In your post 1269 to Idabilly that I was responding to, you had said, "So are you going to dismiss this first hand account by strongly pro-Confederate Southern citizen Myra Inman of Cleveland, Tennessee? ... Do you dismiss this first-hand account?"
But, but, but ... in your post 1259 you said, "I would take accounts like that [Pepper's and Simm's in my post 1254] with a grain of salt. It is in the interest of a devastated and humiliated people with a questionable cause to cast the victor in the worst light possible." Pepper gave a first-hand account of what he saw. Simms was a witness to what had gone on in Columbia, and he also reported first-hand accounts of what happened from dozens of other witnesses.
Do you think the perpetrators of savagery were going to write down what they did?
No, that's why we are fortunate to have had those Southern ladies near by to document the Confederate torture of Robert Carter and General Wheeler's complicity in the war crime of 9/27/1863.
Not just cavalry. Southern citizen Adelia Craigmiles Knox of Lafayette, Georgia had this to say of the passage of Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee:
"When the army moved on there was not a growing thing left on the place."
You are right, it is the nature of war. Both sides.