USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Sherman wanted to defeat the South as quickly as possible; therefore, his troops were ordered to destroy anything they came across that might conceivably help the South. The Union troops set fire to cotton fields, burned down houses, stole livestock, and so on.

Detailed explanation-2: -Sherman grasped this and, though he wasn’t the first military proponent of total war, he was the first modern commander to deliberately strike at the enemy’s infrastructure. The scorched-earth tactics were effective. The fragile Southern economy collapsed, and a once-stout rebel army was irretrievably broken.

Detailed explanation-3: -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.

Detailed explanation-4: -To them, Sherman’s devastating march through the South opened the way to the kind of warfare that culminated in World War II. Called total war, it goes beyond combat between opposing military forces to include attacks, both deliberate and indiscriminate, upon civilians and non-military targets.

Detailed explanation-5: -The tactic of destroying much in an army’s path is called “scorched earth". The Union soldiers would heat up rail road ties and then bend them around tree trunks. They were nicknamed “Sherman’s neckties".