Southern Storm - Noah Andre Trudeau

Category: History
Language: EnglishKeywords: southern storm

Written by Noah Andre Trudeau
Read by Eric Conger
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Abridged

It’s still impolitic in Georgia to mention General William T. Sherman, so synonymous with wanton destruction is his fabled march from Atlanta to Savannah of November-December 1864. A historian of several Civil War campaigns, Trudeau avers that such popular beliefs about Sherman’s plan to vanquish the South require a corrective in the form of a day-by-day chronicle. That approach certainly reveals that Sherman’s orders allowed his subordinate officers and their soldiers leeway about what to burn and what to spare, so that the marching routes were not turned completely into swaths of utter desolation. But his 60,000 men were hardly invited guests, and through their expropriation of Southern food and forage, deliberate destruction of railroads, and defeat of all military opposition, they proved Sherman’s strategic message that resistance was futile. But the Confederates offered it often if ineffectively, by which Trudeau develops a secondary myth-busting theme, that Sherman’s march was not a lark but a complex and risky military operation. Maps of daily marching routes let Civil War buffs follow the action in this detailed narrative.