Happily. There's a huge file at the National Archives called the Union Provost Marshall's Records. It contains most of the non-battle related military correspondences from the yankee army - the day to day routine stuff that didn't make it into the Official Records series. The UPM records are loaded with orders and reports of pillage, plunder, and death all over the south. I have a photocopy of a series of orders by Gen. Robert Milroy, one of Sherman's underlings at the time, from his activities in Tennessee. One of them is a "death list" of over 50 civilians that literally looks like something out of Stalinist russia. There are three or for others over the days following that first one where he adds a couple dozen more names to the death list. The instructions on them are explicit right down to what to steal and, in some cases, the manner in which the victim should be executed.
He gave the things to bands of soldiers under his command and they spent most of January 1865 carrying it out. They note which houses have furniture that can be pillaged, which persons on it were hunters and therefore had firearms that could be confiscated in violation of the 2nd amendment, which farms had animals that could be stolen, and directions in virtually every case to torch the place after it was stripped bare of valuables. Remember that this was in the dead of winter - January - and they burned these people out of their homes.
The "execution" methods are even more bizarre. One of Milroy's instructions tells the soldiers to hang two civilians in doorframes by a slipknot - an old medieval torture method! Another house on the list has directions to shoot the husband and then dispose of the wife "by accident" while they were there. Some of this was detailed in a recent book by Michael Bradley - "With Blood and Fire"
I almost had to wipe the tears from my eyes. Why not post the document? How is anyone to know if the "civilians" were not spies or saboteurs, partisans or common criminals, under military occupation? If these supposed documents date from Milroy's duty in 1864 in Tennessee, the he was most probably reporting to Union General George H. Thomas, a loyalist from Virginia, and one of the finest commanders in the War.
"They note which houses have furniture that can be pillaged, which persons on it were hunters and therefore had firearms that could be confiscated in violation of the 2nd amendment, which farms had animals that could be stolen, and directions in virtually every case to torch the place after it was stripped bare of valuables. Remember that this was in the dead of winter - January - and they burned these people out of their homes."
Sounds like prudent intelligence. The area in question, although you are rather vague, was undoubtedly under marshal law. Tennessee had purported to secede and much of the state, at least, could be considered hostile territory. In these border states and re-occupied areas sabotage and guerrilla warfare were common. Farber notes that the Supreme Court "has never repudiated the view that martial law is an appropriate measure in contested or occupied territory."
In the Supreme Court case, Dow v Johnson (1879), Farber writes, "the Civil War, 'though not between independent nations (note: yet another authoritative denial of southern independence!), but between different portions of the same nation, was accompanied by the general incidents of an international war.' Therefore, when "our armies marched into the country which acknowledged the authority of the Confederate government,' they were governed only by military law. Although an invading army generally chooses to allow local laws to remain in force to regulate relationships between private citizens, these laws continue only on sufferance, 'unless suspended or superseded by the conqueror.' 'What is the law which governs an army invading an enemy's country?' the Court asked. 'It is not the civil law of the invaded country; it is not the civil law of the conquering country: it is military law - the law of war - and its supremacy for the protection of the officers and soldiers of the army, when in the service in the field in the enemy's country, is as essential to the efficiency of the army as the supremacy of the civil law at home, and, in time of peace, is essential to the preservation of liberty.'"
It is not a good thing to be on the losing side in a civil war.