Forage Liberally: the Role of Agriculture in Sherman's March to the Sea Robert Christopher Welch Iowa State University
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Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2011 Forage Liberally: The Role of Agriculture in Sherman's March to the Sea Robert Christopher Welch Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Welch, Robert Christopher, "Forage Liberally: The Role of Agriculture in Sherman's March to the Sea" (2011). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 10372. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/10372 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Forage liberally: The role of agriculture in Sherman’s march to the sea by Robert Christopher Welch A dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Major: Agricultural History and Rural Studies Program of Study Committee: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Major Professor Kathleen Hilliard Charles Dobbs David Hollander Jeffrey Houghtby Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2011 Copyright © Robert Christopher Welch, 2011. All rights reserved. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter One Deposing the Monarch: Secession, War, and the Changing Nature of Agriculture in Georgia 8 Chapter Two From Kid Gloves to “Hard War”: The Evolution of Federal War Policy Toward Civilians 41 Chapter Three “I Can Make This March, and Make Georgia Howl”: Planning the Use of Foraging as a Weapon in the March to the Sea 67 Chapter Four “. Probably the Most Gigantic Pleasure Excursion Ever Planned:” Sherman’s Soldiers on the March to the Sea 93 Chapter Five Those Who Remained Behind: The Women of Rural Georgia and the March to the Sea 129 Conclusion 155 Appendix 175 Bibliography 176 iii Acknowledgements Of all the work that goes into producing a dissertation, this page may be the hardest to write, for there is no way that I can properly thank all the people who have helped in this short space. My committee deserves my deepest thanks. My chair, Dr. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, showed an amazing amount of patience with me throughout this process, offering guidance and suggestions when I needed assistance, and keeping this work on track. Dr. Kathleen Hilliard, a late but very welcome addition to my committee, helped me deal with many of the environmental and agricultural aspects of my work. Dr. Charles Dobbs offered me kind advice and an ear whenever I needed them. Dr. David Hollander and Dr. Jeff Houghtby also have my deepest personal and professional respect for their assistance in this project. Any errors in this work are my own and do not reflect upon them. The Special Collections Department, Iowa State University Library, the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Iowa, and the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City, all assisted in my research. The technological change that enabled greater access to Civil War collections at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa will continue to bear great fruit for future scholars and enabled me to find and utilize more materials in a shorter span of time. Countless friends have been forced to listen to my rambling ideas and discussions based on my research. Kristi Medanic offered advice and a kind ear whenever either was needed. Brian Baird offered helpful suggestions for sources at various times throughout the iv process. Brandon Jolly and several other friends suffered through countless conversations about my research, always willing to listen and offer suggestions and support when they were needed the most. The greatest thanks go to my wife Bridget. She was my rock when I needed it most. She listened, gave advice, and offered me her love and understanding when I needed them. There were times in the course of this project that she provided the moral support that enabled me to continue on and finish. I have no words worthy enough to communicate my debt to her unfailing faith and love. I look forward to spending the rest of my life repaying those debts. In the course of researching and writing my dissertation I lost one man dear to my life and I saw another enter the world. To the former, my heart aches that he will never be able to read these pages, though he encouraged me at every step in life. His death very nearly halted this dissertation. In the case of the latter, well, I joked early in grad school that with my luck, I’d finish my dissertation with a baby duct taped to my desk so that I could write. Thankfully, day care is only a block from my house. Papa wouldn’t really do that, Jack. It is to the love of my wife, the memory of my father, and the hope I have in my son that I dedicate this work. It is far too paltry an offering for all that these three mean to me. 1 Introduction With apologies to Wendell Berry, the Civil War was an agricultural act.1 The secession crisis and war were born of the dispute over an agricultural labor system, and our culture has oversimplified the conflict as one between the industrial Northern states and the agrarian Southern states. The war changed agriculture in both regions as civilians fought to feed their families and the respective armies in the field, as well as manage with the loss of labor due to military enlistment. In an era when combat required large open spaces for the mobilization of armies, fighting scarred the agricultural landscape from Pennsylvania and Virginia to Arkansas and Georgia. To understand the causes and effects of the Civil War, agriculture serves as one of the best lenses available to the historian. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Savannah Campaign in November, 1864, remembered as the March to the Sea, is the ultimate expression of the war’s interaction with agriculture. While historians have long discussed the campaign’s effects on the transportation infrastructure and collective psychology of the South, the mantra of destruction glosses over agriculture in many cases. Foraging, the army’s main interaction with Georgia’s farms and plantations, gleaned the wealth of the land from the storehouses and sheds of the state, and yet the act of foraging and the Union soldier’s understanding of the Southern agricultural landscape often falls into anecdotal discussion while authors and historians write about other aspects of the campaign. Agriculture played the central role in the planning and execution of the March to the Sea. If Sherman had been wrong about the wealth of Georgia’s agricultural resources, history would remember the Savannah Campaign as a failed 1 Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry edited by Norman Wirzba (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2002) page 321. 2 expedition, an incident similar to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. But Sherman was not wrong; he is not remembered for leading an army to its destruction, but rather for helping to usher modern warfare, the warfare of annihilation as historian Russell Weigley described in The American Way of War, into the American lexicon.2 My interest in the March to the Sea and agriculture comes from family history. While in high school I met a distant relative who researched genealogy. Through her, I learned that I had a relative who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, and that he took part in the campaign. From that point forward, my study of the conflict concentrated on the western theater of the war. With only a name and regiment to start with, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the war experience of my ancestor specifically, and Iowa’s soldiers more generally. I have never seen a picture of my ancestor, and the only written account of his surface that I have found is at best an example of the flawed nature of human memory, but James Donaldson has steered my historical imagination and my research interests, including agricultural history. Ultimately, my work in agricultural history and Civil War studies my many year effort to better understand the life of one soldier. This dissertation came about because of my independent reading. While free reading time can be non-existent in graduate school, I have tried to improve my time when I could find it. After finishing my master’s thesis and while casting about for dissertation research, I began reading Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea at night. After fifteen years of researching the Civil War, I encountered something that piqued my combined research interests. Fifty-two pages into Southern Storm, for the first time that I 2 Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1973), pages 150-152. 3 could remember, Trudeau laid out the agricultural importance of Sherman’s March to the Sea. “He utilized a map prepared by the Department of the Interior that displayed the Georgia counties he wished to traverse, over which he hand wrote livestock and crop production from information he found in the 1860 census.”3 For some reason, this was the first time that I saw a clear intersection between agriculture and the March to the Sea. Successful foraging was reliant on the state of Georgia’s agriculture, and it was so much more than just a supplemental action to the destruction of railroads and moving to Savannah.