold of it, nicknamed it "Sherman's March to the Sea," and gave it a totally new significance to the popular mind. Let me explain. At Atlanta I was in the midst of the enemy's country. My nearest base of supplies was Chattanooga—a hundred miles away. That place was itself liable to siege, and it lay the width of two states away from my real and ultimate source of supplies on the Ohio. The enemy might cut it off at any time and even if he failed to do that, I could not defend the hundred miles of single track railroad that connected it with Atlanta. At Atlanta my army was in the air. Its communications were likely to be cut at any moment. Obviously, I must either retire northward from that place, or I must move southward in search of a new base of supplies. As there was no force south of me capable of resisting my advance in that direction, I decided to march toward the south, thus securing a new base for my self within easy sea communication with sources of supply at the north, and at the same time cutting the Confederacy in two again and, more important still, demonstrating the nearly complete collapse of the Confederate power of resistance. So I decided to make the march and change my base. That is all there was of it. But the poet got hold of it—and so instead of a "military change of base," it has become the "March to the Sea."[7]
[7] This report of General Sherman's words was written out while memory was fresh, submitted to General Sherman and approved by him as correct.—Author.
Sherman's first plan with respect to Atlanta had been to make a great military fortress of the place. To that end, as we already know, he had issued his decree of depopulation. Now that he had decided to abandon the town he destroyed it by fire.
His plan of march through Georgia was to move in four columns upon parallel roads, throwing out foragers in every direction to seize upon every ounce of food supplies that still remained in the country, to burn all mills, to capture all live stock, to seize upon all grain and to strip the region bare even of poultry and vegetables. It was to cut a swath of utter desolation through Georgia—a swath sixty miles wide and nearly three hundred miles long—in every square mile of which he should "make a solitude and call it peace."
The desolating march began on the fifteenth of November, Atlanta being left in ashes and smoldering ruins. Under Sherman's marching orders, houses were not to be entered by the soldiers—but those orders were freely disregarded. Only corps commanders were privileged to burn mills, cotton gins and the like; but there were matches in every pocket and they were used with little if any respect for orders which nobody regarded seriously as commands intended to be obeyed. The orders included a provision that wherever the inhabitants should "manifest local hostility, army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."