The Carolinas Campaign

This chapter examines the destructive Carolinas Campaign of 1864–1865 as a strategic culmination of the war by means of the transferal to the eastern theater of hard-war tactics that had long characterized the American Civil War’s western theaters. Infliction of property damage and psychological warfare expanded to wholesale destruction of towns and cities, widespread targeting of White civilians, male and female, summary punishment for irregular warfare, and the liberation of slaves in South Carolina as retribution for that state’s overwhelming and initial decision to secede. Federal commanders and soldiers alike, most from the West, were eager to implement this harder form of warfare in a theater known for a more traditional, limited mode of war making. The use of Black troops was most fully employed in the eastern theater in the Carolinas, much as it had been in the West in the Lower Mississippi Valley. As the war neared its end, the desperate Confederate commander in North Carolina, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, unsuccessfully sought to prevent Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s troops from accomplishing destructive warfare, and thus victory, there. Sherman’s conciliatory surrender terms for Johnston’s army, which occurred days after Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, were rebuffed by angry Republicans in the cabinet, the War Department, and Congress, for whom leniency was now furthest from their minds.