Coping with defeat rhetorically: Sherman's march through Georgia

Abstract

When William T. Sherman marched from Resaca to Savannah, the battle and home fronts in Georgia merged into a scene of death, destruction, sacrifice, and criticism. To accommodate their losses, Confederates first expressed disillusionment, clashed along socioeconomic lines, and converted to more powerful initiatives. Then, in the heat of battle, they forged an ideology of ascension from which they formulated oratorical arguments deployed during Reconstruction, the New South, and twentieth century for self‐interests. By gilding defeat, they rendered the intolerable politically and economically correct. By disinfecting their war stories, southerners pardoned themselves.