The third time (on a stamp) was not a charm for William Tecumseh Sherman, who, on November 15, 1864, sent his troops out from Atlanta on their famous (or infamous) March to the Sea.
Issued in February 1937, the 3-cent stamp, which was part of a 10-stamp series honoring the US Army and Navy, pictured three of the Union’s best-known Civil War Generals: Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan.
Like Grant, Sherman was convinced that the Confederacy’s strategic, economic, and psychological ability to wage further war needed to be definitively crushed if the fighting were to end. Therefore, he believed that the North had to conduct its campaign as a war of conquest and employ scorched earth tactics to break the backbone of the rebellion. He called this strategy “hard war;” others have called it “total war.”
The March to the Sea, which ended with the capture of Savannah on December 21, as well as subsequent campaign in South Carolina, exemplified this approach which focused on consuming or destroying supplies, wrecking infrastructure, undermining morale (but, generally, not killing civilians), and generally making life miserable for those who backed the Confederate cause. Illustratively, in the general orders issued before the March to the Sea began, Sherman gave corps commanders “the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c..” He added, “In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.”
Officers and soldiers serving under Sherman, recognized the carnage this would generate and the power it might have. Major Henry Hitchcock, who served in Sherman’s staff, for example, declared that “it is a terrible thing to consume and destroy the sustenance of thousands of people,” but added if the scorched earth strategy served “to paralyze their husbands and fathers who are fighting…it is mercy in the end.”
Sherman downplayed his role in developing and carrying out the total war approach, usually by claiming that he was simply carrying out orders as best he could in order to fulfill his part of Grant’s master plan for ending the war. But others had high marks for the way he pursued this goal. The influential 20th-century British military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, for example, ranked Sherman as one of the most important strategists in the annals of war, along with Scipio Africanus, Belisarius, Napoleon Bonaparte, T. E. Lawrence, and Erwin Rommel. Liddell Hart also stated that study of Sherman’s campaigns had contributed significantly to his own “theory of strategy and tactics in mechanized warfare,” which had in turn influenced both the Blitzkrieg strategy used by Germans at the start of World War II as well as attacks mounted against the Germans by General George S. Patton.
Unlike Patton who (at least publicly) seemed to revel in the carnage of war, Sherman recognized the damage created by his approach. When Atlanta’s city council asked him to rescind his order for civilians to evacuate the city, for example, Sherman replied, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it….I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success. But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.”
And in May 1865, after the major Confederate armies had surrendered, Sherman wrote in a personal letter: “I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting-its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers…tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated…that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
Despite his misgivings – and despite the fact that he did not oppose slavery and argued against many of the more ambitious Reconstructionist policies pursued by many Republicans, including Grant when he was president – Sherman was anathema to Southerners. So even though he had appeared on stamps issued in 1893 and 1895, his appearance on a stamp in 1937, generated significant opposition in the South and among the many powerful Senators and Representatives from those states.
When plans for the stamp were announced, the South Carolina state legislature urged that state’s senators and representatives prevent its release on the grounds that no man who had such “a history of rapine carnage, destruction, and murder” should be honored on a stamp. The Georgia legislature took a different tack, proposing the stamp be issued only if the federal government paid for all the damage done by his troops during the Civil War. The stamp was issued but, to placate the Southern opponents, the Post Office agreed to issue a stamp in the Army/Navy series picturing two of the South’s leading generals: Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Sherman would not appear again on a stamp until 1995 when he was pictured as part of a series of 20 stamps picturing 16 individuals and four battles associated with the Civil War. Lee, in contrast, was pictured on a 1949 stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of Washington and Lee University, a 1955 stamp that was part of a series of stamps honoring American heroes, and a 1995 stamp that was part of the Civil War series that also featured Sherman.
The stamps, it turns out, are just another sign of the many ways that the North won the Civil War but the South, apparently, won the peace.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.