First published 2008
Noah Andre Trudeau reconstructs General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march from Atlanta to Savannah during the final phase of the Civil War. Following Lincoln's reelection, Ulysses S. Grant authorized Sherman to execute the war's most ambitious and dangerous operation. Trudeau traces how Sherman led over 60,000 Union soldiers across Georgia in a campaign designed to destroy not just Confederate military capacity but Southern society itself. The author details Sherman's orders to burn crops, slaughter livestock, and obliterate the infrastructure supporting the Rebel war effort. This sixty-mile-wide path of destruction split the Confederacy and severed supply lines to Lee's besieged forces in Virginia. Trudeau draws extensively from the personal diaries and letters of Sherman's soldiers and the Southern civilians caught in their path. Through these firsthand accounts, he reveals why Sherman's name remains cursed throughout Georgia and the broader South. The book demonstrates how this calculated strategy of total war succeeded in breaking Confederate resistance and hastening the conflict's end.
Genres: biography, history, american-civil-war, american-fiction, 20th-century, military-history, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-fiction
Setting: Atlanta, Georgia, Savannah, Virginia
Period: Civil War
671 pages · Hardcover · Harper