US Civil War-some thoughts

Great Debates
61

Well, actually, the person whose report exonerated Forrest was Gen. Sherman, but I didn’t know if you would consider it a legimate source, given your regard for his veracity. What happened at Ft. Pillow wasn’t criticized in the confederacy, though, and as far as I know, none of the soldiers responsible were disciplined. After Davis’ proclamation in December, 1862, though, I’m not suprised:

“That all commissioned officers in the command of said Benjamin F. Butler be declared not entitled to be considered as soldiers engaged in honorable warfare but as robbers and criminals deserving death, and that they and each of them be whenever captured reserved for execution.”

“That all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong to be dealt with according to the laws of said States.”

"That the like orders be executed in all cases with respect to all commissioned officers of the United States when found serving in company with armed slaves in insurrection against the authorities of the different States of this Confederacy. "

Why would President Lincoln find it neccesary to issue his Executive order of July 30, 1863 if the confederates didn’t mistreat prisoners of war?

"It is the duty of every government to give protection to its citizens, of whatever class, color, or condition, and especially to those who are duly organized as soldiers in the public service. The law of nations and the usages and customs of war as carried on by civilized powers, permit no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war as public enemies. To sell or enslave any captured person, on account of his color, and for no offence against the laws of war, is a relapse into barbarism and a crime against the civilization of the age.

The government of the United States will give the same protection to all its soldiers, and if the enemy shall sell or enslave anyone because of his color, the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy’s prisoners in our possession.

It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war."

62

This order was issued after Butler had issued an order declaring any woman of New Orleans who refused to kowtow to Union officers to be a whore and liable to be treated as such. Sauce for the goose…

But now you’re getting waaay off the subject. The OP posited, inter alia, that Sherman really wasn’t such a bad sort and that his misdeeds had been exaggerated. I rebutted that. (Effectively, I think.)

You responded with an “Oh yeah, well, Forrest was a war criminal, too!” which is really sort of a non-sequitur, and not germane to the issue at hand, but hey, just for the sport of it, I rebutted that one, too.

Now you’re making generalized arguments that Confederates mistreated prisoners, or killed surrendering black troops. I don’t deny that this happened, or that it was wrong and evil. (Mistreatment of prisoners and the killing of surrendering troops happened on both sides, by the way.) But it is entirely beside the point of this thread.

63

Systematic abuse, killings, and enslavement by Confederates of Union prisoners is germane to the discussion, because it attempts to put the actions of Sherman’s army in the context of the war. It’s disingenous to say “Sherman’s actions in Georgia were terrible”, unless you consider the war as a whole and the events that led the army to do what it did. You still have failed to show evidence of Sherman’s “brutality”, except that he shelled Atlanta at one point without giving advance warning, that there was an incident where he found a man looting and “reprimanded” him, that he removed civilian women in a mill town out of his army’s path, and that numerous women were raped by Sherman’s army, none of whom came forward to report or speak about their rapes, and that you know all this because of the oral histories of the “victims”…the same “victims” who, refusing to recognize a duly elected president because they were afraid he would limit their political power or take away their slaves, “seceeded”, then attacked U.S. military installations in the “seceeded” states, and then sent poor boys to die for their cause while they sat, unmolested, far away from the fighting, damning the government. Cry me a river.

64

Somehow, I don’t think the “context of the war” defense would have saved Lee from the gallows if he had conducted a Sherman-style total war in Pennsylvania or Maryland.

Sure, rationalize all you like. Try to convince us (and yourself, while you’re at it) that the Roswell women “had it coming.” After all, they had the gall to live in a state that seceded from the Union! And then they had the temerity to go to work in a factory to feed their children! Traitors!!!

By the way, it may interest you to know that a majority of Georgians actually voted (by a narrow margin) to remain in the Union, but that the minority carried the day because of a county delegate voting system in the convention that followed. I wonder if Sherman destroyed only the property of secessionist Georgians? I wonder if only secessionist women were raped. Because of course, non-secessionists wouldn’t have “had it coming” according to your logic, now, would they?

Sherman was never prosecuted as a war criminal because his army was victorious, pure and simple. It is sophistry to argue that his victims deserved whatever they got.

65

Well, in that the evidence you have that women were raped comes from “stories your great-grandmothers told” you, I can’t speak as to the political affiliation of the raped. Besides, how can you blame any rapes that occured on the General? Are you arguing that it was army policy to rape southern women, or even that if charges of rape against union soldiers were made, they weren’t taken seriously? If that’s the case, I really need to see proof. As for destruction of property, you do realize that those people who swore oaths that they didn’t act against the union, after the war, were compensated for any damage the armies might have inflicted. As for the “his victims deserved whatever they got” argument being sophistry, that was very much the attitude of the soldier in Sherman’s army at the time, which you can see from reading soldier’s diaries, and that explains why S. Carolina, where pro-secesh attitudes were strongest, suffered the most from Sherman’s armies, and North Carolina, which was largely pro-unionist, suffered the least. I’ll deal with Roswell later…I don’t have time to now, other than to say that unfortunate incidents happen during wartime.

66

We seem to be well into the more- heat- than- light area in this discussion about the Atlanta-March to the Sea Campaign. My position on a few points should be clarified. First, the fact that I am a Northerner and that some ancestors served in the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Cumberland doesn’t have any more to do with our discussions than that some relative of mine likely served in the Kaiser’s army and in Hitler’s army. I have no certain knowledge that my people were in the German army in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, but I wouldn’t be surprised. By the same token, it seems rational that any family that was in the US in 1861-1865 had people in either Federal or Confederate service, maybe both. As an aside, Professor Lieber’s sons were on both sides in the Civil War; one died of wounds suffered in the Confederate service while an other lost an arm in the Union army.

Second, sources are important. Academic works are subject to review and criticism. Privately published stuff, especially anonymously published stuff like web sites is not subject to review. Any one can put anything on a web page. The fact that it is on the Internet just does not make it true. While some one may scoff at the Time/Life books, we at least know who wrote them and who edited them and contributed to the contents. At least they have been widely circulated and subject to comment by generalists and specialists in the field. As far as we can tell the Time/Life editors are not carrying any particular brief for GEN Sherman. In the case of the Atlanta Campaign volume the principal writer was David Nevin, a well-regarded popular history writer, and the consultants include COL. Elting, a retired history teacher at USMA and a respected historian and writer, and Professor Shenton from Columbia University. The Castel book doesn’t say much about the Roswell thing but it does provide footnotes that point to published sources in well known and widely circulated specialized history magazines. The Yew York Tribune is about as reliable source on the doings of the Lincoln administration and its conduct of the war as Rush Limbaugh is for the doings of the Clinton administration.

Third, the Time/life book and the Castel book both support the contention that something strange happened at Roswell, GA, when the Union Army advanced on Atlanta. It seems a little foolish to attack a source that supports your own theory.

Fourth, I recognize that the suppression of the Southern Confederacy in the last year of the war involved resort to the destruction of the South’s ability to wage war and that this was a departure from the way the war had been prosecuted up until then. There can be little doubt that in the war’s principal theaters in 1864 things were done differently under Grant, Sherman and Sheridan than they had been done before. This is not to say that the hard character the war took on was the product of some malignant and malicious wish on Sherman’s part to cause all the pain and suffering he could for the sheer pleasure it gave him. While brutal by any standard, and novel by the standards of the Civil War, the objective of those tactics was clear. The idea was to destroy the South’s ability to fight. It worked.

Fifth, poor old Uncle Billy Sherman is long beyond any judgment we may pass on him. It is pointless to bellow to the sky that Sherman should have been prosecuted as a war criminal. The only purpose that all this can serve is to allow some of my deluded countrymen to claim that The Lost Cause lost because the Union did not play by the rules. War in any age is not an exercise in fancy dress knight errantry. Mark Twain once remarked that the Confederacy died of an over dose of Sir Walter Scott. He may have been right. In any event this shrieking of “we was robbed” is neither seemly nor rational.

67

RE The Burning of Atlanta:
Another Sherman quote:

This seems to conflict with Sherman’s official orders, as given by adjutant Henry Hitchcock:

Maybe the stragglers and teamsters really did set the fire. Maybe Sherman never intended his orders to be taken seriously. Maybe an attempt was made to burn only industry, but the fires got out of hand (and Sherman, later in life, decided that it was just as well). Who’s to say?

RE The March to the Sea:
Foraging was a necessity for Sherman’s army, and there were numerour units set aside for just that purpose. Their activities, however, seem to have included more than just the procurement of food. Union Captain George Pepper:

From Sherman:

If I had to venture a guess, I’d say both Pepper and Sherman were exagerating.

In spite of all this, I still find it hard to indict Sherman. The American Civil War was the first real “total war.” Whichever side’s populace could produce the most men and material would win. Battlefield tactics, while hardly irrelevant, were less important than production and manpower in the final analysis. In conducting a war against the South – not just her armies – Sherman was in untested ethical waters. Hundreds of thousands were already dead from the war (which was even more horrific than we may at first think given the small population of the nation then, relative to today). At a certain point, doesn’t squeezing until your opponent cries “Uncle!” become a viable option?

Finally, for what it’s worth: If Sherman was conducting a war against the populace, the populace was being directed to conduct war against Sherman as well. A proclamation from Beauregard:

From a CSA Senator, B.H. Hill:

Of course, the plan didn’t exactly work out, but still. . .

68

I cannot help but interject that you guys are discussing the SECOND US Civil war. It might amuse you to hear the story of the FIRST Civil War.

http://www.iowa-counties.com/historical/honeywar.htm

The fact that both militias got drunk and went home without shooting at each other is irrelevant. We did it FIRST. :wink:

69

If you still think Sherman was a decent man who, gosh darn it, was just conducting a military campaign in the only way he could (insert rolleyes here, and note for the record that the concept of “total war” is not recognized under international law, and is not a legal excuse for looting and atrocities), then you might want to consider Sherman’s later career in Indian affairs.

From that site:

And thus was “total war” brought to the Plains Indians.

But hey, maybe you folks are right, and Sherman was a fine fellow who just had a few rambunctious soldiers in his command. Boys will be boys, I guess. Nothing Sherman could do about that, right?

70

General Sherman’s actions in the Indian wars, while repellant, as were so many actions by the U.S. gov’t against the Indians, are not relevant to the point of the discussion, which touches on the general’s actions during the rebellion, and during the rebellion, he found himself in Georgia, in the midst of a population who, at every turn, was resisting the government, by blocking roads, slaughering their livestock so that the government was unable to procure it, and otherwise acting to limit and prevent the advance of Federal troops. Gen. Sherman also found himself surrounded by confederate deserters who had turned to banditry, who themselves inflicted a good deal of destruction on civilian lives and property. I can not, sir, find myself with much sympathy for rebels and traitors who found themselves “burnt out” by Sherman’s bummers. Throughout the war and afterwards, the traitors were treated with uncommon leniency by the government, and I can not fault General Sherman for the actions of his army, other than perhaps to wish he had been more severe.

71

Captain Amazing, you would have been a credit to Sherman’s army! How perfectly you understand the mindset! Attach a nice de-humanizing label to your victims (“traitors” or “secesh” or in later wars “redskin” or “gook”) and gosh, you can rationalize all sorts of brutality.

And how do you reconcile this “righteous terrorism” with that inconvenient lttle fact I mentioned earlier, that a majority of Georgia citizens voted to stay in the Union and thus weren’t “secesh” at all? Or the fact that even the slave cabins were being looted? Just “collateral damage,” Captain?

72

Captain Amazing wrote:

They are relevant inasmuch as they reveal the true character of the man (as if the March to the Sea hadn’t already done that). Sherman was brutal, vindictive, and cruel. He knowingly waged war on civilians, first in the South, and then on the Plains. No amount of whitewash or revisionism will change that.

In a word, he was a terrorist (albeit a successful and government-sponsored one).

73

Spavined Gelding wrote:

(low whistle…) Say, that’s some straw man you’ve made there.

Nowhere have I argued that “we was robbed.” In fact, I think the South was in the wrong, and deserved to lose the war. I also think that given the overwhelming superiority of the North in men and materiel, it was virtually inevitable that the South would lose the war. (Bungling Northern generals notwithstanding.)

In my view, this makes Sherman’s acts of terrorism all the more reprehensible, as they were utterly unnecessary. He could have destroyed the infrastructure of the South, its railroads, factories and crops (which was a legitimate military goal), without conducting a campaign of terror. Please tell me what legitimate end the war against civilians served? It did not shorten the greater conflict by one day.

The war ended when Lee’s army was on the verge of utter destruction. Torching or looting a home in Millegeville, Georgia did nothing to hasten that end, and was purely punitive and vindictive.

74

Has this thing now been reduced to a dispute over the necessity of burning an unidentified house in Millegeville, GA?

75

Next time I’ll add a “for instance” so that the slow students can follow along.

76

::Foghorn Leghorn Voice::spoke- I thought ya would have known better son, known better! Arguin’ with these here learned individuals ‘bout Genral Sherman and Genral Forrest and Hotlanta an all that… for shame. You know how it upsets ‘dem folks to hear the southern view of the Late Unpleasantness! Why, it says right there in the history books that Genral Sherman was merely passin’ through an’ that he wasn’t such a bad ol’ feller. Them folks in Georgee who was defendin’ their homes from looters and the like had it comin’ to ‘em. Comin’ to ‘em, I say! Never mind that you find some facts to show ya know what yer talkin’ about! Never mind oral histories - - we southerners been delusional for quite some time. It’s the heat, son, the heat! Makes us think loopy. (Well, that an’ the whiskey, that is.)

As my pappy used to say: “Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll both git dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.” Seems like good advice now, doesn’t it, son? Ya made yer points. Now back out graciously before ya offend anyone else’s sensibilities. ::End Foghorn Leghorn Voice::

77

Ivorybill, we thought you were extinct. The last any of us heard from you it was in the depths of some desolate piney woods swamp. We trust you are in sound mating condition. And just who are you calling a pig, Sport? :stuck_out_tongue:

78

Obviously not extinct, but certainly feeling I’ve outlived my contemporaries. The reproduction is going a bit too well, I’m afraid: Mrs. Ivorybill and I have a fourth hatchling as of July 3rd. Our new son and his mother are doing fine, thank you. And nobody with such a distinguished user name as yourself could ever be even remotely confused with a pig. :wink:

79

Hmm. Yes, my last remark was intemperate and ingracious, and I apologize for it. Spavined Gelding’s posts have been mostly level-headed and reasonable.

We Southerners are a hot-headed bunch, you know.

80

You are, Sir, a gentleman, and a fine judge of horseflesh and whiskey. I’m going home. Good night to you all.