In July 1863, Major General Henry Halleck asked a fellow Union commander stationed along the Big Black River in Mississippi how long Confederate resistance might continue after the fall of Vicksburg. William Tecumseh Sherman replied that he believed Southern belligerence would persist until the Confederacy was made to suffer for a war he thought they had started. “War is upon us. None can deny it,” he said.
“I would not coax them or meet them halfway, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it. ”
By the end of 1864, after capturing and burning Atlanta and cutting a 60-mile-wide path of destruction across Georgia, Sherman was already doing his part to make Southerners sick of war. As January gave way to February 1865, he was about to do even more. Sherman had long believed the war should be brought home to the Southern civilian population in a way that would break their will to continue fighting.
His march through Georgia had demonstrated that strategy. Now, with Union forces closing in on the Confederacy from multiple directions, Sherman prepared to turn his army northward through the Carolinas. The Carolinas campaign was intended to apply the same kind of pressure Sherman had used in Georgia. His target was the state that had been first to secede from the Union: South Carolina.
The region was considered the birthplace of the rebellion, and his troops viewed it with particular hostility. Sherman’s army pushed through the swamps and rivers of the Carolinas in the brutal winter months. It was a difficult advance, with heavy rains, flooded terrain, and muddy roads slowing the march. Despite the conditions, his forces continued their steady movement toward the heart of the state.
The campaign produced the same results Sherman had seen in Georgia. Railroads were torn up, bridges burned, and warehouses destroyed as his army lived off the land and left devastation in its wake. The city of Columbia, South Carolina, was captured, and significant portions of it were destroyed in a fire that consumed much of the downtown area. The destruction of Columbia became one of the most controversial episodes of the campaign.
Some accounts claimed the fire was accidental or started by retreating Confederate forces, while others believed Sherman’s troops deliberately torched the city. Sherman himself disputed the idea that his men had caused the blaze, but the damage was severe and the city’s capture marked a major symbolic blow to the Confederacy. The advance through the Carolinas continued to weaken Confederate resistance in the eastern theater. By the time Sherman’s army reached North Carolina, the rebellion was in its final stages.
The fall of Richmond and the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox in April 1865 effectively ended the war. Sherman’s campaigns remain among the most debated aspects of the Civil War. His strategy of total warfare broke the Confederacy’s ability to sustain itself, but it also brought destruction to civilian property on a scale rarely seen on American soil.
He remained unapologetic about the approach, insisting that the harshness of the war was the surest way to bring it to a swift end and prevent future conflicts.