Let me just say that this opinion is highly subjective. I like a certain type of Civil War book, and this just really wasn't it, but that doesn't mean others won't love this book.

I prefer a steady operational type book, you know, where the divisions, brigades moved, peppered with excellent maps. While this book had both, it is mostly a book of quotes from diaries and contemporaries about the Southern condition. It just didn't "flow", like a Cozzens or Sears or Rhea book does. Maybe just too much description of the "human condition" caused by Sherman's march, interrupting the discussion of troop movements.

Now, I freely grant you that other people whose tastes are different will absolutely love this book. It just wasn't to my taste. Still it was of moderate interest. I can't seem to find a decent book on the march to the sea...

Also, I agree with the reviewer who said the author should have continued with the Carolina operations. Perhaps that's the next book.

A very solid, workman-like account of Sherman's march through Georgia, but not especially emotionally engaging. It does stop at Savannah though, there's nothing on the continuation of the campaign into South Carolina and North Carolina. There are no great battles here, those pretty much ended with the capture of Atlanta. One point made quite clearly in this book is that Sherman did his best to avoid major confrontation with the Confederate forces and split his force into two prongs to at least appear to threaten the maximum number of targets and thin the Southern defences, and he was hugely successful at this, with a great deal of help from the South and its inability to form a united command structure to oppose him. Hood took his substantial forces left after the attacks out of Atlanta and went north to threaten northern supply lines and presumably force Sherman to divert his offensive to follow him, only to succeed in destroying what was left to no particular purpose. The remaining Confederate generals and their forces couldn't decide on what to defend or how to go on the offensive to blunt or stop Sherman. The book gives very clear explanations on what was on the minds of both sides. There's lots to learn here for those sufficiently interested, but little that will stir your blood unless you're a descendent of the folks in Sherman's path.

Sherman's so-called "March to the Sea" is the stuff of American legend. The popular view of it as Total War with the goal of attacking civilians is utterly wrong. Nor was it, as Sherman later claimed, a mere relocation of headquarters from Atlanta to a port on the sea at Savannah. Noah Andre Trudeau takes us through the entire campaign including its origins, and a very detailed and almost day-by-day and mile-by-mile process of Sherman's forces through the forests and swamps of Georgia in November and December of 1864.

The campaign had a general intention, but not a detailed plan. Sherman's forces were 60,000 strong and hand sufficient food and arms to keep those men fed and armed for more than a month, if need be. The line of marching troops and hundreds of wagons were miles long. At the end, the supplies remained almost completely in tact because of the extensive foraging activities. Sixty-thousand men will eat an enormous amount of food each day and it is these foraging activities that caused most of the destruction of civilian goods. While there were some cities along the way that bore the brunt of Sherman's anger, for example the town of Millen near Camp Lawton, a Confederate prison camp for Union soldiers, was ordered destroyed in a "tenfold more devilish" manner than the commander of the Seventeenth Corps had ever dreamed of. Most of the time, guards were put around the homes and the civilians were protected in their homes and the property in the homes was left in tact. However, many of these people had hidden their goods outside and those, when found, were taken by the soldiers.

The citizens were left very vulnerable when their yams, pigs, beeves, horses, and other goods usable by Sherman's army were taken. These people couldn't simply go and get food at a nearby store and their neighbors surely suffered a similar fate. So, yes, there was terrible civilian hardship after such a large army passed through. But the notion that there was a continuous path of burning and murder from Atlanta to the sea is fantastically overblown. One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is the hundreds and thousands of slaves who left their homes to free themselves and follow the army. However, the army told them to go back home because the army could not and would not provide for them. At times, the army pulled up its pontoons and bridges immediately after crossing to leave slaves on the bank and unable to cross. Yet, many still found ways to cross (some probably drowned) and stayed with the army. Later some were used as laborers to lay corduroy (split logs laid crossways over the road) to enable the army to pass over mud.

The Confederate forces were quite ineffective in trying to stand against or even harass Sherman's army. The author places most of the blame for this on Jefferson Davis's empowering separate armies without a central command. The various commanders did not have sufficient force to do any more than sting Sherman's army and had no one to unify the forces. Nor did the civilians answer the call for 10,000 more volunteers.

The taking of Fort McAllister is fascinating reading. The preparation was extensive and the actual battle was over in less than a half-hour. Most of the fatalities on the Union side were caused by the "torpedoes", the word used at that time for what we call land mines. They were used to impede the progress of the army towards Savannah. Sherman ordered the Confederate prisoners of war be used to dig them up and remove them. This act was controversial then and remains so today. Sherman's view is that if they didn't want their soldiers blown up by the torpedoes they should not have planted them. He certainly wasn't going to endanger his men in that work. The taking of Savannah was more or less an abandonment and surrender. There was no battle and the Confederates scuttled some ships, most notably the spectacular explosion of the ironclad "Savannah", and burned some supplies that might have aided Sherman's army. The Rebels were ineffective in spiking their heavy guns, which the Union easily repaired and took for their own use.

This very interesting, well-written, and informative book also has a section of contemporary images and a list of the forces and their commanders for both the Union and the Confederacy during Sherman's march. There are also extensive footnotes, a detailed bibliography, and a very helpful index.

I think this is a superb book and recommend it strongly.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

This book is all over the place. The author jumps from one thinig to another. There is no consistent narrative thread between tactics and personal accounts. Most of the personal accounts are colorless and reveal little, saying the same thing over and over... "ate sweet potatoes, buildings burning." Author adopts an a lame ploy of referring to "today" and "tomorrow," to make the reader think they are there, but it just makes the book hard to read. Statements are made with no elaboration. For instance, we are told O.O. Howard assummed command of Sherman's right wing but never told the interesting facts that General Logan was passed up or that the previous commander, McPherson, was killed in battle. The maps are uninformative and impossible to read, often without a legend.

This book is all over the place. The author jumps from one thinig to another. There is no consistent narrative thread between tactics and personal accounts. Most of the personal accounts are colorless and reveal little. Statements are made with no elaboration. For instance, we are told O.O. Howard assummed command of Sherman's right wing but never told the interesting facts that General Logan was passed up or that the previous commander, McPherson, was killed in battle. The maps are uninformative and for some reason the author thinks it is interesting to constanlty describe the weather forecast during the march.

William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)was along with US Grant the commander who won the Civil War for the United States. Noah Andre Trudeau, author of several outstanding books on the Civil War, has published this long
book on the famous Sherman March to the Sea which transpired from November 15, 1864 to the capture of Savannah in December 1864.
Trudeau has assembled a vast array of first person letters, the Official Records, primary and secondary books and maps to chronicle in detail this amazing odyssey against a faltering and soon to be defeated Confederacy.
Sherman achieved victory in the bloody Atlanta Campaign capturing that important city in September 1864. In November his rested, well equipped and well fed army launched out towards the southeast to plunder, punish, burn and destroy all who might stand in their way on the trip to the coast Sherman's blue clad troopers would be asked to forsake long supply lines by foraging off the rich stores to be found in Georgia.
Sherman's 60.000 men, thousands of mules and horses along with wagons was divided into two huge wings led by General OO Howard leading the right wing and Henry Slocum the commander of the left wing. These men were good subordinates to Sherman. The campaign was well planned and executed. It has become a template of how a campaign can be organized.
They were oppossed by fighting Joe Wheeler and his cavalry force which proved ineffective against the blue clad snake that was Sherman and his forces. Beaureguard was the overall rebel commander but proved inept in marshalling the Georgia State Militia and troops to defeat the Yankees.
Trudeau divides his book into the following sections:
a. Atlanta to Milledgville (then the state capital) November 15-24
b. Milledgeville to Millen-November 30-December 4th
c. Millen to Savannah-December 5-30
d. Savannah-Dec. 11, 1864-January 21, 1865
In an unusual and effective format Trudeau looks in detail at each day of the march through the eyes of soldiers on both sides, civilians, African-Americans and government and military officials. This gives us a new perspective on the march. These accounts run the gamut from the humorous to the tragic. Trudeau also does well portraying the thought, fears and hopes of the thousands of African-American slaves liberated by the Yankees.
It is clear from reading this book that:
a. it was no cakewalk! Every day the men of Sherman's army faced constant sniping from the enemy and outraged citizens, rain, mud, cold and recalcitrant mules and horses. Destroying railroads was not an easy task.
b. Southern leaders did not know where Sherman was heading when he left the Gate City of Atlanta. Macon? Augusta? Savannah? No one knew for sure until the Ohioan left Millen beaded for Atlanta. Sherman was left free to roam through Dixie as Confederate General John Bell Hood had swung his forces north towards Tennessee where he was soundly whipped by Union General George Thomas in the battle of Nashville in December, 1864.
c. The march effectively cut the shrinking Confederacy in two. Along with Grant's triumphs against Lee in the Eastern Theatre and the re-election of Lincoln the war would soon end with Union victory. Sherman would leave Savannah after his victory to plunder and punish the South in the Carolinas.
d. Sherman made the South howl by taking his destructive brand of warfare against a populace who had not felt the hard hand of war upclose and personal. Over 300 miles were trod by Sherman's boys consisting mainly of boys from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana although there were troops from the east who also served under Uncle Billy. A wide swath of destruction 60 miles wide made Sherman a hated name in the region for a century or more.
e. War is hell and these pages testify to that truism. We see people lose their loved ones, homes, farms, livestock and their own lives. War is never glamorous but is always cruel.
f. There were small battles which were fought such as Waynesboro, battles in front of Macon and most notably the scaling of Fort McAllister near Savannah which was soon seized by Sherman's army.
This book will become the source Civil War scholars and buffs turn to for the latest and best account of this pivotal Civil War campaign. Marching through Georgia will never seem the same to those who enjoy military history spun like a tale well told by a master of the craft.

I have copies of the diaries of Martin Curtis Tyler who served with the pontoon train in the right wing of Sherman's army as part of Company E Fourteenth Wisconsin. On Friday December 9,1864 he wrote " We have traveled through a pine forest all day, the forage is scarce and we have only got 1 load of corn and the mules only get 4 ears of corn each night. We got no sweet potatoes & the 25 Wisconsin was sent from our PT train for stealing ours last night. We came 14 miles & was brought to a halt at 3pm & turned off the road to the right & 1 1/4 mile to the Ogeeche River & laid the PT to let the troops cross that came on the other side of the river & they will not be here until tomorrow morn." If you compare this to Trudeau's description of action on the same day, you can appreciate the work involved in combining the accounts of numerous diaries so that an accurate and consistent description is given of the march. Trudeau gives a very useful overview of the march while providing enough detail to identify the daily account in individual diaries. If you think the book is dull and tedious then you should read one of the diaries to understand that the daily life of the troops was dull and tedious. There are few cheering crowds, a lot of mud that the wagons had to be pushed through and a very uncertain supply of food and clothing. Thank you Noah Trudeau for an honest account of the march to the sea and those responsible for carrying out the necessary work.
Marcia Roth

Sherman's march to the sea was important strategically and psychologically, but as a military adventure it was little more than a logistical achievement. Trudeau captures its essence well - 600 pages of soldier accounts that, "We went foraging today, found some hogs and sweet potatoes." The next day would be the same. After a while, the litany gets tedious. He gives a good sense of Southern outrage at the march, and some sense of the God-awful disorder of the South's military, but i felt he could have done much more with the later. All in all, I do not think the project was either worthy of Trudeau's considerable talents or he would have been better served to raise his sights and assess the march's larger impacts. The march and it's subsequent effort through South Carolina affected the South for generations. It broke the South psychologically. Trudeau kept his writing largely with the foot soldiers, and cavalry skirmishes, because that's about all there was to it militarily. I think that the work suffers for that, because that really wasn't where Sherman's real impact was. I had just finished Trudeau's remarkable book on Gettysburg and was expecting more.

After his well regarded "Gettysburg," Noah Trudeau's more difficult task in "Southern Storm" is to detail Sherman's 1864 march through Georgia as something more than that infamous affair brought us in Hollywood's version in "Gone With the Wind." Except for the concluding December capture of Savannah, there are no epic battles pitting one general against another, just the daily slog of a 60,000 man Union army reaping a three hundred mile swath of forage, fire, destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. Told mostly from the side of the Union army, each day is different and uniquely described without repetition. Sherman's strategy was to move two separate armies (led by Generals Slocum and Howard)to the southeast with feints towards Macon, thrusts towards Augusta, concealing his intentions, keeping the Rebels confused and his strategies disguised until the end. With numerous maps, fine descriptions and telling cameos, the book excels by avoiding boredom. Scenes, agonizing and enlightening, enliven the book; the joyous support of the slaves freed by the March as followed the troops, Sherman's well planned tactical maneuvers which enabled his armies to traverse creeks, streams and rivers, and the failure of the Southern leaders especially Jefferson Davis to comprehend the magnitude of Sherman's offensive. Trudeau, to his credit, proves that fact supplants opinion by saving the editorializing overviews to the ending chapter. This is a book which is convincing because of its rigorous attention to detail and the fairness and writing skill of the author.

If the average person were to be asked to name an event of the American Civil War, it is likely that Sherman's March would be near the top of the list, possibly ahead even of Gettysburg. A 20th Century series of damaging floods in Georgia were referred to as the "worse devastation since Sherman's Civil War march to the sea," and an Atlanta sportswriter referred to a disgraced Atlanta Braves' player as "the most disliked person hereabouts since William Tecumseh Sherman." During the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, T-shirts were sold, portraying a fiery image of the general, with the legend, "Atlanta's Original Torch Bearer." Routinely, visitors to ante-bellum homes, not only in Georgia but also in Mississippi and Alabama are treated by the docents to gory tales of what Sherman did to their town. They are befuddled when reminded that, (a) obviously the house we are in did not get burned, and (b) Sherman was no where near here.

Noah Andre Trudeau has written a number of books on the Civil War, among them, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865, an excellent account of the role of the United States Colored Troops, and added to these with Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea.

Trudeau's concern is that most books by and about the March have not tried to nail down exactly what Sherman expected to accomplish and exactly what really did go on. If the destruction was as great as not only remembered by Georgians, but bragged about by Sherman's boys, then why have so many ante-bellum properties survived.

Trudeau argues that the campaign was a highly organized, carefully planned operation, with ample room for Sherman to improvise. When he departed from Atlanta, on November 15-16, 1874, his troops were not travelling lean and mean. "Packed into more than 2500 wagons were a twenty-day supply of bread, forty days or sugar, coffee, and salt and three days worth of animal feed. Moving with the lengthy wagon trains were 5,000 cattle, representing a forty day beef supply." [538] Indeed, his wagon trains were larger per thousand men than were those the Army of the Potomac took into the Wilderness six months before.

Trudeau was also committed to discovering exactly what happened during the march. He dug deeply into writings of both Yankees and Rebels, their letters, their diaries, and to a lesser degree, their reminiscences. His bibliography is thirty-seven pages of fine type, mining numerous manuscript and newspaper sources, as well as dozens of published articles from historical magazines and autobiographies.

Starting with a quick discussion of the post-capture of Atlanta troops movements and the development of Sherman's idea to march to the Atlantic, Trudeau starts Sherman's army from the Atlanta area on November 15, 1864. Each day's march is illustrated by a small quarter page map of that day's troop activities, which would be very helpful if one wanted to drive the March. In addition, Trudeau discovered in his research that the weather was always mentioned by diarists and letter writers, if forgotten by memorialists and autobiographers, so each little map has an inset of that days weather (November 15 was clear, high 40s, low 50s). He argues that the weather played a major role in the campaign with the initial fine weather turning nasty with extensive rains and continued chilly conditions, something Sherman had not counted on.

A typical day, using Tuesday, November 22, went something like this: it snowed in the morning, then cleared in the afternoon with the temperature ranging from upper 20s to low 40s. Henry Slocum's Left Wing moved slowly toward the then-state capitol, Milledgeville, shivering in the cold. Advance units reached the town in the afternoon and evening. The troops moved through, with Slocum making his headquarter's in the local hotel. The residents hung out white flags, a successful protection device for their homes while the inmates torched the state penitentiary. And the blacks greeted their liberators with cheers and dancing in the street. Some African-Americans were not as lucky: an 8th Texas cavalryman recorded in his diary that they "whipped about 1,000 negros, who were on their way to the enemy."

Uncle Billy made his headquarters in the plantation of Confederate politician Howell Cobb, noticing the way the evening sky was lit by the surrounding campfires. Someone turned up a recent Cobb proclamation urging Georgians to assail the Yankees on all sides -- and that was enough to doom Cobb's property.

The Confederates, now convinced that Sherman was not heading to Macon, decided that Augusta with its powder works was the real target and made plans to dismantle the works. The Confederate response to Sherman was hampered by divided command between Wheeler, Beauregard, Hardee and Gov. Brown, each split off form the others by lack of a telegraph, whose lines had been cut by Sherman.

Oliver Howard's Right Wing was sliding past Macon and dealing with the snow and the resulting mud. An important aspect of Sherman's Army were the Pontoon trains that accompanied each wing, waiting to provide instant bridges over any water that could stop the Yankees. The 25th also saw skirmishing at Griswoldville between the Right Wing troops and Confederates from Macon.

Sherman reached Savannah on December 22, occupying the city and making contact with the blockading U.S. Navy ships.

Trudeau is continually concerned with exactly how much damage was actually done to property on the way - not as much as both the Confederate memories and the Yankee boastings would remember - and with the impact of the March on the War.

Where the troops actually passed, damage was extensive: animals killed, fences cut down to build campfires. "Many of us are utterly ruined," one Bulloch County farmer wrote. More fences than houses were destroyed -as is evident by the number of ante-bellum homes that can be toured in the path of Sherman's Boys. The biggest property loss were the slaves who, in the thousands, tramped after the liberating Yankees. Railroads had ties burned and rails bent. Slocum reported that his Left Wing destroyed 119 miles of railroad.

But as soon as the shock passed, people began to rebuild. Telegraph service from Mobile to Richmond had been restored by New Years Day and by January 3, 1865, Confederate engineer, Major General J. F. Gilmer was able to report "cars now run from Macon to Milledgeville."

Ironically, the greatest damage Sherman caused was the exact opposite of what he intended. Trudeau argues that Sherman was a conservative who wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and restore the old world. But the psychological destruction to Georgia society, even more than the physical destruction, made that impossible.

Southern Storm is a superb retelling of this iconic Civil War campaign and will make a welcome addition to your shelves.

Immensely disappointing.
Sherman's "March to the Sea" is an American military epic that has long needed a fresh look and interpretation given the enormous amount of material that has become readily accessible to civil war historians in the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, Mr Trudeau, author of a fine book on Gettysburg (though inferior in so many respects to that produced by Stephen W. Sears at about the same time) has done the research, but has failed to synthesize it into a readable, dynamic, informative, and compelling account. The narrative has no natural flow and one gets the impression that Mr Trudeau decided that, by gum, he had to wade through all of those boring diaries, letters, and reports until his eyelids became singed from boredom and the reader is going to have to suffer also. The fact that letter or diary accounts of events exist is no compelling reason for an historian to quote them ad nauseum; rather, it is the function of the historian to sift the material and present its significance or the power of its narrattive or description to the reader. An early example of this is Mr Trudeau's account of the destruction of Atlanta. He recounts diary excerpt after letter excerpt describing how buildings, etc were destroyed; yet nowhere does he sum it all up and describe just how much destruction Sherman caused in Atlanta and what its military significance was. Indeed, at one point Mr Trudeau takes pains to quote Gen Sherman's orders to his Chief Engineer not to use fire as a weapon of destruction only to, several pages later, accuse Sherman of "firing" Atlanta.
The march to the sea, as presented by Mr Trudeau, is an endless series of quotations from diaries, etc that has very little flow and almost no military insight. In fact, Mr Tudeau is at his weakest when discussing military matters and seems to have discovered most of them while doing research for this book. Mr Trudeau offers us no real insight to the various generals and politicians involved in this narrative and, I would argue, that he really has no insight into them. There is very little of the dynamics between the various Union Commanders and very little of the broader military picture.
One gets the impression that this subject is just a little beyond Mr Trudeau's expertise or ability.
As an aside, the publisher sure didn't spend a lot of money on maps. Was it the end of the fiscal year and they ran out of money? If a subject cries out for detailed maps, it's this one.
A new, fresh account of one of the most famous campaigns in American military history still is waiting to be written.

Sherman's March to the Sea is a simple story. Hood took off for Tennessee, Wheeler presented no real threat and Confederate leadership dithered. For the men it was a long walk in the sun with ample food taken from the local population. In the process, they tore the heart out of Georgia and broke the moral of the Confederacy. Given such a simple story, how could anyone write a 688-page book that is worth reading?
Noah Andre Trudeau is one of our best authors with a number of excellent books and prestigious awards. His writing style conveys large amounts of information in a readable manner that makes large books easy to read. This skill helps the reader by keeping the story fresh and interesting in this very detailed account of the campaign.
The book opens with an explanation of how Sherman came up with the idea for the campaign and how he talked Thomas, Grant & Lincoln, via Halleck, into approving it. The author says the Meridian Mississippi Campaign provided the idea for The March. I feel that he should have gone back to Grant's Vicksburg Campaign for the idea. The Mississippi Campaign may have proven living off the land is practical but the Vicksburg Campaign started the idea. This is a minor point and subject to debate. The second and equally major idea is the role of civilians in the Southern war effort. The author gives us a detailed description of Sherman's ideas on this subject and how they developed during the course of the war. The selling of his idea presents a side of Sherman we seldom see. Here is an accomplished administrator at his best. Alternating assuring Thomas, watching Hood and explaining things to Grant & Halleck, step by step the project is approved.
The heart of the book is the daily chapters, where the activities of all major formations are detailed. Each chapter has a map, showing weather, marching routes and population centers. This daily map keeps the reader in the story and located in Georgia. Gradually, we see how the march is developing and can trace the major formations' progress. This is a major benefit and one of the books strongest points. In addition to the daily map, any significant fighting has a map too. I want to congratulate HarperCollins Publishing for not stinting on this critical item. They have taken a very good book and made it a great one by including these maps.
Sherman's major formations are the Left Wing, the Right Wing and the Cavalry. Depending on the situation, independent detachments appear as required. The work is marching, destruction and foraging. Each day, miles must be covered, food must be found, regulations enforced, infrastructure destroyed and Confederate forces kept at bay. Very quickly, we come to appreciate how complex this campaign is. The rank & file is required to make a huge effort each day. Protecting the wagon train may be the most wearing duty. Encumbered by the slow moving wagons, mud, poor roads and hills these men alternately stand and run. This is in addition to pushing wagons up hills and pulling them out of the mud holes.
Straying to far from the road leads to death. Straggling leads to death. Confederate response while generally ineffective can be deadly for isolated parties. The author does an excellent job of detailing the problems in mounting a response to Sherman. These problems, while endemic during the war, seem much worse during this campaign. "Joe Brown's Pets", a divided and confused command structure, John B. Hood's Tennessee adventure, States Rights, P.G.T. Beauregard, William J. Hardee and Jefferson Davis all have roles in the unfolding disaster. Joe Wheeler is the only person that tries to mount an effective response. Resources, orders and his problems as a commander limit how effective the response is. This is not a long dull walk in the sun. This is a very difficult, dangerous and somewhat speculative campaign.
This is a detailed account. The daily format ensures the reader will have a full picture of the dangers and difficulties. This sequential approach ensures that the reader instantly understands each encounter or problem. The ugly incident where General Davis strands Afro-Americans on the wrong side of the creek is fully explored with realistic and fair comments by the author.
The last chapter, "At the Right Moment and in the Right Direction", is a fitting finial to the story. The author provides a clear assessment of the campaign from both a Northern & Southern perspective. In addition, he gives us a glimpse of the making of an American epic.
I am a huge fan of Noah Andre Trudeau's books. He is an excellent writer that produces well thought out readable informative histories. This may not be his best book but it is one of his best books and deserves consideration as his best.