“Sherman’s men gave my son-in-law sut! He had made that year thirty-two hundred gallons of syrup,—more than he had casks for; so he sunk a tank in the ground, and buried it. The Yankee soldiers all came and helped themselves to it. He had the finest flower-garden in the country; they made his own slaves scatter salt, and corn-on-the-cob, all over it, then they turned their horses on, and finished it. They made my own daughter wait on them at table. She said she kept servants for such work; but they replied: ‘You are none too good.’ They robbed all the houses through here of all the jewels, watches, trinkets, and hard metals the people didn’t put out of their way; and stripped us of our bedding and clothing.”
Sherman’s invasion of the South cannot properly be called a raid: even Wilson’s brilliant expedition with twelve thousand cavalry is belittled by that epithet.
Sherman had under his command four infantry corps and a corps of cavalry, pursuing different routes, their caterpillar tracks sometimes crossing each other, braiding a belt of devastation from twenty-five to fifty miles in breadth, and upwards of six hundred miles in extent. The flanking parties driving the light-footed Rebel cavalry before them; bridges fired by the fugitives; pontoon trains hurrying to the front of the advancing columns, when streams were to be crossed; the hasty corduroying of bad roads; the jubilant foraging parties sweeping the surrounding country of whatever was needful to support life and vigor in those immense crawling and bristling creatures, called army-corps; the amazing quantity and variety of plunder collected together on the routes of the wagon-trains,—the soldiers sitting proudly on their heaped-up stores, as the trains approached, then, in lively fashion, thrusting portions into each wagon as it passed,—for no halt was allowed; the ripping up of railroads, the burning and plundering of plantations; the encampment at evening, the kindling of fires, the sudden disappearance of fences, and the equally sudden springing up of shelter-tents, like mushrooms, all over the ground; the sleep of the vast, silent, guarded hosts; and the hilarious awakening to the toil and adventures of a new day; such are the scenes of this most momentous expedition, which painters, historians, romancers, will in future ages labor to conceive and portray.
Warned by the flying cavalry, and the smoke and flames of plantations on the horizon, the panic-stricken inhabitants thought only of saving their property and their lives from the invaders. Many fled from their homes, carrying with them the most valuable of their possessions, or those which could be most conveniently removed. Mules, horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, were driven wildly across the country, avoiding one foraging party perhaps only to fall into the hands of another. The mother caught up her infant; the father, mounting, took his terrified boy upon the back of his horse behind him; the old man clutched his money-bag and ran; not even the poultry, not even the dogs were forgotten; men and women shouldering their household stuffs, and abandoning their houses to the mercies of the soldiers, whose waving banners and bright steel were already appearing on the distant hill-tops.
FLEEING BEFORE SHERMAN’S GRAND MARCH.
Such panic flights were often worse than useless. Woe unto that house which was found entirely deserted! To the honor of Southern housewives be it recorded, that the majority of them remained to protect their homes, whilst their husbands and slaves ran off the live stock from the plantations.
The flight from Milledgeville, including the stampede of the Rebel State legislators, who barely escaped being entrapped by our army,—the crushing of passengers and private effects into the overloaded cars, the demand for wheeled vehicles, and the exorbitant prices paid for them, the fright, the confusion, the separation of families,—formed a scene which neither the spectators nor the actors in it will soon forget.
The negroes had all along been told that if they fell into the hands of the Yankees they would be worked to death on fortifications, or put into the front of the battle and shot if they did not fight, or sent to Cuba and sold; and that the old women and young children would be drowned like cats and blind puppies. And now the masters showed their affection for these servants by running off the able-bodied ones, who were competent to take care of themselves, and leaving the aged, the infirm, and the children, to the “cruelties” of the invaders. The manner in which the great mass of the remaining negro population received the Yankees, showed how little they had been imposed upon by such stories, and how true and strong their faith was in the armed deliverance which Providence had ordained for their race.