In the mean time, Sherman's army had marched due north, in the direction of Charlotte, leaving behind it a most desolate track. Sherman had determined to make the war so felt as a dreadful calamity, that those who had begun it might be induced to abandon it speedily. He issued precise instructions for the conduct of the troops in their passage through South Carolina. “The army,” he said, “will forage liberally on the country during the march;” and each brigade commander was directed to “organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers,” whose business it was to gather food for man and beast, “aiming at all times to keep in the wagon trains at least ten days provisions for the command, and three days forage.” Soldiers were forbidden to enter private houses or commit trespasses, but were permitted to forage for food, in the vicinity of a camp, or at a halt. He gave the corps commanders power to “destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins,” &c. Such destruction was not to be made in districts or neighborhoods where the army was not molested; but in those regions where guerrillas and bushwackers should infest the march, or the “inhabitants should burn bridges, or otherwise manifest local hostility, the corps commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” He permitted the cavalry to “appropriate, freely and without limit,” horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, “discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly.” Foragers were also permitted to exchange their jaded animals for fresh ones. They were also directed to “leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.”
The simple execution of the orders for the army to live off the country, must have produced an almost absolute peeling of the inhabitants in the track of that host, which devoured every thing in its way over a path of more than forty miles in width. And so universal was the hostility of the inhabitants, incited by Wade Hampton and his fellow-traitors of South Carolina, that the restrictive conditions concerning devastation were nowhere applicable.1 The feeling that South Carolina was the chief offender — the author of all the woes inflicted by the war, its politicians being the chief originators of treasonable designs, and the first to strike the intended deadly blow at the heart of the Republic — made many a soldier more relentless. The system of foraging allowed wide latitude, and afforded license for many outrages and cruelties on the part of unscrupulous soldiers, who always form a part of an army. Large numbers of these, called “bummers,” went in
