Sherman necktie

plural Sherman neckties · alternative Sherman's necktie

1. UShistoricalin pluralrail transportA segment of rail that has been heated and twisted into a loop, as a means of destroying a railway.

   The Road to Tara Museum had a lot of Gone with the Wind and almost no Sherman, except for one twisted Sherman's necktie.

   2014, Anne Sarah Rubin, “Conclusion: Rubin’s March”, in Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, →ISBN, page 232

   5 more examples

   We were compelled to go by carriage, as the railroads had been destroyed, the fat-pine cross-ties burned to heat the rails and the red-hot rails wrapped around the trees growing near the track. We used to call these iron rails "Sherman's neckties," and the solemn-looking chimneys standing guard over the former sites of once happy homes were called by the natives "Sherman's monuments."

   [1917, James Morris Morgan, chapter XXVIII, in Recollections of a Rebel Reefer, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company […], →OCLC, page 244

   As the Democrats met in Chicago to declare the war a failure, northern soldiers 700 miles away were making "Sherman neckties" out of the last open railroad into Atlanta by heating the rails over a bonfire of ties and twisting the iron around trees.

   1988, James M. McPherson, “We are Going to be Wiped Off the Earth”, in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (The Oxford History of the United States; 6), New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN; paperback edition, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2003, →ISBN, page 774

   I break camp and push down the road to the tiny town of Lithonia. It was here that [William Tecumseh] Sherman saw the first homes on the March to the Sea go up in flames as his men wrecked the railroad, twisting the iron rails into Sherman's Neckties.

   1995, Jerry Ellis, chapter 11, in Marching through Georgia: My Walk with Sherman, New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, →ISBN; Marching through Georgia: My Walk along Sherman’s Route, paperback edition, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2002, →ISBN, page 74

   Sherman's army cut a swath of destruction fifty miles wide as it marched leisurely through Georgia without any meaningful Confederate resistance. The men destroyed nearly all property in their path, famously twisting railroad tracks around tree trunks—"Sherman neckties"—so they would never be usable again.

   2006, Christopher J. Olsen, “Confederate Families at War in 1864–1865”, in The American Civil War: A Hands-on History, New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, →ISBN; paperback edition, New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2007, →ISBN, page 214

   Sherman, however, had grown to hate the Confederate trains running into Atlanta almost as much as the armies behind the city's earthworks. He declared, "Let the destruction be so thorough that not a rail or tie can be used again." The troops had a two-day-long Sherman necktie party.

   2009, Marc [Josef] Wortman, “The First Bonfire”, in The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta, New York, N.Y.: PublicAffairs, →ISBN, part VI (War is Cruelty, and You Cannot Refine It), page 306

   Synonyms: Sherman's bow tie, Sherman's hairpin, Jeff Davis's necktie