The legacy of Sherman's march is complicated. In my own research I have come across many credible accounts of rape in Georgia and environs in '64 and '65, but only 10 or so resulted in court martial trials. The charges of ravishment and rape ranged from what we might call sexual assault today, including a man flipping a woman's skirt over her head in public, to serious rape and murder that I won't describe here. More than 10 took place in South Carolina, but not in numbers that would raise your eyebrows considering the hundreds of thousands of people interacting with each other in the conflict. There were undoubtedly many more cases that did not get reported for a variety of reasons that still hold true today. It is a sad statistical reality that given enough people in a particular place, that someone will commit rape. The same goes for any crime, including murder. Those numbers go up when you introduce young men who are angry, starved, lonely, and in a foreign land full of strangers. The reality is that rape happened everywhere during the American Civil War and the March to the Sea was no different in that regard. My research leads me to believe that Sherman certainly had no worse control over his soldiers behavior in Georgia and South Carolina, and perhaps even better than many other commanders I have come across.

There are two large reasons you might associate rape with Sherman and his March. The first is that most historians for a long time have downplayed or ignored the more widespread rape and other atrocities that occurred during the civil war. The reasons for this are complicated, but in general few wished to impugn the service record of American veterans, especially relating to their conduct against other American citizens. For a long time many people felt that it was one thing to rape and murder an enslaved person, or Native Americans or Mexicans, but it is another to attack an American. The former could be referred to as isolated incidents, or boys will be boys, or whatever poor excuse they had, but white men attacking white women wasn't talked about. The Civil War has long been referred to as "The low-rape war" even in highly acclaimed books into the 1990s, but these claims have no basis in reality.

Ignoring older works which are rife with errors and prejudice, here is a sampling of some works from the 80's onward. Joseph T. Glatthaar's 1985 book, The March to the Sea and Beyond, reports that most soldiers had never heard of anyone committing rape. The reality is that masses of court documents and letters written home dispute this statement. If one soldier in a regiment committed rape news quickly spread. Michael Fellman's 1989 book, Inside War: The Guerrilla Confict in Missouri..., states that there was a near total absence of rape in the war, and dismisses most accusations of war. Even Reid Mitchell in her 1993 book, The Vacant Chair, discusses how few Northern solders committed rape due to ideals of sexual restraint and masculinity, without ever citing any evidence to prove her point, and seemingly ignores the stacks of court martial cases. The myth continues to this day. George Burkhardt suggests in his 2007 book Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath that incidents of rape was extremely low. Keep in mind that these are all well regarded scholarly books. The best I can come up with is that authors looked at the small numbers of cases documented which survived from 1865 and concluded that rape must have been rare without reading between the lines in the evidence. Just because something wasn't written down doesn't mean it didn't happen.

The other reason is that the Lost Cause narrative focused most criminal acts on men like Sherman, so their (or their soldier's) poor behavior is magnified and isolated in relation to other people. I won't get into the complicated legacy of the Lost Cause, but will say that during the forging of the Lost Cause authors called upon Southern folk-knowledge of widespread rape, especially by Colored Regiments, to show how horrible Northern generals were. They could rarely substantiate widespread rape beyond a hand full of cases however. It was often a case of "this person told me, that two towns over, his aunt heard..." In reality the generals that people perceive of as highly honorable were no better than Sherman. Robert E. Lee's soldiers certainly committed rape in their campaigns, probably in statistically reliable numbers comparable to other regiments and generals. Some Confederate leaders were undoubtedly worse than Sherman. William Quantrill was a Confederate raider who murdered hundreds of civilians in retaliation for political actions, yet he is best remembered in conjunction with folk-hero Jesse James.

I guess to sum it up, in reality Sherman was probably no better or worse at restraining his solders. Soldiers committed rape everywhere during the whole duration of the war, and the March to the Sea was no different. We only remember it differently.