Thompson wants million-member ground force

shogun
Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:41:37 +0000

This whole conversation got me to thinking—dangerous that it is…
I recently transcribed the original pages of my GG Grandfather’s Civil War Diaries that he wrote in daily from July of 1862 till about July of 1865 (you can read much of them here):

[Battery B, 4th U.S. Light Artillery - Diary of 1st Lt. Charles N. Warner](http://www.batteryb.com/biographies/warner_charles.html)

and here:

[Charles N. Warner in James S. Robbins’ Last In Their Class](http://www.lastintheirclass.com/Warner.html)

The issue of Sherman and the burning of homes, farms, fields, etc “rang a bell” in my seriously underdeveloped brain. When my GG GF was with the 6th Corps (Franklin and then Sedgewicks Corps) at 2nd Bull run, Antietam, Chancellorville, and Gettysburg, he didn’t write much about “foraging” (the practice of soldiers going out into the field and “obtaining” needed food and supplies.) He was with a Battery of Horse Artillery and they moved with the Army of the Potomac as it manouvered throughout Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia in 1862-1863. I got the impression that they were consuming more or less official army rations. After Gettysburg, he was reassigned from Battery D, 2nd US Artillery to Battery A 4th US because most of the latter battery’s officers had been killed at Picket’s Charge (Cushing’s Battery). Shortly afterwards the Battery was reassigned to Robertson’s Brigade of Horse Artillery. After that he was re-assigned to the Western Theatre around Nashville. His new Battery (I, 4th US) eventually was attached to James Wilson’s Cavalry as it roamed the South through Georgia and Alabama. It was when he was in the South that he started talking about foraging. He would lead Union soldiers to forage the countryside almost nightly for food and supplies. (Sorry about the long post). I then realized that a huge part of what Sherman was doing with all this destruction of the civilian infrastruture was denying the Southern Armies food and supplies. The south was fighting primarily in it’s own backyard for the last two years of the war–much of it’s army was living off the civilian population, just as my GG GF’s unit was doing. I think Sherman understood it (heck they all probably did) but he alone was willing to follow it to its natural, strategic, and obvious conclusion: The fastest way to end the war was to defeat the Rebel Army—the fastest way to defeat an army is to make it too weak to fight.

Wow, what great conversations we have here!