I researched this topic throughly a few years back. Read every scholarly source I could uncover as well as a lot of amateur work.

Bottom line....good luck finding Sherman and his 60,000 man army committing atrocities from the control of Atlanta thru the campaign ending at Bentonville.

Another comment here says he wrought wholesale destruction of Atlanta....nope....about one third of it. And I couldn't find a single reference to a single casualty...worst thing I found was Yankee removal of silver hardware from coffins in crypts. However, logic suggests that injury and death due to exposure was certainly a possibility.

Sherman gave standing orders to his men to "forage liberally" which was a wink to destroy fields of crops and herds of livestock. They typically destroyed the homes of the planting class and left yeoman farmer possessions and dwellings untouched. Savannah was left alone. Columbia, the seat of the rebellion, was razed to the ground.

Johnston's CSA forces put mines in Sherman's projected path but Sherman took to placing CSA POWs at the point of his columns while freeing a few to get word back to their commanding officer and the mines disappeared...

So while the eminent military historian B. H. Liddell Hart "credits" Sherman as the originator of "total war", I think any post WW1 understanding of the phrase belongs to someone else besides Sherman IF we only consider his Civil War depredations. But, if you consider what he presided over in the "subduement" of the Great Plains Indian, you might reasonably come to a different conclusion.

EDIT...Misread the comment on "wholesale destruction"...my apologies...yep, there was planning as to what was to be destroyed and what wasn't.

Historiographical Issues Surrounding William Tecumseh Sherman https://www.dropbox.com/s/rp76yewpvd9jyfi/sherman%20historiography.docx

Sherman wasn't directly responsible for the burning of Atlanta, contrary to most southerners, it was actually the confederates that burned it down rather then let it fall into union hands. From Atlanta to the Atlantic farms were raided, but it was usually the Barns, not the houses burned down. If you look at census data from the 1850's and the 1870's you'll see that most of the mansions in his path still stood, but the barns would be conspicuous absent or in a different place and of recent construction. There is some credibility to the atrocity claims though, when his army entered South Carolina the troops did take as much revenge as they could on the originator of the rebellion. Sherman actually sped his troops up halfway through after seeing the level of destruction he was bringing and moved to get out of SC as fast as he could.

Adding on: How soon after the war did lore of Sherman's campaign attacking cities not on their actual route pop up?