Georgia in the Civil War

Atlanta Intelligencer, Atlanta GA.

I intend to make Georgia howl. William Tecumseh Sherman

By the 1930s, most of those who’d lived through the American Civil War were long gone. The war was beginning to fade from the American memory, or at least become less prominent. However, one book and the movie that it spawned not only brought the history of the Civil War to the 20th Century, but brought the particular plight of the state of Georgia during the Civil War to the forefront.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind fictionalized the Civil War through the eyes of that perennial Southern Belle, Scarlett O’Hara, but the state of Georgia and the plight of its citizens during the Civil War figured as prominently in the novel as Scarlett or any other character, and transfixed Southerners and Northerners alike.

Georgia’s Civil War history begins late in the conflict. Although Georgia was one of the first states to secede, and sent 100,000 some men to war, no battles were fought on the state’s soil until late in the war. However, when war came to Georgia, it was total war.

Georgia had the unfortunate luck to be on the receiving end Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s decision to bring the Confederacy to its knees by destroying the morale of both the army and the civilians, enacting a scorched earth policy that would not only apply to the Confederate troops, but also to those at home. Sherman famously stated during the war that:

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Sherman made good on that goal. He began his infamous “March to the Sea” by decimating the city of Atlanta. He terrorized the people of the state as he made his way to the port of Savannah, looting and burning civilian homes as he went. The following is part of his orders to his troops regarding the march through Georgia:

By the time Sherman made his “christmas gift” of Savannah to General Grant and President Lincoln in late 1864, the swath he’d made through Georgia was a charred, barren wasteland and the Confederacy was chastened and beaten. The war was over in less than six months, the destruction wrought on the civilians and troops alike in Georgia a bitter lesson learned.

Yet the Confederacy had brought shame to Georgia, as well, in the form of the horrific Andersonville prison camp, where many Union soldiers were interred, many of whom died there, often from disease brought on by the camp’s terrible sanitary conditions, or from malnutrition. The best known and most despised of the Civil War prison camps, Andersonville was a perfect example of the horror of war.

Despite the ruin that Georgia suffered during the war, it was one of the first southern states to recover financially after the war in the Reconstruction era. However, the grudge the state held against the Union remained for years; in 1870, Georgia became one of the last Southern states to rejoin the Union.