Marching Through Georgia

General William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia endlessly fascinates Americans, northern and southern. Marking the end of the Old South, it is one of the most bitterly remembered campaigns of the Civil War, and has long been captured in people's minds by Gone With the Wind's depiction of Atlanta going up in flames. With Marching Through Georgia, acclaimed author and historian Lee Kennett fires this fascination by vividly capturing the ground-level experiences of the soldiers and civilians who witnessed the bloody siege that would be the turning point in America's most brutal war. Beginning with the opening skirmish at Buzzard Roost Gap and continuing all the way to Savannah ten months later, Kennett analyzes the notorious, complex General Sherman, a military figure of uncompromising dedication who, at any cost, would attack the heart of the Confederacy's arsenal, leaving mass destruction in his wake. Politically the march dealt a devastating blow to the Confederate war machine, virtually securing Lincoln's reelection. Historically it set the stage for the end of the most vicious war in American history. Socially it forever changed the way war is waged, wreaking havoc on the lives of thousands of citizens who had previously thought themselves safe precisely because they were civilians. Georgians - led by their popular governor, Joseph Brown, whose single-minded dedication to his home state would bring him into endless conflict with Confederate president Jefferson Davis - would be faced with an insurmountable enemy who embraced the "modern" idea of making war on the enemy nation in its entirety. Capturing the striking, previously unrecorded, tiny tragedies that struck both individuals and families, and interweaving accounts of prewar life in the cities of Georgia with searing battlefield depictions and histories of both armies fighting at Atlanta, Lee Kennett's compelling narrative of Sherman's campaign casts the enduring final chapter in America's bloodiest war in a fascinating new light.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.