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.

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

Example Sentences

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

What was the real object of Sherman's march to the sea? b.

From A Short History of the United States by Channing, Edward

What would have been the just judgment of mankind upon Sherman's march to the sea if Thomas had failed, as Sherman with a much larger force had done, to destroy or seriously cripple Hood's army?

From Forty-Six Years in the Army by Schofield, John M.

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 Stevenson, Burton Egbert