Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea
By Noah Andre Trudeau
(Price: $35.00)
Award-winning Civil War historian Noah Andre Trudeau has written a gripping, definitive new account that will stand as the last word on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s epic march—a targeted strategy aimed to break not only the Confederate army but an entire society as well. With Lincoln’s hard-fought reelection victory in hand, Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union forces, allowed Sherman to lead the largest and riskiest operation of the war. In rich detail, Trudeau explains why General Sherman’s name is still anathema below the Mason-Dixon Line, especially in Georgia, where he is remembered as “the one who marched to the sea with death and devastation in his wake.”
Noah Andre Trudeau has written a wonderfully colorful and sprawling work that is impressively researched and incredibly readable. Using hundreds of individual soldier recollections, he reconstructs this historic event through the eyes of the average soldier along with the commanders. The narrative is at times repetitive and cumbersome due to the amount of soldier notes, but it nonetheless plays to the mood and tone of the book.
Trudeau also upholds Mark Grimsley’s assessment of Sherman’s march as a fairly conservative expression of war with limited goals. As the author points out, Sherman was never comfortable with the later depiction of his march and always contended that is was nothing more than a “change of base,” as he later said. Though the devastation played out by his “bummers” was “significant,” Trudeau reports that the winter of 1864/65 was not marked by any wide-spread famine and therefore its affects were limited. (Unfortunately the citation for this was not in my review copy as I would question this statement.)
Though I enjoyed the book, I was hoping someone would attempt again to place the “March to the Sea” back in the realm of “total war;” but alas perhaps that can never happen again! There was not wide-spread attack on the Civilian population apparently required for such a label, and for the most part the bumming that took place did not devastate the population, or so it seems.
Pity.
