After burning much of Atlanta, Sherman cut his own supply lines and led his army on a 285-mile march through Georgia, destroying railroads, crops, and infrastructure to break the Confederacy's capacity and will to fight. The campaign, controversial for its harshness toward civilians, reached Savannah in December and is considered a pioneering example of modern total war.
Sherman ordered Atlanta's warehouses, depots, and machine shops burned before departing, then severed his telegraph link to Washington, effectively vanishing into enemy territory with 62,000 men. He told his superiors he intended to 'make Georgia howl,' and he meant it: his troops fanned out across a sixty-mile-wide swath, tearing up railroad track, twisting the rails into 'Sherman's neckties,' and burning cotton gins, barns, and mills.
The army lived off the land, foraging so thoroughly that Sherman calculated his men destroyed roughly $100 million in property, only twenty percent of which had military value. The rest, he argued coldly, was 'simple waste and destruction,' meant to demonstrate to the Southern population that the Confederacy could not protect them.
The march was less bloody than it was psychologically devastating. Sherman avoided major pitched battles almost entirely, instead aiming at Confederate morale and logistics. When he reached Savannah in late December, he presented the city to Lincoln as a Christmas gift. The March to the Sea is still studied at military academies as an early, brutal template for total war against an enemy's economy and civilian will.