Glatthaar,
Joseph T. The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah
and Carolinas Campaign. Los Angeles: New York: New York University Press,
1985.
Glatthaar
is a Civil War historian who specializes at looking into the lives or the
everyday rank-and-file, though he has done work on major generals. He’s a bit
of a social historian with a military focus. He’s more well-known for Forged in Battle, which looked at the
relationship between black Union soldiers and their white officers. Before that
he wrote this overview of Sherman’s force after the fall of Atlanta and up to May 1865. He
attempts to show the reader that the various Union armies were unique in their
own way. Sherman’s army, which was actually a combination of the Army of Tennessee
and the Army of Georgia (actually two corps of the Army of the Cumberland) was
primarily made up of westerners who had a more egalitarian view of the army.
While there was discipline, officers and men spoke more freely. Officers, up to
generals, would sometimes pitch in manually when a wagon or artillery piece needed
to be freed from mud or quickly placed. Compared to the Army of the Potomac,
they had much less concern for proper drill and proper attire. Two corps from
the Army of the Potomac in fact helped make up Sherman’s force and they had
trouble adjusting to this new army, which “at first glance… looked more like a
mob than an army. They were an unkempt, boisterous, seemingly unruly lot, in no
way resembling the stereotypical professional army of the min-nineteenth
century...”
