Posted on 12/21/2017 1:58:38 PM PST by Bull Snipe
President Abraham Lincoln received this telegram from General William T. Sherman "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton."
Genghis Khan used similar tactics. Maybe just a little bit worse.
War is about winning. Sherman knew his business.
Sherman was a war criminal, but the winners are never charged.
A sad day. The War of Northern Aggression was an evil adventure by the Federals.
Hardee and his troops withdrew from the cities defenses on the 20th. The city government realized they were defenseless. They presented Sherman with the keys to the city. Wise on their part
“Sherman was a war criminal, but the winners are never charged.”
You sound like the commies from The Nation or Mother Jones.
It’s quite simple. They shouldn’t gave gone all Democrat hysterical when Lincoln won, shouldn’t have seceded, should have voluntarily freed the slaves and paid them for their labor.
It would have helped everyone economically and wouldn’t have given a large bloc an eternal grievance that has been exploited greatly by leftists and is still to this day.
If the South had freed their slaves, treated black Americans as free men, not done Jim Crow, there would never have been Obama, and the leftists and communists would not have made the massive inroads they have.
I suspect Sherman was a psychopath.
Abraham Lincoln did not see it as a sad day. He wrote Sherman a few days later “Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift – the capture of Savannah. When you were leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went farther than to acquiesce. And taking the work of Gen. Thomas into the count, as it should be taken, it is indeed a great success. Not only does it afford the obvious and immediate military advantage; but, in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole—Hood’s army—it brings those who sat in darkness, to see a great light. But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave Gen. Grant and yourself to decide. Please make my grateful acknowledgements to your whole army, officers and men.”
Charleston, the city where the first shot was fired in the US Civil War, deeply feared that it was next in General Sherman’s sights. No city was more hated by the Union than this visceral capital of the Confederacy, yet Sherman went north to take South Carolina’s real capital, Columbia, and left Charleston to the long-going bombardment of Union Army and Navy from near-by Morris Island that had already put much of the city into ruins. In his march to Columbia and the link-up with US Grant in Virginia, Sherman destroyed the telegraph and railroad links to Charleston, rendering that hated city isolated and trembling in fear of that Yankee Devil!
Ruh roh. Bales of cotton! More proof Lincoln was racis’. Or something.
No argument.
Phew, he was tough. I love all the soldiers on both sides of the fight but, boy, was he tough.
You have no doubt been educated by the public school system. The real story is quite different from what people are usually taught. The whole thing comes down to Money, and whether the nation would be ran by New York and Washington DC. (Which it currently is today.)
“Savannah was spared because the city was too beautiful to burn.”
Your view is the communist view.
Generalship at its best.
It was saved from burning because Hardee and his troops evacuated the city without burning the military stores, and cotton bales in the city.
In other news Sherman is still burning in Hell. :-)
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