William T. Sherman: The Man Who Made A War Nobody Had Ever Fought

The Long Rifle

The Long Rifle

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William Tecumseh Sherman did not just fight the Civil War. He reinvented what war could be.

In November eighteen sixty four, Sherman cut the telegraph wire, abandoned his supply lines, and marched sixty two thousand men into the heart of Georgia with no communication and no precedent. What followed was not just a military campaign. It was a deliberate dismantling of the Confederate system itself, from the railroads and cotton gins to the very belief that the South could endure. But the March to the Sea also carried a cost that Sherman himself never fully confronted, a broken promise of land and freedom that still echoes today.

Sources and further reading:

Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, written by himself, first published 1875

Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volumes 39 and 44

Colloquy with Colored Ministers, Minutes of the Savannah Meeting, January 12 1865

Special Field Orders Number 15, National Archives

Sherman, Fighting Prophet by Lloyd Lewis

Sherman's March by Burke Davis

The March to the Sea and Beyond by Joseph T. Glatthaar

Citizen Sherman by Michael Fellman

Been in the Storm So Long by Leon F. Litwack

The Fiery Trail, Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner

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