Why not trust General Sherman himself. Here's what he said about total war, or near-total war if you prefer.
“The government of the U.S. has any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war - to take their lives, their homes, their land, their everything...war is simply unrestrained by the Constitution...to the persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better...”
“Look to the South and you who went with us through that land can best say if they have not been fearfully punished. Mourning is in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin and poverty and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding to the very cap sheaf of their stack of misery...”
“There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”
Sherman estimated that the March to the Sea campaign had inflicted $100 million in destruction, about one fifth of which “inured to our advantage” while the “remainder is simple waste and destruction.”
After practicing on the South, Sherman turned west.
“The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous...”
I'm not sure why you would want to deny General Sherman, with Lincoln's approval, conducted total warfare against civilians. General Sherman reveled in it . . . perhaps given your view, you should too.
The atrocity stories were largely exaggeration.
There were plenty of atrocities on both sides.
All that was deplorable.
Still, historians dispute the wilder charges against Sherman.
Do you have a reference for that? All I can find is the much discredited dilorenzo.