Noah Andre Trudeau, author of "Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea," spoke to a standing room only crowd over about 200 at the Decatur Library Tuesday night (despite it being a rainy night, which normally cuts attendance by a two-thirds).
The fact such a crowd would attend such a lecture shows the validity of the Berkeley-to-Mayberry scale. This was a very different crowd than you'll see at nightspots in or near Decatur.
Obviously, the Civil War is still a subject of interest, at least to those on the Mayberry side of the Decatur Berkeley-to-Mayberry scale. The crowd was about 95% white (just as a statement of fact).
Trudeau spent four years researching and writing a book about Sherman's March, after all these years, because (in his words) it was "an iconic event in American History." Even the young soldiers participating it in the time realized they were participating in something big, which is why they maintained diaries. Many published them (with some enhancing edits) many years later.
The books in stock were sold out, with latecomers signing up for autographed books to be delivered.
Trudeau based his book on newspaper articles at the time, and the diaries of about 200 soldiers. He noted a commonly referenced "in-person" report was written by a reporter who [in demonstrable fact] never got any closer to the action than Nashville.
The Union soldiers frequently referred to themselves as "foragers" ("Pilagers' would have been a more accurate term.) The term "bummers" was adopted later. An Army living off the land had to stay on the move. If it stalled for even a few days, it died.] After the soldiers had move 15 miles in a day, they had time to pillage the local homes. Even those who didn't get hit by the ravagers realized they were vulnerable to invasion. Just imagine if you had to worry about that today.
The "edited for publication" [over a decade later] diaries of Union soldiers typically referred to the march as being during pleasant weather. According to Trudeau's research, 5 days were in steady rain, and on two days the soldiers woke up to snow on the ground and frozen water. He equates this to our remembering high school as all fun, when in fact we struggled with such issues of acne, weight, and social acceptance.
The Union soldiers assumed those who abandoned their homes had something to hide. They destroyed those homes, taking anything of value to them.
During the talk, Trudeau didn't deal with the matter of rape, many cases of which are well documented. When this blogger buys his book in paperback, he'll see if he deals with it in the book.
Sherman thought the US before the war was nearly perfect. He considered the succession of the Southern states as a disruption which needed to be punished. He had no interest in Blacks voting. While a large number of slaves followed the march, Sherman considered them, at best, an encumbrance.
A gentleman on the front row at the right commented that Sherman was seen as a liberator by many Southerners (even though Lincoln had technically already freed them, by executive order). Trudeau's response, noting Sherman had no such interests, probably made him feel like he was in the wrong meeting.
At one point, 15-20K black slaves, who had left plantations, followed the march. [Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation" had no direct impact during the war, since it only freed slaves in states Lincoln had no control over at the time.] They found themselves out of security when Sherman's Army reached Savannah. One general destroyed the bridges over a river before the tag-along slaves could cross.
Sherman's big fear was that Hood would follow him with his Army and slow him down. The South could have disrupted his march, but did not, mostly due to the individual thinking of Southern generals.
A common misconception is that the Confederacy never impeded Sherman's march. Actually, at one point, 700 confederates east of the Oconee stopped the march for 3 days. Had the confederate troops stationed in Macon, Augusta, and Savannah been effective brought to bear, Sherman's March might have never made it to Savannah.
He noted that it took time as much as an hour to heat up a rail enough to wrap it around a tie to form a "necktie," illustrating the destruction of the rails were not as extreme as commonly reported. Only one unit, with the specific mission of destroying railways, the First Michigan, had a special tool which facilitated the bending of rails. Those rail lines which at rails made of thin strips of metal over wood, such as the line toward Milledgeville, were much easier to destroy. But, in any case, Confederate RR workers restored the lines in relatively short order after Sherman's wreckers moved through.
Sherman did not try to attack ammunition ordinances along the way, because it would slow the Army (which left Atlanta with 2500 horse-drawn wagons) down.
Trudeau says Grant felt the North should have seized Savannah before Sherman started the March out of Atlanta, but Sherman convinced Grant that he could move across hostile territory without a base of operation, supporting his large army off the plunders.
The biggest value of Sherman's march was in bolstering the image of success with the Yankee people, who were growing weary with the war (sound familiar, given current thinking?).
Trudeau noted there are thousands of stories of Southerners saving their property from the ravagers. He said most of these rightly belong in the "fiction section" of the Civil War library.
A mature lady told an anecdote of her relative having a baby during the invasion. They hung a US flag out the window. Union troops stopped shelling and facilitated the birth. The baby was christened "Anna SHELL Adams." Cute story.
This bloggers elderly relatives told the story of my great-grandmother sending the kids down into the swamp to hide the cow, as the union troops took the mules, horses, and a steer (to be barbecued). With my great-grandfater having died in the war, she had to plow the fields with the cow for a year after the war.
A distinguished gentleman standing next to this blogger who said he's been studying the Civil War for decades said Sherman's March had no impact on the outcome of the war. According to him, Sherman could have had a bigger, faster, impact by marching his Army toward Virginia. What he did was to alienate Southerners for decades, greater lengthening the healing after the war.
Noah Andre Trudeau is a history graduate of the State
University of New York at Albany, and the author of three
acclaimed books on the Civil War. Currently a producer in
National Public Radio's Cultural Programming Department, Trudeau
is the recipient of a major national program award from the
Corporation of Public Broadcasting for a four-part audio
biography in Civil War Times Illustrated, the Gettysburg
Magazine, Blue and Gray, America's Civil War, and Military
History Quarterly. He is currently working on a combat history of
black troops in the Civil War.
258 pages with photos and list of maps/diagrams.
The Decatur Library Parking deck was full (requiring this blogger to park about four blocks away), and the books were all sold out before Mr. Trudeau was through speaking. This portly gentleman (who would not be able to outrun the Yankee marauders had he lived back then) rushed out before the talk was over to buy three:
Didn't that style of sideburns go out of style shortly after the war?
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