A lovely ruin: Sherman's March in the literary imagination

A Lovely Ruin brings together nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through Georgia and the Carolinas and examines how travel and tourism replace military action in these accounts. Imagining the campaign as a travel narrative mediates the army's interaction with a civilian populace and mitigates concerns about the army's unchecked movement. One of the most significant and controversial campaigns of the entire Civil War, Sherman's March brought liberation as well as immense destruction. The vaguely ordered policies that governed contact between the army and locals---Sherman ordered his men to "forage liberally" yet trespass only selectively---resulted in inconsistent behavior toward civilians and contributed to conflicting perceptions of the campaign's objectives. Accounts of the march must contend with describing its movement, contact with a liminally foreign culture, and the lawlessness of the army's actions and the South's secession. Travel narratives speak to authorial anxieties because they rely on displacement. They examine the uneasy contact between different cultures, emphasize sites of historic interest, and they even evoke what Paul Fussell calls "the frisson of the unlawful." By framing this military campaign in touristic terms of cultural conflict and spectacle, the differing military and civilian experiences find a common narrative ground.; Sherman's men traveled across the Georgia landscape with unprecedented leisure, and this encouraged them to view themselves as tourists. Soldiers deemed the march a "vast holiday frolic" even as they created the very ruins that gave the American landscape the cultural cachet of Old World Grand Tour destinations. I argue that emphasizing a traveler's privilege and noting historically important sites evades culpability on both sides of the war. Union soldiers transform an invasion into a harmless frolic; Southern citizens imaginatively transform their ruined lands into "ancient" ruins, rather than recent symbols of encroaching Confederate defeat. Modern versions of the march use travel to emphasize a shared cultural heritage and to propose new methods of reconciling the troubled popular memory of the march.