Savannah: The City That Sherman Gave Away as a Christmas Gift

Savannah was founded in seventeen thirty-three by James Oglethorpe on a plan that is still the organizing principle of its downtown: wards, each centered on a public square, arranged in a grid that preserved sight lines, pedestrian circulation, and a human scale that most American downtowns abandoned long ago. Of the original twenty-four squares, twenty-two survive. The trees in those squares are live oaks draped in Spanish moss, some of them planted in the eighteenth century.

General William Tecumseh Sherman arrived in Savannah in December of eighteen sixty-four after his March to the Sea, which had cut a swath of destruction through Georgia from Atlanta to the coast. He did not destroy Savannah. He telegraphed President Lincoln that he was pleased to present him with the city of Savannah as a Christmas gift, with one hundred fifty heavy guns, ammunition, and twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

The city was too beautiful and too useful as a port to burn. The cotton bales belonged to Confederate merchants. The squares were intact.

They still are. The Yamasee people, whose territory included the Georgia coast, were decimated in the Yamasee War of seventeen fifteen to seventeen seventeen and never recovered their numbers or their territory. The Creek confederacy, whose territory lay to the west, ceded the coast through treaty before Oglethorpe's founding.

Savannah's colonial economy was built on slave labor in rice and cotton production. The Cotton Exchange on Factor's Walk processed the region's crop and most of its violence simultaneously. The architecture survived.

The history is visible in it.