General Sherman's Christmas -- Savannah, 1864, by Stanley Weintraub, Harper '09, $24.95, 238 pages, ISBN #0061702986. Index, sources, b&w images sprinkled through text.
Christmas and the Civil War aren't events usually found in the same sentence. But in Stanley Weintraub's new book, readers join Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at the outset of the 1864 holiday season on his "March to the Sea," from Atlanta to Savannah.
The Sherman march evokes an unusual mix of emotions, as Weintraub chronicles the traditional Southern Christmas being celebrated by Georgians along the way. No doubt many Savannah residents feared watching their city burn as had Atlanta earlier in the war. Thankfully, as anyone who has visited this richly graceful city can appreciate, Sherman left the city intact.
Weintraub describes the fateful battle as Sherman encroached on the city from all sides, compelling Confederate Gen. W.J. Hardee's troops to slip out of the city across an improvised causeway. Savannah's mayor surrendered the city three days before Christmas, allowing Sherman to telegraph President Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton." More than the capture of the city itself was the psychological blow it caused to the Confederacy, one which many historians believe led to the end of the war several months later.
Stanley Weintraub is a historian, biographer, and professor emeritus of the arts and humanities at Penn State University and has written two other books.
