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Southern Storm : Sherman's March to the Sea…
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Southern Storm : Sherman's March to the Sea (original 2008; edition 2009)

by Noah Andre Trudeau (Author), Kara Strubel (Designer), Joseph Ibrahim (Cover designer)

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409861,202 (3.95)16
Award-winning Civil War historian Trudeau has written a fascinating new history of Sherman's legendary and devastating march through Georgia. Told through diaries and letters of Sherman's soldiers, this work paints a vivid picture of an event that changed the course of America.
Member:anthonywillard
Title:Southern Storm : Sherman's March to the Sea
Authors:Noah Andre Trudeau (Author)
Other authors:Kara Strubel (Designer), Joseph Ibrahim (Cover designer)
Info:Harper Perennial
Collections:Your library
Rating:*****
Tags:Civil War, Savannah Campaign, Sherman's March to the Sea, Georgia, 1864, Milledgeville, Savannah

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Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea by Noah Andre Trudeau (2008)

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Noah Andre Trudeau's Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea was a short book based upon a variety of AAR's, diary, and journal entries.

The book highlights as the title indicates the period from the capture of Atlanta to the end of the capturing of Savannah. The book highlights big picture leadership from the perspective of Union and Confederate Generals Sherman, Wheeler. Joseph Johnston, P G.T Beauregard, Bragg, Kilpatrick, among others.

The book is almost a day by day accounting of the campaign and goes into great detail of the unit action, foraging details, and Sherman's continued evolution of total war and bringing the war to the Southern people and the destruction of the Southern infrastructure including the destruction of railroads and public buildings. Sherman is often vilified for this period, but ultimately, he fed and supplied his troops by living of the people of Georgia and South Carolina while effectively removing him and his troops with communication with General Grant and the Lincoln administration until the drive was almost complete.

While some don't like the structure and style of the book, I found it to be an interesting and effective organization. Which shed great light on campaign specifics as well as general lack of Confederate resources and leadership at this point of the war.

Not the biggest or most detailed bok at 548 pages of reading it was nonetheless a solid 4-star book on the subject, and I would recommend it to all. ( )
  dsha67 | Apr 7, 2023 |
As I'm neither a professional nor an amateur historian, I cannot critique the content of Trudeau's Southern Storm. As a native Georgian, I've long been subject to the animosity accorded to Sherman in the South to this day, and I'm glad to have finally learned more about the man and his military conquest.

I have two criticisms. First, the author and editor employ an unusual--even willfully obtuse--system of notes. There are no references on any page of the text. Rather, quotes must be looked up in a Notes section in the back, which is organized by page number. For example, the Notes section lists eight quotes on page 406, with citations; yet there are significantly more quotes on that page. Each page is set in rather small type, so there is a lot of ground to cover. A standard (numbered) note system would have worked much better; even more, footnotes rather than endnotes should always be used, as the latter are vestigial appendages of the difficult days of typesetting, long since eradicated with modern word processing software.

The second criticism is minor: there is a helpful "Union Forces Roster" followed by a "Confederate Forces Roster" on pages 549-563. This would be better placed at the beginning, akin to a dramatis personnae in a drama. Non-specialist readers would thus have a better sense of who is on what side from the beginning.

Five stars from me. ( )
  RAD66 | Nov 12, 2020 |
I previously reviewed Noah Andre Trudeau’s Gettysburg so I picked up Southern Storm when it turned up in the remainder bin. I think I liked Gettysburg a little better, but Southern Storm isn’t half bad.


In the unlikely case that you are unfamiliar with the American Civil War: After the Union victory at Chattanooga, Ulysses S. Grant is summoned to Washington to run things there while Sherman is left behind to run things in Georgia. Confederate General Joseph Johnston conducts an extremely skillful retreat toward Atlanta, but the Confederate government is not interested in retreating generals but in attacking generals, and Johnston is replaced by John Bell Hood. Hood attacks, alright, but loses all the battles and is forced to abandon Atlanta and retreat to the southwest.


Up until now, most large Union armies in the West have been supported by river. Sherman in Atlanta has a single track railway for support, and Hood’s cavalry, particular Nathan Bedford Forrest, tear the line up on almost a daily basis. Sherman is a veteran of the Vicksburg campaign, where the Union Army did quite well living off the Southern countryside until it invested Vicksburg and linked up with the river, and thus suggests to Grant (by telegraph) that he simply abandon his supply line and strike out across Georgia to somewhere on the coast. Grant is initially reluctant but on Sherman’s promise that he will send sufficient troops back into Tennessee to defend Nashville, Grant acquiesces (in an interesting contrast to Confederate practice, Lincoln goes along with his generals’ advice). Hood falls in with Sherman’s plans by marching into Tennessee rather than remaining as a covering force in Georgia. And while Hood is marching through Tennessee, Sherman marches through Georgia.


Trudeau makes some interesting comments on conventional wisdom about the March to the Sea. My previous belief is that Sherman planned from the first to “live off the country”; while, in fact, he did plan on foraging as much as possible he actually had sufficient rations in his wagon train to supply his army for a month (including a herd of over 5000 cattle). Thus even if Sherman hadn’t touched a bit of Confederate foodstuff, he still would have been able to get the army to Savannah. (They probably would be pretty tired of hardtack by the time they got there, but they wouldn’t have starved). In order to defeat Sherman, opposing Confederate forces would have had to both prevent him from foraging and capture or destroy his supply train; they didn’t even come remotely close to accomplishing either. Increasingly strident proclamations from Richmond kept advising Georgians in Sherman’s path to destroy supplies before Sherman got to them; the problem with that was nobody in the South (and, in fact, nobody in Sherman’s army, including Sherman) knew where Sherman’s “path” was going to go. This is not to say that Sherman was wandering around at random, but rather that at any point in the campaign he had multiple strategic options: Atlanta to Macon and thence to Mobile or Pensacola; Atlanta to Augusta and thence to Charleston or Savannah; Atlanta direct to Savannah.


I was also intrigued to see that Sherman did most of his own staff work. For example, Sherman had a copy of the 1860 US Census and marked his campaign maps with the amount of pork, corn, yams, poultry and other foodstuff produced by each county in Georgia. Once the campaign started, he left things up to his wing commanders, Oliver Howard and Henry Slocum, just giving them a direction to go and turning them loose. Trudeau points out that neither Howard or Slocum had a reputation for being particularly imaginative, which probably made them ideal for this campaign; they weren’t likely to go off on their own.


Sherman’s “secret weapon” was the pontoon train and his Chief of Engineers, Captain Orlando Poe. There were two regiments of “pontoniers”, who also repaired bridges and corduroyed roads as necessary. (Sherman had to cross over 200 creeks or rivers potentially requiring pontoons; in some cases bridges were captured, repaired or built from scratch). Trudeau doesn’t mention a fact that other historians have noted; early in the war the Confederacy had dismissed Northern soldiers as “pasty-faced mechanics” while Southerners were “hardy tillers of the soil”. In fact, Sherman’s army included entire regiments of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota lumberjacks who turned out to be pretty adept at fabricating bridges out of Georgia pine and who probably would have made some comment on anybody who called them “pasty-face” (On the way to Atlanta, the pasty-face mechanics had started with standing trees and built an 800-foot railroad bridge in three days). Southern soldiers considered any sort of manual labor beneath free men (at least Georgia militia did; the Army of Northern Virginia had learned that digging trenches might be “slave work” but had salient utility).


Trudeau’s main problem with the March to the Sea is that nothing much happened. There was a minor fight between six Union and five Confederate regiments at Griswoldville, on the outskirts of Macon; four Union cavalry regiments (mostly fighting dismounted) took on three Confederate cavalry regiments (also fighting dismounted) at Waynesboro, on the road to Augusta (a feint to persuade the Confederates they were heading that way); and, of course, the siege of Savannah. Even these weren’t as big as they sound; the paper strength of a Union infantry regiment was around 900 but at Griswoldville the largest Union regiment had 366 men (the Union practice was to create new regiments rather than add replacements to old ones; this allowed for more officers and thus more political patronage). The rest of the time the army simply marched, firing the odd shot at distant Confederate cavalry here and there. Union losses were astonishingly small – although records are sparse, Sherman’s army of around 60000 seems to have lost less than 2500 killed, wounded, and missing for the entire campaign from Atlanta to Savannah.


Trudeau also notes that the devastation to Southern infrastructure caused by the March is also exaggerated. Although “Sherman neckties” (railroad rails heated on a fire of ties and wrapped around a tree) and “Sherman sentries” (the brick chimneys remaining from burnt out buildings) are features of Gone With The Wind, the South was able to get railroad and telegraph service between Macon and Augusta restored a little more than a month after Sherman had passed. What the March did do is make it obvious that the Confederacy couldn’t defend anywhere distant from the Army of Northern Virginia.


The Confederate response to the March was a study in disorganization. The basic problem was Richmond had no troops but plenty of generals. Thus at various times Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, William Hardee, John Bell Hood, and Richard Taylor all had commands in the area. While, as noted, Sherman’s destruction of Confederate infrastructure wasn’t permanent the temporary effects were pronounced, as the various Confederate generals disappeared into the fog of war where telegraph and rail communications had been lost, only to pop up somewhere else too late to do anything about Sherman. The Confederacy also made the classic mistake of trying to defend everything; the major cities (Augusta, Macon, and Savannah) all had substantial troop concentrations busy fortifying rather than concentrating to meet Sherman in the field, and as demonstrated by Savannah the fortifications at any one city really wouldn’t have slowed him down much if he had decided to go that way. The available Confederate cavalry under Joseph Wheeler was also parceled out between the commands rather than concentrating for an attack on Sherman’s rear; each commander wanted cavalry reconnaissance support leading to lots of reports on where Sherman was without doing anything about him being there.


This leads to classic alternate history questions, and Trudeau speculates a little. The first question is what of Hood had stayed close to Atlanta and Sherman rather than invading Tennessee? Well, the whole premise of the campaign was the assumption that Hood would take himself out of the picture. At the start of the campaign Sherman outnumbered Hood almost four to one. If Hood had stayed in northern Georgia or Alabama, Sherman presumably would have gone and fought him. While the outcome of that is not a forgone conclusion, Hood hadn’t won a battle against Sherman yet.


Richmond’s dream was that the citizens of Georgia would fly to arms en masse and stop Sherman. The problem was just about every white male of military age was already in the army and elsewhere in the Confederacy. The militia units scattered around Georgia were already using freed prison inmates and conscripted factory workers and totaled around 10000; even if a force that size could have been concentrated in Sherman’s path and supplied they scarcely would have annoyed him.


One thing that might have changed history is if Sherman had been killed in action. There was scarcely any action that would have made that a possibility until the siege of Savannah, but assuming a stray bullet or bacillus turned up, it might well have made things a little more interesting. As mentioned, Trudeau notes that Sherman’s subordinates were noted for being steady rather than imaginative; it’s possible they may have decided to retreat to Atlanta rather than carry on the campaign. Even this would only work if the campaign was just under way; once everybody was deep in Georgia the only militarily sensible thing was to keep going and given the disparity of forces even an unimaginative general could handle that.


As mentioned, the pontoon trains were essential to the campaign and Trudeau speculates that a successful cavalry attack on the pontoon train could have changed things. Even that would have been temporary, though; pontoon boats aren’t that complicated and, as noted, the army was full of skilled carpenters. The best to be hoped for would have been a couple of days delay. If there had been a large Confederate army in pursuit or on the flank that might have made a difference – but there wasn’t.


A final game changer would have been bad weather. Trudeau did extensive research on weather, and the maps for every day of the march note the weather conditions. Sherman had fairly good luck; there were only a couple of days of rain, probably unusual for November and December in Georgia. When there was bad weather, it did hamper Sherman considerably; wagons and soldiers bogged down in the mud and rivers rose enough to make crossing problematical. A week of heavy rain might well have been pretty unpleasant.


Very good maps; as mentioned, Trudeau provides a map for every day of the campaign plus detailed maps for what battles there were. Unfortunately, the maps are missing names for the rivers (the rivers themselves are shown but are not labeled, which makes it hard to correlate with the text). The maps also lack scales, an annoying omission; when I took a cartography course the instructor said the first thing you put on a map is a direction arrow and a scale and only then do you start drawing other stuff.


The appendix includes orders of battle for both sides; it would have been nice to add approximate numbers, since as mentioned “regiments” could vary greatly in size. The bibliography is extensive.


I’ve got half a dozen books on the March to the Sea; this is far and away the best. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 19, 2017 |
Trudeau's usual style of daily entries for the five or so weeks of the campaign. Since Sherman advanced in four columns, or sometimes five, there is an entry for each of them on most days. Sometimes there is coverage of the Confederate side, but apparently the records are scanty, compared to Union records and diaries. Also, for most of the march there was not much Confederate opposition, and Savannah was evacuated and surrendered after only a short battle at a peripheral fort. A somewhat revisionist account, downplaying the extent of destruction, but not idolizing Sherman. Gives a lot of credit to his subordinates. The author believes that the most notable accomplishment of this campaign was the logistics, bringing the army through almost entire and in reasonably good conditions through enemy territory, with no supply line (though they carried lots of supplies in addition to foraging), and very difficult terrain, especially through the swamps and flooded rice fields of lowland Georgia.

I recommend this book highly for those who want a day-by-day account at ground level of the campaign. I do not recommend it to Lost Cause believers or Sherman worshippers. Or to anyone looking for an overview. ( )
  anthonywillard | Dec 28, 2014 |
“Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea” is the first book by Noah A Trudeau and the second book on William Tecumseh Sherman that I have read. Trudeau has done an excellent job of writing what should be a popular history on an iconic event in the history of the United States, an event that has suffered at the hands of partisan revision at the hands of Southern “historians”. The campaign was brutal, Sherman intended to destroy any military asset in his path and he had his troops foraging to extend the supplies they brought with them. They took any horses needed to replace their worn mounts and destroyed broken down mounts and pack animals to prevent them from later serving the rebels. Did civilian homes burn? Sure some did, it was a windy dry day in Atlanta and Sherman was not going to risk his men fighting the spread of fires. As Sherman said to a complaining rebel prisoner, anyone that starts a war has no right to complain of the violence.

The book reads like the works of Cornelius Ryan. Ryan attended reunions of World War Two veterans for both sides to collect his personal stories. Trudeau had diaries. He had so many diaries that he was able to reconstruct the weather, he said he had at least six references to the weather from each day. What are future historians going to do? Will they be able to look at old Facebook pages and Twitter feeds?

There were a few disappointments in the book. The maps could have had a scale on them. I was often wondered were his lines separated by miles or tens of miles. “Special Field Orders #15”, forty acres and a mule, which could be the most controversial aspect of the entire operation was only mentioned in one paragraph. Without prior knowledge of the Special Order a reader would not have a clue what it was about from Trudeau’s work. Even though the subtitle was “Sherman’s march to the sea” I was a little disappointed that the narrative ended with Sherman in Savannah. Sherman and his Army of the West pulled up stakes and marched through the Carolinas and into Virginia, where is that story? The post march history was interesting but can be summed up simply, the north is proud of Sherman and the Army of the West for their brave efforts to shorten the war of rebellion and the south resents hearing about it.

It was a good read, informative and at times entertaining. I recommend it, as long as 550 pages of text with an extra 200 pages of index, bibliography, and muster rolls does not seem overwhelming. I was concerned about the length, it did take longer than usual for me to finish it but at no time did the book seem to drag or become repetitive which is sometimes a problem when an author has a point they want to make so badly that they are willing to beat it to death. This is not that sort of book but the sparse treatment of the benefits derived from the labors of the African Americans who left their “owners” and volunteered their local knowledge and labor to the Army of the West makes me wonder if anything else was overlooked. ( )
1 vote TLCrawford | Nov 26, 2014 |
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Award-winning Civil War historian Trudeau has written a fascinating new history of Sherman's legendary and devastating march through Georgia. Told through diaries and letters of Sherman's soldiers, this work paints a vivid picture of an event that changed the course of America.

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