Bummers

Foragers during Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea

Bummers was a nickname applied to foragers of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's Union army during its March to the Sea and north through South Carolina and North Carolina during the American Civil War.

Sherman’s veterans appropriated the belittling title bummer as a point of personal pride. On May 24, 1865, Sherman’s Army paraded for six hours through the Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D,C., during the Grand Review of the Union Armies on May 23–24, 1865. Union General Horace Porter called foraging during the Sherman's raid a "novel feature of Sherman's command . organized for a very useful purpose from the adventurous spirits which are always found in the ranks." Another Union General Henry Warner Slocum characterized the Sherman's March as "one great picnic from beginning to end” with "just enough fighting and danger of fighting to give zest to the experience." Union General Edward Follansbee Noyes said that in "this rollicking picnic expedition there was just enough of fighting for variety, enough of hardship to give zest to the repose which followed it, and enough of ludicrous adventure to make its memory a constant source of gratification." The Southern portrayal of Sherman's bummers was quite the opposite and was epitomized by Margaret Mitchell in her novel Gone with the Wind. A United States military education resource states: During Sherman's March to the Sea in the Civil War, General Sherman and his subordinates earned a reputation for destruction and for the lack of discipline of his troops. His marauding stragglers became known as "Sherman's bummers."

In American cartoonist John L. Magee's 1865 cartoon Jeff Davis Caught at Last: Hoop Skirts and Southern Chivalry, a Union soldier threatens the disguised Jefferson Davis, "[Drop] that bucket and hood or I'll drop you quicker than a Duch lunch can slide down a Bummer's windpipe."