Indeed. According to the Augusta Chronicle these benign Yankee soldiers who only foraged what they needed to survive, did the following:
In their route they destoyed, so far as possible, all mills, cribs, and carried off all stock, provisions, and negroes, and when their horses gave out they shot them.At Canton, they killed 100 [horses]. ... Along their route the road was strewn with dead horses. Farmers having devoted a large share of their attention to syrup making, there is a large quantity of cotton ungathered in the field, which was left by the Federals, but there is not a horse or ox in the country, hence the saving of corn will be a difficult matter. At Madison, they broke into Oglesby's office, and carried off all his medicines, including several jars of arsenic and corrosive sublimate, which had no labels on them.
...They ravaged the country below there to the Oconee River. The roads were strewn with the debris of their progress. Dead horses, cows, sheep, hogs, chickens, corn, wheat, cotton, books, paper, broken vessels, coffee mills, and fragments of nearly every species of property strewed the countryside.
Quite a happy little band of foragers.
No one to my knowledge ever suggested that the mission was to take what was needed to survive. The idea was to punish traitors and weaken their resistance to the national government.
Walt