Published in 1951, The General Who Marched to Hell: Sherman and the Southern Campaign tells the non-PC (abundance of grinning n-words), rather rosy,
tale of the swathe of destruction left by Sherman's Union soldiers as they marched from Atlanta to Savannah and up through Colombia to Charleston, South Carolina.

While not without honest depictions, given the many original sources available in the 1940s, and not shrinking from some horrors, the book has been criticized for not evaluating
Sherman's choice to burn small homes and farms, to murder animals, and to totally destroy all food and crops.

Burning the public buildings, destroying railroads and bridges, looting art, and taking the food needed to feed the army and the many slaves joining The March, would have been a more compassionate approach. But Sherman and his soldiers, notably after witnessing the conditions of the surviving prisoners at Andersonville, wanted The South to never forget the war
that it had started.

While Sherman is a hero in the sense of ending Confederate power in the South and was a hero to the newly freed slaves,
his treatment of the Nez Perce was unrepentant evil.

And the confederates nearly won another decisive battle because Sherman's soldiers were out of condition after looting all the way across Georgia. ( )