===March to the Sea===
[[Image:Savannah Campaign.png|thumb|200px|right|Sherman's March to the Sea]]
see [[Sherman's March through Georgia]]
Before marching out of Atlanta, Sherman’s engineers put the torch to selected buildings and destroyed all railroads in the vicinity. On November 12, moving away from the Nashville depots toward Savannah, the Division of the Mississippi troops broke telegraphic contact with Grant. They had twenty days’ emergency rations in their wagons but planned to replenish them by living off the country. Operating on a sixty-mile-wide front unimpeded by any Confederate force, Sherman’s army systematically burned or destroyed what it did not need. The march became something of a rowdy excursion, but the destruction of private homes and towns has perhaps been exaggerated by popular myth. Sherman concentrated on destroying Confederate warehouses, depots, railroad lines, and other elements that assisted the Confederate war effort. His thrust deep into the Confederacy also liberated thousands of slaves, many of whom followed the Army in its march to the sea. Sherman’s campaign, like Sheridan’s in the Shenandoah, anticipated the economic warfare and strategic aerial bombardments of the twentieth century.