Posted on 07/18/2004 8:40:59 PM PDT by canalabamian
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.
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Are you amazed that some people will still argue about what the War of Southern Rebellion was about, and about who started it?
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Actually, I am sometimes. Since it takes some serious revisionist denial to claim the Civil War was about anything other than slavery, there has to be a reason for it.
The only thing I can come up with is two motivations. First, there's still some good old racists down here (I live in Atlanta), who wish that they could put those uppity blacks back on the plantations where they belong, and second, there are some folks who can't bring themselves to admit that their beloved South fought a war for the "right" to own people like chattel.
Did you know that W.T. Sherman was the first president of L.S.U.???Yeah, but I still can't bring myself to be an Ole Miss fan. ;-)
Despite the criminal effort of Lincoln and his worshippers.
Nothing more, nothing less
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But, the war was not started by Lincoln for slavery. His goals in the war were to keep the union,
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This is simply more revisionism. Lincoln SOLD the war to the North as a war to preserve the Union. He did this because there was a large slave-sympathetic minority in the Northern States, but don't think for a moment that ending slavery wasn't on the top of Lincoln's list and one of his key motivations.
Fact: The Republican party was formed for the express purpose of ending slavery.
Fact: Lincoln campaigned for the Senate on a strict abolitionist platform.
Fact: Lincoln was a strict abolitionist as president.
Fact: Lincoln wanted to issue an emancipation proclamation from almost the first day of the war, but knew he needed a Union victory (or at least a stalemate) before he could issue it with moral authority.
Slavery was THE issue behind the civil war, revisionists not withstanding.
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not representative government
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But only for people with the right skin color.
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Another screw up on Sherman's part. If he had handled this the way lee did, then the south would not STILL be bitter after 150 years.
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No, racists in the south are still bitter 150 years later because the Radical Republicans installed Republican governers in the South after the war because they had the fear that once the war was over, the whites would go right back to putting the blacks into slavery.
The Jim Crow laws showed they were right.
Why issue a proclamation only ordering freedom in rebel states (which he didn't have the power to do anyway until they were brought back under the Union fold), not border states also?
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Why issue a proclamation only ordering freedom in rebel states
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Assuming this isn't a troll, the answer is simple: Political expediency. The border states were being held by a thread. You're in a civil war. You don't swell the ranks of the enemy. (It's also another example of why he was selling the war as one to preserve the Union. It WAS one of the reasons, but not the main one, but it had to be PRESENTED as the main one so those states dangling by a thread would not join the rebels.)
Although I cannot read Lincoln's mind, it is reasonable to assume that he would realize that, with victory in the Civil War, he would have the ability to abolish slavery in the remaining states without risk of war with them as well.
It's called incrementalism, and something some conservatives would do well to learn.
Wow. I lived down there for 23 years, before moving to Chicago, then Madrid and NY. I feel for you if you think you are surrounded by 'inferior' people.
The southerns have a point to people who do not like it down there, move back up North...
"Let me know when you do... I'd like to know how you liked it."
Will do.
Indeed, that bullet helped to concentrate legislative and executive powers into a rump congress lusting for vengeance, plunder, and the need to justify a war of aggression.
My point about McClelland was not based on his reticence as a general in the field but as the presidential candidate of an anti-war(yes, even back then) Democratic party that had many power brokers in it calling for a negotiated peace that would have left behind a country shattered in two.
It's well documented that prior to Sherman's victory in Atlanta, Lincoln himself did not expect to win reelection in 1864 or at least had very grave doubts about his chances. Would a President McClelland have given Sherman the go ahead to wage the concept of "total war" as Lincoln did, if say, Sherman would have become bogged down on the way to Atlanta, his victory coming after a Lincoln loss and a subsequent McClelland inauguration? McClelland's history of being overly cautious(an American Bernard Montgomery)suggests he might not have especially when one considers the platform and the backers who would have gotten him elected.
"Indeed, that bullet helped to concentrate legislative and executive powers into a rump congress lusting for vengeance, plunder, and the need to justify a war of aggression."
Yep and "We the People" are still paying for that act of megalomania by John W Booth.
I've always thought he was insane, and a coward to boot. Ironically, his brother was playing here in Cincinnati when he shot Lincoln, and it caused quite a bit of rioting here, mobs wanting to lynch him etc etc etc.
Constitutionally he could not. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a measure to combat the rebellion. Slaves could be used as tools to support the southern army and southern economy, so the EP was a measure to remove that form of support. Prior to that, slaves that ran away to Union lines legally had to be returned to their owners. After that, they could be considered free men and women. It was carefully tailored not to include those states not in rebellion, and the sections of rebellious states that had been liberated by the Union army. In all other areas Lincoln could not order slaves freed because slavery was legal and he had no authority to issue orders relieving law-abiding citizens of their property. It took a constitutional amendment to achieve that. And Lincoln threw the whole weight of his office behind the passage of that in 1864.
An interesting point. However, Stlain's motivations in those two instances were purely political- they had nothing to do with winning the war.
Wars of national survival, such as the Civil War and WWII, are situations where normal rules of morality get put on hold. The very basic purpose of any nation and government is the contuinued existence of such entity.
On these threads, a lot of Southern partisans seems to believe that everyone (the South included) would have been better off if the CSA had been able to achieve independence from the USA. They seem to miss the point that, if the South had won the Civil War, there would have been several more wars between the two North American powers, resulting in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, additional deaths.
Lee was one of the last, and one of the greatest, of the post-Napoleanic/pre-modern generals. However, Grant and Sherman were the first of a new breed-the modern general. To them, war was not based on major battles, but rather an ongoing campaign used to grind down the enemey and destroy his will and ability to fight.
Lee never quite grasped that. If he had, he would have dug his army into a defense posture and worn the Union down until support for the war collapsed in the North.
The policy of returning escaped slaves (to their masters) must have had a demoralizing effect on a significant section of the federal armies. Imagine being a private soldier from Massachussets (and thinking you are fighting slavery) only to see your own picketts conducting an outraged slave owner bearing a petition to see your division commander. That would be a little hard to comprehend. At least the Emancipation Proclimation cleared up that little paradox.
Stuart did no such thing. Stuart's order of June 23rd orders, signed by both Lee and Longstreet sent Stuart around the Union Army...to meet up with Ewell at Carlisle.
Lee was not blind. He had 3,800 troopers under Robertson and Jones at his call. Lee chose not to use them. They remained in the Valley until after contact had been made with Buford's command at Gettysburg.
Now, The Killer Angels should not become our history and neither should the in-fighting that occurred after Lee's death. The squabble between Longstreet and Lee's two aids should not become the basis of our history either.
Lee never blamed Stuart because he knew Stuart had followed his orders.
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