[Colonel Kangaroo]

So are you saying all Sherman did was break old lady's mirrors and that is why we are angry with Sherman?

The murder and rape was greatly exaggerated. Where in Sherman's orders is there a sanction for murder?

[rustbucket]

The murder and rape was greatly exaggerated. Where in Sherman's orders is there a sanction for murder?

Actually there is one famous Sherman order for murder. General Sherman to U.S. Brigadier General Louis Douglass Watkins at Calhoun, Georgia, on Oct. 29, 1864:

Can you not send over to Fairmount and Adairsville, burn 10 or 12 houses of known secessionists, kill a few at random and let them know it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon from Resaca to Kingston.

Trains were legitimate targets of war.

Well, somebody in Sherman's army tolerated rape. From William Gilmore Simms:

We have been told of successful outrages of this unmentionable character being practiced on women dwelling in the suburbs. Many are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered -- one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated. ... Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women [rb: black women in this case] to the torture of their embraces ...

[mstar]

The murder and rape was greatly exaggerated. Where in Sherman's orders is there a sanction for murder?

Don't you remember, a white planter family's testimony was not valid, and besides they deserved it.

Here's a refresher for you;

"guess the bottom line here is that Sherman's visit to Columbia SC was no atrocity, unless you were a planter class white secessionist." mac_truck

"Sherman's goal in his own words (see memoirs) was to destroy the planter class of the south" mstar

"An admirable goal. I'm glad he succeeded as well as he did. As individuals, I'm sure many had admirable qualities, but as a political class, the plantation drones were pure evil, greedy for power, politically mendacious and full of contempt for their fellow Southerners of both races." Colonel Kangaroo

We could always go count the period tombstones, if the graves had not been robbed and defiled by Uncle Billy's gentlemen.