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Actually the Atlanta campaign was a military failure.

Next best to destroying an army is to deprive it of its freedom of action.

Sherman had accomplished this much of his job and then inexplicably nullified it by his thirty-mile retreat from Lovejoy's to Atlanta.

But, so far as its territorial objectives were concerned, the campaign was successful.

Within the narrow frame of military tactics, too, the experts agree that the campaign was brilliant.

In seventeen weeks the military front was driven southward more than 100 miles.

There was a battle on an average of once every three weeks.

The skirmishing was almost constant.

In the summary of the principal events of the campaign compiled from the official records there are only ten days which show no fighting.

The casualties in the Army of the Cumberland were 22,807, while for all three armies they were 37,081.

Men were killed in their camps, at their meals and in their sleep.

Rifle fire often kept the opposing gunners from manning their pieces.

Modern warfare was born in this campaign -- periscopes, camouflage, booby traps, land mines, extended order, trench raids, foxholes, armored cars, night attacks, flares, sharpshooters in trees, interlaced vines and treetops, which were the forerunners of barbed wire, trip wires to thwart a cavalry charge, which presaged the mine trap, and the general use of anesthetics.

The use of map coordinates was begun when the senior officers began to select tactical points by designating a spot as `` near the letter o in the word mountain ''.

A few weeks later the maps were being divided into squares and a position was described as being `` about lots 239, 247 and 272 with pickets forward as far as 196 ''.

This system was dependent upon identical maps and Thomas supplied them from a mobile lithograph press.

Orders of the day began to specify the standard map for the movement.