Why did Sherman's strategy of total war work?

Question

Why did Sherman's strategy of total war work?

Answer 1

My guess is you're referring principally to Sherman's "March to the Sea" near the end of 1864, i.e., the last full year of the U.S. Civil War, in which this general led a vast Union army from Atlanta through northern Georgia and parts of South Carolina to Savannah on the Atlantic coast, effectively splitting the territory of the Confederacy. Along the way, Sherman's army not only decimated the already depleted remnants of Confederate forces but they also waged a campaign against Southern civilians, not directly through massacres nor similar egregious war crimes but rather through attacks on public and private property and infrastructure, which included destruction or confiscation of crops and livestock and the disabling of railroad transportation by the method of vandalizing the rail hardware (resulting in twisted metal edifices that were called "Sherman's ties"). Another thing the Union forces did was liberate slaves, who of course at that time and place were also considered "property" and were vital to the largely agricultural Southern economy; indeed, many of these freed slaves now having pretty much nowhere else to go and facing few prospects in this war-ravaged land simply followed Sherman's troops on their march.

 

Thus this kind of "total war" practiced during the march was indeed effective since it targeted not just the military but also the civilian populace (indeed deliberately, as Sherman had the clear intention to demoralize the Southern people and thereby to hasten the end of the war by diminishing any remaining will of theirs to carry on the fight) of what was by then one of the last bastions of the Confederacy, and the success of the operation (symbolized by Sherman's triumphant message to Abraham Lincoln around Christmas 1864) was one the final blows that led to the ultimate surrender of the South a few months later in 1865.