When Sherman received word that the provost marshal condoned taking store contents unnecessary to the subsistence of the troops, he ordered Brig. Gen. J.A. Mower to look into the matter. “The feeling of pillage and booty will injure the morals of the troops, and bring disgrace to our cause,” he warned. Even at this stage, Sherman considered his objective to be removing supplies from the enemy’s use and putting them to use by his own troops. He still respected the rights of private citizens and destroyed only public property.

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Grant continued to order the region around Vicksburg stripped “to prevent an army coming this way from supplying itself.” He sent Sherman back to Jackson after the fall of Vicksburg to retake the city from General Joseph Johnston’s army, which had reoccupied the capital.

As during his first trip to Jackson, Sherman went about destroying and confiscating supplies from the area in and around the city. He also caused Johnston to retreat. However, this trip to Jackson proved different from any other prior attack on a city during the war. Sherman continued to destroy railroads, but even though he was not immediately threatened or in need of supplies, he collected and demolished supplies from Jackson and the surrounding countryside, and burned the remaining factories and cotton.

Grant had ordered Sherman to “leave nothing of value for the enemy to carry on the war with.” Sherman took these orders to the extreme, reporting to his superior that his men were “absolutely stripping the country of corn, cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, everything,” and that he used the fields of newly sprouted spring corn for pasture or cut them for fodder. “The wholesale destruction to which this country is now being subjected is terrible to contemplate,” he continued, “but it is the scourge of war…and weakening the resources of our enemy [is] being executed with rigor.”

He wrote triumphantly: “Jackson, once the pride and boast of Mississippi, is now a ruined town.” Sherman also remarked happily that after his two successful raids on the capital, “Jackson ceases to be a place for the enemy to collect stores and men from which to threaten our great river.” This was the first step that illustrated Grant’s and Sherman’s belief that the Union army needed a new type of strategy to win the war.

In the preceding months, Sherman had tried diligently to end the guerrilla attacks along the Mississippi River with a series of precise retaliations. Then he had attacked the settlements near the points of these assaults, destroying property and insisting that the local populace either was the guilty party or, at the least, was aiding the attackers. Next he increased the area of his retaliation to encompass not only the immediate vicinity of the harassment but some miles around the place, still searching for partisans and their supporters. Now Sherman attempted to render an entire region thoroughly and systematically unusable to the Confederate army and the guerrillas.

In all of these actions except one, Sherman took great care not to disturb nonmilitarily significant private property of those not directly involved in the war. In Jackson he had changed his view concerning private citizens and their property. Sherman now felt he had to attack a larger, more encompassing area of the Confederacy, destroying and confiscating both public and private property.

In September 1863, Sherman laid out his emerging philosophy in a long letter to Halleck. He believed that the Federal government should deal with each sector of the population and the rebellion as a whole. In general, he thought that “every member of the nation is bound by natural and constitutional law to ‘maintain and defend the Government against all its opposers whomsoever.’ If they fail to do it they are derelict,” he maintained, “and can be punished or deprived of all advantages arising from the labors of those who do.”

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