#cump

What an intriguing question which led me down an interesting rabbit hole! I think I got you an answer but I still have some questions. Here’s the badge in the photo you’re talking about and a better view:

Both of these were taken shortly after the war (note the black mourning armband for Lincoln) but I can’t decide if they were taken at the same portrait session or not. In any case, Cump is wearing the same medal in Healy’s 1866 portrait now on display in the National Portrait Gallery:

After some digging I’ve figured out that it’s the (or a) corps badge for the XV Corps, which Sherman commanded at Vicksburg etc.

Based on a scouring of various ACW sites, it seems to be made up of various corps symbols, but I know next to nothing about corps badges and organization so I don’t know who/how/why these symbols came together to represent XV Corps. “40 Rounds” is the XV Corps’ motto, though, something Sherman writes about in his memoirs:

It was on this occasion that the Fifteenth Corps gained its peculiar badge: as the men were trudging along the deeply-cut, muddy road, of a cold, drizzly day, one of our Western soldiers left his ranks and joined a party of the Twelfth Corps at their camp-fire. They got into conversation, the Twelfth-Corps men asking what troops we were, etc., etc. In turn, our fellow (who had never seen a corps-badge, and noticed that every thing was marked with a star) asked if they were all brigadier-generals. Of course they were not, but the star was their corps-badge, and every wagon, tent, hat, etc., had its star. Then the Twelfth-Corps men inquired what corps be belonged to, and he answered, "The Fifteenth Corps." "What is your badge?" "Why," said he (and he was an Irishman), suiting the action to the word, "forty rounds in the cartridge-box, and twenty in the pocket!" At that time Blair commanded the corps; but Logan succeeded soon after, and, hearing the story, adopted the cartridge-box and forty rounds as the corps-badge.”

Hi! Not sure what you’ve heard about it, but I imagine the reality of Sherman’s march was not as brutal as you might’ve heard. The Lost Cause has worked hard to turn the Savannah Campaign/Sherman into a boogeyman, but it was not as hellish as Southern sympathizers would have you believe. I mean, it was war, and war is hell, as Cump himself said. But it was not a murderous free-for-all.

Whether or not it was total war depends on how you would define total war. Sherman’s main objective was to destroy the South’s capacity for war (breaking up its infrastructure, blocking railways, material considerations like that). His second goal was to win the psychological war -- i.e. convince Southerners that they could not and would not win, that as long as they were in rebellion his boot would be on their throats, and that as soon as they surrendered he would come to their aid again. He knew it was either this, tear up Georgia swiftly, or enter a prolonged and bloody conflict that would cost thousands of more lives as it dragged on.

“Make Georgia howl” came from a telegram Sherman sent to Grant in October 1864 -- as I mentioned above, he knew the South and he knew they would not surrender until they realized the futility of their efforts. He proposed to destroy infrastructure, roads, morale, etc. in order to bring the war to an end without more large, deadly battles.

His beard 😍

And also how deeply he cared for his country, and how he overcame his mental health challenges