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.

Thanks for the response. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Ideas like restricted franchises were tried and didn't last. It was precisely angry populists, little guys who had to pay taxes and suffer when times were hard but didn't have a say in the kind of government they lived, under who led the fight against them. Now that things have changed some people, especially angry taxpayers, look at how things are, and feel some fondness for the old ways, when they'd be the first ones to complain if the franchise were restricted in hard times when they couldn't make the voter. Your grandfather or mine, if he'd lost his job in the Great Depression and been thrown off the voter roles would have fought hard to get reinstated -- and he would have been right.

Of course there will always be restrictions and limits. We won't have children voting any time soon, if ever. And of course, there is a slippery slope, but it's slippery in both directions. Start restricting voting in some ways and people will introduce new restrictions that may lock you out if you don't own land or have sufficient investments or savings or formal education. If you only allow those who don't benefit from government in any way to vote, government will become their property and instrument and they will surely find ways to use it to their advantage in any case, though perhaps in different ways than they do now.

Moreover, how could you really enforce such a restriction. If bankers have influence over the government, and it makes regulations and policies to benefit them, will they really lose their votes? Are soldiers and sailors to risk their lives for their country and not be allowed a voice in deciding when to go to war? If you can think back to draft riots and war protests in past years, you can see where such a policy will lead.

There is something to be said for ideas of a restricted franchise, property or educational qualifications for voting, or opposition to women's suffrage, but people who consider such ideas don't always look at such proposals "in the round" or "in all three dimensions." They see how such policies might solve some problem that's important today, but don't see how they might cause other problems, or be perceived as burdensome or unfair by those who have to live under them. So I can't see such things as real solutions, but simply as rushing to rebuild things that will inevitably be torn down (or tear down things that the next generation will simply rebuild).

There's also a slippery slope to civil rights. Some people wrongly see race as the American story and "civil rights" as the permanent central issue in American politics, and that's misleading and dangerous. But for some others, there's a tendency to dismiss all talk about race or racism. Banish all such concern about racial equality, make "state's rights" and local prerogatives trump equality before law on every occasion, and we may end up reimposing the same old racial inequalities at law.

There's much to be said for seeing socialism and democracy as linked ideas, as some conservative thinkers of previous generations did. But what they missed is the extent to which the rise of democracy also reflected Christian ideas of the dignity of the individual. Tocqueville, ever the critic of mob rule and the despotism of the masses, recognized and approved of the movement to recognize the humanity of those who had been excluded from the process of government and give them a role in determining the laws under which they lived.

I'm not going to re-argue this for the umpteenth time.

You say that, and then type over 600 words to not "re-argue".

Where this began was your assertion that "Whether or not Lincoln wanted war, Davis clearly was willing to risk war to get what he wanted".

That contention is fallacious. Davis was charged with the same responsibility that Lincoln was...the protection of each of their own unions.

War could only come as a result of Union invasion. And that matter was completely under Lincoln's control.

You simply deny my assertions and accuse me of dragging in "red herrings" or "diversions," .....When I asked if you expected people to believe "that abolition was seriously considered as a positive option by secessionists at that time" I was referring to a "red herring" of your own: "Why was he willing to endorse legalized slavery at the time of the inauguration, but was unwilling to endure the issue until gradual emancipation could be arranged?" What is that in reference to? What were you trying to say? Isn't it a little hard to figure out? As though Lincoln "endorsed legalized slavery," rather than simply accepted it legal where it existed? As if Confederates didn't also "endorse legalized slavery?" What is your point?

Remember Lincoln's first inaugural address wherein he endorsed the Corwin Amendment?

You've drunk the Kool Aid and accepted the Confederate view of the world. That includes a pretty cartoonish or melodramatic picture of Lincoln as a villainous and mercenary schemer...

Villainous? He arrested the mayor of Baltimore and other elected officials; he imprisoned northern newspaper men, threatened Taney, deported Van Landingham, arrested ten thousand plus citizens of the northern states.

Schemer? The records of his cabinet meetings 3/8/61 to 4/10/61 show that he certainly was scheming to invade Charleston harbor.

but excludes any speculation on what Davis's motives may have been that might put them in an unattractive light.

There is no room here for speculation.

We know now that Lincoln overestimated the strength of unionist sentiment in the South

You do not "now know" that. You are speculating yourself, or quoting the speculation of someone else. Another red herring diversion.

Thus it looks as though he had no reason to take actions that he thought would provoke the Upper South to join the rebellion.

An assumed premise does not make the conclusion true. Try again.

Davis, by contrast, had everything to gain -- at least in the short run -- by provoking a fight that would rally other slaveowning states to the Confederate banner. I don't assert that that was his motivation, just that it's plausible

You can continue with unfounded assertions, but they remain just that.

Your portrait of a desperate President provoking a crisis to get what he wanted applies just as much or just as little to Davis as to Lincoln.

More logical fallacy......tu quoque this time?

Skinner, the behaviorist, once said that the consequence determines the behavior. We know that Lincoln's action of sending the ships to Charleston started the war. What did Davis have to gain by starting war. Nothing. It was bad for business. How about Lincoln? He had everything to gain by shutting down the secession and stopping the South from being a free trade zone.

And we do know that Davis must have been conscious of the advantages of starting a war for improving his shaky position.

Another unfounded assertion.

It may be that he was careless in not seeing how the Confederates would respond to his action but that's not quite the same thing as reckless endangerment or deliberate provocation.

It was deliberate provocation, not carelessness.

March 9, 1861, Lincoln invited a group of military and naval experts to his cabinet meeting to give their views. For various reasons, they were all against military excursions to Ft. Sumter. "Most believed that this effort would certainly prompt a military response from the Confederacy, with war sure to follow."

He didn't miscalculate.

You can complain or rage that things don't work the way you think they should, that "state's rights" aren't absolute, and look for villains, or you can recognize a tragic situation -- in many ways the product of the secessionists' own rash actions -- and try to understand why things happened as they did, and why some reckless actions naturally produce strong reactions.

You ought to cut down on the Kool-Aid. I suppose next you will say that the Peace Commissioners had broken into the Cabinet meeting and were holding guns at Lincoln's head, demanding that he send the ships to Charleston Harbor.

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