And the claims of large amounts of civilian deaths only make sense if one makes the argument that deaths from diseases unintentionally spread by armies on the march qualify.
The underlying blog post is not based on hard sources and uses the Napoleonic Wars as a way of calculating Civil War civilian deaths - a highly flawed assumption.
There really is just one good example of starvation as a result of direct military action in the US Civil War: the siege of Vicksburg - and there the number was probably closer to 200-300, not thousands.
What is happening in Syria is different: it is the deliberate execution of noncombatants by government troops and by terrorists.
This is happening on a scale far larger than those conducted by mass killers of civilians like William Quantrill in the Civil War - who was accused of killing several hundred people during his raids.
the claim that Sherman’s March resulted in starvation for anyone is a myth invented after the war.
I tend to agree. Sherman used the 1860 Census reports to determine his most effective field of march. He needed to feed his troops and he needed to know where the productive farms were.
Having read numerous accounts of Sherman’s campaign in the South, it should be noted that he, and many of the people that were with him, were utterly astounded at the amount of food and materiel that was being withheld from the South’s own military effort. Barns and warehouses in the South were overflowing with food, weapons, livestock, clothing etc.
For some reason a lot of the scenes struck me as very MST3K like. Especially the burning Atlanta giant barn collapse scene.
Just a neutral reader here. ‘wideawake’ appears to be anything but that.
1)Headline doesn’t mention Sherman.
2)myth? unintentionally spread?? sound like opinions.
3)Napoleonic Wars were absent large numbers Black slaves with no way to support themselves.That would suggest a possible worse situation here.
4)Vicksburg number of starvation victims PROBABLY 200-300? Visit Ft Mott on the Delaware.
5)How do you know what is happening in Syria? And then you say”by government troops and by terrorists”.
6)’Quantrill...accused of killing several hundred’ This is a different era. greater population and apparent use of CBWA.
Are you perhaps a Lincoln relative? :-)
The silly part is that people still talk about Sherman’s March to the Sea as if it were uniquely destructive.
Whereas the fact is that Sherman subsequently marched across SC, and ALL parties at the time were agree that the destruction was MUCH greater in SC than in GA and later in NC.
For instance, it was reported that in GA few houses along the line of march were burned, while in SC few escaped. It would be surprising if the people were not also treated more harshly by the soldiers who blamed SC for the war.
For some reason Marching through Georgia has caught people’s attention ever since. Marching through South Carolina has fallen into a memory hole.