Victor Davis Hanson
American Heritage

THE GENERAL'S MARCH THROUGH GEORGIA IS USUALLY REMEMBERED AS A RUTHLESS CAMPAIGN OF INDISCRIMINATE TERROR, WAGED AGAINST HELPLESS CIVILIANS RATHER THAN SOUTHERN SOLDIERS. BUT VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ARGUES THAT IT WAS BRILLANT, EFFECTIVE, AND, ABOVE ALL, HUMBLE.

BY THE FALL OF 1864 NO ARMY IN EITHER EUROPE OR AMERICA was as mobile, self-supporting, and lethal as William Tecumseh Sherman's, Which was composed of soldiers in prime physical condition expert in the handling of modern firearms. Their general was in some sense not merely the most powerful man in America but also the most dangerous person in the world. The Macon Telegraph warned its readers: "It would seem as if in him all the attributes of man were merged in the enormities of the demon, as if Heaven intended in him to manifest depths of depravity yet untouched by a fallen race.... Unsated still in his demoniac vengeance he sweeps over the country like a simoom of destruction."

The advent of Sherman's army must have been a terrifying experience for an agrarian society. The southern Central Valley of California where I live is similarly about three hundred miles from north to south; its eastern corridor between the Sierra Nevada and state freeway 99 is a belt about forty to sixty miles wide that comprises the richest farmland in the world. To comprehend anything comparable to Sherman's coming into Georgia is to imagine a huge column of mobile burners, starting out in the state capital to the north at Sacramento and descending to torch all the farmland of this valley southward to Bakersfield. Everything between San Francisco and Los Angeles would be as desolate as the sixty-mile-wide corridor between Atlanta and Savannah.

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