Episode Details

After the fall of Atlanta in 1864, William T. Sherman proposed cutting his own supply lines and marching about 300 miles to Savannah, a plan that worried Abraham Lincoln. This episode explains how he used 1860 census data on corn and livestock to plot his route, sent sick and weak soldiers north to leave a force of about 62,000, and issued Special Field Orders No. 120 to regulate foraging parties known as bummers. He split the army toward Macon and Augusta to keep defenders divided, let John Bell Hood march into Tennessee, and had rails heated and twisted around trees so they could not be repaired.

Near Savannah, flooded rice fields stalled the army as food ran short until it stormed Fort McAllister in about 15 minutes and reached the Navy. Mayor Richard Dennis Arnold surrendered the city, and Sherman offered it to Lincoln as a Christmas present with 25,000 bales of cotton. The episode also covers Ebenezer Creek, where Jefferson C. Davis cut a pontoon bridge and stranded hundreds of refugees, the resulting Special Field Orders No. 15 and its 40-acre plots, Sherman's estimate of $100 million in damage, and the debate over hard war versus total war.

• A freed prisoner handed Sherman a poem written in a Confederate prison, and its author was added to his staff; it became Marching Through Georgia.
• Union soldiers in the captured capital of Milledgeville held a mock session and voted to repeal Georgia's secession.
• Foraging orders barred entering homes and told troops to treat wealthy planters differently from poorer families.
• The march stripped a front about 60 miles wide, and discipline broke down into widespread looting.
• Studies cited in the episode link the campaign's damage to lower agricultural investment in the region into the 1920s.