THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA: Civilians were Sherman's targets

Not only was William Tecumseh Sherman guilty of many of the crimes that some apologists portray as "tall tales," but also his specter seems to haunt the scandal-ridden halls of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Sherman had a relatively poor record battling armies. His lack of preparation nearly destroyed Union forces at Shiloh. He was repulsed at Chickasaw Bluffs, losing an early opportunity to capture Vicksburg, Miss. The result was a bloody campaign that dragged on for months. He was blocked by Gen. Pat Cleburne at the Battle of Chattanooga and needed to be bailed out by Gen. George Thomas' Army of the Cumberland. His troops were crushed by rebel forces in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.

But Sherman knew how to make war against civilians. After the capture of Atlanta, he engaged in policies similar to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia by expelling citizens from their homes. "You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war," he told the fleeing population. Today, Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for similar actions in Kosovo.

An article on Sherman in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last spring asserted that Sherman attacked acceptable military targets "by the standards of war at the time." This seems to assume that human rights were invented with the creation of the United Nations. But Gen. Grant did not burn Virginia to the ground. Gen. Lee did not burn Maryland or Pennsylvania when he invaded. Both sought to destroy each other's armies instead of making war against women and children, as Sherman did.

After promising to "make Georgia . . . howl," Sherman continued such policies in the Carolinas. Not only did he preside over the burning of Columbia, but he also executed several prisoners of war in retaliation for the ambush of one of his notorious foraging parties. While Andersonville's camp commander, Henry Wirz, was found guilty of conspiracy to impair the health and destroy the life of prisoners and executed, nothing like that happened to Sherman.

According to an article by Maj. William W. Bennett, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Sherman turned his attention to a new soft target after the Civil War: Native Americans. Rather than engage Indian fighters, Sherman again preferred a strategy of killing noncombatants. After an ambush of a military detachment by Red Cloud's tribe, Sherman said, "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."

Bennett notes that Sherman carried out his campaign with brutal efficiency. On the banks of the Washita River, Gen. George Armstrong Custer massacred a village of the friendly Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, who had located to a reservation. Sherman was quoted as saying, "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous."

Such slaughter was backed by the extermination of the buffalo as a means of depriving the men, women and children with a source of food. Many Native Americans not killed by Sherman's troopers were forced onto reservations or exiled to Florida to face swamps and disease.

Now we have learned about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Such events may seem unrelated, were it not for reports that Sherman's policies are still taught to West Point cadets as an example of how to break an enemy's will to fight.

Are we therefore shocked by the acts of barbarity against Iraqi detainees? As long as we honor Sherman, teach his tactics and revise history to excuse his actions, we can expect more examples of torture and savagery against noncombatants we encounter in other countries.

John Tures is an assistant professor of political science at LaGrange College who was born in Wisconsin, opposes the 1956 Georgia flag and still has a low opinion of Sherman.

And I am sure that you tout the logical and moral fallacy that the end justifies the means.

"General Sherman was the plunder-in-chief. He had had three years of practice for his March to the Sea in Georgia, and his plundering of South Carolina. In the autumn of 1862 Confederate snipers were firing at Union gunboats on the Mississippi River. Unable to apprehend the combatants, Sherman took revenge on the civilian population by burning the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground.

"In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife Sherman explained that his purpose in the war was 'extermination, not of the soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.'

"In the spring of 1863, after the Confederate Army had evacuated, Sherman ordered his army to destroy the town of Jackson, Mississippi. They did, and in a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant Sherman boasted that 'The inhabitants [of Jackson] are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around.'

"Meridian, Mississippi was also destroyed after the Confederate Army had evacuated, after which Sherman wrote to Grant: '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, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no longer exists.'

In "Citizen Sherman" Michael Fellman describes how Sherman’s chief engineer, Captain O.M. Poe, advised that the bombing of Atlanta was of no military significance (the Confederates had already abandoned the city) and implored Sherman to stop the bombardment after viewing the carcasses of dead women and children in the streets.

Sherman coldly told him the dead bodies were "a beautiful sight" and commenced the destruction of 90 percent of all the buildings in Atlanta. After that, the remaining 2,000 residents were evicted from their homes just as winter was approaching.

In October of 1864 Sherman even ordered the murder of randomly chosen citizens in retaliation for Confederate Army attacks. He wrote to General Louis D. Watkins: "Cannot you send over about Fairmount and Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses . . ., kill a few at random, and let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon . . ." (See John Bennett Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War, p. 137).

The indiscriminate bombing of Southern cities, which was outlawed by international law at the time, killed hundreds, if not thousands of slaves. The slaves were targeted by Union Army plunderers as much as anyone.

In "The Hard Hand of War" Mark Grimsley wrote: "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked."

A typical practice was to put a hangman’s noose around a slave’s neck and threaten to hang him unless he revealed where the household’s jewelry and silverware were hidden. Some slaves were beaten to death by Union soldiers.

"One soldier wrote that he had personally burned more than 60 private homes to the ground, as Grimsley recounts". After the work of destruction and theft was finished Lincoln grandly conveyed to his generals his personal thanks and "the thanks of a nation."

Historian Lee Kennett, author of "Marching through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign", wrote an article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in which he argued that Southerners had been too critical of Sherman. His book is very favorable to Sherman and Lincoln, but he nevertheless wrote on page 286 that:

"Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified (as victors generally do) in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for
waging war against noncombatants."

Niether Lincoln nor Grant were really up to letting Sherman put his plan into effect. But Sherman knew well that splitting the south in two was the only way to speed the end of that useless and idiotic war.

Are you saying that the Union Armies did not follow the broad outline of Winfield Scott's "Anaconda Plan"? The Plan called for controlling the periphery of the south by blockading the seaports and controlling the lengths of the Ohio & Mississipi River networks. Once this was accomplished with the capture of Vicksburg, Armies would be launched from the line of the rivers into the interior.

It looks to me like the Federals pretty much followed the Plan to a tee.

Oh, and a comment as to the quality of the General Officers available to command the Western Armies is probably in order here: If not Sherman, than who? Grant had gone East. Pap Thomas, despite his efforts to mitigate the defeat at Chickamauga, was nevertheless associated with that debacle -- and he was a Virginian who might have been under suspicion in some quarters. Several other promising field commanders had already been sent packing (Rosecrans, Buell, McClerndon).

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