These were not hollow threats. Sherman had already issued a special order empowering the provost marshal to prepare a list of thirty inhabitants. In the event a boat was fired on along the Mississippi River near Memphis, ten families from the list would leave the city.

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In October an attack on the river craft Catahoula compelled Sherman to intensify retaliating against wrongdoers. Hoping that harsher action would end the harassment, he sent Walcutt to “destroy all the houses, farms, and corn fields” from Elm Grove Post Office to Hopefield, Arkansas, a distance of roughly fifteen miles.

Furthermore, he made good on his promise to expel Memphis citizens. After three subsequent guerrilla attacks along the river, he sent several families out of the city beyond Union lines. These tactics seemed to work, as partisan attacks subsided for several months.

While moving south down the Mississippi from Memphis on transports in December 1862, as part of the Vicksburg campaign, Sherman continued his policy of punishing those who sniped at river craft. He penned an order to his men that, if fired upon, the troops should land and “attack the property and stores [and take any supplies] useful to the United States.” They should burn “the neighboring houses, barns &c.” and dispose of any enemy personnel in the area.

Unless the marauders ended their attacks on riverboats, he wanted to ensure that they and their families and friends would feel repercussions. To a friend, Sherman later described his own transformation in 1862: “[Early in the war,] I would not let our men burn [a] fence rail for fire or gather fruits or vegetables though hungry. We at that time were restrained, tied to a deep-seated reverence for law and property. The rebels first introduced terror as part of their system….No military mind could endure this long, and we were forced in self-defense to imitate their example.”

That winter and spring, during the campaign to take the Mississippi River fortress, Sherman learned another important lesson that would prove extremely valuable in his later campaigns—and would change the way that he would conduct war against the Confederacy. He had observed the two battling armies at Shiloh earlier that year and saw how bulky, slow-moving supply wagons could slow down an army. “[Federal Maj. Gen. Don Carlos] Buell had to move at a snail’s pace with his vast wagon trains, [while Confederate General Braxton] Bragg moved rapidly, living on the country,” he noted. Sherman remained unsure, however, whether a Union army could live off the hostile country as successfully as the enemy’s army had done in its own territory.

By late December, Grant had moved his Army of the Tennessee into northern Mississippi from western Tennessee, stretching his supply lines nearly sixty miles from his starting point. Confederate cavalry leader Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn striking at his supply and communication lines at Holly Springs and Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest hitting at other locations in northern Mississippi isolated the Union force from its base. Grant immediately ordered his men to live off the countryside, hoping that he could reestablish his lines before continuing on the campaign. He was surprised to observe that his army lived well from what they found on northern Mississippi’s farms.

He remarked to Halleck that within a radius of fifteen miles from his principal position, “everything of subsistence of man or beast has been appropriated for the use of our army.” Grant later commented in his memoirs, “I was amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded. It showed me that we could have subsisted off the country for two months instead of two weeks.”

Sherman understood that by not having to guard a supply or communications line, he could free the men previously used to protect that line for use on the battlefield. Furthermore, the Union army could subsist in unfriendly country at the expense of the enemy, while simultaneously removing valuable provisions from Confederate use.

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