Chapter One: The Python's Parade of Part II

Washington, D.C.
May 24, 1865

Twenty-two hundred and thirty-four years after Epaminondas's homecoming, a triumphant parade marched through Washington, D.C. By all contemporary accounts the army of William Tecumseh Sherman both delighted -- and awed -- the Washington crowd. Sherman himself, who rode with his men like a Roman imperator, was proud of that dual nature of his soldiers, an army of deadly democratic avengers that had burnt its way through Georgia in wonderful order, ruining for the cause of freedom the rich countryside in its path. The narrative of his memoirs closes with a description of that last ceremonial march of his men:

It was, in my judgment, the most magnificent army in existence -- sixty-five thousand men, in splendid physique, who had just completed a march of nearly two thousand miles in a hostile country....The steadiness and firmness of the tread, the careful dress on the guides, the uniform intervals between the companies, all eyes directly to the front, and the tattered and bullet-riven flags, festooned with flowers, all attracted universal notice. Many good people, up to that time, had looked upon our Western army as a sort of mob; but the world then saw, and recognized the fact, that it was an army in the proper sense, well organized, well commanded and disciplined; and there was no wonder that it had swept through the South like a tornado. For six hours and a half the strong tread of the Army of the West resounded along Pennsylvania Avenue; not a soul of that vast crowd of spectators left his place; and, when the rear of the column had passed by, thousands of the spectators still lingered to express their sense of confidence in the strength of a Government which could claim such an army.

Sherman himself would never have been content had his men simply marched in good order and discipline like Grant's Easterners in the Army of the Potomac. His "tornado," after all, was not exactly an Eastern army. Something else made his veterans, his perceived "mob" different, and he was not about to let the world forget it -- many of his men had refused the newly issued blue parade uniforms, but kept on the ragged clothes worn continuously since the march through the woods of Georgia six months earlier. Sherman thus finished his description on a more Roman note:

Each division was followed by six ambulances, as a representative of its baggage-train. Some of the division commanders had added, by way of variety, goats, milch-cows, and pack-mules, whose loads consisted of game-cocks, poultry, hams, etc., and some of them had the families of freed slaves along, with the women leading their children. Each division was preceded by its corps of black pioneers, armed with picks and spades. These marched abreast in double ranks, keeping perfect dress and step, and added much to the interest of the occasion.

Sherman's was an army that was wilder and more rugged than other Northern corps, and yet still far better equipped, disciplined, organized -- and more lethal -- than the battle-hardened veterans of the South it opposed in 1864. Just as Epaminondas's rustic Thebans had outshone their purportedly professional Arcadian allies and terrified the crack troops of Sparta, so too Sherman's Westerners, who had routed or bypassed all veteran Southern forces, also made the well-drilled and veteran Army of the Potomac look in comparison somewhat soft. For Sherman's men, the spring parade was just another -- simply the last -- day on the long march; but for Grant's troopers the ceremonial procession was something quite unlike the months of crawling and digging in the mud of Virginia. Other observers that May afternoon at once perceived the Westerners' army's incongruous ferocity and recklessness beneath its veneer of seeming order and precision. On the following day, May 24, the New York Times described Sherman's army as "tall, erect, broad shouldered men, the peasantry of the west, the best material on earth for armies. The brigades move by with an elastic step."

Most contemporaries naturally compared Grant's and Sherman's men, noting that it was much harder to distinguish officers from enlisted men in the Army of the West. Sherman's troops walked, even talked, differently from other corps; they somehow seemed "more intelligent, self-reliant, and determined." Marching through an enemy country and destroying its economic infrastructure and social strata -- while losing less than 1 percent of an army -- can instill confidence in soldiers in a way that camp life, entrenchment, and even ferocious set battles cannot.

Sherman's enlisted men themselves were aware that the Union's other great army had settled in Virginia and ended there, while they had started in Tennessee, marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, and finished their circle ten months later right beside the sluggish Army of the Potomac. A soldier from the 7th Iowa wrote -- perhaps rather unfairly -- of Sherman's men and the Army of the Potomac, "The difference in the two armies is this: They have remained in camp and lived well; we have marched, fought and gone hungry and ended the war." A Minnesota recruit scoffed of the Easterners, "The more I see of this Army [Potomac] the more I am disgusted with operations for the last years. If there had been an army worth anything here, Richmond would have fallen three years ago."

Sherman's veterans failed to appreciate that their corps, except for normal furloughs, were one and the same army that had left Atlanta a half a year earlier. In that sense, their esprit de corps was more akin to Epaminondas's hoplites than to Grant's army, which, in contrast, was in reality a continually metamorphosing body. In its revolving-door manner of mustering, thousands of its crack troops were to be killed in a series of harrowing assaults in the Wilderness (May 5-12, 1864), Cold Harbor (June 3, 1864), and outside Petersburg (June-October 1864), always to be replaced by a continual stream of raw and often anonymous human fodder. In a way, the Army of the Potomac was not an army at all, but an abstraction, an organization that facilitated the recruitment of mostly adolescents, their brief training, their charges into battle, ending all too often a few weeks or months later in their deaths or injuries. To Grant and his army, men -- in the general and brutal sense of sheer manpower that shot iron into the flesh of the enemy -- were the key to Northern victory; in contrast, the Westerners under Sherman believed that their particular men alone would both win and survive the war.

All Union troops in both armies sensed that dichotomy: by late summer 1864, those with Sherman felt that in the year to come they would live, while a great many with Grant knew they would probably die. Not one soldier in Sherman's army pinned paper with his name to his back -- the nineteenth-century equivalent of dog tags -- as he marched toward battle. The Ohioan C.B. Welton wrote home of his general that Sherman "was a great military genius who depends upon his brains to win his victories instead of the lives of his men." An officer on General Thomas's staff agreed that Sherman knew "it is sometimes much easier to fight with the legs and feet than with muskets and cannon."

The outward appearance of invincibility of the Westerners was due in large part to the fact that they had fought and marched together for over a year and had survived the ordeal. When General Peter Osterhaus's 15th Corps marched past the Washington reviewing stand -- they had occupied the southern wing during Sherman's March to the Sea -- the German ambassador remarked, "An army like that could whip all Europe." Of the 20th Corps -- half of Sherman's renamed Army of Georgia -- that followed, he added, "An army like that could whip the world." And finally when its sister corps, the 14th under the fiery General Jefferson C. Davis, passed, he concluded, "An army like that could whip the devil."

In the same manner that Epaminondas's Thebans stood apart from their Arcadian allies when they entered Laconia, so too Sherman's men were intimidating even to their own Union comrades. Before they were removed to the opposite bank of the Potomac, the Westerners in camp habitually picked fights with Easterners, drank, were disobedient, and required Sherman himself to ride out into the streets at night to calm his men. Some had no shoes. All were sunburnt from their last leg through the Carolinas. Blacks from Georgia and the Carolinas marched proudly in the ranks, and the men still carried plunder from the plantations of the South.

Why this nearly unanimous verdict on the superiority of Sherman's men? They had fought in few bloodbaths like the Army of the Potomac's against Lee -- nothing quite like Gettysburg, the Wilderness, or Cold Harbor. Nearly two-thirds of all Northern casualties in the Civil War came from the Army of the Potomac, which had continuously battled Robert E. Lee's crack Army of Northern Virginia for over three years.

The answer was nevertheless clear to the thousands of onlookers in Washington: Sherman's men had marched, moved hundreds of miles, and survived, whereas too many of Grant's were fixed and had died. The former had sliced through hostile territory and freed slaves, destroyed property, and brought fire and ruin to the enemy; the latter fought not far from home, pitted against like military kind, and had rarely touched the economy that fueled the enemy. The South would hate Sherman, whose troops had killed relatively few Confederates, for a century to come, but come to forgive Grant their future president, whose army butchered its best soldiers -- a propensity to value property over life. By April 1865, Grant at horrendous cost had at last overwhelmed the best of the Confederate army; Sherman at little human expenditure defeated the very soul of the Confederate citizenry with a force that was mobile, patently ideological, and without experience of defeat. These facts the crowds in Washington knew, and the rugged appearance of Sherman's army now confirmed their previous belief in his army's singular ability to destroy the enemy without destroying itself.

Yet Americans had not always been so impressed by the Union armies. Less than a year earlier, Northerners were despondent and gradually coming to the realization that winning the war of more than three years' duration required something more than the defeat of Southern soldiers in the field or even the occupation of Confederate state capitals. Even when Sherman arrived on the outskirts of Atlanta in the summer of 1864, there was no guarantee that the war was likely to be won by the North at all -- or that Lincoln would be reelected to a second term in the fall. Nothing less, it seemed, than a new mentality of war-making -- or an armistice -- was needed to conclude this most horrible of American conflicts.

Spectacular Northern battlefield successes in the past had not translated into the collapse of Southern morale or even of the Confederacy's ability to field new armies. The Union string of victories in 1862 along the Mississippi, at Shiloh, Antietam, and Perryville, and the presence of ponderous and plodding Union armies a few miles from Richmond led to vast numbers of Southerners killed, territory lost, and communications disrupted -- but not to a crippling of the Southern desire or ability to continue war, as the subsequent recoveries by Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley and Lee's stand against McClellan in the encounters during the Seven Days prove. Even the second wave of dramatic and brilliant campaigns in the summer of 1863 -- at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga -- did not make the South sue for peace. Before those successes, the Confederates had been victorious at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Even after that summer of Northern optimism, the South would rally to stand firm against Union troops at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania (May 5-19, 1864). Cold Harbor (June 3, 1864) was a bloodbath for Grant's men. By June 1864, the Northern armies had lost 90,000 in just the last two months of fighting. The New York World asked the question, "Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of Grant's campaign?"

It was not clear how much longer the Northern public would stand for further catastrophic losses in Grant's trenches and for Lincoln's policy -- whether inadvertent or not -- of the "terrible arithmetic": trading horrendous fatalities with the South on the premise that the Confederates would exhaust their manpower reserves first. The now accustomed reversal after each promising Union battle success bred cynicism, and soon contempt for Lincoln. By mid-1864 there was the resigned acknowledgment that even a victory in battle was unlikely to end Southern resistance on purely Northern terms.

While it is true that the North enjoyed considerable superiority in human and material resources, by late 1864 the traditional advantages that accrue to the defense in a war of attrition were starting to play an increasingly prominent role. The South need not win, only not lose. As it was stripped of its territory to the west of the Mississippi and south of Tennessee, its shorter interior lines alleviated problems of supply and movement -- as the Spartans learned when they were under siege in Laconia and did not venture into Boeotia, and as the Germans discovered during their retreats before the Americans in late 1944 and early 1945. As the Northern armies advanced southward from Tennessee into Alabama and Georgia in 1864, garrisons were left at towns and railroad junctions to occupy and protect territorial gains. So Sherman's army shrunk, even as his opponent's grew from desperate calls to resist the invader of their homes. Moderate Union success did not ensure greater recruitment from a tired and complacent Northern citizenry; greater Southern failure demanded wider participation from the desperate secessionists to save the homeland.

From now on, brave Confederate soldiers would be fighting not on Northern or Border State ground, but almost always on their own home soil. They would not even be killing any longer for abstractions like states' rights or plantation slavery, but rather battling desperately to repel invading troops from their sacred earth. Fortification and entrenchment -- the dirty arena where casualties soared -- would now serve as more frequent points of resistance, as defenders were given direct aid from civilians and guerrilla bands alike. More and more Northerners conceded that if the Union were to win, they must either annihilate almost all the Confederate zealots in uniform -- Sherman's dictum that "We must kill those three hundred thousand" -- or find some other way of bringing the costs of war home to the Southern populace itself. If the North had mixed results in defeating Confederate soldiers in battle, how could it invade and subdue the entire territory of the South itself?

It is often remarked that the North had a potentially mobilizable population four times the size of the South; but in actuality the Confederacy had nearly doubled the North's rate of recruitment from their respective manpower pools. In terms of actual men recruited into the army -- 950,000 for the South, 2,100,000 on the Union side -- the Confederacy had an army almost half the size of the North, not a decisive disadvantage for a Southern force that was to repel invaders as it fought on familiar ground with access to local supplies.

Their land southeast of the Mississippi was no small country, but still a gigantic region of millions of free citizens and over 4,000,000 black slaves; and even a truncated Confederacy comprised a geographical expanse alone far larger than most nations in Europe. The South's comparatively backward transportation network might now favor the defenders, who knew local terrain and the idiosyncrasies of provincial rail lines, and could move more easily on less well known and traveled roads. Northern forces -- blockading the coast, patrolling the Mississippi, occupying the West, responsible for the distant frontier, entrenched between Washington and Richmond -- would be even farther afield, spread thinner, harder to supply, and more dependent on long, single, and vulnerable railroad lines.

To all Southerners there was no tomorrow in defeat, and an understandable hysteria about Northern invaders: their entry east of the Mississippi and south of Tennessee threatened a complete end to the entire antebellum way of life, and a surrender to the new, growing -- and mostly foreign -- culture spreading throughout the North. Not just slavery was to be gone and the South's peculiar notion of states' rights. Defeat also, the planters believed, meant an embrace of laissez-faire capitalism, increased materialism, massive immigration, urbanization -- all antithetical to the rural and agrarian hierarchies of the past. Southerners, in short, despite the vast geographical extent of the slaveholding states, were as far removed from the mainstream of North American life as the Spartans were from the other Greek city-states. Whether this blinkered perception was entirely true or not, Southern elites in a newly reconstituted Federal Union feared a crass, egalitarian morass, where a radically heartless and soulless market -- not status gained at birth -- would govern the opportunity of all citizens in America. Success and status would be found solely in profit, not in inherited reputation. The states, in this often paranoid view, would slowly give up local cultures and rights in exchange for an all-encompassing Federal government that would lead all to a more uniform America through greater taxation, transportation, communication, and national expenditures. As Mr. Lincoln and his Union generals insisted on unconditional surrender, the end of slavery, and the specter of an egalitarian nation where race and class were in theory to be subordinate ideas, so recalcitrant Southerners by the summer of 1864 dug in deeper for their Armageddon to come.

In contrast to the fanaticism of the Lost Cause, there was real opposition in the North to the Union effort of total war. Copperheads and traditional Democrats were agitating at best for different presidential leadership -- someone other than Lincoln who might bring about either a return of the Confederacy to the Union with slavery intact, or an agreement to let the South go in peace and become a second kindred American nation on North American soil. At worst, outright Southern sympathizers in the North welcomed an admission of Union defeat. Racial prejudice and self-interest were constant choruses -- why send thousands of free whites to die for Southern Negro slaves? Liberating slaves by presidential edict in the abstract was not the same thing as sending thousands of young white Northern boys down South either to die or to kill other white adolescents to ensure that blacks were free to leave their masters. Of course, there were Unionists in the Confederacy and quarrels among the worn fabric of the increasingly self-interested and bickering Southern states, but politics in early 1864 was far more volatile in the North. Opposition there was more likely to change the administration and the very policy of continuing the war unabated. Ironically, Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis, whose economy was in fact on the verge of collapse, was more likely to be run out of office. By the same token, the former would be assassinated, while the latter would live to an honorable old age among recalcitrant secessionists. So too was Epaminondas put on trial in the aftermath of his greatest triumph, even as the defeated King Agesilaus faced no such challenge from within his collapsing society, and would outlive the far younger Theban. In a slave society at war, democracy functions poorly, if at all, and in its eleventh hour has little choice but to trust in the will of its last fanatic.

Then, abruptly, in autumn 1864 one man at the head of more than 60,000 of their soldiers ended for good all the Northern worries. Now there was a general and an army that could march into the heart of the South, free the slaves, destroy the prospects of the enemy where it hurt most, and come through unscathed -- and mirabile dictu could articulate as no other Union leader except Lincoln why and how the South would lose through an entirely new concept of "total war." So in understandable wonder mixed with trepidation the jubilant crowds this May afternoon cheered their slightly crazy, red-haired general William Tecumseh Sherman and "the most magnificent army in existence" -- this rumpled fellow and his boys who had brought them victory when victory was not foreseen.

In November 1864 the citizens of the Confederacy were about to be squeezed precisely in the manner as the Spartans had been by Epaminondas so many centuries earlier. "All sorts of colors, over a wild monotony of columns, began to sway to and fro, up and down," the New York World wrote of the May 23 entrance of Sherman and his army into the streets of the nation's capital, "and like the uncoiling of a tremendous python, the Army of Sherman winds into Washington."

Copyright © 1999 by Victor Davis Hanson