"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." -- William Tecumseh Sherman

Almost from the day when Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman sent President Lincoln his famous message of Dec. 22, 1864 -- "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah" -- his campaign through Georgia has occupied a mythic, capital-letter place in the national consciousness: Sherman's March to the Sea.

To Northerners, it was a daring plunge into the Deep South that broke the back of the rebellion. To Southerners, it was the waging of war on the civilian population, a barbaric precursor of the scorched-earth tactics of the next century.

In "Southern Storm," Noah Andre Trudeau relies on journals and letters written during the march, rather than memoirs written years later, to peel back the layers of lacquered mythology and offer a realistic, detailed, on-the-ground view of the campaign.

He finds that although Sherman did much damage to railroads and other parts of Georgia's infrastructure, it was far from "total war." Homes, while subject to search, were left more or less intact. Farms were plundered, as foraging soldiers seized all the hogs, chickens and sweet potatoes the army could eat, but not destroyed. Cases of soldiers abusing civilians, although they did happen, were few.

Militarily, much of the march was uneventful; Sherman's army was largely unopposed except for a lone Confederate cavalry corps biting at its flanks. (Spoiler alert: Even the capture of Savannah turns out to be anticlimactic when the rebel garrison slinks out of town under cover of darkness.)

Compounding the lack of drama is Trudeau's rigid day-by-day format, which he uses to outline in exacting and often arcane detail the day's troop movements and the results of foraging excursions.

Civil War buffs will delight in this. But more casual readers of history accustomed to the likes of McCullough and Ambrose will find that it makes for a plodding narrative.

"Yam, yam, yam," an Illinois soldier complains. "Confound the yams." By that point -- page 355 -- I could relate.

Sherman's march did break the back of the Confederacy, Trudeau says, but not in the way you might think. Many of the destroyed railroads and telegraph lines were back in working order within weeks. But as white Southerners watched Georgia's slaves walk free, their lives, and their society, would never be the same. In Sherman's wake, the Lost Cause was born.

Casey Common is an assistant business editor at the Star Tribune.