Posted on 06/22/2014 1:52:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
All the time I was growing up in Atlanta, the face of Robert E. Lee was taking shape on the side of an enormous granite mountain just outside town. He loomed like a god above us, as much a presence as any deity, and God knows he was accepted as such. It was only much later that I began to question his sanctity, and then to hate what he stood for.
When I was in elementary school, the face of Lee on Stone Mountain was a rough-cut thing, weathering and wasting as the generation that began it in 1912—a generation that still included veterans of the Civil War 50 years before—gave way to generations with other wars to focus their attention.
Then the carving began again in 1964 in a centennial haze of romantic memories about the Old South and frenzy of fear and defiance provoked by the civil-rights movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. was marching on Washington, Confederate battle flags floated above state houses and sculptors using torches began again to carve the granite features of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, taking up three vertical acres on the mountain’s face.
It is this sort of image—the bas-relief nobility of memorial sculpture—that Michael Korda chisels through in his massive and highly readable new one-volume biography: Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. But, as Korda clearly recognizes, Lee himself could be almost as impenetrable as stone.
He was not cold. He was very loving with his wife and many children. He enjoyed flirting (harmlessly, it seems) with young women. He had the self-assurance of a Virginia aristocrat, albeit an impecunious one, and the bearing of a man born not only to be a soldier, but to command....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
We, who are proud of our Southern heritage, are glad to have anything connected to our ancestors. Genealogy is one of my hobbies and nearly every family came to this land in the South. I discovered that many different families traveled to the different areas generations before getting married. Two families came over on the Mayflower and we have Cherokee ancestors. They make up who we are today. I do have relatives who do not want to say anything about our Indian ancestors and I do not understand that. Some ancestors were offered land in the Indian Territory/OK but did not accept it. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if they had accepted it.
I hate what Sherman did. It was brutal.
But from a coldly, logical stand point...burn and destroy is a time honored method in war.
And I don’t think he invented the strategy.
A stupid comment must be responded to. No intellectual content is warranted with your postings. I’m merely correcting your errors regarding Lee.
Intellect is lost on you, I’m afraid.
Carry on....
General Lee was a most honorable man. And you, Mr. Dickey are not qualified to stand in his shadow at Stone Mountain.
Being too dumb to know that the TEA Party does not endorse extremist policies gave you away.
.
Sherman marched to Atlanta and destroyed virtually everything in their path.
Sherman was not content simply to use what food and supplies he needed, but boasted that he would ‘smash things to the sea’ and make Georgia howl. His men entered dwellings, taking everything of value that could be moved, such as silver plate and jewelry; and killed and left dead in the pens thousands of hogs, sheep and poultry. Many dwellings were burned without any justification. Sherman in his own Memoirs testifies to the conduct of his men, estimating that he had destroyed $80,000,000 worth of property of which he could make no use.
I can think of no better way to judge a man than by his very own words:
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.............Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who left a 60 mile wide, 300 mile long path of death and desolation across GA and up through SC.
I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay and farming implements; over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat, and have driven in front of the Army over 4,000 head of stock and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep. Tomorrow I will continue the destruction down to Fisher’s Mill. When this is completed, the Valley from Winchester to Staunton, 92 miles, will have but little in it for man or beast.....from an Oct. 7, 1864 report to Gen. Grant from Gen. Sheridan.
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...Mjr. Gen. W. T. Sherman, Jan. 31, 1864.
This war on citizens was not simply restrained to be applied against men and women but also children. Gen. Sherman in a June 21, 1864, letter to Lincoln’s Sec. of War, Edwin Station wrote, “There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” Stanton replied, “Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval.” While the war on civilians started much earlier than 1864, the above is simply proof that the war on children was part of that scheme.
In 1862 Sherman was having difficulty subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing federal gunboats on the Mississippi River near Memphis. He then adopted the theory of “collective responsibility” to “justify” attacking innocent civilians in retaliation for such attacks. He burned the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground. He also began taking civilian hostages and either trading them for federal prisoners of war or executing them.
Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, were also burned to the ground by Sherman’s troops even though there was no Confederate army there to oppose them. After the burnings his soldiers sacked the town, stealing anything of value and destroying the rest. As Sherman biographer John Marzalek writes, his soldiers “entered residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value . . . those articles which they could not carry they broke.” After the destruction of Meridian Sherman boasted that “for five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists.”
In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people” of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish was for “a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”
The Geneva Convention of 1863 condemned the bombardment of cities occupied by civilians, but Lincoln ignored all such restrictions on his behavior. The bombardment of Atlanta destroyed 90 percent of the city, after which the remaining civilian residents were forced to depopulate the city just as winter was approaching and the Georgia countryside had been stripped of food by the federal army. In his memoirs Sherman boasted that his army destroyed more than $100 million in private property and carried home $20 million more during his “march to the sea.”
Sherman was not above randomly executing innocent civilians as part of his (and Lincoln’s) terror campaign. In October of 1864 he ordered a subordinate, General Louis Watkins, to go to Fairmount, Georgia, “burn ten or twelve houses” and “kill a few at random,” and “let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon.”
Another Sherman biographer, Lee Kennett, found that in Sherman’s army “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World.” Although it is rarely mentioned by “mainstream” historians, many acts of rape were committed by these federal soldiers. The University of South Carolina’s library contains a large collection of thousands diaries and letters of Southern women that mention these unspeakable atrocities. Shermans’ band of criminal looters (known as “bummers”) sacked the slave cabins as well as the plantation houses. As Grimsley describes it, “With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked.” A routine procedure would be to hang a slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners’ valuables were hidden.
Sherman himself admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged for the things he did. But in war the victors always write the history and are never punished for war crimes, no matter how heinous. Only the defeated suffer that fate.
In a September 17, 1863, letter to Henry W. Halleck, the general in chief of the Union armies, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote:
“The United States has the right, and ... the ... power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain…. We will remove and destroy every obstacle - if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.”
On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] … men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” A few months later, Sherman informed one of his subordinate commanders:
“I am satisfied ... that the problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory, so that hard, bull-dog fighting, and a great deal of it, yet remains to be done…. Therefore, I shall expect you on any and all occasions to make bloody results.”
On September 27, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. John Hood, the Confederate commander of the Army of Tennessee, and announced, “I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south and the rest north.”
Sherman lived up to his boast - and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.
The source of the preceding quotes is The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (128 volumes published by the Government Printing Office). Thomas Bland Keys compiled some of the most shocking comments in his excellent 1991 book, Uncivil War: Union Army and Navy Excesses in the Official Records, published by the Beauvoir Press in Biloxi, Mississippi. For a masterful examination of the broad issues surrounding the war, check out Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).
Sherman was America’s first War Criminal and should have been treated as such. Had the South won the war, I’m sure he would have been hung, but since the South lost, he’s considered a hero.
Let me ask you this: if the commander of US forces in Iraq ordered his unit to march across the nation and burn every building they come across, strip the land clean of any source of food or supplies, destroy any and all livestock they come across and loot and rape, what would you think of him? War criminal, perhaps?
That’s exactly what Sherman did, yet he’s considered a hero.
Just goes to prove the old adage that the history books are written by the victors.
.
Lee created the Confederacy? Wow, everything I've learned must be wrong, then. Can you give details as to how he did this?
Many of us, born and raised in the South, agree with what you said. It is a pity that some still hold to bigoted, made up, clueless, ignorant ideas pertaining to that tragic time in American history.
Bless their hearts.
I think we might be overlooking the federalist vs state perspective, and Lee, like most men at the time, we very much a defender of states rights.
You see, his loyalty was to the US but he was a Virginian—first—and states were respected back then because everyone understood we are a collection of sovereign states, a group of “united states.” And this is the central issue, I think, when it comes to understanding Lee and his loyalties.
Consider: I was reading the 22 Jan 1897, Congressional Directory, 2nd Session, 54th Congress, published by the GPO and came across the following:
In the section on “Department Duties, The Department of State, Secretary of State,” that section states the Sec State “is charged under the direction of the President, with the duties appertaining to correspondence with the public minsters and the consuls of the United States, and with the representatives of foreign powers accredited to the United States; and to negotiations of whatever character relating to the foreign affairs of the United States”
No big surprise there, but the next sentence struck me:
“He is also the medium of correspondence between the President and the chief executives of the several states of the United States;”
Wow.
That sentence clearly demonstrates that at one time in our history the federal government respected state sovereignty so much so that the President would communicate with state governors in that same manner that he would when dealing with foreign heads of state, via the Sec State.
By treating the governors of the states with the same amount of dignity and respect afforded to foreign heads of states clearly shows that back then the federal government understood its limitations.
Extraordinary. And Lee stood for states rights, state loyalty. . .and apparently the US government did too, when convenient.
Today we see no such respect, no such divide that would indicate the federal government (President) respects federalism and its limits.
Lee was more in line with the founding fathers than most know.
IMHO.
Cheers.
Me too
So then shall we also hate the U.S. generals who commanded the strategic bombing of Germany and the firebombing of Japan during World War II? Cities destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. Houses and businesses and churches and schools destroyed. I have no doubt that some of the stories from those countries could put those of Miss Lunt to shame.
I strongly disagree with the “not about slavery” comments. Since the writing of the constitution the south was worried about slaves having full rights. Look at how they were only counted as a fraction from the beginning.
The south wailed and gnashed their teeth as new states were created to make sure slave and fee states were equal in number.
From the time of his election to the inauguration, 7 states seceded because Lincoln opposed slavery and was likely to support more free states coming in.
So you can piss and moan about states rights, but it was keeping people as property the state was interested financially and otherwise. That was the right they wanted to maintain.
BTTT! Excellent and I agree because it’s true, despite my Yankee public school indoctrination. Taxes unequally imposed upon the industrial and successful South were used solely in Northern States.
I'll address the same question in my reply 72 to you as well.
The Geneva Convention of 1863 condemned the bombardment of cities occupied by civilians, but Lincoln ignored all such restrictions on his behavior.
The First Geneva Convention of 1864, not 1863, dealt solely with treatment of sick and wounded in the war. And it wasn't signed by the U.S. until 1882 anyway. Link
The source of the preceding quotes is The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (128 volumes published by the Government Printing Office). Thomas Bland Keys compiled some of the most shocking comments in his excellent 1991 book, Uncivil War: Union Army and Navy Excesses in the Official Records, published by the Beauvoir Press in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Did he include this one?
"I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands upon thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and molded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success."
Or this one?
"War is the remedy our enemy's have chosen. They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunderstorm. I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in till we are whipped or they are."
George Washington would disagree. Read his Farewell Address.
"The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.
For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. "
Here's a website detailing a lecture that gives more details on the actual incident and gives a somewhat different view on what happened. Link
Good post.
“did the national government or the state have a right to nullify a national government ruling”
A very good subject for debate. Most states were incorporated into the Union by mutual consent. Or applied for entry.
I won’t lie. I wish the South had won sans slavery which was a dying institution. We wouldn’t be part of the current mess now...maybe.
If that was true then who paid for Fort Sumter?
Sherman was evil and heartless. He should have been hung for war crimes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.