Stainless, thank you for the article you wrote. Apologists in the North and those Southerners who are consumed with liberal guilt often say that Sherman was marching to the sea to "free the slaves," and suggest that the whites whose homes were burned deserved it for participating in an economy that used slaves. But if Sherman and his ilk were so dedicated to the liberation of the black person, why were black men rounded up like cattle and forced to work for the Union Army? Why were black women raped and used so cruelly? Why was the property of black people destroyed?
Slavery was a horror, a holocaust of cruelty, but this was not the way to end it, making the innocent of both races suffer. This was not done for a noble purpose--look at Sherman's remarks about Indians. He had no love or tolerance for people of different races.
Today we would say that Sherman was mentally ill. Another generation would have simply say that he was evil. The truth may lie somewhere in between. In either case he was a monster.