Sherman's march to the sea

Cultural  

1. A movement of the Union army troops of General William Tecumseh Sherman from Atlanta, Georgia, to the Georgia seacoast, with the object of destroying Confederate supplies. The march began after Sherman captured, evacuated, and burned Atlanta in the fall of 1864. His men, numbering about sixty thousand, destroyed railroads, factories, cotton gins, houses, livestock, and anything else that might be useful to the South in the war.

---

Discover More

Northerners celebrated Sherman's march with the song “Marching through Georgia.” Southerners remembered it bitterly.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

Sherman's march to the sea

To explain why Wilson refused at first to visit the ruined battlefields of northern France, she cites his boyhood memory of witnessing the devastation left by Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War.

From New York Times ● Jun. 22, 2018

The land was in the path of Sherman's march to the sea.

From Time Magazine Archive

Cutting themselves off from their bases of supply, and relying upon an alliance of miracle and rapine to sustain them, their triumphant campaigns were one continuous and colossal Sherman's march to the sea.

From The Ifs of History by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

The last of these tasks was that of stopping Sherman's march to the sea, but Sherman had sixty thousand men to his seventeen thousand, and a battle was out of the question.

From American Men of Action by Burton Egbert Stevenson

It was virtually confined to four States, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, and these but shells that only needed Sherman's march to the sea to prove how hollow they were.

From The Land We Live In The Story of Our Country by Henry Mann