Sherman’s army marched out of Atlanta like
a fire breaking loose.
General Sherman's troops cut a path of destruction in
their march to the sea
The rails were twisted into knots. Warehouses burned. Smoke hung over the city for days. When the columns finally moved east in November 1864, they carried sixty days’ rations, little hope of supply from behind, and orders that shocked the country. William Tecumseh Sherman was cutting himself loose and living off Georgia.
Iowa
men were deep in it from the start. They marched in the heart of Sherman’s
army, not on the edges. Iowa regiments filled the ranks of the XV and XVII
Corps, the hard-used western infantry Sherman trusted most. These were the same
men who had fought at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Atlanta. Now they were being asked
to march hundreds of miles through enemy country and make the Confederacy feel
the war.
The
Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, part of the XV Corps under Major General John A.
Logan, stepped off with the rest. The Eleventh, Thirteenth, Sixteenth,
Thirty-first, and Thirty-second Iowa followed in long blue lines. Sherman said
his western troops “had learned that war was not an affair of posts, but of
movement,” and Iowa regiments were exactly the men he meant.
