This Country of Ours

by H. E. Marshall

The army marched in four divisions, taking roads which as nearly as possible ran alongside each other, so that each division might keep in touch with the others. Every morning at daybreak they broke camp and during the day marched from ten to fifteen miles. And as they passed through it they laid waste the land. Railroads were torn up and thoroughly destroyed. The sleepers were made into piles and set alight, the rails were laid on the top of the bonfires, and when hot enough to be pliable were twisted beyond all possibility of being used again. Telegraph wires and poles were torn down, factories were burned, only private homes being left untouched.

Foragers quartered the country, sweeping it bare of cattle, poultry, fodder and corn. For both man and beast of the great army fed upon the land as they passed through it, the rations with which they had come provided being kept in case of need. Indeed the troops fed so well that the march, it was said, was like a "continuous Thanksgiving." What they did not eat they destroyed.

Thus right across the fertile land a stretch of waste and desolation was created about sixty miles wide. Yet it was not done in wantonness, but as a terrible necessity of war. It clove the Confederacy from east to west as thoroughly as the Mississippi clove it from north to south. It rifled and well-nigh exhausted the rich granary which fed the Confederate army, and by destroying the railroads prevented even what was left being sent to them. Grant meant to end the war, and it seemed to him more merciful to destroy food and property than to destroy men.

Through all this great raid there was little fighting done. And as the army marched day by day through the sunny land a sort of holiday spirit pervaded it. The work was a work of grim destruction, but it was done in the main with good temper. The sun shone, the men led a free and hardy life, growing daily more brown and sinewy, and at the end of the march of nearly three hundred miles, far from being worn out, they were more fit and strong than when they set forth.

By the second week in December the goal was reached - Savannah and the sea. Here the army joined hands with the navy. Fort McAllister, which defended the south side of the city, was taken by a brilliant assault, and Sherman prepared for a siege of Savannah both by land and water. But in the night the Confederates quietly slipped out of the city, and retreated across the swamps. When their flight was discovered they were already beyond reach of pursuit, and with hardly a blow struck, the city of Savannah fell into the hands of the Federals.

The great march had ended triumphantly on December 21. "I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift," wrote Sherman to Lincoln, "the city of Savannah with a hundred and fifty-nine heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton."

This news followed hard on the news of another victory. For on December 15th and 16th the Federals under General George H. Thomas had fought a great battle at Nashville, Tennessee, in which the Confederates had been defeated. By this battle their strength beyond the Alleghenies was practically crushed, so as the year 1864 closed, the hopes of the Federals rose high.

Early in 1865 still another victory was recorded in the taking of Fort Fisher in North Carolina. This was the last port in the possession of the Confederates. With it, they lost their last link with the outside world, and the blockade which Lincoln had proclaimed nearly four years before was at length complete.

All hope of success now utterly vanished for the Confederates. Even Lee knew it, and he might have advised the South to lay down arms, but Jefferson Davis, the Southern President, doggedly refused to own himself beaten. So the war continued.

On the 1st of February, Sherman set out from Savannah on a second march. This time he turned northward, and carried his victorious army right through the Carolinas. The march was longer by more than a hundred miles than his now famous march to the sea. It was one too of much greater difficulty. Indeed, compared with it, the march to the sea had been a mere picnic.