At the front of that line, making plans to march to the sea and choke the South, was Major General William Tecumseh Sherman. He shelled Atlanta, killing civilians who had stayed behind, tearing up railroad tracks, raiding farms for field provisions. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman wrote to Atlanta’s mayor. He hit the slaveholders everywhere—in their homes, their plantations, their public buildings. The Union now had a million men in uniform, and more on the way. The South was out of money, out of food, out of troops to counter the steamroller making its way toward Richmond.
