Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea | 
 enlarge | Author: Noah Andre Trudeau
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 5237
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 688
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.8
ISBN: 0060598670
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.7378
EAN: 9780060598679
ASIN: 0060598670
Publication Date: August 1, 2008
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Condition: New and unread. Light shelfwear to DJ.
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Product Description
Award-winning Civil War historian Noah Andre Trudeau has written a gripping, definitive new account that will stand as the last word on General William Tecumseh Sherman's epic march—a targeted strategy aimed to break not only the Confederate army but an entire society as well. With Lincoln's hard-fought reelection victory in hand, Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union forces, allowed Sherman to lead the largest and riskiest operation of the war. In rich detail, Trudeau explains why General Sherman's name is still anathema below the Mason-Dixon Line, especially in Georgia, where he is remembered as "the one who marched to the sea with death and devastation in his wake." Sherman's swath of destruction spanned more than sixty miles in width and virtually cut the South in two, badly disabling the flow of supplies to the Confederate army. He led more than 60,000 Union troops to blaze a path from Atlanta to Savannah, ordering his men to burn crops, kill livestock, and decimate everything that fed the Rebel war machine. Grant and Sherman's gamble worked, and the march managed to crush a critical part of the Confederacy and increase the pressure on General Lee, who was already under siege in Virginia. Told through the intimate and engrossing diaries and letters of Sherman's soldiers and the civilians who suffered in their path, Southern Storm paints a vivid picture of an event that would forever change the course of America.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Comparing Southern Storm with Eye Witness Account September 7, 2008
I have copies of the diaries of Martin Curtis Tyler who served with the pontoon train in the right wing of Sherman's army as part of Company E Fourteenth Wisconsin. On Friday December 9,1864 he wrote " We have traveled through a pine forest all day, the forage is scarce and we have only got 1 load of corn and the mules only get 4 ears of corn each night. We got no sweet potatoes & the 25 Wisconsin was sent from our PT train for stealing ours last night. We came 14 miles & was brought to a halt at 3pm & turned off the road to the right & 1 1/4 mile to the Ogeeche River & laid the PT to let the troops cross that came on the other side of the river & they will not be here until tomorrow morn." If you compare this to Trudeau's description of action on the same day, you can appreciate the work involved in combining the accounts of numerous diaries so that an accurate and consistent description is given of the march. Trudeau gives a very useful overview of the march while providing enough detail to identify the daily account in individual diaries. If you think the book is dull and tedious then you should read one of the diaries to understand that the daily life of the troops was dull and tedious. There are few cheering crowds, a lot of mud that the wagons had to be pushed through and a very uncertain supply of food and clothing. Thank you Noah Trudeau for an honest account of the march to the sea and those responsible for carrying out the necessary work.
Marcia Roth
 Boring subject, handled well. August 26, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Sherman's march to the sea was important strategically and psychologically, but as a military adventure it was little more than a logistical achievement. Trudeau captures its essence well - 600 pages of soldier accounts that, "We went foraging today, found some hogs and sweet potatoes." The next day would be the same. After a while, the litany gets tedious. He gives a good sense of Southern outrage at the march, and some sense of the God-awful disorder of the South's military, but i felt he could have done much more with the later. All in all, I do not think the project was either worthy of Trudeau's considerable talents or he would have been better served to raise his sights and assess the march's larger impacts. The march and it's subsequent effort through South Carolina affected the South for generations. It broke the South psychologically. Trudeau kept his writing largely with the foot soldiers, and cavalry skirmishes, because that's about all there was to it militarily. I think that the work suffers for that, because that really wasn't where Sherman's real impact was. I had just finished Trudeau's remarkable book on Gettysburg and was expecting more.
Finally, fact and detail win out over uninformed opinion August 22, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
After his well regarded "Gettysburg," Noah Trudeau's more difficult task in "Southern Storm" is to detail Sherman's 1864 march through Georgia as something more than that infamous affair brought us in Hollywood's version in "Gone With the Wind." Except for the concluding December capture of Savannah, there are no epic battles pitting one general against another, just the daily slog of a 60,000 man Union army reaping a three hundred mile swath of forage, fire, destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. Told mostly from the side of the Union army, each day is different and uniquely described without repetition. Sherman's strategy was to move two separate armies (led by Generals Slocum and Howard)to the southeast with feints towards Macon, thrusts towards Augusta, concealing his intentions, keeping the Rebels confused and his strategies disguised until the end. With numerous maps, fine descriptions and telling cameos, the book excels by avoiding boredom. Scenes, agonizing and enlightening, enliven the book; the joyous support of the slaves freed by the March as followed the troops, Sherman's well planned tactical maneuvers which enabled his armies to traverse creeks, streams and rivers, and the failure of the Southern leaders especially Jefferson Davis to comprehend the magnitude of Sherman's offensive. Trudeau, to his credit, proves that fact supplants opinion by saving the editorializing overviews to the ending chapter. This is a book which is convincing because of its rigorous attention to detail and the fairness and writing skill of the author.
Southern Storm is a superb retelling of this iconic Civil War campaign August 13, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
If the average person were to be asked to name an event of the American Civil War, it is likely that Sherman's March would be near the top of the list, possibly ahead even of Gettysburg. A 20th Century series of damaging floods in Georgia were referred to as the "worse devastation since Sherman's Civil War march to the sea," and an Atlanta sportswriter referred to a disgraced Atlanta Braves' player as "the most disliked person hereabouts since William Tecumseh Sherman." During the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, T-shirts were sold, portraying a fiery image of the general, with the legend, "Atlanta's Original Torch Bearer." Routinely, visitors to ante-bellum homes, not only in Georgia but also in Mississippi and Alabama are treated by the docents to gory tales of what Sherman did to their town. They are befuddled when reminded that, (a) obviously the house we are in did not get burned, and (b) Sherman was no where near here.
Noah Andre Trudeau has written a number of books on the Civil War, among them, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865, an excellent account of the role of the United States Colored Troops, and added to these with Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea.
Trudeau's concern is that most books by and about the March have not tried to nail down exactly what Sherman expected to accomplish and exactly what really did go on. If the destruction was as great as not only remembered by Georgians, but bragged about by Sherman's boys, then why have so many ante-bellum properties survived.
Trudeau argues that the campaign was a highly organized, carefully planned operation, with ample room for Sherman to improvise. When he departed from Atlanta, on November 15-16, 1874, his troops were not travelling lean and mean. "Packed into more than 2500 wagons were a twenty-day supply of bread, forty days or sugar, coffee, and salt and three days worth of animal feed. Moving with the lengthy wagon trains were 5,000 cattle, representing a forty day beef supply." [538] Indeed, his wagon trains were larger per thousand men than were those the Army of the Potomac took into the Wilderness six months before.
Trudeau was also committed to discovering exactly what happened during the march. He dug deeply into writings of both Yankees and Rebels, their letters, their diaries, and to a lesser degree, their reminiscences. His bibliography is thirty-seven pages of fine type, mining numerous manuscript and newspaper sources, as well as dozens of published articles from historical magazines and autobiographies.
Starting with a quick discussion of the post-capture of Atlanta troops movements and the development of Sherman's idea to march to the Atlantic, Trudeau starts Sherman's army from the Atlanta area on November 15, 1864. Each day's march is illustrated by a small quarter page map of that day's troop activities, which would be very helpful if one wanted to drive the March. In addition, Trudeau discovered in his research that the weather was always mentioned by diarists and letter writers, if forgotten by memorialists and autobiographers, so each little map has an inset of that days weather (November 15 was clear, high 40s, low 50s). He argues that the weather played a major role in the campaign with the initial fine weather turning nasty with extensive rains and continued chilly conditions, something Sherman had not counted on.
A typical day, using Tuesday, November 22, went something like this: it snowed in the morning, then cleared in the afternoon with the temperature ranging from upper 20s to low 40s. Henry Slocum's Left Wing moved slowly toward the then-state capitol, Milledgeville, shivering in the cold. Advance units reached the town in the afternoon and evening. The troops moved through, with Slocum making his headquarter's in the local hotel. The residents hung out white flags, a successful protection device for their homes while the inmates torched the state penitentiary. And the blacks greeted their liberators with cheers and dancing in the street. Some African-Americans were not as lucky: an 8th Texas cavalryman recorded in his diary that they "whipped about 1,000 negros, who were on their way to the enemy."
Uncle Billy made his headquarters in the plantation of Confederate politician Howell Cobb, noticing the way the evening sky was lit by the surrounding campfires. Someone turned up a recent Cobb proclamation urging Georgians to assail the Yankees on all sides -- and that was enough to doom Cobb's property.
The Confederates, now convinced that Sherman was not heading to Macon, decided that Augusta with its powder works was the real target and made plans to dismantle the works. The Confederate response to Sherman was hampered by divided command between Wheeler, Beauregard, Hardee and Gov. Brown, each split off form the others by lack of a telegraph, whose lines had been cut by Sherman.
Oliver Howard's Right Wing was sliding past Macon and dealing with the snow and the resulting mud. An important aspect of Sherman's Army were the Pontoon trains that accompanied each wing, waiting to provide instant bridges over any water that could stop the Yankees. The 25th also saw skirmishing at Griswoldville between the Right Wing troops and Confederates from Macon.
Sherman reached Savannah on December 22, occupying the city and making contact with the blockading U.S. Navy ships.
Trudeau is continually concerned with exactly how much damage was actually done to property on the way - not as much as both the Confederate memories and the Yankee boastings would remember - and with the impact of the March on the War.
Where the troops actually passed, damage was extensive: animals killed, fences cut down to build campfires. "Many of us are utterly ruined," one Bulloch County farmer wrote. More fences than houses were destroyed -as is evident by the number of ante-bellum homes that can be toured in the path of Sherman's Boys. The biggest property loss were the slaves who, in the thousands, tramped after the liberating Yankees. Railroads had ties burned and rails bent. Slocum reported that his Left Wing destroyed 119 miles of railroad.
But as soon as the shock passed, people began to rebuild. Telegraph service from Mobile to Richmond had been restored by New Years Day and by January 3, 1865, Confederate engineer, Major General J. F. Gilmer was able to report "cars now run from Macon to Milledgeville."
Ironically, the greatest damage Sherman caused was the exact opposite of what he intended. Trudeau argues that Sherman was a conservative who wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and restore the old world. But the psychological destruction to Georgia society, even more than the physical destruction, made that impossible.
Southern Storm is a superb retelling of this iconic Civil War campaign and will make a welcome addition to your shelves.
 Northern Yawn August 11, 2008
15 out of 32 found this review helpful
Immensely disappointing.
Sherman's "March to the Sea" is an American military epic that has long needed a fresh look and interpretation given the enormous amount of material that has become readily accessible to civil war historians in the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, Mr Trudeau, author of a fine book on Gettysburg (though inferior in so many respects to that produced by Stephen W. Sears at about the same time) has done the research, but has failed to synthesize it into a readable, dynamic, informative, and compelling account. The narrative has no natural flow and one gets the impression that Mr Trudeau decided that, by gum, he had to wade through all of those boring diaries, letters, and reports until his eyelids became singed from boredom and the reader is going to have to suffer also. The fact that letter or diary accounts of events exist is no compelling reason for an historian to quote them ad nauseum; rather, it is the function of the historian to sift the material and present its significance or the power of its narrattive or description to the reader. An early example of this is Mr Trudeau's account of the destruction of Atlanta. He recounts diary excerpt after letter excerpt describing how buildings, etc were destroyed; yet nowhere does he sum it all up and describe just how much destruction Sherman caused in Atlanta and what its military significance was. Indeed, at one point Mr Trudeau takes pains to quote Gen Sherman's orders to his Chief Engineer not to use fire as a weapon of destruction only to, several pages later, accuse Sherman of "firing" Atlanta.
The march to the sea, as presented by Mr Trudeau, is an endless series of quotations from diaries, etc that has very little flow and almost no military insight. In fact, Mr Tudeau is at his weakest when discussing military matters and seems to have discovered most of them while doing research for this book. Mr Trudeau offers us no real insight to the various generals and politicians involved in this narrative and, I would argue, that he really has no insight into them. There is very little of the dynamics between the various Union Commanders and very little of the broader military picture.
One gets the impression that this subject is just a little beyond Mr Trudeau's expertise or ability.
As an aside, the publisher sure didn't spend a lot of money on maps. Was it the end of the fiscal year and they ran out of money? If a subject cries out for detailed maps, it's this one.
A new, fresh account of one of the most famous campaigns in American military history still is waiting to be written.
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