Sherman (the "Pyromaniac") - Washington Post

By Mary Ann Anderson, travel writer, Hazelwood, Ga - from the Washington Post, May 22, 2014.  

"I am a Southerner, through and through. If it’s fried, I eat it. If it’s a one-syllable word, I stretch it to two. Or three or four.  If it says Old South, I’m on it like a duck on a June bug.... 

.... In between Macon and Athens, the highways wind through the towns of Old Clinton, Gray, Milledgeville, Eatonton, Madison and Watkinsville. 

Those hundred miles of highway are designated Georgia’s Antebellum Trail, which runs through a string of communities and historical sites that predate the Civil War.
 
If you go: Georgia’s Antebellum Trail

After burning Atlanta 150 years ago, in November 1864, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman blazed a path southeast to Savannah in his March to the Sea, promising to “make Georgia howl.”  Along the way, the pyromaniac general burned and destroyed everything in his way, pretty much trying to obliterate Georgia from the map. 

But the towns on this trail he mostly left alone, concentrating instead on destroying crops, plantations and railroads while looting farms and confiscating their animals. By ignoring these towns, he left open a few pages for the history books, so that today we can still see glimpses of the Old South and a good bit of its white-columned architecture as it was before the War Between the States....

We pass scattered cotton fields, not nearly as many as there were a just a few decades ago, when King Cotton ruled the South. Cotton today is picked by giant harvesters, but in the past, it was a labor-intensive job. Slavery was abominable, but the South couldn’t survive without it.  It was hard work, period. As poor farmers, my Mama and Daddy both picked cotton growing up, and until the day they died, they often joked that their backs still hurt every time they passed a cotton field....  Just based on my parents’ experiences, I can’t imagine what it was like for the slaves picking endless acres of cotton from sunup until sundown." 

"The best way to see Milledgeville, the next town on the trail, is by trolley. Probably best known in the 20th century as the home of Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, Milledgeville served as the capital of Georgia from 1803 to 1868.  The trolley takes you past the Old Capitol Building; the stunning Greek Revival Lockerly Arboretum, which was built as a private home around 1839; and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where Sherman’s troops burned the pews for firewood, used the stable for their horses, and even poured molasses into the organ pipes. We don’t call ’em damn Yankees for nothing. But at least they didn’t burn the town, primarily because it had no military importance.  

[my aside:  Yes, that would make Sherman in compliance with the rules of warfare in that time period].

"Eatonton is a lovely old town...  we drive into Eatonton’s historic district, with more than 100 antebellum and Victorian homes. In the relatively compact, completely walkable neighborhood close to town, amazingly well-preserved pastel-hued houses, many with venerable spires and chimneys, are clustered together among formal and informal gardens. The wide, airy verandas speak of a time when no one even thought of air conditioning, and belles and beaus courted on the porch swing."  [aside: Anderson doesn't mention it, but Sherman was here.  His men did burn Eatonton's railroad depot and warehouses as well as the slave pens, whips and paddles.  But once again, the homes were not burnt].

Each of the towns on the trail holds a special place in my heart, but Madison captures my imagination like no other. Legends and myths abound as to why Sherman and his troops trampled the rest of the state but didn’t torch Madison, a town widely considered to be the most beautiful in Georgia. The most popular is that he proclaimed the town simply too pretty to burn, while another suggests that he had a lady friend who lived or had once lived there. Another less well-known story is that a local citizen flashed his Masonic ring at the general, who was also a Mason, and thus spared the town. But in the end the most believable theory is that he had a West Point buddy who was from Madison, and the two men reached a gentlemen’s agreement that the stately community would not be set aflame."  [aside:  or that, just maybe, Sherman didn't burn many Georgia towns at all?]

 "I’m not a Civil War historian by any stretch, but I know the basic story line, which is that the Yankees beat the pudding out of us Southerners, and a century-and-a-half later, we’re still pretty much miffed about it."

[aside: then there is the "basic story line" about how the U.S. Army, which included 450,000 southerners, beat the pudding out of "you" Confederates who attacked several  U.S. military installations before the U.S. government bothered to respond].