The Georgia Historical Society and Georgia Battlefields Association recently erected a remarkable Civil War marker on the grounds of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, near where Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s “March to the Sea” began in the autumn of 1864. The marker neither demonizes Sherman nor romanticizes “The Lost Cause.” It states in part, “Contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war. … Sherman’s ‘hard hand of war’ demoralized Confederates, hastening the end of slavery and the reunification of the nation.’” This week, the 150th anniversary of the fall of Savannah and the closing days of the Civil War Sesquicentennial in Georgia, we ask: How should the present generation remember Sherman’s march?
