Marching Through Georgia

From History.com:

From November 15 until December 21, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman led some 60,000 soldiers on a 285-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of this “March to the Sea” was to frighten Georgia’s civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause. Sherman’s soldiers did not destroy any of the towns in their path, but they stole food and livestock and burned the houses and barns of people who tried to fight back. The Yankees were “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people,” Sherman explained; as a result, they needed to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”

Songwriter, Henry Clay Work, wrote many songs against slavery and in support of the north. When he was a child, his father had been imprisoned for helping some runaway slaves. One of the songs he wrote was in celebration of Sherman's March To The Sea, however, after seeing the pictures of how terribly the south had been destroyed, many northerners felt very badly about The March. Southerners hated this song.

Marching Through Georgia

by Henry Clay Work

Performers: Jay Unger and Fiddle Fever

Bring the good old bugle, boys, we'll sing another song

Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along

Sing it as we used to sing it, 50,000 strong

While we were marching through Georgia.

Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!

Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!

So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea

While we were marching through Georgia.

From "The Song That Drove Sherman Crazy," an article by Christian McWhirter:

By the time Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman arrived in Boston for the 1890 national encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, he was already sick of hearing “Marching Through Georgia,” a song commemorating his historic 1864 campaign from Atlanta to the Atlantic coast. A friend of his, later asserted that Sherman had always hated it “above all songs,” but something snapped in the old general’s mind that day in Boston. We can only imagine his growing discomfort as he stood on the grandstand and heard no less than 250 different bands parade by playing the tune. He vowed then and there to never attend another reunion without a guarantee that no one would play it.

Sherman died soon after. For his funeral, organizers hired one of America’s most prominent former Civil War bandleaders, Patrick S. Gilmore, and asked him to play an appropriate selection. Naturally, he chose “Marching Through Georgia.”