Sherman's March to the Sea 1864: Atlanta to Savannah

By David Smith
Illustrated, maps, orders of battle, bibliography, index, 96 pp., 2007. Osprey Publishing Ltd., 443 Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10016, $18.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Carl R. Schenker Jr.
Carl R. Schenker Jr. is a lawyer living in Washington, D.C. His wife, Susan Sherman Richardson, is a great-great-granddaughter of William Tecumseh Sherman. Schenker is the author of "Grant's Rise from Obscurity" in North & South magazine.

Review:
This slim book, with a misleadingly narrow title, is a worthwhile product of the Campaign series by Osprey Publishing. In nutshell fashion, it relates the two dramas that unfurled in November and December 1864 on vectors diverging from Atlanta, Ga. - William Tecumseh Sherman's southeasterly March to the Sea and the northwesterly campaign in which John Bell Hood led the Confederate Army of Tennessee to ruin against John M. Schofield and George H. Thomas, respectively, in the battles of Franklin and Nashville.

General Sherman himself deprecated the military significance of his March to the Sea, stating in his memoirs that he regarded the march as a largely unopposed "'shift of base,' . . . from the interior to a point on the sea-coast." Nonetheless, as Sherman well knew by the time he wrote that, his march captured the imagination of his contemporaries, and it lives on vividly in popular memory, as illustrated by the appearance in 2005 of the E.L. Doctorow novel The March.

In this Osprey book, David Smith, apparently a freelance writer and Ph.D. candidate with an interest in U.S. military history, segments the march into two parts (at Sandersville, Ga.), covered in two compact chapters (47 pages in total), each with an annotated map showing the path of each of the four corps which marched with Sherman from Atlanta to Savannah.

There is also a detailed order of battle. The basics of the march are here for convenient reference, but the condensed narrative omits some notable points and the just-the-bare-facts approach leaves scant room for colorful details about personalities or events.

To illustrate, Smith has very little discussion of the impact of the march on civilians, black or white. In this vein, there is no discussion of the controversial incident (Dec. 9, 1864) in which Union General Jefferson C. Davis took up his pontoon bridge at Ebenezer Creek, stranding the freed slaves following his forces and leaving them to the tender mercies of Confederate cavalry forces.

Readers seeking a more multi-faceted overview of the March to the Sea have many options, including John Marszalek's 2005 study Sherman's March to the Sea in the McWhiney Foundation Press Civil War Campaign and Commanders Series.

Much less broadly known today than Sherman's March is the drama that played out in late 1864 on the northwest vector from Atlanta - Hood's Tennessee campaign, which culminated in the shattering of his army in the battles of Franklin (Nov. 30, 1864) and Nashville (Dec. 15-16, 1864).

Smith presents this tale in 26 pages, including annotated campaign and battlefield maps and a detailed order of battle for Nashville. Again, the essentials are here without some of the color, such as full details of Ulysses S. Grant's near-firing of George Thomas due to delays in his attack on Hood outside Nashville.

Consistent with other offerings in the Osprey Campaign series, this book is only an overview and is tightly focused on matters military. Overall, it does its job well, and this reader is glad to have the book for his library.

The text is enhanced by a generous helping of illustrations. Oddly, the only portrait of Sherman - the title character - is small and overexposed, but there is compensation in photographic reproduction of Sherman's famous telegram offering Savannah to Lincoln as a Christmas present, just as Lincoln probably saw it on Christmas Day, 1864.