USA HISTORY

Sherman believed that the Civil War would end only if the Confederacy’s strategic, economic, and psychological capacity for warfare were decisively broken. Sherman therefore applied the principles of scorched earth:he ordered his troops to burn crops, kill livestock, consume supplies, and destroy civilian infrastructure along their path. What offers the BEST reasoning behind William Tecumseh Sherman’s strategy of using “total war” to defeat the South?

(A) The strategy of “total war” was needed to stop the Confederates from trading with France and England.

(B) Sherman’s men wanted revenge for the horrifying treatment of Union soldiers in Andersonville prison camp.

(C) ** The destruction in Georgia would be so complete that it would break the Confederacy’s will to continue fighting.

(D) The invasion of Georgia would lead to armed revolt by the slaves, which in turn would help the Union win the war.

Concept note-1: -Through the employment of a scorched-earth policy, Sherman successfully disrupted the flow of supply of Confederate forces, broke the will of the civilian South to support the Confederate cause, and thus, hastened the end of the civil war.

Concept note-2: -Sherman led some 60, 000 soldiers on a 285-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of Sherman’s March to the Sea was to frighten Georgia’s civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause.

Concept note-3: -Shermans application of total war, however, was not only to destroy the support base of the Confederacy but also to take the war to the people of the Deep South, making them feel the hardships of war and breaking their will.

Concept note-4: -Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman believed that it was necessary to break the South’s will to fight. Sherman summed up the idea of total war in blunt terms: “We are not only fighting hostile armies, ” he declared in 1864, “but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."