The Battle of Bentonville
On December 21, 1864, the port city of Savannah, Georgia, unconditionally surrendered to Major General William Tecumseh Sherman and his Military Division of the Mississippi. It was the coup de grace of Sherman’s “March to the Sea”—an attritional campaign that carved a swath of destruction through Georgia’s economic heartland. Sixty thousand Federal troops employed a scorched-earth policy, as described in Special Field Order No. 120, that crippled Confederate industrial capacity, destroyed infras
